Comment by JamesArgo | Hacker News Reader

Comment by JamesArgo | Hacker News Reader

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One of my first comments on this site pertained to this issue:

>As computers begin to become capable of more and more jobs, the demand for human labor will decline. Automation is qualitatively different from mechanization. Education is a thin gilding on an impressive but non-optimal brain architecture. To say education will cure the ills of automation is a bit like saying fitness training could have saved workhorses from obsolescence. Workers of the world, you're fucked.

My opinions haven't changed much since. Though years off yet, we are heading into uncharted territory here. Sure, the labouring classes survived, actually thrived, after the economic obsolescence of their muscles; I doubt we will do well after the obsolescence of our minds. If a body's worth a penny a day, a mind a nickel, and it costs a quarter to eat - we will not survive even if the lump of labour fallacy is, in fact, a fallacy. It's entirely possible to starve to death while never once wanting for work.

> It's entirely possible to starve to death while never once wanting for work.

Perhaps on an individual basis, but not in large groups. An economic and social system in which most humans are starving will rapidly collapse, and be replaced - if necessary, through violent revolution - by a system that at least keeps most people fed, assuming there's still sufficient real resources to produce and transport the food.

Food stamps exist not out of genuine compassion for the poor, but because those in power know very well what happens when starvation becomes too widespread.

>Food stamps exist not out of genuine compassion for the poor, but because those in power know very well what happens when starvation becomes too widespread.

someone needs to cc that memo to the right wing American Oligarchs.

While I don't necessarily dispute American oligarchy existing... don't you think capitalizing the term makes you seem a bit too much like a conspiracy theorist?

Hearts and minds, people.

Right wingers solution to unemployment/poverty is exactly that - let them starve and blame them for not being able to get a job.

"imaginenore", I see you like straw men, here is another one for you:

And on the other side of the coin, we have a legion of well-fed, opinionated individuals who, from the comforts of their warm home, tell the poor: "You can not help yourself, only we can help you, using the state. Don't mind me and how I got here, that's irrelevant, what's relevant is that WE are the only ones that can help you!" - With the implied assumption that the poor are pathetic and can't help themselves.

How is it a straw man if your leadership announced the intention to make deeps cuts in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program?

Instead of picking just one, here's an entire google search term for you to ponder over: http://lmgtfy.com/?q=illegal+to+feed+homeless

Goes to show how stupid right wingers are, it doesn't take much to make people happy consumer slaves these days. Much less of a problem than having angry mobs at their gates that want to lynch them.

Panem et circenses - they know that for now they don't have to fear anything.

But if food costs more than most people can afford, it'll have to drop prices - after all, the 0.1% richest aren't enough to sustain the market. You can say that one quarter is already the cost, so it can't drop more, but that just poses the same situation for the suppliers instead. In the end, there's no absolute floor for prices, they'll have to drop until there are enough buyers.

Of course, that doesn't mean the new equilibrium will be good compared to current western standards.

You're assuming there's not a more economically efficient use for farmland than feeding really, really, really poor people. The floor for the price will be the opportunity cost of using the land to grow food rather than, say, covering it with solar panels and exporting computation or whatever else can be dreamed up. At some point, it costs more to feed people than their economic worth over their lifetimes. I think in the long term, computers and robotics will be ridiculously efficient replacements for labour.

I don't really expect everyone to starve to death - and to be honest I think there are more-worrying implications of AI than this: http://selfawaresystems.files.wordpress.com/2008/01/ai_drive...

I do, however, want to point out that's there no economic law preventing the majority from being far worse off.

If the "really, really, really poor people" are a minority, I can believe that, but then again that's already the case.

But if those poor people are most of the current salaried people, which is the threat of automation, who will buy that computation or whatever else? Do you think EC2 would be successful if all services running on it where only used by the very rich?

When you only have a small number of buyers, there's only so much computation or whatever that is economically feasible to produce.

To make an analogy to the current world, the profit margin of luxury cars is much higher than of small compact cars. If markets worked like you're saying, every car manufacturer would exclusively switch to making luxury cars.

You're starting to sway me. But suppose we cloned the least-productive 0.001 percent of the population such that they outnumbered us all one hundred to one. Suppose, too, that all resources on earth were multiplied by the same amount. Do you think that would end well for the clones? Would Honda start making cheaper cars for the clones? What forces are at work that would guarantee the survival of these unproductive clones?

To keep the analogy fair, resources (like arable land) would also need to be cloned 100:1 - after all, automation doesn't affect the people:resources ratio. I think they would survive, yes.

What forces? Greed from everyone who could see an opportunity to profit by selling stuff to an untapped market.

Yes. I just noticed that - an idiotic oversight. I added that in. I think in general I'm more wrong than I thought I was. But at some point it breaks. If all the clones have an IQ of, say, 50 there's no way they would be able to survive. To take it to an absurd extreme, suppose we cloned chimps instead of people. The vast majority of the new 100x resources would end up in human hands.

That is, it seems obvious to me that humans would find a use for that land that is more efficient than selling its outputs to the chimps, whose value would be absurdly low - 100 chimps being worth less than one human. I think it's more likely the humans would up their land use by 100 (even supposing a static population) than attempt to sell food for nearly worthless chimp labour.

Define "end up". Humans could own the majority, but they couldn't possibly consume the majority, and in the end it's still more profitable to sell those resources to chimps as long as you get any benefit from it, as opposed to just letting it rot.

Of course, that means chimps would be forced to work for humans to eat, but then again, is that new?

Your hypothetical situation is not very hypothetical. We already let food rot to get the benefits from letting it rot. Accounting for the whole production process we throw away 1.3 billion tons per year.[0]

In Before the wall came down I see a supermarket in East Germany where products in the process of expiring got new price tags 2 or 3 times. But in the west for as far as I know we just put the vegetables and the fruits on display, people can pay what it says on the label, and the rest is all thrown away, every day, all of it. If food doesn't fit the high standards set in that scheme is it thrown away even before it goes there. Then, much of the food that does get sold expires before it is eaten.

To simplify: The supermarket has to guess if you are going to buy the strawberries. If you chose beans in stead the strawberries go in the bin. The supermarket will try sell you the strawberries a few more times but eventually they will just remove them from the assortment and a scale down of the strawberry production will follow.

[0] - http://www.fao.org/news/story/en/item/74192/icode/

Yes, I know. But the hypothetical situation is one where the majority of people in the world starve. That's certainly not what happens today.

By the way, here in Portugal supermarkets do discount some perishables when their expiration date is near. And they're not thrown away every day, at least for most vegetables and fruit.

I don't think there's anything chimps could do that would cause humans to provide for more than a tiny fraction of them; farmland that produced bananas for chimps last year might be converted to biofuel or parkland or just lie fallow this year.

Ultimately the problem will be that for the vast, vast majority of tasks, it would be orders of magnitude cheaper to spawn a new process to take care of it than to ask a human to do it.

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