Comment by weitendorf | Hacker News Reader

Comment by weitendorf | Hacker News Reader

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This is called the lump of labor fallacy. When jobs get automated, almost always, people find other jobs. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lump_of_labour_fallacy

This is why our standard of living is much better now than it was 150 years ago. Even though we have autoamted pretty much all of the jobs since then, except teacher and lawyer (there is another term in economics for what happens here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol_effect)

Personally I think it's fine, even as my own profession undergoes the same transition. We now have new jobs in running the waymo fleet in various capacities - the cars still need to be serviced, cleaned, supported, scheduled, etc - and the highly compensated jobs designing what are essentially real-world robots that can safely coexist with humans on the road. This is how technology has always worked and it's always made us better off on the whole.

Also, the new product is just better. When a human is not in the car, it's ok for to leave them waiting for a few minutes to pick me up if it's not a busy street, and I don't have to deal with the risk of an unsafe or unsavory person hosting me in their personal vehicle. I can control the music and the AC, and tap a button to have the car pull over. I can and do still take Lyfts and Ubers when I need to - it's cheaper for anything involving the highway, still, and better when I need to get somewhere in a hurry.

The past does not repeat.

IMHO jobs were far less specialized in the past. Working in a factory is not that different from working in a kitchen or laying tile.

Take Muhammad, a fresh arrival from Syria, who drives a taxi. What will his next job be that is that easy and he already knows how to do?

The truth is we don't know. Anyone who can answer that question will be rich.

But actually, what I've commonly heard from immigrants from developing countries is not having their certifications recognised. What was once a surgeon/lawyer/accountant is now forced to do menial labour. So maybe that's one problem to consider solving.

    > not having their certifications recognised.

The same happens when bakers move from one rich EU country to another. (The Financial Times has written a few articles about it.) I'm not here to dump on the EU, but cross-border recognition of credentials is an insanely complex topic.

The past does not repeat.

But if you are going against 200 years (some say even 10,000 years) civilization trends, you better have extremely strong data points to prove this time is different

Simple: humans are needed for their physical labor (traditionally) or more recently their cognition. We are now automating the cognition part, and it is widely believed physical labor will be automated not that far after that. So what's left ? Most A.I labs mention some form of UBI why do you think they're saying that?

It is interesting that you chose "laying tile" as similar to the other jobs. I reject that idea. Some of the earliest specialization of labour is anything in the trades, and can probably be traced back to central European guilds from more 500 years ago.

> Take Muhammad, a fresh arrival from Syria, who drives a taxi. What will his next job be that is that easy and he already knows how to do?

Remotely operating a taxi (or some other semi-autonomous robot) from Syria?

When I read people talking online, it seems as if philosophy has been solved and we all just agree that utilitarian is the way to go? Is the trolley problem solved? So long as people on average are better off (not that I'm conceding they will be, you can't use the past to predict the future), it's fine to go ahead with the technology?

You’re on a site created by a startup accelerator for people in the startup world, you’re going to get overwhelmingly utilitarian capitalist views.

Not to troll here, but if we asked taxi drivers across the world, few will probably have "utilitarian capitalist views". People in tech have those views because they align with their economic incentives.

Are these things actually complicated, or is it the case that simplicity feels bad somehow?

The trolley problem is just messy emotionally, not actually complicated. You only have two choices, you pick the one that saves the most lives and that’s the best you can do.

You raise a good point: It is important to separate the logical and emotional concerns. I think the previous poster is concerned that the emotional side receives so little attention on these forums.

Weirdly, this has parallels with soldiers in military conflicts. For generations, we only focused on their physical health. Today's modern militaries are much more concerned about the mental health of their soldiers during and after combat.

The problem of the trolly problem is not about "best outcome" it is about ethics of action and inaction when weighed against lives

Let's put it this way. Consider a trolly problem where there are two tracks and one person on each track . There's a trolly coming to hit one person. Is it ethical to change the track so it kills the other person instead?

In this case you're only weighing one life against one life. So clearly it's never ethical to pull that lever right?

Now make it two people on the trolly track. Saving two lives instead of one. Is it now ethical to pull the lever just because there is one extra person there? If not, then how many people would it have to be before it would be ethical?

Idk. The trolley problem is anything but simple in my mind

In these scenarios you’re morally obligated to save the most people. I don’t see why this is complicated at all.

Maybe other people put a lot of emotional weight on the choice itself but as long as I tried to save the most people I’d sleep soundly at night.

Minus the horror of watching people get run over by a trolley of course.

"When jobs get automated, almost always, people find other jobs"

Never as good pay and many end up on the system.

When my parents were my age, there were almost no jobs working with distributed systems or robotics and the relative standard of living was much worse than what I have been able to attain at a similar age and level of education.

My grandparents performed jobs that now are rarely performed in the US due to there being better jobs for those qualified to perform them.

I am much happier working with AI and distributed systems than as a carpenter or steel mill foreman like my grandfathers. Everybody on my father's side of the family had these white marks all over their forearms from molten metal splashing on them and burning them as they worked.

This is only possible because of technological progress. It creates new jobs.

Same.

My grandfather was a sailor, then cook. Father drives a taxi. Mom is a seamstress. Stepdad worked at the same factory for 65 years. As I was coming of age in the 90s, they chastised me for spending all my time in front of the computer. Yet here I am still sitting in front of one, making more money than they could've ever imagined.

Society progresses whether or not you want it.

Bad times and golden eras do happen. Yet we only get one lifetime, which can fit entirely inside one or the other.

It's entirely rational to worry we're in the midst of a bad time for many, possibly even most as the median slips into the lower class.

My grandfather lived in a golden era. Worked as a cookie salesmen/stocker to earn a pension and got the GI bill even though he was never deployed. He retired in his mid 60s with two homes, motor boat and dock (used every summer weekend), two cars, a healthy stock portfolio, and had raised four kids.

My father needed a college degree but otherwise did nearly as well.

I had to go to college and will likely never afford two homes, much less a boat, no defined benefit pension, taxable social security with higher age threshold and reduced benefit, little retirement savings, have been laid off, had to change jobs repeatedly to get raises, trying to raise half as many kids, and have already begun supporting extended family members. It's also very possible my career will cease to exist, or become a niche role with crushing oversupply of labor for many years to come.

Modern work may be more interesting for those who can get it. Increasing specialization does leave behind folks of below average ability. Underemployment is also a thing when labor is disorganized and demand is low.

While it might create new jobs, I don’t think what it affords you would be better.

Take the gig economy for example. There has been a rapid uptick of it taking a slice of the labor pie. If the majority of labor shifted to that, you’ll have plenty of new jobs but your quality of life will be substantially worse.

But, as a whole, the entire population's pay goes a lot farther since no one has to pay drivers to drive them around anymore.

Living standards would be a lot worse today if we still had to pick crops in the field by hand.

> But, as a whole, the entire population's pay goes a lot farther since no one has to pay drivers to drive them around anymore

They still have to pay the Waymo though, it didn't become free. :/

You're kidding yourself if you think autonomous taxis will be cheaper in the long run just because they don't pay a driver.

They will outcompete human drivers on cost and once they are dominant they will raise prices. This has happened every other time human labor was replaced too. It is practically the Silicon Valley playbook.

The cost to take a picture today and keep it on your phone is not more expensive than it was when you had to get them developed in a darkroom.

The cost to watch a movie today through streaming is not more than it was when you had to go to a movie theater to see one.

The cost to buy and sell financial instruments today through Robinhood or similar products is not more than when you had to have a broker to place orders for you.

The cost to find vast amounts of information through search engines is negligible today. To do so previously would take immense amounts of time, effort, and money parsing through encyclopedias is the information even existed at the time.

The cost to print a few drafts of a memo today requires a single session typing into Microsoft word and then printing to your office printer. Previously you had to pay a typist to put together multiple drafts for you.

On autonomous vehicles:

Yes they will absolutely be cheaper, as long as a complete monopoly is avoided. It's not just that you don't have to pay the driver. You also will have vastly lower insurance rates due to how safe they are. Maintenance costs will be lower due to economies of scale when fleet operators can have the car deliver itself to a dedicated massive maintenance facility.

> The cost to watch a movie today through streaming is not more than it was when you had to go to a movie theater to see one.

Now you just have to maintain multiple subscriptions to streaming services so you can watch the movie you want. $22/month for Hulu, $27/month for Netflix, Amazon Prime where you pay for the privilege of paying to rent some movies.

So you might be able to watch more with your subscription, but the nexus isn't quite that simple.

Pretty sure a DoorDash driver now gets paid better than a 19th century farmer inflation adjusted? Over a single lifetime, there are no guarantees because there's too many variables, but civilization-ally, the progress seems to always hold up.

I always hear people saying this but when? the 70s the 60s? that’s your golden age?

> Never as good pay and many end up on the system.

I mean, every complex large-scale change to society has upsides and downsides. Very few things are purely good. So it makes very little sense just to name the upsides and pretend it's all good, or just to name the downsides and pretend it's all bad. You need to do the actual cost-benefit analysis.

And when you do, net-net, generally speaking, technological progress does does much more good for humanity than bad, even though there is some bad.

We tend to get things that make our lives easier, more efficient, safer, and more comfortable at ever cheaper prices.

And it might take into the next generation to find that other job. Hard to retrain past 20-30 or so. And, perhaps, automating taxis aren't something worth all that effort? Having a driver means they can do things when there is a problem rather than just phone home.

    > Never

I don't know to respond to such a silly hyperbole.

    > I can and do still take Lyfts and Ubers when I need to - it's cheaper for anything involving the highway

Is there something particular that makes Waymo so expensive for expressway driving?

> When jobs get automated, almost always, people find other jobs. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lump_of_labour_fallacy

Yes yes I'm aware of the fallacy

It's obviously not the whole picture though. When Number of Jobs automated approaches 100% then what?

If the number of jobs automated approaches 100%, then either what small proportion that is left is still sufficient to pay people, whether because the number of jobs in absolute terms is still large, say by the creation of new types of work, or because of reduction in working hours, or mass unemployment eventually forces some form of redistribution.

Large scale automation is only a problem if society allows it to become a problem.

> Large scale automation is only a problem if society allows it to become a problem.

When I look around me I see a society that I think would happily have jackboots round up excess labor and execute us rather than redistribute money fairly

So I wish I had your optimism

If you redistribute money evenly, how would you get anyone to do anything?

If you gave everyone $10k a month UBI, who is going to change your tire? How much you have to pay them to go to work if they get $10k while sitting at home?

If a town has a lack of apartments, how much will an apartment cost if a young couple has $20k a month to spend?

> If you redistribute money evenly, how would you get anyone to do anything

Currently, people need money to pay for necessities like food and shelter. Therefore either money is redistributed somehow or people have jobs to earn money, or we change the paradigm entirely to something else

We cannot have both no wealth redistribution AND replace all labour with automation without really messing this system up

This seems pretty obvious to me?

It seems totally not obvious to me. It seems so confusing. If you gave everyone a million... Eventually someone needs to buy a house... What does it cost to buy one? Would you sell your house for 2 million if everyone around you had a million? No, some Indian family would pool everyone's government pool of 1 million and bid 8 million for it. So how does a single person buy one? Same as today. Except you screwed up inflation too.

There are certainly downstream consequences to this that might not work, in which case we are simply screwed full stop :)

Do you have anything to say about the actual point I was trying to make?

Its this part:

"We cannot have both no wealth redistribution AND replace all labour with automation without really messing this system up"

My point is I'd prefer to deal with one issue, which would be labor being automated.. instead of dealing with both issues (automation and crazy inflation) at the same time.

The scenario we are discussing is one where "the number of jobs automated approaches 100%", so the point would be that it is explicitly a situation where most people are not needed in the job market.

Well, I didn't say I'm confident that society won't allow it to become a problem. But I don't think a society that triggers mass unemployment and poverty at the same time will remain like that for long before it'd face uprisings. A society like that would also face the problem that without people having money they have no customers.

Unfortunately the gains of automation will not become our post scarcity utopia, instead they will be consumed by the new AI overhead and we remain in a regime of scarcity. AI will reshape all our processes and societies, that is where the gains will go.

> When Number of Jobs automated approaches 100% then what?

When was that? Or hypothetical? Why would that be and not that new jobs being created?

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