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Comment by lenerdenator | Hacker News Reader

Depends on what your definition of "good" is.

If your definition is "it could, at some point, enable me to stop paying humans for their labor and pass along more of the value to major shareholders like myself", then yes, that's a reason to want humanoid robots.

If your definition of "good" is a little more broadly scoped than the above - which it should be if you don't have an MBA and a substance abuse problem - then you're correct.

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In a competitive market, this won't happen: "passing along more of the value to major shareholders like myself." The price of human labor will go down, but competition will force the price of goods to go down alongside it. Profit margins will stabilize, but the cost of living and the cost of goods will plummet. It's like the invention of the power loom: it was terrible for the wages of hand-weavers, but it made clothing radically cheaper and more abundant for the rest of humanity. The only way the shareholders keep all the value is if we allow monopolies to form.

The potential difference here is that it might eliminate all human labor which would likely force us into some new kind of economy. Hopefully something better than one where humans waste their lives on manual labor.

More than half of the cost of living is land rent, which has nothing to do with human labor or cost of anything. It's a rather artificial forced payment that only increases when everything else gets cheaper.

I'd love to see the cost of living go down. Unemployment raises fast; the cost of living goes down very slow, and it will take a few generations. That's why the underclass will go through a lot of pain.

I found Manna to be a decent read, with its dual vision of how a post-human-labour world could be.

http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm

There won't be any value at all to pass along, as wage labour is the base requirement for a capital-driven economy.

In the long-term, you're absolutely correct.

But the kind of person I'm describing doesn't care about the long-term, or really, anything beyond the current fiscal reporting period.

If there really were some sort of AI that were to be able to drive a humanoid robot to do the same tasks as well or better than a human, and we saw mass adoption, it'd take longer than a fiscal quarter to see the full macroeconomic impact, but the layoffs? You can write those down right then and there.

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