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Fair point. But let’s think again. When you automated the audit role you took advantage of the remaining time so you could learn programming. You had an opportunity and seized it. Now a new guy like you won’t have the oportunity because you did it first. You inadvertently kicked the ladder. Before long all the low hanging fruits will be collected and newcomers will have a hard time getting an opportunity because things are already automated, no need for a new guy.

Hold off you say, there are many things to automate, and thats true to some extent. Eventually they will exhaust too at some point.

Im not bashing you for automating anything, in fact I did the same thing as you. Most of us automated something at some point. My point is, we are automating our jobs away. It will take a while though...




> You inadvertently kicked the ladder....no need for a new guy.

and so would you argue the same for the farmer who planted fields? Did that farmer kick the ladder for the hunter-gatherer?

The new guy _should_ have a different education, and provide value in a different way. May be instead of doing automate-able jobs, he/she now works as an entertainer, paid for by the guy who did the automation (as they are richer now, and can afford to do so).

The thinking that 'automation' destroys jobs is too narrow. The pie grows bigger when work is automated.


> Did the farmer kick the ladder for the hunter-gatherer?

looks around

Certainly seems that way.

How many tribes, peoples, and nations no longer exist because they had a less efficient means of production than their neighbors?


While the answer is difficult to ascertain, anthropological comparisons between farmers and hunter-gatherers suggests that the answer is rather close to 0.

Fun fact: hunter-gatherer lifestyles require far less work to maintain self-sufficiency than agricultural lifestyles. In fact, it wasn't until around 1900 or so that agricultural societies caught up to hunter-gatherer societies in metrics such as life expectancy and general health welfare.


What happens when hunter-gatherers and farmers come into conflict over land, which the latter utilize far more efficiently (in a calories / sq km sense)?

Note that as population densities rise, land becomes a bottleneck for a population more than number of available hours.



The farmer replaced the hunter gatherer but not with a robot, the work was still done by humans, and in fact they continued to hunt. The industrial revolution too, automated parts of labor but didn’t take the human out of the equation. This is a different situation though, it’s not equatable in the same sense. The problem with this type of automation is that the early bird will inadvertently kick the ladder; hopefully won’t turn into a feudal like society where the lower class entertains because this, as it may sound decent, is in fact a power imbalance that could easily turn into abuse. History shows us time and time again power patterns. And we should not be only hopeful it will not turn into that, we should actively make sure it won’t. In my honest opinion.


> The farmer replaced the hunter gatherer but not with a robot, the work was still done by humans,

Critically, the work was done by fewer humans (per unit of caloric energy). This allowed other people to specialize in other ways that provided value to the farmers.


Sure but does automation equate specialization?


someone must specialize to produce the automation.


Would it hurt the really good craftsmen who prefer to do it manually for higher quality? I wish I could get a pair of shoes that are custom made for my feet by a shoemaker. I’d pay more since they are better quality, last longer and are serviceable, the soles and the heels are still replaceable and there are still, luckily, shoe repair shops around. The thing is that it’s almost unheard of, at least here in NYC of a shoemaker like that nowadays. Automation killed them long time ago. Along with that we did lose some quality with it.

Whoever specializes to automate doesn’t care about the craft or quality as much as quantity. We’re in a better place now, luckily nobody goes barefoot these days, but I wish there was a solution where craftsmen could continue doing their art and craft the way they are used to without being pushed out by automation. I wonder if a compromise could be reached to meet that halfway such that automation becomes merely a tool in the hands of craftsmen, a solution where man is still at the center of his game and uses tools to enhance their game.

But the general consensus is that everything will be eventually automated away and the only things left for people to do is entertain eachother or something to this tendency.


It does grow bigger, assuming that the education level of workers is increasing. This is one of the founding tenets of Scandinavian social democracy. Eventually society will expect every citizen to go to at least college. This becomes more or less tenable with tuition-free higher education.


> Eventually society will expect every citizen to go to at least college

This is not a personal dig, but you clearly did not brush with the real world. There are a lot of smart people out there that through no fault of their own couldn't go to collage, but there are others that would not get far anywhere...

That's just how the cruel distribution mistress works.


Well you're clearly no Swedish Social Democrat...


Not everybody is intelligent enough to go to college. Society needs to provide for those people too.


The point is to make education not require so much intelligence. It’s a strange goal but at least people are somewhat honest about it.


Well, the automated farmer certainly kicked the ladder for everyone else.

Try and start a farm now, you can't compete without serious investment.

The high tech farms will send their overabundant produce 2000 miles and still undercut you, while profiting.

It's impressive, really, but it does put many local farms and would be farmers (lots of land, no other skills/ideas) out of a job.


I'm not sure this is entirely true. While I agree that we might be automating our work away, it's not zero-sum. New technologies and industries will develop creating new spaces to automate. There are tons of things that computer scientists in the 70s couldn't even dream of. I'm sure there will be things we couldn't even imagine in 50 years. I'm not saying the rates of growth and decay are the same, but it's definitely not just all decay.


We're already seeing the consequences and have been for decades. Crappy service jobs have sprung up to fill the avoid. Even those are being automated. McDonald's has claimed a $15[1] minimum wage will force them to roll out robots to replace the expensive cashiers. These robots are already being rolled out, the $15 minimum wage would only move their timeline. There's not much time before a lot of mundane service jobs get priced out of existence by crud terminals with a cash slot and chip reader. Grocery stores, gas stations, liquor stores, hotel front desks, and fast food will be the first. My guess is substantial disruption (>50% decrease in hours worked) within the next ten year's for these fields. Then I see bars and restaurants in major metros following. A table clearing, dish washing, order taking and delivering robot could be today with off the shelf parts and some talented computer vision engineers backed by a fleet of underpaid contracted out data labelers. Up front probably cost in the low tens of billion and 3-10 years to get a production ready prototype. Roll out over 3-10 years before mass adoption. Conveyor belt style restaurants and bars could pop up far sooner and completely undercut the incumbents with an Amazon model of burning cash until the competition is gone.

In 50-100 years there won't be much to automate. Drone delivery will happen soon unless the drones kill a ton of people. Same with driverless trucks. Uber might go under first but someone will figure it out. Between service jobs, warehouse jobs, unskilled manufacturing jobs, and driving jobs there's going to be tens of millions of jobs lost with virtually nothing to replace them. As jobs are made simpler by machines the value added by the machine goes entirely to the machines owner. This is a net loss for society and a net loss for the economy.

100 years ago, just sending this message to everyone of you who reads this would have taken countless man hours. Think of the paper that needs to be made, the trees fell for the paper, writing each letter and delivering them to the post office. Where someone sorts them and they get distributed to the various routes they go along. Hundreds of man hours, for a message to go around the world. Thanks to technology this message is virtually free. But the technology replaced countless jobs to get us here. We, as a society, have robbed our countrymen of opportunity by allowing technologies fruits to be captured by a select few people who are no more special than any other human on earth.

1. https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/05/mcdon...


The backlash from all that unemployment is going to crash the system at some point. The gilded, automated future is DOA. Even now, $15/hr is starvation wages, even outside of HCOL areas.




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