Well, Robots may be cheaper, but they may also be more accurate. In my 20 years shopping with Amazon, I have very occasionally received the wrong items, so maybe robots will combat that, or reduce the need to double check, etc.

I agree, low-skill jobs are shrinking, but we should not expect companies to solve that. We have a government and we vote. Ideally, we should all be asking the government to propose solutions to this problem, not expecting it to be inside the corporate charter.

If my anecdotal experience of Amazon deliveries is anything to go by, the mistakes may well have been made by a computer - on a couple of occasions I've received the wrong item, then gotten in touch with Amazon whose customer service have apologised big time, then sent me another item - only to have another incorrect item arrive a few days later. Another E-mail to Amazon, another apology, another incorrect item in my mailbox a few days later. My guess is the bins containing the items have been labelled incorrectly, thus leading the poor warehouse worker to pick the wrong item time and time again.

Robots will make the same mistake, only faster. :/

With the current political gridlock voting is not enough. Workplaces -- the very entities that provide the jobs we need to earn a living -- need to shoulder more of the burden they inflict from the zero-sum game that they're paying. They hold a disproportionate amount of the world's wealth and they need to take responsibility for it.

I understand that completely. The way to hold companies accountable is to increase taxes on them, or increase regulations.

Companies solve to a given tax burden and regulatory regime. Their solutions can be influenced by changing the rules or the rewards.

Personally, I find it likely that no amount of regulation will solve the problem of creating employment opportunity for low skill workers. I think that we either need to create those jobs through the government (e.g. WPA, CCC, etc), or raise taxes to improve the amount of dollars spent supporting underemployed people, or investing in the skills.

The economy is not a zero-sum game, nor are corporate profits. Increases in productive efficiency create objectively more wealth overall, and those benefits diffuse out to every socioeconomic class (the classic conservative snark that even poor people have cars, refrigerators, and air conditioning, living better than medieval kings in many ways, is not inaccurate). We are living in an era where megacorporations and their related efficiency gains will rapidly increase the "standard of living" for a population which is (nonetheless!) going to get more miserable over time.

Stepping past the "zero-sum" claim, though, I agree that corporations should take responsibility for their incredibly powerful role in modern society, but I don't see a mechanism by which this could happen. The entire point of a regulated liberal democracy is to create a legislative landscape which modifies the incentive structures of businesses to "coerce" them into providing more social benefit than cost.

There is also nothing wrong with some level of redistributism, as long as it doesn't blindly ignore economic reality (a la communism). Many of the right-leaning nerds here on HN are in favor of universal basic income for that reason.

If that is true then why is wealth inequality so high? I have a hard time believing the argument that that wealth manifests as tech toys and amenities when the amounts of money that are in question here outweigh technology a million-fold.

UBI's an option -- one that I'm in favor of -- but as long as it is an idea and not reality there are still millions of people getting shafted without a lot of recourse, short of restructuring one's entire life and starting over in a new career. An expensive and emotionally draining transition that weak-ass severance packages fail to adequately compensate for.

If corporate tax payers were actually paying taxes and not sitting on a dragon's hoard of cash I might be more in favor of increased automation, but the fact is reserves being as high as they are means that automation is not so necessary in many sectors short of unreasonable and unethical shareholder demands.

Wealth inequality is because capitalism. We collectively permit a very large share of wealth to return to owners of capital. Frequently, this is concentrated because of a variety of financial realities (e.g. large amounts of liquid collateral make it easier to gain leverage, which can increase returns, etc.). OTOH, this return to capital has made the retirement funds and investments of many people's pensions possible. After all, Vanguard and others like them are probably the biggest beneficiaries of the great return on capital (who do you think "Shareholders" are?).

Balancing that return, is of course the relatively lackluster returns on cash. Companies sit on cash not because they enjoy counting it, but because they cannot find appropriately productive uses of it. They also hold it because it helps them cope with uncertainty (of economic reality, regulation, opportunity, etc). Taxing cash is fine, but companies will just change how they balance their uncertainty with other methods.

It sounds like what you are concerned with is that labor is not receiving an equal share of the output, compared with capital. this is likely because true labor productivity has not been great (https://www.bls.gov/opub/btn/volume-6/below-trend-the-us-pro...) and also because capitalists (including pension fund shareholders, often the workers themselves) are engaged in rent-seeking on behalf of their capital. I think in many cases this reflects a shift in the role of savings from the employee to the employer. In eras past, the employee received relatively more pay compared to shareholders, but was required to save for themselves. Corporates that offered pensions had to set aside money to managed those obligations directly. In modern times, corporations tend to create retirement benefits that come from an employee's salary and the company's money, but which have been underfunded due to the assumption of future returns. This "optimistic" assumption about rate of return on the 401k/retirement fund/pension funds of today drives a lot of capital into the role of rent seeking from corporations. Corporations respond by trying to meet their shareholder demands, and corporate officers tend to be the beneficiaries of generally capital friendly activity, since they themselves are shareholders.

There's a lot to unwind here, and a lot more that I haven't written, but I think it is best to not assume that there can be a single solution to a very complex problem which results from a system built of many interacting components.

I'll agree that individual pension-holders and retirement-account holders create something of a perverse incentive, since decisionmaking about capital markets generally improves them less than they think and incentivizes their demise, but how many private-sector jobs nowadays even offer a pension? I imagine the pensioners' argument will hold less and less weight going forward as these populations retire and die off.

I am not saying there is a single solution to the complex problem of low-level work disappearing. However, there are many countries where the business culture is more willing to hold on to labor (non-english-speaking western europe, the specific example I am thinking of is big-box retail in France and Germany, though I've also seen this with the lack of self-serve gas stations in parts of South America); these are still successful businesses doing well in their sectors and in many cases out-competing American entrants to their markets. (And yes the reasons for their success are often better cultural fit than foreign entrants versus comparing where the spend their money) Yet the American zeitgeist seems to be heading full-on into mass automation with its eyes wide shut, when there is already so much money floating around that it doesn't really seem necessary. What labor crises are there that necessitate the deployment of automation? (I don't think rising minimum wages nor increasing threat of unionization count as they do not raise costs above what can be absorbed by capital hoarding)

Agree that there are fewer pensions, however, I think the incentives for rent seeking in 401Ks are still quite strong, and the 401K is quite common for professional jobs.

I'm not in full agreement here. Having spent nearly a decade in customer service, I've found that it requires:

+ Lots of empathy

+ The willingness to learn and be wrong

+ A ton of training

Even then, human-based customer service is still subjected to the whims of:

+ Gut checks

+ Power trips

+ Misinformation/misinterpretation of policy (whether intentional or not)

+ Lots of emotion on both sides of the interaction

Not every single customer service interaction requires a human behind it. At some point, there are simpler and more efficient ways of solving a problem besides throwing another human's time at it. Robots can easily process replacements without requiring a human being hear about why it needs to happen. They can quickly identify when something is late and proactively issue a credit.

Piling on to this, customer service isn't just an interaction with an [entity] when something goes wrong. I would fairly categorize the initial shopping & fulfillment experience in the context of Amazon's e-commerce product as "customer service". If it solves your problem correctly & reliably, I'd call that "good customer service".

On the flipside, I hate nearly every non-human interaction introduced in the last few years that I have to make. With the exception of withdrawing money from an ATM (later edit- and some kinds of online shopping), automated customer service experiences have always been worse, mostly because they always seem to be programmed with a very narrow and optimistic set of goals in mind. Life would be even more of a hell if I couldn't mash 0 to speak to an operator in a lot of cases; as it is that option is already hidden.

There isn't a lot of good reason to be optimistic about the future either; chatbots and fast food kiosks were a flop (and rightfully so) and most of these other styles of interaction feel forced and constricting.

Humans may have their flaws but you can't beat the fact that they're what other humans are comfortable around.

For certain tasks, robots are also faster, safer & produce higher quality, as the automotive industry has demonstrated.

The issue isnt that low-skill jobs are being replaced by robots, since many of them are kind of shitty and/or physically harmful by being repetitive, etc. So it's not necessarily a bad thing to see them disappear.

The problem we have is with the existing low-skill workforce: how can we re-train them in an effective manner.

This is inevitable. In the end we'll face a choice between basic income, revolution, or totalitarian police state to enforce extreme inequality.