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Comment by magicseth | Hacker News Reader

As I look around, I see mass, systemic unemployment taking hold.

This ever increasing march of technology may result in more goods being created, but due to the nature of our capitalist society, it tends to pool the capital in those who have capital to begin with.

The huge disparity between the rich and the poor in the US is not due to "technology" but it is not being helped by it either.

Technology creates efficiencies, but there is no natural way for those efficiencies to benefit those whom it puts out of work.

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"As I look around, I see mass, systemic unemployment taking hold."

Only because we are paying people to not work, and because fair pay is illegal under a certain rate. Consequence is that work worth less than minimum wage cannot, by law, be given to people - and so automation moves in.

Stop paying people to not work and they'll find or make work. (There is a difference between a safety net and making lack of arbitrary wealth illegal.)

And "the poor", for most practical purposes, does not exist in the US. If you are living on more - a lot more - than the world median income, if you are flushing your toilet with drinking water, if you have a TV & car & cell phone & AC & thermostat heating & >1000 sq ft housing & ..., if you have over $1/meal/person/day[1], and etc you're not poor.

[1] - http://abuckaplate.blogspot.com

You're forgetting that many of the people who have those things you describe can only actually 'afford' them in the US because of cheap credit. If they were to sell all those things at the price they bought them, they would still be in debt, and thus are, in fact, poor.

Cheap credit is a luxury. You're ignoring a host of mitigating factors.

If your choice is 850 days of food vs. a TV, and you opt for the TV, you're not poor. (Derived from [1] above.) With over two years of energy literally under your belt, paying off that cheap loan and earning far more, even under adverse conditions, leverages you well outside poverty.

"Poor on paper" is unconvincing, given the opportunity for wise choices.

What if traditional brick-and-mortars business eventually turn to business models we frequently see on the web? What if robots drive costs down so low that you can have free hamburgers sponsored by some luxury product? Once you cut down human labor costs entirely, all that is left is natural resources costs. I'm just throwing out some ideas, perhaps someone with a better understanding of economics can elaborate or criticize...

"free hamburgers...luxury product"

Noblesse Obese

It seems likely to me that for today, the mass unemployment is more likely a result of failures in the economic policy arena. Automation simply hasn't advanced far enough yet, there are still far too many human-only jobs for the technology argument to fly. We don't really need wild explanations to explain where we are today, rather simple business cycle theory can take a pretty good run at explaining it. (I even saw people using business cycle theory to predict it in advance, including the fact that we've still got years of a down economy to go through yet.)

I really don't expect mass unemployment due to technology to be a problem until we get a lot more jobs disappearing to robotics. When you see a purely-robotic McDonalds, start wondering.

Try moving to a different country.

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