The realization a self-driving car is not infinitely exciting is how bubbles pop. This particular bubble was formed mostly by Tesla hyping up the coming of their fleet of millions of robotaxis that will turn every other car immediately obsolete, “like owning a horse”, and Teslas will 100x in price, and Tesla will be the most valuable company in the world. And all that, over a product they still can’t ship (and won’t).
The reality of robotaxis is that they’re happening but gradually, not overnight. There will be problems, also benefits. And it’ll be an OK business. And humans will be kicked out of another job only they could do.
In a way it’s not good news. It’s bad news. Because we think not being able to work this or that means we’ll be given more responsibility at a higher level. But we’re still apes barely qualified to drive a car. How does that magically make us capable of higher jobs? It doesn’t. As robots do more, the expectations of humans are also to do more. And most will fail.
Your Luddite take is profoundly wrong, and has been consistently proven wrong at every single technological turn in history. We have more robots than even today, and yet a labor SHORTAGE.
Eliminating the tedious and dangerous task of driving is an enormous benefit to humanity that will save 30,000+ lives a year in the US alone. We will end the misery caused to millions from injury and tragedy, and the billions of dollars lost. We can rethink our cities and move parking to the periphery. New jobs will emerge to replace long distance trucking and taxi driver (two jobs that didn't really exist just 100 years ago). Humanity will benefit.
> We can rethink our cities and move parking to the periphery
Just moving parking to the periphery won't make American cities better or more walkable.
> Eliminating the tedious and dangerous task of driving is an enormous benefit to humanity that will save 30,000+ lives a year in the US alone
If you're assuming that self-driving cars will be perfect and segregated, conditions will always be perfect (e.g. no pedestrians or bikes slipping), etc. etc. etc. Why would you?
> Eliminating the tedious and dangerous task of driving is an enormous benefit to humanity
The vast majority of driving can be replaced by already existing, proven and drastically more efficient tech - public transit.
> > We can rethink our cities and move parking to the periphery
> Just moving parking to the periphery won't make American cities better or more walkable.
It certainly can make cities better. Removing street parking allows streets to be narrower, giving us room for larger sidewalks, bikepaths, outdoor seating in restaurants.
> > Eliminating the tedious and dangerous task of driving is an enormous benefit to humanity that will save 30,000+ lives a year in the US alone
> If you're assuming that self-driving cars will be perfect and segregated, conditions will always be perfect (e.g. no pedestrians or bikes slipping), etc. etc. etc. Why would you?
Humans definitely aren't perfect, that's why there are so many collisions, deaths and injuries. Many of those occur in "ideal" conditions due to distracted driving. In exceptional conditions (where people, bikes, animals run into the road), humans have a pretty poor response too. You'd have to run the numbers (like insurance companies) to determine when they are generally better than humans.
There's also no reason you couldn't delegate parts of the road system as autonomous only, we already have areas that are pickup/dropoff or taxi only. Just expand them.
> > Eliminating the tedious and dangerous task of driving is an enormous benefit to humanity
> The vast majority of driving can be replaced by already existing, proven and drastically more efficient tech - public transit.
Why not both? Put in your destination in an app and if there are enough people on the way, an autonomous bus can pick you up. If not, an autonomous car does.
It also won't cure cancer or make me toast in the morning, but being able to move parking has big meaningful advantages that are likely to be leveraged!
If you think you can convince the 3rd largest country by landmass in the world to just swap over to trains and buses - great.
In the meantime, let's approach other solutions too. Self driving cars are here, are actively used in areas without trains, and seem like they solve some real problems and maybe create a few new ones.
I've noted this here before, it's worth repeating:
We will continue to accept our current 42,000 human-driven-car-related deaths/per year (2022) in the U.S. rather than 420 self-driving-car-related deaths annually for many years.
Autonomy is a fierce thing that humans can't bear to part with.
>The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has released its latest projections for traffic fatalities in 2022, estimating that 42,795 people died in motor vehicle traffic crashes. This represents a small decrease of about 0.3% as compared to 42,939 fatalities reported for 2021.
How was it a Luddite take? Luddites argued that robots undercut quality by offering a price that couldn't be competed with, but ultimately with an inferior product. The person you're replying to is suggesting humans are unskilled apes incapable of competing with robots on both price & quality
You’re not thinking through what you’re talking about, unfortunately that’s typical.
Think about it, how can there be a “SHORTAGE of jobs”, when we have over 8 billion people on this planet? Are we running out of people in general? No. Is everyone employed and happy? No.
So we are short of the kind of increasingly mythical people with 20 years experience in some tech that came out yesterday, we’re short of people with IQ 180 and above with five diplomas, people with certain increasingly higher level of requirements. PRECISELY the kind I’m talking about.
Most people do not qualify for those jobs. They never will. They can’t. They’re not seeking those jobs as they don’t understand them (the employers often also don’t), and if they saught them they would not be given to them. Do you understand what I’m talking about?
More and more people will be in the pool that do not qualify. The more “shitty jobs” you take out of the jobs pool we have available for humans, the more “shitty unemployed people” there will be. Eventually there will be billions of “shitty unemployed people”, because what passes as moderately intelligent person today will be just another shitty person 10-20 years from now, who better brush up and get those five diplomas and his IQ to 180 and otherwise how dare they ask for a job?
There is no such situation where dumb people rule over smart machines. If the machines are better then the people become useless. Many aren’t good at much. They’re decent people but just happen to be best at “store clerk”. Those are maybe some of your friends, parents, siblings, children. Your wife. They don’t get math, and find it hard to remember too much. Those people are doomed. And that’s most people.
Your elitist attitude is only further stressed by the incorrect reference to the Luddites. They embraced technology with open arms. Their bosses told them no one will be fired, only promoted, everyone will be rich. Then they got fired. They protested and were subdued with violence and prison time. That’s the story of the Luddites. They didn’t hate machines. But the machines made them useless. So they were gone from the picture.
You think you’re not like them, you’re better. You’re one of the smart ones. But you’re precisely them. Your don’t know your history so you’re doomed to repeat it.
I’m not against machines. I love machines. I make machines. I program machines. I evolve machines. I’m sympathetic to any system in this universe, be it smart, dumb, protein, silicon and metal. But it’s incredibly awkward to me to see people cheer for their own obsoletion. We really have no idea what we’re doing. We’re simply the scorpion riding on the frog’s back and following our nature. We can’t escape our nature.
Relatively speaking, it’s the best it has ever been in the history of humanity.
Of course it’s hard to measure happiness and we’ll never be perfect but we have greater safety, lower violence, more food, more work, etc etc.
I wonder if people had succeeded in stopping the tractor because it displaced workers.
Of course it displaced workers. Workers who now do more valuable work. Or even less work altogether.
100 years ago, retirement was very rare. Now people retire and live 10-30 years without work.
Robots and automation will help this trend, not hurt it.
Of course as a programmer I’ve been making myself obsolete for decades and just moving onto cooler problems. Only stupid programmers worry about “job safety” and creating brittle software that requires them to be around forever.
I don't disagree that we live in a relatively good time right now, but I do wonder if this is the best it has ever been in the history of humanity.
We have more pollution (air, water, noise, light), more cancer, more heart disease, more obesity, more addiction, more suicide, much worse environmental impact, and so on (though these are the worst that I can think of off the top of my head).
Your points about safety, violence, money, etc, are all good, and there are many other really positive things about the present, for sure, but it is not clear to me that we are absolutely better off than at any time in the past.
There were some bad times, and there is too much nostalgia by well-off people for past times when they were well-off while most others were not.
I think that things are in general pretty good right now. Modern medicine alone makes me prefer to live now than wish I were some scruffy medieval peasant. We should recognize that we have paid a huge price for how we live now, and that price might not have been worth it. I don't know how we judge one way or the other.
Anyway. I wish I could see the stars. I wish there was still real wilderness. I wish that PFAS weren't almost literally everywhere. I wish farmers selected for flavor rather than size or density. Etc.
Now, the 1990s! That was the best time in human history. ;)
Also we live longer so it’s more likely to detect and die from cancer.
Even over 100 years ago is true incidence of cancer higher? Not to mention why we would think we have more cancer now than 1000 years ago. Or perhaps we have more cancer but that’s because people aren’t dying of other things first, so it doesn’t matter we have more cancer.
This is the kind of counterproductive examples I find people arguing about. Of course there are more vehicle accidents now, but that’s because there’s more people driving, not that cars are more dangerous.
Yet vehicle mortality rate has decreased [0] and pedestrian mortality rate is a bit trickier as over the past 40 years it dropped and then climbed back to where it was in absolute numbers [1]. So it’s definitely less dangerous based on the rate of drivers, passengers and pedestrians who die each year.
Please share any better metrics you like for showing increase in danger.
No both the absolute and rate of of cancers has increased. Even if you ignore environmental factors older people get more cancer and we have more older people today. Age adjusted cancer rates for some kinds of cancers have dropped because fewer people smoke etc, but it’s not universal across all cancers.
We do also detect more cancers early, but that also makes cancer treatment look better. Aka 5 year survival rates look better when you start the clock sooner.
You touch upon it in your comment and giving it zero weight for some reason: you can’t develop most types of cancer if you die at 30 (extreme example).
Because it’s irrelevant when the global age adjusted cancer rates are increasing overall.
An increasing number of people under 30 are developing cancer. America is only 4% of global population, if you want a better picture look at China and India which have both skyrocketed pollution levels recently.
I think you have your rose-colored glasses on when looking at the past.
Air pollution: down since the 1990s. [1][2][3]
Water pollution: down since the 1990s. [4][5]
Noise/light pollution: definitely up since the 1990s, agreed there.
Cancer: US deaths are way down since the 1990s, though it's cheating a bit since that was the top of the smoking-related spike in lung cancer. Still, other cancer deaths are way down since then too. [6][7] (Edit: worldwide this looks worse and things have increased lately, see: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/number-of-people-with-can...)
Heart disease: can't find long term stats on this quickly, but cardiovascular mortality is way down. [8]
Obesity, addiction, and suicide: certainly up.
"Much worse environmental impact," I think the decline in air and water pollution makes this debatable.
Climate change is a bit of a weird one, because it's definitely getting worse, but at the same time, the worst-case scenarios (greenhouse gas emissions continue unabated into the indefinite future) is becoming less likely. [9] So the derivative is bad, but the second derivative is good.
> Cancer: US deaths are way down since the 1990s, though it's cheating a bit since that was the top of the smoking-related spike in lung cancer. Still, other cancer deaths are way down since then too. [6][7] (Edit: worldwide this looks worse and things have increased lately, see: <a href="https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/number-of-people-with-can...)
> Heart disease: can't find long term stats on this quickly, but cardiovascular mortality is way down. [8]
And these two are linked. If most people get their cancer in their 70s, but they're dying of heart attacks in their 50s, anything that stops people dying of heart attacks is going to increase the number of people getting cancer.
I don't have any quibble with your stats. Thanks for supplying them.
I was kidding about the 1990s. :)
Have you seen the maps that show where PFAS are? (Nearly everywhere.) Micro and macro plastics? (Pretty much everywhere.) Pollution (air and water) is absolutely up from pre-industrial levels.
Look, I am really not saying that now is worse than any time in the past. I think things are pretty good right now, except for a few real tragic issues and localities. All I am saying is that I am not 100% sure that now is undeniably better than at any time in the past of human history.
I think your stats make a pretty compelling case that the story is a bit mixed at the moment, especially depending on how someone might define what the best time to be alive would entail.
Your reasoning seems logical at first glance so I can understand why you would come to your conclusions.
History shows you to be wrong. It doesn't take a high IQ to use a machine to hugely increase your productivity. And in some cases the machine is easier to operate. I'll take a car over a horse any day.
Salaries for low skill jobs in the US are going up. UPS drivers now get paid close to $200k. The labor shortage is not just for highly skilled, high IQ people.
New technology has only ever resulted in people doing more productive work. That might change. No one can predict the future. But based on history we will continue to see quality of life improve thanks to productivity increases, and employment to stay high.
The one change I would like to see is workers organizing to capture more of the profit and productivity changes they help create. UPS drivers did it. More of that means we all share in the wealth of productivity increases.
What quality of life? Most families need three or more jobs to cover basic needs of life like housing, healthcare, food and travel. Salaries are rising. The value of those salaries is dropping.
We are more interconnected and more surrounded by tech. This is not the same as higher quality of life. It means more tech. Which is the subject. Oh I can watch someone pretend to be NPC on the other side of the globe on a pocket box. Quality of life.
I think it’s telling people want a vacation away from tech and “modern life”. Why would they go for lower quality of life as a vacation?
I already mentioned the problem of masssive wealth gaps indirectly. Us workers need to organize to recapture the profit that used to be shared with us. UPS workers just negotiated $170,000 TC. I think that's enough to live a nice life, especially if two people are contributing to a household.
Productivity has increased by a lot. It's up to voters and workers to get their fair share of those gains. The uber wealthy are not going to willingly give it up.
Yes, we mostly agree. The part I disagree with is humans being obsolete. We don't manually weave cloth anymore. Which is why we can afford far more clothing than folks 100 years ago. The jobs are there. That most of the profit from that work goes to the uber wealthy is the problem.
The problem is that history shows there is no such thing as humans banding together and taking things back. As a group. The group has new “benevolent leaders” emerge, then they take everything and stop being benevolent very quickly, if not instantly. Animal Farm anyone? Animal Farm. Still relevant.
That sounds to me like you're repeating dogma, but even if it's true, that's fine by me. I'd rather my union steward was getting rich (for some low value of 'rich') than my CEO. Only one of them is on my side.
It’s interesting, because this is how your response sounded to me. Is there no dogma about how everyone should group together and take back the means of production? There is a very large, prominent movement about this response to capitalism.
My point is, that theory and practice differ, and when they differ it’s not the practice that is wrong, but the theory.
Every time people banded together to take the means of production, it resulted simply in destruction, instant corruption and a new autocratic regime built around the toughest thugs. The utopia does not occur. So clearly this is not the solution for solving our problems. There are problems. And there are solutions. But you need to search elsewhere.
Your union leader is not necessarily on your side. Even if they are, not for long. The system decides how they act, and power corrupts. Watch the strike in Hollywood. Watch how the previous strike in 2007 caused the present situation in 2023, and watch how the union will end up dissolving itself as more and more people will start leaving it. I’m not happy about this. I think workers need to be able to band together in groups and negotiate in groups (called companies, for example). I’m not convinced it should be one all encompassing mob-like group with no alternatives, but that’s just me.
Ok, well, as long as we're on the subject of the distinction between theory and practice I'm not worried that unionizing Amazon warehouses will bring about a new USSR.
I've worked union jobs and I've worked non-union jobs: the union jobs paid better and came with better benefits than their non-union equivalents. QED.
But don’t you know that organizing labor and giving safety nets like universal health insurance to people leads directly to shortages, breadlines, massive government repression and the entire population eating their cats?
Everyone should be aware of the TTV of these activities (“Time to Venezuela”) and refrain from unionizing.
</sarcasm>
Anyway, unionizing will only hasten the R&D investments to replace human labor. We should instead have an automation tax on the corporations and have a UBI. We won’t need unions or minimum wage laws. Even then, though, the UBI will always be less than what the corporations would spend on people. But we have to get that in place before demand human labor drops like a stone, and the governments simply won’t care about mass unrest because they’ll control everyone with surveillance, drones and new laws.
Unionized Amazon warehouses are the strongest kick in the butt that Amazon needs to automate this entire union out of existence. Once again. See Hollywood. Strike. “No AI” said the signs. Result? Studios amping up AI hiring like crazy.
Humans are into humans. But capitalism isn’t, that much. It doesn’t care about what substrate it’s made of. Its soul is made of money.
Unions make things better for workers in the short term because a business can’t adapt that quick. It’s like a racket. Same like when a lone worker faces few gigantic corporations and they all offer bad jobs. It’s like a racket. But rackets don’t last. Adaptation kicks and the layers shift. And AI is the biggest adaptation ever. It adapts us out of being necessary. Human leverage drops to near zero and with it the union leverage, also.
I wouldn't count your AI chickens yet. Path dependence is real and SAG/WGA are smart to pick this fight today not in 5 years' time. If they play their cards right now, while they have leverage, then they will gain additional legal/contractual leverage for the future.
Slavery and child labor were once common and economically lucrative, today they're very rare in the developed world. It's simply not true that humans can never choose to collectively reject an economically compelling option.
“Humans are into humans. But capitalism isn’t, that much.”
I wish more people on HN would understand this. Capitalism isn’t your friend. It give you short term wins but in the end, the negative externalities can add up hurt everyone including the vast majority of those who were winning initially.
At first, in all transactions, A and B win at the expense of C. Ancaps only look at A and B being better off. But in the end, almost everyone is a C, and the externalized costs add up for them all.
We need to switch to a more sustainable system before it’s too late. Capitalism’s negative externalities are also destroying the environment and running up an ecological credit card that future generations will have to pay.
“The bill always comes due!” - Mordo (great philosopher)
> My point is, that theory and practice differ, and when they differ it’s not the practice that is wrong, but the theory.
Your socio-economic theory is at odds with what happened in the so-called western world over the last three centuries, but to understand why, one would need to step away from over-generalizing just the most dramatic parts of history, and study the boring bits as well.
It's more like "you're wrong, because your theory does not even correspond to evidence we have around us." The reasons why your doom-laden prognostications did not inevitably come to pass are not, however, reducible to a paragraph or two.
As for being verbose, compare it to the post I was replying to.
Once again you forgot to even hint what evidence you’re talking about.
It’s like you’re eager to win an argument, you want that reward, so you’re posting, but you’re too lazy to actually make an argument. So you kind of keep posting half way and declaring yourself a winner because “everything around” proves you right about… something. It’s kind of funny.
For example, your claim that “Every time people banded together to take the means of production, it resulted simply in destruction, instant corruption and a new autocratic regime built around the toughest thugs” is falsified by the history of Western Europe. If it actually were the case, Western Europe would now resemble North Korea, but instead, the means of production is well-regulated by democratic governments.
At least it's clear what I'm trying to persuade you about.
As for evidence, frankly like this other guy says "it's all around us" but you need to translate what happens to systems (species, civilizations, ecosystems, nations, companies, industries) in smaller scale, and translate it to a globalized economy. Indeed, by the time we have evidence that our entire species is potentially screwed... we'll no longer have use of the evidence.
It's the same story as climate change. I actually think it's quite poetic both of those are hitting us at the same time. COVID was a bit early and a bit weak, but I'm sure another will come, to make the perfect triple storm.
It is not entirely clear to me exactly what you are trying to persuade us about, though it is quite possible that we share a number of concerns. I am not, however, going to be persuaded of that on the basis of a socioeconomic theory that ignores, and attempts to contradict, the complexity of recent history.
Your theory, which you may find so evident to you that you won't bother saying it out loud, is that unions are bad for capitalism.
The real world during the 1900s, if anything proved the opposite. It's not that all unions by definition always are great, that could be said for anything and should be obvious. It's that treating workers as an integral part of the business, with the obligations that come with rights, wins in the marketplace every time.
All rich countries, at least in the western hemisphere, became rich because of worker's movements, not in spite of them. Other countries have been pushed into the businesses with the slimmest margins where there is no innovation.
The truth is that innovation and worker's rights won. When arguing that an ideological map is right despite real world data, at least make those arguments against the same reality as we live in, so everyone involved will have a chance to understand how the ideal system measures up against their experience.
This is easy to demonstrate as false. The US Revolution and many others that followed put far more power into the hands of the average person. And unionized workers earn more almost everywhere you go. Union leaders probably do take more than they deserve, but not as much as the company owners would if you were negotiating as an individual against their organized management and legal team. So yeah, you do have to pay someone to lead your organization. But going without an organization is kind of nuts when the other side pays for one.
And being efficient enough and providing a service that's valued enough that both the companies doing the shipping and the people receiving the packages are willing to absorb the labor costs. If residential delivery cost a lot more/was less convenient (as it generally used to be), people would be much more inclined to just go into stores.
The actual key being that they get paid somewhere around half that. Other industries don't calculate the overtime potential or benefits in the total compensation figure but of course this gets clicks and misinformation spreads like wildfire.
I was using this article for my source [1] which says:
"By the end of the new contract, full-time UPS delivery drivers will make an average of $49 per hour, which works out to nearly $102,000 per year, assuming a 40-hour workweek, 52 weeks a year. Those employees are guaranteed an eight-hour workday, a UPS spokesperson told CBS MoneyWatch.
Drivers also receive $50,000 in benefits that include health, welfare and pension contributions, the spokesperson said."
I think a base salary of $100k is a decent living for non-skilled labor. And the pension contributions, whatever they are, are reasonable to include. I'm also noting that the end of the new contract is in 5 years, so maybe it won't be as good of a living as I'm thinking, depending on inflation.
In any case the important point is that UPS cut earnings forecasts because of this which means that workers did capture more of the profits that would have gone to owners. I consider it a win. Could it have been a bigger win? If most other workers were organized, I think so. With so many workers negotiating as individuals in the US, companies still have the upper hand as a whole. Workers continue to underestimate their value to the economy both in terms of labor and as consumers. The rich need labor, the rich need consumers. We should be getting a bigger piece of the huge profit pie that productivity increases result in.
>which works out to nearly $102,000 per year, assuming a 40-hour workweek, 52 weeks a year. Those employees are guaranteed an eight-hour workday
Exactly the point I was making. They’re making $100K which is decidedly not almost $200K. This isn’t to say that it isn’t good, but every well paying job includes pension or 401k matching, paid time off, health insurance, sometimes education reimbursement, etc. It’s (intentionally, on the part of “journalists”) misleading to quote $170K when that is not how compensations are compared in the US. Rounding up a fudged number to $200K is even more misleading. Quoting a number including 5 years of merit increases and inflation is even more misleading. The numbers are good and impressive on their own, there is no need for this fudgery except to drive clicks.
I would rather use TC because health plans and pensions vary from company to company. So the number I'd go with is around $150,000.
Right of you to call out the rounding up though. The article was exaggerating with $170k, and to remember that number I had mentally noted almost $200k. I looked for the article later to refresh my memory. You're right that any discussion on this deserves more accuracy than I started with.
The important thing to me is for us workers to recognize how to get a fairer share of the increased productivity. Unions have delivered throughout history.
Past results are not an indicator of future performance. There is no economic law that guarantees human labor will always be in demand. 70 years ago one man could sustain an entire household on one paycheck, his work was valued and the company man worked decades until he got a pension. Today, both sexes work long hours just to afford a tiny apartment, they have to switch jobs every couple years and even started doing the gig economy on the side to get by. Until robots replace them.
Sure, some humans will be more productive, but then we’ll need less of them. And with AI, it’s easier to just have the AI learn the new “irreplaceable” skills much faster than retraining millions of humans.
Horses and oxen were very useful throughout history, until the car and tractor was invited. Today the number of horses and oxen is at an all-time low. No amount of unionizing by horses would change that.
> Past results are not an indicator of future performance.
Sure, but we can't predict the future, so it's the best model we have.
> Today, both sexes work long hours just to afford a tiny apartment, they have to switch jobs every couple years and even started doing the gig economy on the side to get by.
What you've missed is that productivity (as measured by GDP) has gone way up. Someone captured those profits. Which is why we see such massive wealth gaps.
> Sure, some humans will be more productive, but then we’ll need less of them.
This has never happened before. I could be wrong and maybe it will happen, but the most technologically advanced country in the world has companies competing for workers and salaries going up. This is in the face of massive automation.
> And with AI, it’s easier to just have the AI learn the new “irreplaceable” skills much faster than retraining millions of humans.
> No amount of unionizing by horses would change that.
If horses were the ones buying your products and creating your wealth, then they would actually have a pretty big say. What us workers fail to understand is just how essential we are to the economy. We need to organize and demand our fair share of the productivity gains.
> What you've missed is that productivity (as measured by GDP) has gone way up. Someone captured those profits. Which is why we see such massive wealth gaps.
Exactly! That is what happens under capitalism. Which is why we need safety nets in place that can grow and be funded by taxes on automation. The safety nets should redistribute money equally to all citizens. We can also fund them by other pigovian taxes, like those on fossil fuels at the point of extraction — Alaska does exactly this with its Permanent Fund.
> This has never happened before
AI that can replace humans at most tasks within a couple years of R&D hasn’t happened before.
But when it came to machine labor, the farms were all automated and the factories were all automated. We know what happens. It’s not like humans got the windfall — because the only way regular get money in capitalism is through wages.
> If horses were the consumer
The ones unionizing are the labor producers, so not a valid analogy
> AI that can replace humans at most tasks within a couple years of R&D hasn’t happened before.
We've seen absolutely massive automation in manufacturing, and as you noted even in farming. And no massive unemployment as a result. I just won't believe that AI will do anything more than hugely increase productivity until I see the unemployment. People have predicted massive unemployment with every new technology advance. They were wrong every time.
> The ones unionizing are the labor producers, so not a valid analogy.
They are also the consumers. How are the wealthy supposed to get that way or even stay that way with no consumers?
No massive unemployment? The Great Depression lasted quite a while! And we only got out of it by after a decade of building up the next job sector of things for people to work in (see three sector model in economics)
Compare pictures of farms before and after automation and count the number of farmhands. Before automation, 20% of American jobs were farm-related!
Read Grapes of Wrath and other books by John Steinbeck… you won’t say there was no unemployment after that.
The Great Depression was largely caused by loss of farm jobs. As the farmhands migrated to the cities it took a decade to build up the manufacturing centers to give them all jobs. In the meantime, one third of the banks failed and the money supply they issued. The Fed didn’t bail them out and we got a depression.
Oh, and the hugely increased productivity led farmers to be engaged in a race to the bottom, trying to make up for falling prices with ever-larger harvests. The land became depleted and this led to the Dust Bowl as it simply blew away in dust storms.
Capitalism does this around the world. TODAY, one third of arable farmland has undergone desertification, likely due to similar economic factors.
> How are the wealthy supposed to get that way and stay that way with no consumers?
The wealthy can get that way without needing to pay much to human PRODUCERS. That’s the point.
If the only way an average person can get money and be a consumer is to sell their labor, then they will get less purchasing power over time. Yes things might get cheaper due to technology, but not everything (eg rent) and also the money supply could be inflated so prices could also rise due to that. The government COULD be giving all that money to people as a UBI but it usually exacerbates inequality by propping up stock markets etc.
Also, if wealthy people control all the resources and infrastructure then they can easily extract rents from all kinds of ecosystems. But even if the people on the ground barely have any money, the wealthy can just pay corporations for their own needs (eg robots doing their work). The owners of the corporations are wealthy and they cover the cost of robots.
We already see this in rising inequality … the wealthy didn’t need the poor to consume their products. Many of them could just have the middle class and wealthy consume them. (Look up Plutocracy.)
Having said that… if the automation could be made accessible to all, then everyone would be increasingly a consumer of products made by robots. Tax the robots, and give the money to the people unconditionally, so they can consume more.
It wasn't caused by a big advance in technology. [1]
"There is no consensus among economists and historians regarding the exact causes of the Great Depression. However, many scholars agree that at least the following four factors played a role."
1. The stock market crash of 1929.
2. Banking panics and monetary contraction.
3. The gold standard.
4. Decreased international lending and tariffs.
Nowhere are technological advances mentioned. You can probably find an article that mentions it, but productivity increases as a cause are considered heterodox theory.
> If the only way an average person can get money and be a consumer is to sell their labor, then they will get less purchasing power over time.
Not if they are as organized and lawyer up like the folks they are negotiating with. And the numbers say you are wrong. Purchasing power has stayed about the same over the past 40 years. [2] The real problem is that workers increasingly negotiate as individuals against an organized management team who has the goal of extracting more profit for the owners, and less profit for the workers. Organized workers have far more negotiating power, but workers fail to join in and use this advantage. Who is to blame for that other than us workers ourselves?
If workers had become more unionized over the past 40 years, they would have captured more of the profits and wealth gaps would be smaller. We can see exactly this with UPS announcing lower earnings for owners in the coming years due to unions winning higher salaries.
> The wealthy can get that way without needing to pay much to human PRODUCERS. That’s the point.
How? Where exactly is the money going to come from if the producers don't have any money to spend? From where does this money magically appear and who is buying the products that the wealthy are selling?
It may be heterodox (like Einstein’s theory of relativity vs the luminiferous aether theories) but I think the facts are there. I follow more the thinking of Joe Stiglitz and the Three Sector Model of economics to arrive at that conclusion:
> 70 years ago one man could sustain an entire household on one paycheck
There are just as many "one salary sustains an entire household" jobs today as there ever were in the past. More in fact. The factory job that provides enough for the whole family was only ever a reality for a tiny, tiny portion of humanity. The vast majority of people, even the vast majority of americans did not have access to those jobs. Even the "glory days" of american manufacturing were filled with abject poverty.
> Horses and oxen were very useful throughout history, until the car and tractor was invited. Today the number of horses and oxen is at an all-time low. No amount of unionizing by horses would change that
This ignores that horses have zero political power. No one is working to make their lives better.
Average family income in 1950 was $3,300, according to estimates issued today by Roy V. Peel, Director, Bureau of the Census, Department of Commerce.
The average income across all occupations in the USA today is $61,900. The average household incomes averaged to $87,864
According to recent data, the average price for a home in 1950 was just $12,000, while the average price for a home today is upwards of $540,000.
It turns out that a typical “household” back then had one breadwinner make the vast majority of the money. Today the households are often single-parent, or both parents working
So I don’t think that only a factory job could provide for a whole family back then. But my point is that whatever the corporation was (law firm, or whateve) they weren’t going to lay people off because the automation and AI wasn’t there. Now there increasingly is. The number of people who hold a job for 20-30 years at the same company is much smaller than back then.
I guess the main factor is the diminishing returns of a glut of products (crops in the farm example, or AI-generate content now) which devalues that specific industry’s products and makes everyone in a race to the bottom, so humans are priced out of a job. If you do this across enough industries (and many today are electronic or manufacturing) that means humans are no longer cost-effective to employ for any except a diminishing number of positions. What will we do with the growing unemployed class?
Those are not my points. I know it’s a long comment bordering on a post transitioning into a rambling, but if you don’t want to spend the time to read it and understand it, at least don’t produce a superficial strawman version of it.
The most important part to understand is that systems operate on a “use it or lose it” principle. This is why no one looks like Arnold while sitting in a chair all day, even if they eat all the protein.
If we stop being useful nothing can stop what we created from chewing us up and spitting us out. And all this while everyone involved may have the best of intentions even.
And most people can’t adapt that fast or at all to this situation. It has happened before, many times and it keeps happening at larger and larger scales, in shorter and shorter periods of time.
The Aztec and Inca didn’t adapt to the European tech and get “jobs”. They went extinct.
The first point you’ve extracted is too narrowly focused. I’m not OP but I believe they were making a general point about increasing automation, not a specific point about driverless cars.
I agree with everything the OP has written. I had a similar revelation myself not long ago. I think that I’m one of the smart ones and that I’ll okay, I’ll thrive even. But what about stupid people? Stupid people deserve to have happy lives too.
Do we have a labor shortage, or do we have a shortage at the wages companies are prepared to pay? There's a largely unexamined assumption built into capitalism that there exists a market clearing wage where humans will be incentivized to provide labor and owners will reap a profit. But what if that assumption is breaking down? My most "valuable" skill is writing software, but it may soon be the case that ChatGPT 9 can do that much better and cheaper than me.
What happens when we have nothing profitable to offer capitalism?
That’s indeed one of many ways people are driven out a job market that seemingly is hungry for jobs.
Posting unrealistic job offers can be a way to cover legal requirements or excuse yourself for automating everything. Or it can be business owners legitimately searching the space if humans can provide better value than machines, and increasingly finding that… no.
I wonder what would happen if people kept posting jobs for human calculators up to 2023.
“Must work without sleep, perform all calculations up to at least 9 digits, make no mistakes and provide instant answers. Management occasionally may curse and be violent towards the calculator, when the numbers are bad for business (must keep quiet and take it). Salary: $12 (per year)”.
We have a labor shortage. Economists don't assume that markets will clear. There are many reasons why they often don't.
Given that wages are about as high as they have ever been in our lifetimes, and unemployment is about as low as it has ever been in our lifetimes, it is an odd time to go Luddite.
Why keep stressing about wages being high? Do you people not understand basic inflation? At any point in time wages will always be highest they’ve ever been. In many places in the US, three years ago $100 bought you a week’s worth of food. Now it buys you a day’s worth. Maybe two.
Even in poor countries food has 3x in prices in two years.
Jobs are high because everyone has to work, wife, husband, even children in some cases, and many people take two jobs. While more and more don’t ever register at the bureau so they fall off the system. That’s your utopia?
>Do we have a labor shortage, or do we have a shortage at the wages companies are prepared to pay?
There are a ton of services that I'd be happy to have people perform for me, but there's some upper limit to what I'm willing/able to pay. This applies directly or through some (capitalist) intermediary. If it's going to cost me $1,000 for you to cut my lawn, I'll either do it myself or just let it grow.
Exactly. So what happens when the amount they're willing to pay is much lower than what it costs to live? If the robo lawnmowers will cut grass (and the occasional hand or foot) for $1/hour, what happens to the people who work as landscapers? Maybe you could argue they'll shift higher up the value chain, designing gardens or planting flowers and we'll all have prettier gardens... but I'm not sure the story of the last 50 years has been a race to the top.
There will always be a labor shortage in a way, but that doesn't translate to wages.
In 1990, my dad started earning 4x minimum wage. He was a recent immigrant that barely spoke English, but he could be the foreman of a shop in the SF Bay area that built cabinets because he was a bright guy.
Now 30 years later, he is the senior project manager for a much more successful version of the same company. He is an expert in his field. He works on $2million CABINET projects for Google campus or Rivian's offices. He makes $70 an hour. A little over 4x minimum wage.
Eliminating the tedious and dangerous task of driving is an enormous benefit to humanity that will save 30,000+ lives a year in the US alone. We will end the misery caused to millions from injury and tragedy, and the billions of dollars lost. We can rethink our cities and move parking to the periphery.... Humanity will benefit.
They said all these things about the Segway, too.
I think it's been ten years since I've seen anyone except a cop using a Segway. (And I'm not sure how my local PD is still using them [as of yesterday], since I thought they were discontinued.)
this is moronic. If anyone reading this has had the experience of being abused for low-skill work, wages stolen, unfair terms with no insurance or benefits, or in a new twist, a contractor who was unexpectedly terminated with no warning.. please add your insights
the actual history of labor is that Slave Labor, Peasants and Indentured Workers, are the biggest part of large scale industry since the Pyramids. Actual people use and abuse "workers" to the fullest extent possible..
This "shortage" language in the USA has an agenda, and is flatly manipulative IMHO
We have a shortage of fulfilling jobs too, and a shortage of jobs that pay enough to ever afford a home.
Ever wonder why people are bored enough to make up Qanon conspiracies, believe them, and start an insurrection over total nonsense? Too many people with nothing to do and nothing to live for.
The job shift should go toward reducing waste and environmental impacts of our technological trash that we produce en mass due to global consumerism...
We should have every petroleum company on the planet employing people to recover and capture their waste(s) in all formats.
Honestly - we need to kill the capitalist oil industry - its a global need that should simply be communized not capitalized. (just like nuclear energy)
I, for one, welcome a boring self driving car experience. Unfortunately they tend to be exciting. And in the case of Tesla lethal. In the case of cruise mostly annoying and mildly terrifying.
The reality of robotaxis is that they’re happening but gradually, not overnight. There will be problems, also benefits. And it’ll be an OK business. And humans will be kicked out of another job only they could do.
In a way it’s not good news. It’s bad news. Because we think not being able to work this or that means we’ll be given more responsibility at a higher level. But we’re still apes barely qualified to drive a car. How does that magically make us capable of higher jobs? It doesn’t. As robots do more, the expectations of humans are also to do more. And most will fail.