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Comment by anthonyarroyo | Hacker News Reader

If, as this guy contends, the future economy won't adapt to automation as it has in the past, it will lead to massive unemployment and social instability.

When threatened with massive social instability, smart countries will regulate automation. Countries that fail to regulate will face rising social instability and eventually eat themselves alive, being taken over by countries that are more stable. Political elites will regulate automation purely out of the interest of keeping their jobs.

All of these technofatalist arguments (the technology is coming, so why fight it?) fail to take into account that Angloamerican laissez-faire politics are not a global inevitability.

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http://lao8n.com/2015/04/05/if-technology-growth-does-lead-t...

the flaw in your reasoning i think is that there will be zero-sum fight to have the limited number of companies in your country so that you can tax those companies and support the massive number of unemployed people. there will be a race to the bottom in the automation regulation that you describe because companies will just move if they are not allowed to lower costs through more automation... thus i think the result is that some countries will have very high employment rates because all the high-skilled, unautomatable jobs are located there (e.g. the US) and some countries (e.g. spain?) will have really high unemployment... this will lead to extreme tensions internationally followed by god knows what..

Unfortunately (fortunately?) your rebuttal assumes that 1) companies can move easily from country to country and 2) companies are motivated entirely by profit.

As for 1, countries have many ways from persuasion to coercion to keep companies in their sphere of influence. There are plenty of business-unfriendly countries in this world that somehow retain businesses. In the real world, there's friction.

In my cursory research, I find 2 to be, once again, a liberal-democratic assumption which relies on our particular barrier between public and private. This barrier doesn't exist the same way everywhere: some corporations operate as extensions of nationalistic projects. Gazprom's relationship to Russia is different than Apple's relationship to the US. Samsung (and other Chaebol corporations) has a different relationship to the Korean nation than Google has with the US.

it is not just a function of companies moving after they are successful. just look at silicon valley where most of the best start-ups are founded. silicon valley is a classic global zero-sum game because the network effects are so strong... look at attempts in chile, dublin, london etc. to create startup hubs, they are struggle with the fact that silicon valley is taking all the best companies first...

re 2) that's a good point i didn't thikn of that and many countries may seek to nationalize big corporations to keep them based in the domestic country etc..

clearly i'm not arguing that there will be no companies in some countries and all the companies in other countries, but maybe just a more extreme version of what you already see now where most of the big technology companies are based in just two countries: usa and china... maybe you need only half of all the companies in the world to be global enough to serve the world from just one location/country to have extreme international inequality/differences in % unemployed etc.

Countries that regulate automation will be eaten alive by countries that don't.

Unless you embrace industrialization/automation then the other people will have the maxim gun and you will not. Ask the Zulus what happens then.

Any country that regulates the robots is doomed.

But regulating energy, land usage and other natural resources can be a way to make it work.

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