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Comment by LapsangGuzzler | Hacker News Reader

You could apply this argument to so many modern workforce changes, for example, the 40-hour 5-day workweek. Throughout history, most workers have not had the kind of rights that they do today.

I think we all deserve to make progress on things like retirement instead of making arguments like this. Sure, retirement hasn’t always been a guarantee, but can we agree that this isn’t a good thing?

We never question the desire to innovate in how to make money, but we’re often very quick to dismiss the idea that we can also dream to innovate society in a way that’s decoupled from profit, which is sad.

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While I agree that most of society should be the beneficiary of productivity gains, I’m not sure retirement is still a net positive. It seems like a lot of health and well-being is related to being a valuable member of society and fortunately or unfortunately, for many, work provides that function.

> and fortunately or unfortunately, for many, work provides that function.

I agree with this, but the problem is that there is no guarantee of work being available to everyone. With the rise of AI and hyper-specialization of work, that problem is only going to get worse.

I see the problem but have a hard time squaring it with history. Decades ago I had an old professor who spoke about how he was tasked, as a student decades prior yet, to write a report on what people will do with all their free time due to automation.

And yet, here we are with people still working many hours on average and many jobs going unfulfilled. I personally think it’s a problem with our relationship to work, rather than limited opportunity for work. Humans seem to have an insatiable apple for more, which requires continued amounts of work to be done. I think the bigger problem is getting people to have the skills to do the jobs that will still need to be done.

> I agree with this, but the problem is that there is no guarantee of work being available to everyone. With the rise of AI and hyper-specialization of work, that problem is only going to get worse.

The key here is to make sure that automation and cost efficiencies make it through to the production of necessities, and we don't prop up artificial scarcity.

There are an effectively unlimited number of jobs that employers would pay someone $0.01/hour to do. Not as many that employers would pay $100/hour to do. So if you need to make $100/hour to afford housing and medicine, that's a problem. But if we reduce the artificial scarcity and regulatory overhead in these industries, so you only have to make $5/hour to afford them, we're in a much better place. And all the better if lower costs allow someone to make a living at $2/hour.

AI and automation can help to reduce those costs. As long as they're in the right places (i.e. production of necessities) and we don't have regulatory capture preventing it from happening there.

How do you see automation helping housing? I work in an org interested in 3D printed structures and it still seems a long way off. Or are you looking at improvements in logistics that make it easier to live in less expensive areas?

It can be more than one thing. But one of the interesting possibilities for housing is modular construction. You mass produce homes on an assembly line as walls prefitted with plumbing and electrical, put them on a truck and snap them together at the site. Now you can produce them wherever labor costs are low and assemble them in a matter of days or weeks rather than months or years.

This doesn't get you out of zoning restrictions but could allow you to recover from their historical effects more quickly after zoning reform is achieved.

People keep saying this, and it keeps not happening in a significant way as described. Trucking assembled parts is harder than trucking the parts, which tends to limit the distances assemblies are trucked. It becomes cost efficient to truck construction workers (even if it's not great for the workers).

That said, some assemblies have become pretty common, I think preassembled roofing trusses are frequently used in favor of framing on site.

> It becomes cost efficient to truck construction workers (even if it's not great for the workers).

This gives me a different idea and I wonder if it's worthwhile.

There are industrial robots that e.g. mass produce cars. Suppose you make one to mass produce housing, but instead of putting it in the factory you put it on the truck. Put it on the construction site. It takes a pile of lumber, cuts it to length and turns it into walls, puts the pipes and wires through the walls etc. This is the kind of thing that existing industrial robots can actually do if you program them appropriately.

Then you send it across the street to put together another building. Assembly line, but the products are big so instead of moving the products to the next station you move the robots.

I’ve worked on those robots that mass produce cars. The idea that you can ship them from site to site doesn’t really work. They require a lot of support infrastructure. The use a lot of large parts (dies in the case of cars) that are heavy and must be constantly swapped out. They require a lot of constant tuning that would likely be made worse when subjected to the vibrations of transit. They require whole specialized teams just to maintain.

Those sound like things that are actually specific to cars, which operate on metal with tight tolerances because it e.g. has to hold compression in a cylinder.

Houses are made out of wood and tolerances are measured in centimeters if not inches.

This sounds like conjecture from someone who hasn’t worked in construction or automation. I’ve worked in both. Problems generally seem much simpler when we don’t have much experience with the nuances and details of execution. Some tolerances are forgiving (like framing, which can be corrected by a finish carpenter) and other systems are much more difficult. Both take some level of AGI to problem solve that comes in the form of a human. That's why there are "design" drawings and "as-built" drawings that (in my experience, at least) never match.

I'm not saying its impossible, but I think the marginal costs are too high to replace what we already have. In addition, society has been moving towards individualization since the 1980s. We aren't in the Henry Ford days where people are ok with "any color of car as long as its black." People want individualization when it comes to their homes as well, and that lack of standardization makes automation more difficult than building a modern Levittown with robots.

Ugh, I hate this way of thinking. Perhaps we've all been brainwashed to believe this by capitalism?

I'm perfectly happy pursuing my own interests, at my own pace, without having some overlord making sure I'm maximizing value for some corporation. Sure, I don't want to just sit around doing nothing, but there's a wide gulf of possibilities between that and full-time employment.

I think you missed some of the nuance in the statement. It is not advocating for staying in the grind forever.

But for many retirees, they have never developed the mechanisms to continue being a productive member of society without structured work. The net result is a general drop in well being and health in their “golden” years.

Also, i made a comment where I think our relationship to work needs to change. I think that speaks to your point. I don’t think a false dichotomy between “working for the capitalist overlord” and “doing whatever I want” is what I was after.

Retired people can provide a lot of value in ways that can't be expressed in money. A lot of parents will be fscked if they don't have grandparents to help out with kids.

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