It's fundamentally different. Horses might always want more and more things no matter how much they get. But they don't create demand in our economy, so we'll never know.

No matter how much humans get, they'll always want more. And other humans will have to come up with ways to meet that demand.

Sure - if we ever reach a time where the entire human race says "this is enough" and everything is automated, then there won't be any jobs. But we're a very far way away from that point. In 2013, 60% of people on the planet didn't even have a toilet [1].

There are obvious problems. In the Western world, it certainly seems like we don't have enough jobs for workers without certain skillsets - or at least jobs that employers are willing to pay minimum wage for.

But there are also lots of jobs available.

[1] https://slate.com/technology/2013/02/60-percent-of-the-world...

Indeed, it's true, horses don't create demand, but neither do unemployed humans.

Our economy isn't centred around humans, it's centred around capital. Unemployable humans are as useless to it as horses, as they can't exchange their labour with capital owners (or become capital owners themselves).

Unemployable people might want more, but will they get more? No, they won't.

But can people be unemployed because we run out of things for humans to do? That's what the video is arguing, but it won't be the case unless we've fully satisfied all of our desires. If we haven't, there are, by definition, still things to do.

This idea was particularly popular during the recession (the video was made on the tale end of it). It was common to hear that the high level of unemployment was because automation had taken our jobs or because Americans didn't have the skills for the jobs that were needed. But much of this was nonsense, and we saw employment gradually rebound as we moved out of the recession. Not only nonsense, but dangerous nonsense, since it leads people to entirely misunderstand a solvable problem.

-- You'll always have something that some other human wants the human X to do. Whether that other person can pay human X sufficient money to make that activity their job is the question. And it seems plausible you'll reach a point where the answer will be no for a lot of people. You can call that "structural" if you wish but it seems related to the marginal utility provided by a given person and that goes down as one finds automated alternatives.

And just from the definition of money, it's unlikely to find a scenario where people can't pay other people to do arbitrary labor. There will always be people that have a majority of wealth, however that's denoted

It's not possible for civilization as a whole to run out of jobs or money. both are human social concepts and can be re-imagined at any time

And by availability of resources, such as energy.

From the industrial revolution we've being living in a time of effectively limitless energy and without having considered the consequences of tapping that energy. Fossil fuels, and other resources are running out - or we can at least see the end of them - and the consequences of their use are starting to bite hard. Realistically we're looking at a 2degC average global temperature rise this century, and the destruction of ecosystems due to that relatively rapid rise is going to be massive.

When the energy and resources, that we've used to support a consumption economy, grow more scarce that economy will no longer work. We won't be able to get ourselves out of low employment by just consuming more and so making more jobs.

>There will always be people that have a majority of wealth, however that's denoted

That may be true but we can narrow the spread of wealth by a very large factor; and morally we should do so.

I think that's what's essentially being advocated (whether now or later): reimagining human social roles outside the wage/employment model (and perhaps distributing an "automation dividend" to ensure liquidity and market demand).

> But can people be unemployed because we run out of things for humans to do? That's what the video is arguing, but it won't be the case unless we've fully satisfied all of our desires. If we haven't, there are, by definition, still things to do.

The question at hand though is exactly why is this true of humans but not horses?

Now, I'm talking about typical desires as they stand now. Obviously you can have people creating increasingly exotic and bizarre desires to the point where it's impossible to satiate them all ("I want to own Antarctica"). It's also possible to hit resources limits, but that's a separate problem from "running out of work because of automation."

Consider a case where person A builds widget X, and person B builds widget Y, and they trade with each other. Automation takes over, they lose their jobs. If they continue getting the widgets they used to trade for (which are now created automatically), they simply have the same wealth as before but more time. If they don't have the widgets, they're now detached from the new automated widgets both in production and consumption. There's no reason they couldn't carry on the same work as before and continue to trade with each other. This might require societal and political will (they might need some sort of support to reach their previous arrangement), but if the desire for their old work is there and not being met, then there is work to be done.

Let's say Person A builds Widget X, and needs Input 1 to produce a Widget X. Person B builds Widget Y and needs Input 2 to produce Widget Y.

Person A uses their capital from their job to purchase Input 1 and produces Widget X. Person B uses their capital Input 2 and produces Y. Person A and B trade widgets and are happy.

But now, as before, automation takes the jobs of Person A and Person B. They lose their jobs, but retain their desire for the opposite widget.

Person A no longer has the resources to acquire Input 1, and Person B can no longer acquire Input 2. Neither X nor Y get produced, and both have their needs but are unsatisfied.

There is no guarantee that new automation will continue to fulfill all the desires that were fulfilled previously.

I mean, sure this arrangement can happen. But why would it? Why would person A want to trade with person B when they can get their goods made by a robot cheaper and better?

Obviously true, but that doesn't mean the things still left to do can be done by anyone.

In a world where there's not enough food or housing, everyone can be gainfully employed, since just about everyone can learn to plant seeds or cut wood.

In a world where all of our material desires are already met, plenty of people will still want e.g. new AAA-quality video games every year. But what are the people who aren't programmers or artists supposed to do?

Keep the programmers and artists happy.

You can make a lot more and better AAA games if 50% of your time isn’t spent on life chores.

That's what the robots are for! And they never complain, never need to sleep, and are always one software upgrade away from amazing new capabilities.

For example: the ballooning of admin jobs in academia that add no benefit to services rendered other than keeping other useless admins busy.

According to the book, when you remove the bullshit jobs and bullshit work most of us already work 20 hour weeks or less.

That wouldn't be a problem if the BS was more or less evenly distributed. But unfortunately the distribution is highly uneven, so eliminating the BS, even if you resolve to not cut paychecks, would leave quite a few folks entirely unemployed (so no paycheck at all), and quite a few more significantly underemployed (so at high risk of their employer consolidating three 5h/week jobs into one 15h/week job).

If wealth continues to become increasingly centralised, the wealthy might be able to have all their desires fully satisfied, while the poor won't have enough power to demand that - which potentially creates a vicious cycle.

Then the existence of sufficient jobs is fraught.

World Gini coefficient for wealth has increased from 0.804 to 0.904 between 2008 and 2018, where 1 means that a single person holds all the wealth.

Besides, you replied to try and refute a comment which was quite unambiguously about wealth inequality. It's possible to occasionally admit you were wrong, rather than doubling down when you are.

If you disagree with these points, please site evidence.

Citation: World Bank. "Poverty and Prosperity 2016 / Taking on Inequality"[1].

1. https://openknowledge.worldbank.org/bitstream/handle/10986/2...

Sure, globally. But that's as a result of a rising floor beneath extreme poverty, ie. the percentage of people subsisting on less than $1.90 per day has been dropping.

Sure, that's only a part of the story, and a growing global middle class is nothing to sneeze at, but the reduction in poverty is projected to slow considerably over the next decade, with half a billion remaining in extreme poverty in 2030, 87% of whom will be concentrated in sub-saharan Africa.

Meanwhile, social mobility up and out of the middle class is also slowing considerably in the various advanced economies, as is downward mobility from the upper class into the middle class, while downward mobility from middle to working class is growing.

I don't mean to diminish the progress that has been made so far, but it is starting to look likely that these successes are stagnating.

Sure they do, although almost certainly nowhere near enough to sustain our current situation and the system it's built atop of (from which the holders of capital seem to have benefited immensely), although perhaps this is exactly the point you were making.

It might not be recognizable to most people living in modernity today, but in general humans will always trade (by some means, not necessarily with "money") with other humans whenever relative specializations occur between them, which even in small groups is likely to happen naturally.

After all, it's not the exchange of paper bills or service to capital in particular that makes an economy, and there is always going to be demand of something and some supply of some of those things as long as humans are around and interacting, regardless of how miserable the existence is, or how "inefficient" such a system might be.

"It might not be recognizable to most people living in modernity today, but in general humans will always trade (by some means, not necessarily with "money") with other humans whenever relative specializations occur between them, which even in small groups is likely to happen naturally."

This is reductive. Yes, humans have always traded. But never before our current economic system has trade been the primary ordinator of people's lives - this is a modern creation, indeed core to property itself.

"After all, it's not the exchange of paper bills or service to capital in particular that makes an economy, and there is always going to be demand of something and some supply of some of those things as long as humans are around and interacting, regardless of how miserable the existence is, or how "inefficient" such a system might be."

This is also reductive in the same sense. Traditionally in human society, demand and supply were not, for the majority of people, the very core of one's life - that is a modern invention. And that was only possible in the framework where labour became service to capital before service to oneself. Outside this set of relations of production, the problem of runaway unemployment isn't possible, because employment itself is not a major productive force. And that's precisely how humans got into a situation like that of workhorses - or rather how workhorses got into the situation of humans!

Well, actually around value - which is different from capital. It just so happens that we use capital to trade a lot (but not all) of what we consider to be valuable.

Even in a world of abundance there would be things that are scarce but we still consider valuable. Social status for example.

Trade is not what I'm discussing as an abstract concept, but instead how we structure our relationship to sustenance and work. That is centred around capital, not value - hence the word "capitalism". Which is not necessarily a bad thing, in some ways this is a good organization for things we care about, but it's not mainly about maximizing value for everyone, it came about very mechanistically.

Capital is valuable (high price) when it's needed and scarce, e.g in the junk bond market. Labor is valuable (high price) when it's needed and scarce, e.g productive software engineers.

There's no sense in conceptually elevating capital above labor, or vice versa, insofar as we're attempting to understand economic systems, as they're both just factors of production.

Now, that's not disagreement with Sam's point. Labor will decline in value as an input since AI will provide zero marginal cost competition to labor (effectively it'll be a massive increase in the supply of labor). More supply = less unique value = wages crater. Capital may slightly decline in value too, but at a slower rate than labor.

What Sam is proposing is massive wealth redistribution by taxing land and capital. Seen any memes referencing $1400 lately? Unemployed humans who are given cash absolutely create demand.

Besides, massive wealth redistribution in the form of direct payments indiscriminately is not politically viable right now, but maybe this line of argument can help.

That's artificial demand which creates inflation.

Isn't one story of how some currencies get their start, that some monarch or someone wants their troops fed, and so they require (on threat of force) that their subjects pay a tax in coins that the monarch has printed, and distributes to their troops? If they did this continuously over time, say distributing only the same coins to their troops that they received as taxes, (or, keeping the amount in circulation constant, by some means), why would the amount of bread that each coin would tend to buy, decrease over the years?

(Of course, the monarch or whatever would also use some of the same coins for their own use, but they aren't being paid to do anything.)

There is nothing wrong with subsidizing citizens and/or companies but there should be limit because you can end up with inflation where you for example over subsidy citizens and therefore excess of money and demand drives prices of goods and services up.

Reflecting on your example Roman Empire for instance had huge military expenses and they started diluting coins in order to mint more coins but they ended up in inflationary spiral in which coins eventually lost value and their economy collapsed.

Here is chart showing debasement of roman coins: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debasement#/media/File:Finenes...

I don't understand what you mean.

What are the supply and demand in question? supply of and demand for money? I've generally been confused by what people mean when they talk about the demand for money, especially when they talk about whether it is equal to the supply. The supply of money is a particular quantity of money (like, M0 or M1 or M2 or whatever), and so, if the question "is the demand for money equal to the supply of money?" to not have a type error, then the demand for money would have to also be a particular quantity of money. But, I don't understand what this quantity could mean. I understand that for each desirable item, there is a "how many [the type of item] would you be willing to forgo for [quantity of money]" which relates how much someone values money, their demand for it, in terms of each of the types of items, but I see no way to take these together to produce a single quantity with units of money. Maybe add up how much someone would accept as payment in terms of each of their possessions individually? idgi.

__

I appreciate that chart and the info about Roman Empire coins. I of course recognize that increasing the amount of money the state spends, making it easier for people to obtain money, tends to make the money less valuable, but I think this would be largely counteracted by increasing the amount of money that the state requires that people return to it?

Though, there is of course a limit to how much you can pay for this way. If you were a sovereign and wanted to, idk, produce as many chicken eggs as you could, by increasing spending on chicken eggs while also increasing the amount of taxes you attempt to extract, you will eventually run up to a limit on how many chicken eggs you can get each year, and trying to buy more chicken eggs, would just result in either the price of chicken eggs increasing without increasing how many you get, or would just result in more people being unable to pay their tax obligations and being punished. Probably also a lot of people starving and such, because this would be forcing as much of the economy as you can towards producing chicken eggs? Kind of a horrifying situation actually. Would probably produce decreasing numbers of chicken eggs at some point. Well, much before this point, there would be a coup/coop. haha.

But, yeah, there's clearly a limit, and I suppose that this probably suggests a flaw in the way I initially thought of the idea, but I'm not where. Ok, yes, it does show that increasing how much you spend, even if you claw all of it back through taxes, will eventually buy smaller quantities of the thing you are spending on, per unit. In the chicken egg situation, how would the price of the cheapest sufficiently nutritious meal change? This isn't clear to me.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perfect_competition [1]

And I said money supply depends on market activity meaning only scenario where would amount of money be constant is perfect market competition(quantity demanded and quantity supplied are equal) but perfect market competition does not exist in reality.

It is also called Market equilibrium: "in this case is a condition where a market price is established through competition such that the amount of goods or services sought by buyers is equal to the amount of goods or services produced by sellers." [2]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perfect_competition

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_equilibrium

Also, without the fed printing money, we'd be feeling deflationary pressures, because we are in, you know, a recession. Some printing doesn't actually cause abnormal inflation in that situation.

Unemployed humans don't create supply. Incomeless humans don't create demand.

Horses also can learn to provide different value, just up to a threshold lower than that of humans. But humans still have a threshold.

All you have to do is look at the bell curve for IQ and see where this all leads, and its nowhere pretty.

A person with an 85 IQ or below is too dumb to even be in the Army, even doing the most basic of tasks. Turns out, a military force with advanced computerized weaponry requires smart people. Now here's the kicker... 85 and below is something like 16% of the population.

That's 1,250,000,000 people that will, in the coming years / decades, be totally unable to function in the economy in any worthwhile way. And I'm sorry, I just do not trust the "benevolence" of the human race to fix this problem when our technology advances to the point that people of 100 IQ and below aren't useful. There is no way that 50% of the people with 101 IQs and above are going to spend money to keep the other 50% of the human race alive.

I doubt there'll be "mass exterminations" like we've seen of ethnic groups throughout history, but more likely the unemployable will be left to their own devices; after all, out of sight, out of mind.

As higher and higher IQ individuals are keeping the same company more and more and self-segregating, I suspect we're going to see the development of an overclass of individuals that will eventually grow resentful of spending X percent of their income, whatever number "X" ends up being, for keeping those who aren't able to provide for themselves alive. That's a pretty common human emotion. The tribe works fine when every tribe member is even minimally capable. When half the tribe members are literally dead weight? Nothing good, I'm afraid.

More than 25% of people OF WORKING AGE aren't part of the labor force in almost all western economies [1]. And another 20-30%+ of the population is too old to be part of the labor force / retired [2].

This is well over 16% with too low of an IQ to contribute in a theoretical economy. It doesn't seem hard to shift priorities - the age for retirement, the people who qualify for welfare, etc...

Since 2015, the US and France already spend over 30% of GDP on social programs [3].

[1] https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SL.TLF.CACT.ZS

[2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_age_str...

[3] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_social_...

Job retraining has an abysmal success rate. I don't think it's even 10%, last time I looked into it.

That's why all the "Learn 2 Code" shit that Huff Post and Vox and etc. so forth were spouting off to rural West Virginian coal miners was so stupid... if you can write, or can even learn to write, complex C++ code, why the fuck would you keep mining coal to begin with? Strangely, I didn't see much "#learntocode" when those 47 Huff Post workers got fired, many of whom had been there for 9-10 years.

Where are all the toilet-manufacturing and toilet-installing jobs? We certainly have the technology to produce billions of toilets if we as a society decided to. We know there are billions of humans who need toilets, why isn't this demand creating jobs? Where are the toilets?

A big part of the answer to that question is that the billions of people who need toilets can't afford them, because they don't have jobs that would enable them to pay for toilets.

Toilets are so easy to manufacture at our technological level that toilet factories don't require many workers. Certainly not billions of workers, but we have billions of humans who need toilets.

Maybe the same problem affects all products. Will technology advance until 10000 or 10 or zero human workers will be required to run all the factories in the entire world for every imaginable product? Where then will billions of unemployed humans get money to buy the products from those factories?

So you cant swap out horses for humans as they analogy is completely flawed.

Neither was making things better for humans. The point of the economy is for capital to reproduce itself, humans being taken care of is an accidental side effect because capital doesn't like a torch mob very much.

No, in any non-totalitarian society, humans being taken care of is the main effect. In a market of buyers and sellers, it is only by making the buyer better off that the seller survives. As Smith said over 200 years ago, "It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own self-interest."

And humans are literally just collections of cells, does that mean you have no wants and that your pancreas is running the show?

It's very arrogant to think that only humans have desires. Nations have desires, institutions have desires, and capital itself has a lot of desires. Lots of scary entities out there that have desires.

When capital is unhappy with capital owners it's prone to fire all of them, reconfigure entire industries, eliminate entire sectors of human activity, redraw nation-states and in the not so distant future probably reconfigure human bodies.

Of all the firms in human existence maybe a fraction of a percent are still around. You think the 'owners' of capital wanted that to happen? Capital keeps tagging along, individual actors, not so much. Give it another few decades and you may interact with a lot of firms that have no human working for it at all, and possibly not even one owning it.

This seems like a fundamental misunderstanding of what people mean when they refer to organizations as entities. One might group together the common interests of an organization as a whole for the sake of simplifying discussion, but that in no way implies that an organization is actually some kind of inhuman entity that functions without humans. When people say "the government wants X" or "Britain doesn't like Y", they don't mean it literally. Government is nothing without the human politicians and officials it's comprised of and/or the human citizens that recognize its authority. A hundred dollar bill is worth nothing without humans to want it and the things it can buy. Suggesting that capitalism can produce non-human economic value contradicts the most basic definition of economic value.

And no, I don't think only humans have desires, but the capitalist economy we have created is based on human desires. Horses clearly have desires too, but thus far they have not invented an economy to serve horse desires. It wasn't non-existent horse capitalism that replaced horses, it was human capitalism.

> Of all the firms in human existence maybe a fraction of a percent are still around. You think the 'owners' of capital wanted that to happen?

Yes actually, I don't know why you think that's somehow undesirable. A lot of firms fail to adapt to human desires & needs so humans drop them. I'm honestly confused at the implication that capital owners want a lot of "firms" to exist when they're only a means to an end.

the same applies to you. You're a system of competing interests which we call "themacguffinman" solely for the purpose of simplification. You're nothing but an organisation of cells, systems and drives and the interaction of a lot of parts that we slap a label on for practical purposes. When we say something like "Britain likes X" we actually should take it literally, because Britain is a very real thing. Just like your body sends immune cells to kill themselves to fend off a disease, Britain sends her soldiers to die for a quasi empty rock off the coast of Argentina. Britain has territory, but none of her citizens have one. Britain has interests that are older and different than the interests of any of her people.

The world actually makes a lot more sense when you let go of the very atavistic idea that humans have any sort of special ontological status or have some level of realness that other entities don't have, it's just systems all the way up and down.

People actually intuitively understand this when they discuss the so called 'AI alignment problem'. They just don't understand that all the AIs are already around and we're solving alignment problems with entities with non-human desires and interests all day already.

Well no, Britain's interests are literally and technically and metaphorically and whatever-ly not older than the interests of any of her people. Britain did not exist in any way, shape, or form before any of her people. The humans of Britain sent other humans of Britain to die for the sake of humans of Britain. Britain doesn't have territory, the rulers and leaders of Britain have territory. Someone always benefits.

This is a fundamental misunderstanding of systems thinking. It can be useful to describe the collective interests of an organization as a whole system, but they're still human interests. Sending immune cells to kill themselves to fend off a disease is still in the interests of cells, just like the humans of Britain sending humans to die in a war is still in the interests of humans. And just like humans can't have interests without cells, organizations and economies can't have interests without humans.

I'm also not saying that humans are special or unique in the way that they can have interests, I'm saying that the capitalist economy we live in is defined by human interests and cannot somehow become non-human. Human interests will always be involved because that's how we define the system of capitalism & economy. Suggesting that our economy could somehow replace all humans makes as much sense to me as suggesting that a body of water could some day replace all of its H2O molecules.

I'm going to go ahead and say that of course increasing inequality caused by capitalism is a major concern for many humans which seems to be what you're getting at. This talk of Britain & capitalism functioning without humans is distractingly nonsensical. No, capitalism can't get rid of humans because a capitalist economy without humans is not a capitalist economy. No, the importance of horses is not comparable to the importance of humans to a system literally defined by interactions between humans.

I think you're missing the point that if necessary, the humans involved can be swapped out until ones with the 'right' desires are in place.

> but that in no way implies that an organization is actually some kind of inhuman entity that functions without humans.

An organization doesn't have to be capable of functioning without humans to be an inhuman entity with inhuman motivations and so on. The human components just need to be fungible and more easily steered by tweaking incentives etc. than the organization is.

For that matter, epiphenomena like regulatory capture really don't occur at an individual level much, but largely at the interface between governments/agencies and corporations, or even higher-level entities like industry trade groups and consortia.

I don't see why an unemployable horse would be considered any differently from an unemployable human to the cold profit motive.

Sometimes that leads to really unfortunate outcomes (in my view) like Trump and Brexit, but those things were the result of genuine democratic processes and driven by the choices of individual voters. That's true generally in the democratic world too.

It may be convenient to blame the state of the world on shadowy anti-democratic forces running things from the shadows, because that can be used to de-legitimise the current state of the democratic world, but I'm afraid that's self-delusion. This is the world we have chosen through a process of consensus and compromise.

I think that most technology has made life easier if not measurably better for humans. Medicine, machinery, transportation. Those things dont make life better for people? I suppose the cynical take could be that it is for the 'ruling class' but I think the measured take is that even the lower rungs of society have at least some access to better jobs than they did 100 years ago.

What is the incentive for "wasting resources on the lower rungs of society" when you don't need them as workers anymore?

You kind of can though. The economy cares about no one, it cares only about capital. And as far as capital is concerned, humans are just fancy horses. Humans are expenses that need minimizing to the point of zeroing. In a perfectly efficient capitalist economy, no one pays any humans for anything ever.

Horses were not workers. The were tools workers used.

Farmers used horses to plow the fields. Transport workers used them to transport goods and people. As those workers got better tools to plow and transport, productivity increased, society got richer.

There are also millions of old telegraphs, slide rules, and rotary phones "unemployed" across the world. The fate of these no longer needed tools tells us nothing about the conditions for human workers.

Also, the fact that you can't find a human example to make this argument, but have to use a loyal, brave, and majestic animal instead, should be enough to hint that this is maybe a bit of emotional manipulation rather than a rational argument.

Few people would argue that the job of “Amazon warehouse worker” is anything other than a tool for Jeff Bezos to become richer and more powerful. The person who has that job, from when they clock in to when they clock out, is functionally equivalent to a horse.

Amazon software engineers are the same, they just make more money today.

Comparing people and horses in terms of jobs they can do, and their ability to adapt to new tasks is so unbelievably dumb it's staggering it even needs to be pointed out. This is why these arguments for automation imminently putting vast swathes of people permanently out of work has never come true, in the hundreds of years it's been predicted.

Meanwhile developed world economies are close to full employment and have many more vacant positions than unemployed people. We have a skills problem, not an unemployment problem.

CGP Grey argued (paraphrased) “if X happens in the future, Y will be like Z”, you are arguing that Y will never be like Z in the future because Y is not currently like Z.

How long are we supposed to wait for this prediction to come true, and how many times does this have to be disproved across how many economies?

Horses represent the importance of muscle power in the economy, which was made vanishing small by mechanisation; AGI would do the same for intellectual labour.

The difference between this and previous tech improvements is that this one replaces human thought, not manual labor. That’s fundamentally different than everything that’s come before.

If they want to get money and work at a specific company, don't claim they are slaves. Amazon makes an offer: hey, if you work here you get X amount, and they accept.

You can claim an employee is a tool for the company, but you can also claim a company is a money generator for an employee. It's a work-money trade between 2 parties. Don't claim it's slavery.

> Work for another company -> compete for decreasing number of jobs with increasing number of candidates.

> start their own business -> compete with everyone that is smarter than you and/or had a better starting position.

> go live in the forest and live off the land -> this is called poverty.

But I think there might be a way out:

Spend as little as possible and use all your extra cash to buy stocks. Not meme stocks of course but either an index fund or if you really trust your skill go ahead and pick stocks. If there is a wealth transfer you will be at least partially on the receiving end.

Leave your job -> Lose health insurance and anything you paid towards your deductible

> Also, the fact that you can't find a human example to make this argument

What would you count as a single human example of human workers becoming obsolete? This has happened many times. About 96% of people used to work in agriculture. Today it's about 4%. Machines and technology have replaced the rest of the labor needed to grow our food.

Let's say the 96% number is from 1750, which I think is roughly right.

World population then was ~800 million. Today it is ~7700 million. Most have jobs.

The human workforce has expanded almost 10x in this period.

Without machines and technology, we would need far, far more people today in agriculture. The need for all those jobs has been destroyed by technology.

When one job becomes obsolete, this frees up labour and people gradually move to other jobs. This increases production, since we're still producing agricultural products (using fewer people), and there's more people now producing other things. Agricultural jobs were destroyed, but there were always other jobs people could do, that weren't done before simply because agriculture sucked up so much labour.

This pattern will continue for a while. When human labour is no longer the best tool for one job, that labour will be reallocated to something else. There's still plenty of things we'd like more of.

But the video is talking about what happens when humans are no longer the best tool for any job. It's happened many times in history that some job has become obsolete. We haven't yet made a machine that's better than humans at every job.

Actually, what's happening in automation is not what people expected. We still don't have good robot manipulation in unstructured situations. Machine learning gave us automation of "higher" functions first.

The current result is a growth in really dumb jobs, like Amazon warehouse pickers. The computers do almost all the thinking. Humans just pick up things where told to do so and put them somewhere else. Such jobs have no promotion path.

This is the "machines should think, people should work" revolution.

I doubt this.

In the USA, we have an unemployment number, “able bodied, but not working, or looking for work.” If the 50’s, it was basically housewives. Today it’s a lot of people. (This might not be the exact wording the government uses.)

My point is this number is huge, and never talked about much in the United States. I don’t think the government even has a way of tracking the number?

I don’t know how the rest of the world treats this number.

My guess would be most don’t have jobs, or if that number crossed 50% in any country, the jobs would not be of a livable wage living alone.

India deliberately chose not to automate agriculture. They still have about 50% agricultural workers. Recent attempts to change this have resulted in riots.[1]

[1] https://www.facebook.com/Reuters/videos/242972323968171/

Absolutely correct. And the entities employing those tools are called "Capital".

The point is that we found new jobs for horses because there were areas where machines were inferior to them. Once machines could do everything that a horse could do (probably some mixture of load carrying and agility / endurance) we had no more work for them.

To bring the same logic to humans, in history machines freed up humans to do better work than before. Let's say what humans excel at is dexterity and thinking. Once machines are more dexterous and can think better than people, there's no more new jobs - because whatever jobs they would be, machines will be better qualified for.

Even if you think a miracle ai revolution is on the horizon, humans and horses are not comparable in terms of diversity of labor

As someone who does expect an AI revolution, I think you’re being overly literal with an analogy.

For arguments’ sake, a toy model of AGI: copy a human brain onto a substrate that costs less to run than a real human costs to feed [0]. For every intellectual task this human could have performed, it is now cheaper to have the AI do it. As this AI could be based on any human by the nature of the hypothetical, any human intellectual task is now done cheaper by the corresponding AGI.

Current robot bodies (for the hypothetical uploaded minds) are currently a bit meh, but (a) not so much as to make the idea ridiculous, and (b) we’ve already got BCIs demonstrated in animals, so an AGI puppeting a fast growing cheap animal is also entirely within the realm of the plausible if you don’t want robots and don’t care much about animal rights (though not much worse in that regard than current meat production, IMO).

As an aside: tasks is a better metric than jobs, as almost all jobs have many tasks some of which are easier to automate than others.

[0] https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/51746/when...

My core point is that horses didn't have jobs!

People used horses to do jobs.

> Once machines are more dexterous and can think better than people, there's no more new jobs - because whatever jobs they would be, machines will be better qualified for.

I think this is another version of the same error. Machines have jobs in this scenario! People have to pay for what the machines produce, but there is no human on the other side of the transaction, so after a while humans run out of all money and die off.

Or something.. It's getting late and I'll stop here.

If I order food delivered, I and the restaurant are using a human to do a job. If that job can be done by a drone instead, that human has to find something else to do for income. For better or worse, the labor market is a process for turning other humans into tools.

The fact that the horse is paid in oats and not wages is irrelevant: a socially useful niche is transferred from a biological creature to a machine. It's an open question whether the future will contain enough socially useful niches for every working-age human (at least, ones that can pay a subsistence wage).

But the horse analogy isn't good way to show this imo. I hate to be "specie-ist" but human beings have a remarkable ability to learn new skills and attain new abilities. Horses don't. The human consumption of human's time, attention and so-forth is at the center of the economy. Human consumption of horse time isn't all that high a priority.

Human flexibility makes human activity something that can satisfy a vast number of human wants (and it means that there are a vast number of those wants to satisfy). That still doesn't mean you'll always have people employed but it makes employment a more plausible thing.

What are the trends that will lead to mass unemployment, even decades hence?

Visit a slum in Mumbai or a village in the Congo. Better yet, visit a trailer park in the Rust Belt. I really don't get why people don't understand how the future for most people - who don't manage to accrue capital prior to the substantial advent of AI and automation - is already out there for us to observe.

In A, people are happy, we’ll fed, Pursuing their interests, living meaningful lives.

In B they are not.

however, in A, companies and the economy are not growing so fast: resources are funnelled into a populace that takes but doesn’t give back.

Over a long period of time, the extra 2.5% growth in country B will become so meaningful that it will look back on the savages in country A and decide that it’s resources would be better off under B’s management.

It’s AI colonialism.

Only if you define 'productive' as 'generating more capital'.

Yes, over the very very long term, externalities that aren't accounted for (it doesn't matter whether we're talking about negative externalities not mitigated, or positive externalities not invested in) will eventually exact their toll on capital, but in the short, medium, and even moderately long term, any externalities that can possibly be dismissed as irrelevant to the fundamental mission of turning large piles of money into larger piles, will be.

It is also worth noting that by ignoring externalities until some crisis forces the issue, opportunities are opened up for capital to (quite profitably) address the resulting crisis. Whereas addressing an externality in a more timely manner, while reducing overall costs, even more sharply reduces those opportunities.

In that case it could be that country A outgrows country B because the restributive policies have a stimulus effect.

The thing is, we don’t know how fast society-wide experiments will turn out.

In the US, this is where federalism is advantageous. Allow different states to try different policies and then measure the outcomes. Over time, winning policies will emerge and spread across the country.

Greater wealth means a bigger "pie" to split. Inequality obviously comes into question here, but objectively there is more total wealth that can be spread around, so it's a net good, if we can optimize the distribution.

It also means that the contribution of an individual can create more value. In some ways this leads to inequality, where the most capable people are able to capitalize on technology and make a lot more money than was possible in the past... see: any of the FAANG founders.

Taking the thought experiment to a logical extreme: in a hypothetical world where 100% of the supply chain is automated, people would no longer be required to work. So it must be true that there's some level of automation that will produce a net decrease in jobs. At that point some form of UBI likely makes sense.

Though I'm doubtful we'll ever reach that kind of state. Realistically people will continue to divert their efforts into new things.

Look at https://ourworldindata.org/economic-growth and take 5 minutes to look at the data on the rest of the site and you will understand how much life has improved not just in raw numbers (there are more people living above the poverty line than existed 100 years ago), but more importantly in percentage terms - a far smaller fraction of people live in poverty today than in 1880.

In fact, the number last time I ran it was that less people live in abject poverty in 2019 than did so in 1880 - despite a 7-8 fold increase in population.

I think in the long run we need to figure out a reasonable economic system that can deal with abundance of the things people want/need, and scarcity of work. Maybe it's as simple as making a 30, or a 20 hour work week the norm. The default alternative seems to be to have more and more people fighting for fewer and fewer jobs, to the point where everyone who has a job has to work extremely hard under long hours and bad conditions for low pay because if they don't there's ten more people ready to take their place at the drop of a hat.

They don't have to actually vote, anymore than corporations or wealthy humans do, in order to exert their will on the political process.

That's what campaign contributions, PACs, lobbyists, astroturfing, think-tanks, etc. are for.

But if they said "yes, those politics would happen in humans, but some of these other factors are more important toward the eventual outcome[...]" then that's perfectly compatible with understanding the story. And that's roughly what the earlier commenter did! They accepted the argument that jobs will go away, while saying the secondary and tertiary effects would be different.

Cheers.

I so agree that increasing automation doesn't always mean more Jobs That Make Money (even if it might continue to for a while yet). Maybe when there's less work for humans to do we just... work less? and get more?

You will immediately notice that nobody likes it when work is done slowly. Working for 4 hours a day is only possible if you complete a paid portion of work at that time (e.g. teach 2-3 classes). Nearly any project that has work for multiple days would benefit from people working on it 24/7 and completing it faster, but it's often too expensive.

So your less work schedule often becomes a high-energy consulting gig when you work 12 hours a day, and then a couple months of leisurely coasting.

I have no reason to think that the future would be materially different. Just finding the gigs is going to become harder. This very future has already arrived for many low-skilled workers, like those in Amazon warehouses; they never know if there will be demand for their service today, and need to apply daily.

As long as this is like a retired horse given support to last out its years in a nice pasture (i.e. UBI) and not the dog food route, we'll be ok. If the change comes too fast leaving too many without too much while too few have it all, then we'll have problems.

Future generations will be surprised we lived so that we can have “job”.

I'd rather have something like 15-hour workweeks.

Horses could not be retrained to do jobs other than those replaced by machines.

Horses did not have voting power.

A large number of unemployed horses would not go on robbing and killing humans in a mob.

And decrease in human population is welcome until some point. (We have relatively more educated people having less / no children, and backward, dumb stupid people having more children, which is BAD).

There's fewer horses now, but it's not like they were taken en masse out back and shot in the head (though that certainly happened to some). They just aren't bred as much. I don't think anyone (horses included) bemoan that.

If horses are the comparison, then I don't think humans have a thing to worry about.

> Processing wild horses into chicken food in the 1930s reached its peak, when nearly 30 million pounds of horse flesh were canned.

http://netnebraska.org/basic-page/television/wild-horses-sla...

Here's the truth: life expectancy is going down, birth rates are below replacement, sperm counts are down something like 90% in less than a century, we're working longer hours than medieval serfs, and suffering from more disease than our hunter-gatherer ancestors.

This Techno-religion of AI, genetic engineering, automation, etc being "right around the corner" is the opiate of the masses -- the propaganda keeping the working class from revolting.

My point was an evolutionary one: wouldn't those couples who choose to reproduce more (assuming you can afford to raise your kids) be selected for, evolutionarily, vs couples who chose to remain childfree?

Thus, even in a few generations, I would assume a moderate cultural shift towards having kids, since now only those who want kids, have them.

The first hormonal birth control method (The Pill) was invented in 1960; we're 60 years beyond that (~3 generations). Maybe my theory isn't panning out as fast as I assumed.

Keep in mind that the incentive to have kids, evolutionarily speaking, is weak enough that we have had to be bribed with sex to keep things going.

Once sex and reproduction were decoupled, you're definitely looking at much more than a couple of generations before biological selection pressures start having the effect of an increase in the desire to have children per-se, as distinct from the desire to have sex.

OTOH, cultural incentives are an entirely different matter: whether we're talking about religions decrying or forbidding the use of contraceptives, or advocacy for those who want children at all to have larger families, these can have a snowballing effect especially since culture is passed down to offspring even more readily, though not as reliably, than genetic traits (eg. you can pass your culture on to an adopted child, or to a spouse, etc.).

This selects for cultures that are good at spreading themselves and good at encouraging reproduction, and selects humans for a general tendency toward susceptibility to indoctrination (at least during childhood) including the imperative to eventually pass the cultural package onward. To a certain extent it also selects for acceptance of authority and resistance to indoctrination with beliefs that conflict with already held ones as an adult.

Actually, all these particular biological traits are selected for and reinforced by so many other different feedback loops, that cultural packages can mostly just assume their presence and focus on leveraging them.