Comment by uiri | Hacker News Reader

Comment by uiri | Hacker News Reader

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I think it may have everything to do with how we're measuring productivity. The world in 1975 is obviously not the world today. The biggest difference being the personal computer and by extension the internet. How much of productivity gains are due to computers? Email can be near-instantaneous and although the paperless office is probably a pipe dream, filing and paper work have become less plentiful and are taking less time. Not to mention the advances in software which improve productivity. Of course, this is just in offices. You can go ahead and look at factories which are becoming more computerized and I'm sure the primary sector has benefited from computers too.

So, although workers of today are more productive - per dollar paid per hour/month/year, is it possible that people haven't actually been working harder but rather machines have been doing more work? Is it possible that these productivity gains represent value provided by giving every office an IT department rather than people working better (or harder or smarter)?

I think it is possible, but I don't think it is a satisfactory explanation. It could simply be the effects of supply and demand on the marketplace. Beyond a certain point, money doesn't buy happiness so I see no reason why the upper end of salaries would increase other than pure greed (which is consistent with lots and lots of increases in executive pay) and unskilled labour provides minimal value so why would machines making one interchangeable labourer able to do the work of two or three interchangeable labourers lead to an increase in the pay of interchangeable labourers?

One way to look at it: years ago, we dreamed that all of the menial tasks that we do would be done by robots, and that we could enjoy endless leisure while our robot servants labored under us. The first half of this dream is coming true. Unfortunately, the second half is not, and consequently we wind up with robots (or IT) doing the menial work instead of us while we sit unemployed.

Well the fantasy was that we could go through this transition without a period of displacement and upheaval. That much is inevitable. Hopefully we can find a path through the increasing reality of technology unemployment that could reduce the stress on those at the edges of it.

Who will get paid when robots can do all of the work? Should robots get paychecks? Are people who use robots stealing from poor people since the robot is stealing the poor person's job? These are the questions we must answer before the robots take over hr and accounting.

Why would anyone need to get paid if robots are doing all the work? And if no one needs to be paid, why does anything need to cost?

Capitalism is nothing more than a system for allocating finite resources. If, for all practical intents and purposes, nothing is finite anymore then there's no reason to keep around a finite resources system.

i was reading this http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm

its an interesting book about this very topic.

Economically, there's no real difference between productivity rising for different reasons. However, people "working more" has nothing to do with any of them - productivity measures value produced per time worked, and so rising productivity by definition means that people produce more with the same amount of time working. From this perspective, there's no reason why a productivity rise due to computers in the 2000s should be any different from a productivity rise due to better factory equipment or production processes in the 70s.

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