Maybe we need to acknowledge that we're moving towards having a society where "everyone has a job that earns them their living" is untenable, because there will be less work for humans to do than humans to do it, and we have to find a different kind of social contract to survive on.

Amazon employs way more people than B&N, the company they put out of business. Maybe those jobs should be better (OK, they definitely should), but that's different from saying there are no jobs, isn't it?

Admittedly, I'm driving the conversation towards a general problem from this specific example. But I think that even if I accept the premise that right now, things are OK, we still need to prepare for the future that's coming. Automation is coming for truck and taxi drivers, for restaurant workers, for the last remaining factory jobs. It's even coming for relatively skilled workers in some fields. It's not directly what this post is talking about, but it's the context in which this post takes place, and we shouldn't avoid it.

> Amazon employs way more people than B&N, the company they put out of business. Maybe those jobs should be better (OK, they definitely should), but that's different from saying there are no jobs, isn't it?

Amazon employs more people than B&N, but B&N is by no means the first or only company they have destroyed, and there are more to come. And as soon as Amazon can make the same amount of money while employing fewer people, they will do so. Every company does. The cycle repeats, only this time more people lose and fewer people gain.

I disagree, honestly. Not because I don't think all the things you're saying will happen will happen, but because of all the things that are also going to happen that we're not talking about, because we don't know what they are. Yes, tons of jobs are going away (although I think it'll be 10-20 years for most of these, not 3-5 years like many seem to think), but what new sectors, opportunities, jobs, etc. will be created? I'm an optimist, so I genuinely think we'll adjust and adapt. I think we'll end up with most people doing jobs that don't exist today.

I could be wrong though.

However, no one knows the future, and the prediction that tech will destroy more jobs than it creates has been made since the start of the industrial revolution. So you basically have to fall back on the claim that "this time it's different". Which has also been made repeatedly during that time period :)

But honestly, at the end of the day, it doesn't really matter whether we should prepare or not, because we won't. Not in America at least.

There is no chance in hell that our political system will get its act together in the next two decades to get ahead of this problem and put policies in place for a bad situation that's coming but hasn't arrived yet. Look at all the problems that we know are problems because we're already living through them that we won't even fix now. We just put patches in place (maybe) and keep kicking the can down the road. Seriously, if half the jobs in America get destroyed in the next 20 years, it'll take us 40 years (or violent revolution) to address it.

How many of the people whose jobs are destroyed will be able to move into the jobs that are created? In something like 30 states [0] 'truck driver' is the largest single occupation; where would those skills be re-applied?

I agree that nothing will be done regardless due to a lack of political will, but I don't share your optimism. I suspect that the change will be gradual to begin with, but that suddenly there will be a whole category of people unable to earn a living with their skills, and unable to afford to re-skill into something that can be used.

[0]: https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2015/02/05/382664837/map-...

Even if the truck did drive itself, would it also load/unload and deal with flat tires and other vehicle damage conditions? I don't think these problems are insurmountable but I do think they will further extend the life of the truck driver profession.

I mean trains and subways don't even drive themselves right now somehow, so I think truck drivers will be fine.

Self-driving (though human monitored) trucks are already operating:

https://www.wired.com/story/embark-self-driving-truck-delive...

I think the first step will be replacing long-haul truck drivers with autonomous trucks, they'll start at a depo near a freeway and end at a depo at the other end, then a human will drive to make the local delivery. Freeways are (relatively) easier to navigate than local streets.

That takes a 30 hour long haul job and turns it into a 30 minute job -- a single driver can do 10 of those a day.

Autonomous trucks will handle flats and other roadside breakdowns the same way many human drivers do -- pull over and wait for the repair service to come.

There's less incentive to replace train/subway drivers due to the high driver to passenger/cargo ratio (plus union rules get in the way) -- 1 truck driver to 40 tons of cargo versus 1 train engineer to 10,000 tons of cargo

I mean that is possible but I'm skeptical about us being that shortsighted with so many jobs on the line.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but you clearly have no idea how the trucking industry works.

Which part of what I said do you disagree with? That Company Drivers ask dispatch to send the a tire service truck when they have a flat?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_automated_urban_metro_...

To take the truck driver thing, here's a plausible scenario (to me anyway).

First of all, "top job in X states" seems like a really weird way to express this. It honestly feels like a way to make it seem as dire as possible.

There are something like 3 to 3.5 million truck drivers in the US. That's a lot. However, BLS reports that only about half of these are heavy and tractor trailer truck drivers [1]. So maybe the rest are driving smaller trucks and vehicles around town? Those seem safer from job loss to me, I suspect that any job that requires driving a truck here and there and loading / unloading things will not be replaced by AI as fast.

Side note: BLS is predicting 6% growth in this job from 2016 to 2026, which is about average. But let's assume they're wrong.

So let's say that 1.8 million are long haul truckers that can be relatively easily replaced by AI. How long will that really take? I know everyone thinks that self-driving cars are around the corner, but I'm really not convinced. We've been hearing that for a few years now, and it seems like lots of teams are hitting some roadblocks (heh) in terms of their ability to solve some of the remaining issues. Just my ambient observations though, I'm no expert.

Even if we do get there with some cars in the next 3-5 years, are we really going to be ready to put heavy loads on highways unattended? We're going to handle the technical issues, security issues, legal issues, insurance, in a few years? I'm really skeptical. Maybe we can do point-to-point on highways in 5 years, but then what? Do we have huge lots where these trucks park and then drivers ferry them to local warehouses to be loaded / unloaded? What about fueling these things along the way with no drivers? How do we keep these loads safe from theft? None of these are insurmountable, but are we really going to solve these things in the next few years such that we're ready to start laying people off?

I think 10-20 years is much more realistic to put the majority of truckers out of a job. Not all, but the majority. But truckers are already old (49 average) and many will be retiring over that period anyway. Why can't we just not replace them as those jobs dwindle?

1. https://www.bls.gov/ooh/transportation-and-material-moving/h...

It's hard to tell what the average tractor age is, but it looks between 6 and 10 years old so you have the same rough math in the 6-10 years after we have fully autonomous self-driving trucks where we'll still have half the trucks on the road as human-driven.

Plus if autonomous trucks increase capacity and/or efficiency and cut shipping costs, that might also stimulate shipping demand and therefore keep human drivers on the road longer as well.

Your 10-20 years guess feels right to me, but only after we actually have the autonomous truck thing fully sorted out, IMO.

You say that in 10-20 years, tons of jobs are going away. You say it seems very unlikely the American political system is going to address it without violence in any successful manner.

But you also say that you think we will adjust and adapt and thereby keep the work a job, make a living system that we have. I don't see how that optimistic result follows from the pessimistic future you predict. And I think we're talking about the same problem - a period of volatility due to a lack of available work and a refusal to acknowledge the failures of our current system - but looking at different resolutions. I don't accept violence to restore status quo as the only possible solution.

This is what I think: Your predictions are relatively spot on, if nothing changes, but we have the opportunity to change them if we act now. If we install a government dedicated to addressing these problems, if we begin to think seriously about solutions rather than spending time repeating the same arguments about whether the problem exists at all, we can fix it. Yes, we've failed to do this on other things (e. g. climate change, North Korea, etc.) until it was more than a little too late, but the fact our society still exists and functions suggests that we must have had some success, too.

Remember that it's only in the last couple centuries that we transitioned from most countries being monarchies or what we'd now call dictatorships to most countries being at least some level of democracy. It's only in the last couple centuries we've tried systems of economy and government other than direct rule by a ruling cast. Some of those systems didn't work (full communism, fascism); some have worked out quite well thus far (modern capitalism, democratic socialism a la much of Europe), and of course many are in the middle. We can work out systems which are better still, and we can transition into them without violence or (too much) societal strife, but only if we can at least acknowledge that it's necessary or even just wiser to do so than to try and maintain the system we've got just because it's what we have.

TL;DR: You're right that we don't know what's coming, but, in my opinion, it's a mistake to assume we can't decide for ourselves if we move quickly.

But you also say that you think we will adjust and adapt and thereby keep the work a job, make a living system that we have. I don't see how that optimistic result follows from the pessimistic future you predict.

Very fair, I wasn't clear. I don't think this terrible future is coming, but even if it is, and the majority come to agree that it is, we're not going to do anything about it. Even if the number of jobs does plummet and we have record-high unemployment, we still will take forever to do anything about it, assuming anything can be done. It might be that all the ideas we've come up with (which really just seems to be variations on UBI) won't work and are just rearranging the deck chairs again. Except now the AI is Amazon and we're all B&N :)

if we begin to think seriously about solutions rather than spending time repeating the same arguments about whether the problem exists at all, we can fix it

Yeah, I'm not really in favor of that. The arguments are necessary. We shouldn't be putting huge changes in place without even having the argument as to whether it's necessary.

I think you're underestimating how destabilizing and destructive these changes are going to be. If AI is going to be as bad for employment as many think, the solution is massive and represents a completely fundamental shift in economy, culture, politics, etc. For example, switching to meaningful UBI would entail huge tax increases, slashing of other benefit programs (and dealing with their supporters), and decades of fighting about the amounts, administration, waste / fraud / abuse, etc. There has never been a coalition in American politics strong enough to get something like this done. The abolition of slavery would be the closest thing, and we had to fight a full-blown bloody civil war to get that done, and we're still dealing with the cultural fallout of that change 150 years later.

I also think you're way ahead of the vast majority of Americans as to whether it's as necessary as you claim. To wit: Republicans have exactly zero interest in fixing any of this (or a bunch of other problems) and 18 months ago voters decided they should hold all three branches of government. Yes, popular vote, gerrymandering, voter suppression, etc, etc.

The point is that it's all well and good to say "enough talk, let's put these solutions in place!", but I don't think you realize how hard the opponents to those solutions are going to fight, and how powerful and entrenched they are.

Specifically, that technology has previously allowed workers to be more productive by shifting away from manual labor and towards cognitive work that requires the human mind. But AI is a unique threat because it can match (and then quickly absolutely dominate) humans for any kind of work that requires cognitive power.

It's not a ridiculous argument, but I'm not convinced for several reasons:

1. I'm not convinced that AI can actually achieve something like the general intelligence that's required to perform in rapidly changing and dynamic environments.

2. Even if they can, there are lots of artistic and creative jobs that AI may not be able to do. Maybe we'll all be writers and poets and songwriters and sculptures in the future.

3. Also, doesn't incredibly smart and capable AI that can do any job that humans can do mean that the price of everything should plummet? Maybe post-scarcity will look different than we expect; maybe all the things we need for life will be effectively free, and companies will give them away the way they do with advertising schwag now.

4. If AI gets so cognitively powerful that it puts most of humans out of a job, we'll have either much bigger things to worry about (war with AI), or nothing to worry about (they'll either just squish us quickly or save us from all this).

Shorter work week!

Higher taxes, spent on social services. There is tremendous need for all kinds of social services in the US. Such occupations could fill a lot of jobs. Social workers, teachers, judges, police, EMTs, soldiers, programmers, managers, infrastructure building, doctors, financial counseling, career advisors. If the Republicans could let go of their incoherent,burn the house down strategy of governing, things could really be put on a better footing.

Limitations on amount of AI that can be utilized in a company. It’s simply not viable to exclude large percentages of citizens from the working economy, and think that the technicians and managers will capture increasing proportions of the economy’s output. There’s no rule that we simply have to accept unfettered and increasingly Darwinian capatilistic competition, as it destroys society. I doubt it’s even possible in the US, as the sort of brutality required to maintain this type of extreme system is antithetical to the spirit of America. US citizens have some notion of themselves as having worth and rights.

The history of the labor movement shows that constraints on trade in the name of improving working conditions is possible.

My view is that we see the ugly rumblings of what a backlash might look like in the election of Trump. I understand some of the frustrations behind Trump as protest. I don’t think that is working that well. Things aren’t actually that bad in the US, compared to what they could be. There will be time to change course if things really start to disintegrate.

And when cars were new, there were limitations on their speed and where they could go so they didn't threaten horses.

Only at very specific tasks. As you point out later there is no evidence that AI general intelligence where it needs to be for this actually to be a threat to humans who can adapt to unexpected circumstances.

Not every company does, every public company does. It seems hard to believe in this day but there are some privately owned family-run businesses that care deeply about their employees and aren’t looking to cut labor costs as a means of profitability.

Amazon doesn't employ them, they contract certain services from them. Your first post talks about "getting laid off" but it won't even be that, it'll be not extending their contract.

Most people can still, for the time being, contribute to the economy - but already not at a level where the economy is comfortable hiring them for the long term. The "jobs" Amazon offers are explicitly designed to be automated away.

No, we need a society that guarantees everyone a job, a job that will generate the income necessary for survival. We shouldn't give up agency and become simple wards of the state, waiting hand stretched ahead for the UBI to fall from the crumblings at the tech billionaires table. UBI without jobs is humiliating and lacks vertical mobility. Self reliance is good.

The slogan should be "Give us jobs or give us the means of production!"

In the future it will be easier to be self reliant by using solar energy, agro-bots, 3d-printing and various biotech and materials research technologies. We can be self reliant, we don't need no stinking BHI. We don't like to be passive and hand our dignity out for a penny.

As a final argument, think about this: what is cheaper? what is more tenable - to hand out free money to everyone, or to create jobs that pay for themselves? The jobs could be - cultivate your own food, raise your own house, educate the children of your community, repair cars and electronics for local people, etc. Most of the jobs emerge from the needs of the community, so the community can hand them to itself. Then only a small amount of external aid could go as far as a huge amount of UBI.

The name of this philosophy is Local Self Reliance and it is related to Distributism (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributism).

A list of related concepts: community ISPs, credit coops, anti-trust, buying from local businesses.

This is a promo video from the Institute of Local Self Reliance: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kDw4dZLSDXg

Let the tech billionaires be saddled with the moralizing virtues of self-reliance and feelings of humiliation. Certain societies raise their youth to value work as a means of proving themselves. The truth is that perspective is completely subjective and in many ways a pathology more than a guiding principle.

Humans will work. That is what we do. If we're alive we will create reasons to do things. The problem is who is deciding the values we're supposed to work toward. Distributing work will fail because people don't agree on what is important and will even act against their own self interest. When that happens what do you do? Do you punish them? Do you leave them to die? Do you ostracize them from the community? That's why the system we have now in the industrialized west works at all, because it allows us the illusion of choice. Our shared language of moralizing and virtue signaling is how we cope with the fact that we actually don't have a choice, we're just pragmatically putting our heads down and picking our poison.

With UBI it's scary to think of millions of people unmoored from work because work is a form of social control. UBI will turn hundreds of years of social convention on its head. As much as we want to believe it there are no iron laws of culture. Some values will be destroyed and new values will be born. That's the nature of change.

Our descendants at some undefined point in the future will find our moralizing about work absolutely quaint.

I think a much better alternative to UBI, which is just a modern twist on bread and circuses, would simply be larger inheritance taxes that are kept by the state. That way work that actually contributes to human betterment still gets rewarded, but society doesn't begin to stratify into rich and poor people in a world where it becomes almost impossible to move from poor to rich.

That said, your idea isn't mutually exclusive with UBI. One interpretation of UBI is that it acts more as a social safety net than as a long-term solution.

What if the economy evolves in such a way that most people are unproductive?

What if the cost of creating a job (creating a jobs bureaucracy, administering it by assigning jobs to people, making sure they show up to work, etc.) is actually higher than the economic value that those jobs generate?

In that case, 'jobs for all' would just be a subsidy, or UBI, with many more steps, no?

I agree that giving people a share of the means of production makes sense. We should experiment with granting a share of equity to all citizens and sitting an equity floor.

However that comes to my mind because what I really think that the job should be is a more general category of 'problem solver' and right now society is really bad about making it easy for people to make good choices and have positive impacts.

Seriously, UBI is better than inventing jobs just so that people could have jobs. At least in this system, you can get cash, and become a home maker, an artist, or invent some other occupation for yourself that you wouldn't otherwise have. Unlike the "guaranteed job" program, where you would be pushed to do barely useful stuff, that not only would break your spirit, but would not give you time to do something truly productive.

We need people to defend themselves from big corporations that suck the money out of communities, such as Walmart, Amazon, Comcast, Verizon, large banks, Samsung, Apple, Monsanto, etc as they start automating jobs and paying less in wages.

I do believe we already have that. Open any kind of news website and it'll be all over you.

This new social contract is entertainment. I know it is right now considered "work" as well, but to think about it, most of it doesn't contribute in any other way that helps other people (most often - workforce) kill time. Celebrities, tv & internet personalities earn not because they do only because they are.

Some time ago being a celebrity or internet personality would gain you a huge pile of cash. Right now that starts to get watered down. You can get reasonable known YouTuber show on your sons or daughters birthday party for reasonable amount just because there is so much content that fan fragmentation starts to show up.

What I believe we're seeing is world transitioning from "live to work" to "live to work or entertain those who work" with sad turn to "entertainment through hate" happening lately...

The company today is only worth $340M dollars. Maybe it could restructure as some sort of higher end boutique store, but that would probably require a significant downsizing and realignment. Its hard to see a positive way forward but maybe someone else will.

I look back on my childhood in the 80s and 90s and remember retail as not only fulfilling the need of acquiring stuff but also as a central meeting place. Going downtown to buy stuff was an activity as much as it was an errand. There were movie theaters, restaurants and all sorts of other business that existed in an symbiotic ecosystem with all the retail outlets. Over time, each of these business has been or is being replaced by a more-efficient, internet version of itself. We now order more and more food delivery rather than eating out. We now stream more of our entertainment in our homes and many people haven't been to a theater more than a couple of times per year. And while none of these shifts is bad in and of itself, the common theme is that we've replaced the social version of each of them with a version that we use alone, interacting only with a computer and not another human being.

I don't think it's a coincidence that we're having an epidemic of drug addiction and overdose considering how often drug addiction is a side effect of lack of human connection. We've taken all of these services and removed the human interaction and I think we're seeing that that human interaction was more than just fulfilling a transactional need. It was also keeping us sane in minuscule increments that, overall, added up to something tangible.

It's a tough duality for me to accept. I love my Kindle and I find the reading experience to be so much nicer than a physical book. On a recent year-long trip abroad, I was able to bring enough books for the entire trip and it weighed less than a single physical book. In one sense, it was great. Every book I read was something I wanted to read and I probably enjoyed them more because of it. On my first prolonged trip abroad back in the late 90s, I could only bring a couple of books with me. After I'd finished them, I had to find people to trade with to get new books. I probably didn't enjoy those books as much as ones I would've selected for myself, but I also ended up reading things I'd never have even considered reading before because I just didn't have any other options. There's a distinct part of me--the person that's able to look beyond the immediate fulfillment of my needs--that thinks that things were much better back in the days where stuff cost a bit more, it took more time to buy and I had to actually talk to a person to buy it.

Some of this may be the lack of companies reinventing themselves. I am more likely to go see a movie now that the one near my house has reserved seats. I would be more inclined if they served adult beverages and maybe something a bit more advanced than a hot dog or nachos. There are theaters that I have seen that I could see myself going to if they were near my house. Maybe there is a model of a bookstore that I would be inclined to go to should it pop into existence.

The main thing I miss is browsing for books; the experience on the Kindle or on the web is terrible compared to walking down an aisle and flipping through books that draw my interest. I have young children now, so I purchase a fair number of physical books for them, mostly through Amazon, but occasionally browsing in our local Barnes and Noble. Whenever I'm there, I find myself rooting through the shelves, finding all sorts of interesting books that I want to buy, and then I guiltily take a picture of them to buy on Amazon later for my kindle.

EDIT: One thing I have noticed, though, is the increase in price gouging in ebook sales. I think a result of the Hachette deal; lots of things that would have been $6 mass-market paperbacks are instead $10. Unfortunately, this is not local to Amazon, so leaving the ecosystem is no help at all.

[0] https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/feb/03/balancing-the-...

It's not so much a "bargain" as it is how we discover which jobs are useful. Capitalism is very efficient at exposing useless labor, and this is a good thing. Having a bunch of humans laboring at jobs no one needs or wants is wasteful.

The ideas of “efficiency” as they are used in economic theory are very narrow, and reflect a technical understanding of a vastly over simplified model of reality. Such models do provide insight into real life, but they are analytical tools, nothing more.

Economics, as field of study, has a big problem with the concept of “value.” The price of things tends to stand in for the value of things, as it is easily measured.

You don’t have to look hard to see the absurdity of taking this compromise too far. Look at military spending. Since dollars are spent buying a weapon, and workers get paid, profits are made, the “value” of the sale gets added into GDP. Then we take that missile, and blow it up. If we kill our enemies, then maybe one could say we got our money’s worth. If we kill only innocents, then I see it as more of an “anti-value.” What if it just blows up in the desert, and makes a multi-million dollar hole in the sand? Sort of a modern, high tech version of paying one group of workers to dig holes, and another to fill them in, is it not?

How would you suggest choosing who gets to do the "make work" versus who must toil away at the necessary? How would you suggest compensating those whose work is more vanity than value if no one pays them for their output?

This was done in the Great Depression, to try and keep the economy going.

There are ways to create work that is valuable, but the market value is below what anyone can afford to live on. So the government could subsidize salaries, in addition to hiring people.

Getting back to my comment about military spending: I see it as a destructive waste. How does that get decided? It’s decided by people operating in a complex political-financial-industrial-military complex.

If we, as a society, can decide to waste lives and wealth on idiotic military action, we can decide to spend wealth on helping our own citizens.

That’s all government spending.

That doesn't mean we always like those outcomes, hence the need for regulations, social safety net, etc.

Overall, it's a pretty shitty system, since it means that some people are always losing, but it also seems to be the best we've got.

_Emphasis mine_.

Is it a system or emergent behavior? I'd argue that these are mutually exclusive and that capitalism falls squarely in the latter category. It is the result of individuals being free to exchange whatever they find valuable.

No its really not a lot of work out there adds limited value to anyone's life.

Further the measure of the worth of the labor is determined by how much resources the decision making party controls.

Something which flatters a rich person and ads negligable value is worth more than something that keeps 3 poor people alive.

I haven't been returning the books for two reasons: When you get ten books in the mail and eight of them are damaged, and some of them are immediately useful, are you really going to go through Amazon's return process for all of them, photograph each one, package, ship, etc.? Second, I just know that if I do this, it will contribute to some poor schmuck losing his job at a fulfillment center, or some LAZR driver getting taken off their route, because DATA-DRIVEN.

Now I just order used books, sadly most of the vendors are on Amazon so I can't really take my business elsewhere. At least I don't feel quite as ripped off when my "Like New" book arrives in "Good" condition. Even sweeter, those vendors don't sit on my order for a week for funsies like Amazon does if you resist their PRIME offering.

Has anybody else been receiving damaged "new" books from Amazon lately?

What’s the deal with this? I turned off prime a couple of years ago and it certainly feels like they’re intentionally slow processing orders.

For books, I only buy used and try to pick nearby sellers. Often the media mail shipment will show up in 2-3 days. Pretty great.

While I still get some books from Amazon, I've been increasingly purchasing through Abebooks. They tend to be more accurate in what they stock with regards to ISBN, which is what I go by when purchasing a book as I like to get specific editions.

--------

> It's important to note that the vast majority of workers (>90%) before the industrial revolution worked in agriculture, and that this number is now less than 5%. Why did the automation of agriculture not lead to widespread, long term unemployment? This is because disruptive technologies have multiple effects. They:

* Destroy existing jobs

* Complement existing jobs (by making them more efficient)

* Create new jobs

* Reallocate the workforce to where it is most productive

Note that only one of those four effects causes long run job loss. Two of those cause job loss in general (job reallocation implies job loss in the short term, after all).

For automation to cause long run structural unemployment, the new technology needs not only to destroy jobs and create no new jobs, but it also needs to somehow prevent reallocation of workers to other sectors of the economy.

-------

The issue as I see it is not so much automation, which is inevitable. The issue is that humans are hard to retrain, unless you spend a lot of expensive human power to make the transition.

This makes it un-economical (you need to give people money, and time, and teachers, and then IF they certify, they need to qualify/compete with people who were already in the industry).

Re-training is an unsolved problem (In my opinion), and it is possible we may not want to solve it.

As the internet has shown, any communication technology is morally neutral. If you found a way to re-train huge groups of people faster than ever before, then that tool could be used to indoctrinate people faster than before as well.

EDIT: It is pretty important to note that this is the current weak spot in the over arching economic model that drives the world.

Tech advances are mathematically responsible for improving the size of the economy - they are necessary and critical for humanity.

The general answer by economics is that people move to other sectors where there is demand for them.

Unfortunately, if you cannot make that move, the system doesn't work that well.

Or worse - you make a move from being a manager to a burger flipper.

One side effect of this is an increase in inequality of wealth distribution.

So figuring out if re-training works, and if it is working at the scale needed to deal with creative disruption, is obviously a major component of future human well being.

In my mind one of the most distinguishing features of the labor world today is the growth of complete independence. You have solitary people start software companies and independently design, develop, and publish products that go on to earn billions. I think a big part of this is the efficiency created by current systems. The economic systems to handle payments are almost entirely automated. The system of publication processes payments and delivers product in an entirely automated fashion. And consumers can learn about and purchase your product also using fully automated systems. Compare that to times when software was sold exclusively in retail outlets. For that matter you don't even have to go that far back to times when computers themselves were outside the reach of all except the most elite of society rendering such economic possibilities moot.

And I think this trend of independence is something that will likely continue going forward. Imagine in a post automation world where things like industrial level machining and eventually even things like semiconductor fabrications become as accessible as PCs were let's say 30 years ago. This is a game changer that I think is going to be extremely difficult to predict the implications of. For that matter imagine automated construction bots capable of executing building designs all the way from ground clearance on up.

Let's get more agrarian. Consider things like automated micro-farms. People could use these for their own nourishment, but then there's also the possibility of automated delivery systems enabling user-to-user distribution systems where people could even make a living off of their land in an autonomous fashion. Right there are vast amounts of great arable land in the US that's for sale for next to nothing. In some cases you can get land literally for free. But without automation it's not so straight forward to monetize this. What would be the implications, if it did become possible? 4 acres and a bot?

The whole point here is that I think by focusing on training as a means of contributing to a large company as a means of earning a living is not necessarily something that will be a given in the future. These large companies are the ones that have the means and motivation to eliminate these jobs. The present already rewards independence vastly more than dependent labor and this is a trend I think we'll see grow exponentially in the era of automation. And that has very difficult to even imagine implications.

As dumb as it is, that stupid job at least gives them a reason to get up in the morning, maybe even a bit of satisfaction from time to time.

These universal income ideas have the notion that your average joe will decide to learn an instrument, or maybe practice swimming, or maybe backpack across the country. In the real world they'll sit on the couch all day watching TV or playing video games and/or getting high. Universal income won't work until we figure out how to not turn the country into rural West Virginia with it.

Or as Picard put it: You see, one of the most important things in a person's life is to feel useful.

I haven't bought a book at a retail outlet in probably 10 years. There's just nothing about the retail experience at B&N that's even worth the effort to drive there and park. It's not salvageable.

B&N's 'competitive advantage' today is not experienced staff. I can't ever recall an employee up-selling significant amounts of merchandise, or having a customer relationship that might move a needle.

Like Sears, it has real estate and a terrible retail position. If you treat the stores like mini-warehouses, with Amazon-warehouse-worker-hours, it might work. My guess is that failing to staff-up for the holidays was, seen charitably, a way to get the full-timers through the holidays.

I don't think so. Outside of the airport that's not useful to anyone. At that rate you can just go to the section where they have bestsellers at Costco or Walmart. A bookstore with no selection is practically pointless.

Target has more merchandise than B&N, but there's no career employee on the floor to suggest that you might like Mossimo if you bought Merona.

There are also various regional retailers.

The last book I bought at B&N wasn't so long ago. They pulled it off the shelf and had it waiting for me when I arrived. I appreciated being able to preview it to decide it was worth buying.

I don't have a local B&N anymore, but a local independent book shop is pretty good. They've ordered new books for me to preview too.

Yeah, they could have managed the holiday season better. They could have a better strategy for ecommerce. So what? It doesn't fundamentally change anything. It maybe delays the inevitable for a year or two? But in the end, B&N is almost certainly going out of business.

EDIT: I guess there are two other possibilities:

1. B&N finds another B&M strategy that works beyond just selling books. But it's not clear what, given their financial situation, existing stores, employee base, etc. Either way, lots of layoffs between here and there.

2. They pivot to selling books online solely. This actually seems likely, at least for awhile, because it's a decent brand, and they're already doing this, so this would just mean shutting down all their stores. But all these employees are still losing their jobs in that scenario.

You don’t have to think that hard to realize the callous absurdity of this viewpoint.

Many healthy retailers use omnichannel, ship-from-store, buy-online-fulfill-in-store, etc. These methods can improve fulfillment, increase inventory utilization, and reduce stale inventory.

If a retailer wants to draw down inventory, then just cut replenishment. I believe Target Canada was accused of doing so. Implementing "faux omnichannel" and the associated IT, store processes, etc. would be much harder.

The fact of the matter is logistic operations in the Midwest are favorable for the medium range retailer. In the post-warehouse age, when the book your NYC customer wants is in Seattle, you’re paying Zone 8 rates to USPS instead of Zone 3 from Indiana to NYC (or Seattle).

The article states i) distraction from in-store sales for employees, ii) removing inventory from store shelves, and iii) no credit for stores.

The "stores don't get credit" argument is weak. The article implies that corporate is siphoning credit from stores to online. Sales are down 6% across the board. Samestore sales down 6.5%, online sales down 4.5%. Omnichannel does not create those numbers.

Anyway, the logistics argument depends on more than rates. Fulfilling from a midwest warehouse can be cheap; a warehouse full of product sliding down a markdown curve can be expensive.

I've been surprised by the merchant pushback to omnichannel. I've been hearing "there are no cash registers in the warehouse", etc. for years. Now we expose more inventory to customers and stores complain about selling to the wrong (usually ecommerce) customer.

Time Warner and Comcast pass this test. They refuse to compete and then aggressively raise prices, seemingly to no end, knowing full well their customers have no choice. Microsoft's Windows 10 also passes this test with extreme anti-customer behavior that relies exclusively on consumers tolerating only due to a lack of choice.

Now back to Amazon. If they started ramping up their prices they would fail, fail hard, and fail practically overnight. There's a difference between a company being incredibly efficient and passing, with great success, that efficiency onto consumers and monopolies. Another general trend in monopolies is that they generally rely on tertiary forces to prevent competition. For the telecoms, this is the lack of access to wiring or even simply poles. For Windows, it's native execution of decades of third party software as well as the vast majority of all consumer software written today. There's no barrier to competing with Amazon, you're just not going to do it as well as them. It's the same reason WalMarts destroy small local businesses.

This breaks the HN guidelines in two ways. First, it's uncivil. Second, it falls far short of this:

"Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize."

Could you please read https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and follow those rules when commenting here? It does take an effort, but it's an effort everyone needs to make if we're to succeed in having a bit higher quality here than internet median.

Did you read my other responses because I 100% agree with him. I was just laughing because he made a textbook economic argument but didn't actually mention economics.

> "Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize."

What? I am 100% in agreement with OP. What argument do you think I am making?

What and how much of a safety net do we need considering the opportunity cost of supporting said safety net?

My main point was bringing up unemployment benefits.