Comment by axefrog | Hacker News Reader

Comment by axefrog | Hacker News Reader

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This is interesting because it is a great example of how technology is in the process of automating the world out of jobs. That is not a complaint mind you; it's simply an important indicator of the change taking place in the world at the moment. With every passing year, new, more advanced technologies become available and the ones from the year before get cheaper and with artificial intelligence and automation technology becoming more and more powerful and capable, I am 100% certain that most "dumb" jobs - the kind for which low wages are paid due to the lower skills required, are going to become obsolete and replaced by technology. This means we'll go through an ever-more-apparent period of politicians becrying the losses of jobs, the need to create new jobs and so forth and whatever they try, they will fail because jobs lost due to automation are going to dwarf those lost due to economic/recession-related reasons. Personally I think this will eventually bring about something of a new age where the masses (the 99%) end up forcing in a new paradigm surrounding how we live and work. I am not sure what that would look like, but it is certainly inevitable.

All automation is predicated on a machine being cheaper and more reliable than a human. As the cost of energy rises in coming decades, I'm expecting that we'll discover that some forms of automation only make sense in a world where conventional petroleum is dirt cheap.

Automatic checkout only takes electricity, so that'll probably be with us for quite a while. But manufacturing jobs will return to North America once it no longer makes sense to ship in consumer goods from east Asia. And I expect that as agriculture becomes more locally-oriented, there will be a lot of labour jobs associated with that—especially for tasks that might have been automated at the industrial scale, but are cheaper done by human hands at a farm 1/100th the size.

That's the wildcard though isn't it? Some, such as yourself, decry this form of futurism because it is predicated on the assumption that energy will become more expensive. I personally think it will become cheaper and personally am open to the possibility of breakthroughs making it negligibly cheap. See http://www.bloomenergy.com/products/, http://ecat.com. E-cat may or may not be real, but I do see interesting possibilities as a lot more time and research starts to be put into these sorts of technologies as conventional fuel becomes more expensive.

>But manufacturing jobs will return to North America once it no longer makes sense to ship in consumer goods from east Asia.

I think you'd be surprised how much shipping costs would have to rise for that to happen.

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