Instead, I’d argue that returns are going to IP holders.

The returns go to cheaper items, because there is less labour time going into each item as productivity improves.

If you redenominate in the 'labour hour' currency, then it all starts to make sense. As does the apparent increase in pay of a concert violin player. Ultimately a concert level violin player doing their thing still takes the same amount of time top produce as it always did, society still likes concerts, and they haven't yet become fond of AI violin players. They exchange those hours for products with less hours in them. So they appear to get a wage increase. Classically this is known as the Baumol effect.

This goes beyond 'real wages', to 'real stuff'. People are definitely getting more stuff than they did 40 years ago. My iPhone is testament to that. As is the lack of power cuts.

Underlying everything is essentially an exchange of labour hours.

As to returns to IP holders, those are often the pension fund, who then pay the pensions to pensioners who then spend it on stuff.

Since we have an ageing population there will definitely be an increase in the transfer to the elderly. It can't be any other way. Is that a fair transfer? Well that's the debate.

Yeah, we can get much more and much cheaper stuff than before thanks to the 'Made in China' boom, but what we can't get now is affordable real-estate. Too bad we can't go live inside our iPhones. /s

During the pandemic the price of used cars started to rise. Did we attribute that to people with more money who can then get higher credit on the now more expensive cars?

No, we attributed it to a lack of supply of cars, and worked to free up the blockages so that the market would return to its correct state where cars depreciated.

It's the same problem with housing. We need to build an awful lot more, and we need to move the work to where we build the houses.

Once we cross the rubicon and house prices start to depreciate, as they should because they wear out, then we'll see a phase shift in the market and vastly more supply. It'll be like the latent heat of condensation.

In 2015, of all renter households:

* 38% were rent burdened (defined as spending 30% or more of pretax income on rent), an increase of about 19% from 2001.

* 17% were severely rent burdened (spending 50% or more), an increase of 42% from 2001 (the 38% rent burdened includes the 17% severely burdened).

For households headed by someone 65+, 50% are rent burdened, ~20% severely rent burdened.

https://www.pewtrusts.org/-/media/assets/2018/04/rent-burden...

Real estate, education, healthcare...

And that was entirely predictable, when a country allows the free flow of capital, and goods but not people then it becomes a race to the bottom in sectors which can move to lower cost areas. There is a certain amount of price suppression for some local goods and the demand dries up, but for things which aren't optional the price will continue to inflate until the system breaks. Infant child care is in this position, the workers competing internationally can't afford to pay for the care of their infants because its local labor intensive.

Basically its broken economic policy and its just a matter of time before it explodes. And its probably not fixable because if the cost of labor ever gets equal, then capital is just going to move to the country that say has the smallest carbon tax/whatever.

Basically a prereq for free trade should be a common government, and free movement of people.

The only exception is the US because it has a structural deficit.

It's actually the opposite. Countries have tried to artificially raise interest rates above liquidiry preference via inflation targeting and stimulus for the last 40 years.

Median housing in the US has been around inflation adjusted $100/sq ft for decades.

Houses today are massively larger than in the past, making the costs look higher. And what you get today is also a lot better - more efficient, cheaper to heat and cool, safer, better electrical, water, etc.

I was talking about the European real-estate market. I don't know the US market but I heard it's much more affordable than here, at least outside of SF/NY/etc.

I don't see evidence across all of Europe any data for much difference than in the US. Dense places cost more, sparse places are amazingly cheap. Poorer countries, like poor states, have even cheaper housing.

Maybe we need more housing options

Pensions aren't distributed evenly across the population, it tends to be that the richer you are, the bigger the pension. That means that IP has the effect of making the rich richer, increasing inequality.

The rosy side of the equation happens when we look at the price of useful products that can be automated, like fridges or computers, where labourers are much richer in such products than they were 100 years ago. However, the ugly side is visible when looking at the price of products that can't be automated, like land, where labourers are much poorer then they were 100 years ago. The difference is often made up of useless products that could be automated, like cheap fashion or fast food, which marketing keeps pushing as hard as possible.

Here the Labour hour is valued only in terms of its exchange rate to the denomination that the area pays tax in.

Potentially yes, as long as the competition doesn't destroy the manufacturing landscape, e.g. by emergence of lowest-common-denominator or monopoly suppliers.

Somehow there is also a systematic economic double-standard that works for some but not others: "free markets" of dog-eat-dog inputs (i.e., suppliers), but less free markets on outputs (i.e., monopolies, mega corporations, patents, proprietary-ness, closed-source). Unregulated greed fixes all problems by the "invisible hand", right?

And to the overall economy - more stuff with less resources is growth. But that's all going to capital, look at the s&p500 vs wages over the same time period.

I agree the parent comment should be more specific, but his point stands: gains are going to a few companies that automate everyone else's processes or benefit from the huge economies of scale that automation provides.

I've recently been thinking a lot about policy changes that might help with housing affordability, and the same thing keeps happening: every time I think I've come up with something clever, I eventually realize that I've just accidentally made things even better for people that started off with a lot of capital.

It feels like aside from explicit redistribution of wealth (raise minimum wage, tax high income earners more, raise high-end property taxes), you can't change _anything_ without making the rich richer and the poor poorer.

(You can certainly have the input to one feedback loop be the output of another).

Then structural deflationary forces would manifest as UBI increases instead of interest rate decreases.

I think the positive real interest rates would ensure the UBI isn't all captured by rent increases, although it's hard to be certain unless it's tested.

We got at least two world wars out of "deflationary spirals" and every single gold standard that was attempted failed during deflation.

Also, liquidity preference is a systemic redistribution from the bottom 90% to the top 10%.

The people that benefit from inflation are the savers and bankers in the top 10% because they can live off the interest or capital yields which must be higher than interest.

Bankers and savers benefit because governments, people and companies pay debts first before they pay anyone else. If the cantillon effect exists it exists in the boring form of those who own the most get paid the most. The proximity argument is nonsense because there are banks in every city. You can "print" money yourself by getting a mortgage to buy a house and many people do.

This is pop psychology and there is ample counter-evidence for it.

World War 2 was not caused by monetary policy! A hypothesised, partial cause that Hitler certainly exploited was crippling debts. But that wasn't solvable by economists. Do you think the allied powers that defeated Germany in WW1 would have sat back and tolerated Germany inflating away its war debts?

Every single, new building puts downward pressure on the average price. The moment supply outstrips demand, prices goes down, housing market stops being reasonable asset, money outflows causing further collapse of the market and houses are dirt cheap.

At the very least, a supply-solution proponent would need to explain how China's property supply glut didn't bring prices down until the government cracked down on credit.

A lot of equity derives its value from real estate so the obvious escape into stocks won't work in practice.

That said, deflation only ends up happening in specific goods categories like TVs and computers, which are at a particularly sharp point in the technology curve, such that they deflate even faster than average. That's again because the average CPI growth is governed by a feedback loop, where the central bank adjusts interest rates to target 2% inflation, so as, say, food gets cheaper to produce, monetary stimulus is gradually added to the system to combat the falling costs and encourage more consumption. This is done to avoid the kind of deflationary cycle that you're talking about. (Central banks want to avoid deflation so that debts don't become onerous to repay, which can create a depression).

But the result is that while technology is deflationary, it does not create deflation, because that's maintained by a feedback loop; instead it manifests in gradually declining interest rates (and thus increasing valuations and real estate prices, as I mentioned).

That's what it's like to be in a feedback loop. Your computer may act as a heat source for your home but as long as the thermostat is maintaining temperature at a setpoint, the computer won't change that average temperature -- heat it produces will be offset by reduced furnace activity.

(Of course there are also long-term structurally inflationary forces as well. Environmental damage and resource scarcity, like declining fish stocks for example, are structurally inflationary forces. Demographics can go either way. Short term things like wars, debt crises, earthquakes, or pandemics can obviously have a huge impact, and irresponsible monetary policy can throw things right out the window.)

> Central banks want to avoid deflation so that debts don't become onerous to repay, which can create a depression.

Agreed. In other words I didn't realize the 19th century was so bad!

Also, since its hard to imagine technology process with out debt in a market economy, we have have an interesting interaction here.

This is still true today. Interest is at zero, people keep their money in bank accounts of banks who are so heavily overleveraged vs their demand deposits that they are unable to take the risk of lending.

Money is stuck and has to be replenished by more borrowing i.e. QE asset purchases give banks more reserve assets and let them pretend their balance sheet is clean.

Someone who is capable of cleaning a machine and loading materials and tools as well as unloading product is valued different than someone who actually knows how to make any kind of object that is within reason to be fabricated with lathes, mills and other shoptools, which is what a master machinist is. Those people are rare, they always were rare and historically they were valued as much in the past as they are today. Using them to operate a CNC machine is a complete waste of their skills. Typically those people are making one-offs that CNC jockeys would not be able to due to the difficulty of setting things up and/or the need to get it right the first time because the part is irreplaceable.

Profit isn't a reward, it is a reallocation of capital to a new sector. At some point growth stops and there are no new sectors meaning there is nothing to reallocate existing capital to.

They reduce the number of workers needed to produce the same amount of output. What is slightly counterintuitive is that having done so, they may actually increase the demand for workers, because they now can produce far more output in the same amount of time.

Modern languages and tools have made programming much more productive, and now there are lots more programmers and they get paid more.

They may do that.

Too many people take it for a guarantee that technology by itself must do that, and can never result in a situation that a human hand is needed to steer us away from.

Well not really. Computer industry pay is increasingly becoming bi-modal at least for a decade. The highly paid programmer is just a US phenomenon and that too in few major IT hubs.

There are lot of programers/IT admins who would make pretty decent money in late 90s to 2000s. And they make less than they were 20 years ago and yes all hadoop/big data training did not really make any better paid.

Inflation adjusted IT salaries have gone down in lot of places in the world. Of course 1 percenters of IT in FAANG+ make it sound like IT salaries are going up heavily for everyone.

That's simply not true. Programmers around the EU are among the best paid professionals in their local markets, even more so for young people (out of college/school/university). The salaries are far away from Silicon Valley levels, but are still very high locally.

I've heard from a lot of my colleagues that they couldn't afford to have the same lifestyle in an Western capital city with equivalent IT salaries. I know I wouldn't be able to rent in downtown Amsterdam, Paris or Milano with my equivalent IT earnings were I to live in those cities the same way I now do in Bucharest.

It's true. Unless you work for a FAANG, or some Fin-Tech or a unicorn flush with cash, dev wages in Western EU are not higher than Eastern EU anymore.

I know devs in Poland and Romania making way more than me and some friends do in Austria/France/Belgium.

It's because of huge amount of outsourcing from US companies moving directly to Eastern EU, pushing the wages higher than what Western EU based companies can offer locally, coupled with the higher taxes in the Western countries, meaning devs in the West taking home lower wages than their counterparts in the East.

Someone here said it well, but I don't have the original post to quote anymore: {a cleaner in Sweden makes way more than a cleaner in Poland, but a dev in Poland can end up making as much or more than a dev in Sweden}. That's whack but that's the reality of supply and demand caused by the bleed from the US tech boom to certain regions.

That's not really true. I live in Austria and many more skilled professions earn better than most devs here as the local SW industry sucks, almost no product-based companies and a market overabundant with talent.

I'm sure in hot markets with plenty of product based companies like London, Berlin, Amsterdam or Eastern Europe the situation is better.

0 - https://www.payscale.com/research/IT/Job=Junior_Software_Eng...

1 - https://www.statista.com/statistics/708972/average-annual-no...

2 - https://www.paylab.com/it/salaryinfo

The thing about management is what I've heard Italian devs complain about (and it's a common complaint is tech-weaker countries), that to get decent money you have to transition to management, whereas countries with stronger tech sectors like the US have more companies that let engineers continue to grow as engineers (or architects).

Was my original comment and point. Salaries for tech are very good for the local markets, even if they might be considered low compared to other markets.

Of course, part of this may be that the wage spectrum as a whole is compressed compared to the US, but that's an explanation, not a contradiction.

Yes, it is in any capitalist economy, because income distribution isn't normal. In the US, for instance, per capita GDP is about $64k, but median personal income is a little over $35k, and median pay of a full-time worker income, annualized, is just under $45k. An individual worker making just over the per capita GDP is doing quite well.

This is the main Problem. Technical excellence is not valued and rewarded enough. The best Engineers get promoted to Mediocre managers because that's the only way to move forward. The result is an economy focused on micromanaging for small gains instead of innovation for big gains.

The situation in the EU is the same as in the US, and outside the local hubs, wages are lower.

Any evidence?

Source?

And not all automation increases worker productivity, lots of it just eliminates workers from certain jobs altogether, e.g. self driving cars / trucks.

On the other hand, turns out that once a shirt is cheap humans will buy not just one extra so there's one to wear and one to wash, but a dozen, or hundreds. And they'll throw it away when it's a little worn not when it falls apart. So while industrialisation of fabric and clothing production made clothes cheap, the result wasn't that fewer people were employed in that work but that we just all bought more clothes.

I hope he's not listening to tunes. A change in the sound it's making is often the first warning that your $500,000 piece of machinery is about to self destruct.

Whose machine?

Think: there used to be a theoretical limit to how much regulation could exist, because the regs had to be known by a person (otherwise how are they enforced?).

Now we have regtech. A whole industry built on automating compliance.

How long before each individual needs a regtech software program (or two!) just to function in society? I'm not talking about tax filing, that's just the start.

We don’t even have self-driving cars yet, how can you know what effect they have?

When there's an inequality in productivity, more productive firma will see an increase in labour, bit that doesn't mean the whole sector does.

In practice some people want money itself, which is an empirical contradiction of says law. There are also people who hoard jobs because they like them, which is bad for people who want the money to actually spend it.

The assumption is that blue collar work is the stuff that gets automated away. The reality is that blue collar workers are getting more productive instead but are still essential. And we already have vastly less of them than we used to due to the industrial revolution and the wave of automation in the last centuries. Meanwhile a lot of white collar work is melting away or increasingly of the "bullshit job" variety where the added value is dubious. So, a strange side effect of automation is that we've created a lot of bullshit jobs instead of creating mass unemployment.

An even stranger side effect is that a lot of people with college degrees are now doing artisanal stuff instead of committing to a life long of a meaning-less and soul crushing office dwelling existence. So, they're choosing to become blue collar workers. And artisanal here of course means "choosing to do things by hand" instead of maximizing quantity and revenue through industrialized processes. Artisanal is more fun to do and quality of the goods means they are worth more. You can buy bread from a factory, or buy a sour dough bread from a hipster with a college degree. Lack of automation is the whole point there.

What the lockdown last year showed quite convincingly is that a lot of white collar jobs are not really that essential and it doesn't matter that much if productivity there drops by few tens of a percent. The economy suffered a little but mostly that's because of reduced consumption and not of reduced production. And even that is hardly proportional to the productivity loss of masses of people suddenly no longer doing what they were supposed to be doing or doing a lot less of it. A lot of those people never got back to their former level of "productivity" and it continues to not matter economically. Their most important job is spending the money they earn. The labor performed earning that money is secondary.

It's a great argument for basic income: give people money and get them to spend it in order to boost the economy. It's a lot more effective than funneling it to the offshore accounts of the 1 per-centers. They hoard rather than spend their money.

And it frees people up to do something more valuable than stare at a cubicle wall doing something that absolutely and provably does not matter economically. Like bake bread, create art, or do something else that people might spend on.

Per your source, the "productivity-pay gap" largely explainable through increases in pay inequality while the change in labor's share of income is a much smaller factor (and it's worth mentioning EPI is probably overstating the size of the gap in the first place[1]).

As an alternative to your hypothesis, my guess is that workers in jobs amenable to automation are reaping huge increases in pay (e.g. engineers) while jobs that are more difficult to automate are falling behind.

> We already need to find ways to distribute the benefits of these efficiency improvements more equally.

I wholeheartedly agree. I propose we find ways to automate low productivity jobs so all workers can enjoy the associated benefits.

[1] https://fee.org/articles/the-myth-of-the-pay-productivity-ga...

[1] https://global.oup.com/academic/product/the-new-ruthless-eco...

The effect of productivity improvements on the real incomes of workers ultimately depend on how the change affects productivity of the marginal worker. You need to look at more than a single firm to figure this out. If the availability of spreadsheets makes clerical workers so much more productive that overall demand for their services increases more than four-fold (which might be definitely possible), the marginal spreadsheet-tweaking activity will be paid quite a lot, and workers' income will increase.

Mostly because automation isn’t making that person more valuable, it’s just removing it from that persons role. Skilled labor becomes unskilled labor. Supply goes way up. Clerks are a great example.

They used to do a lot for a store and had to know all the products. Now a clerk is just a last mile button presser. They don’t add much value at all. They’re not doing 4x the work. They’re doing 0.1x the work. Trying to say “but the value couldn’t be captured without that guy” is wishful thinking.

Not to detract from your overall point, which is absolutely correct, but having been a grocery clerk there's a slightly different phenomenon in play there. Having a clerk who knows the products well is a big help, but you really only need one available at a time. So rather than make acquiring that knowledge an actual part of the job, they rely on scale to have enough workers who learn it through their own initiative.

Which is bad for skilled labor (wrt. that set of skills) but good for unskilled labor.

That depends on how the extra profit is distributed, aka taxation and social welfare. Slaving away 40 hours a week on a bullshit job that can be trivially automated is not a benefit per se.

For some workers, that's a huge benefit. If they get ousted they have to find another degenerate position or work for a lower salary. Usually it's both.

At first I thought you were bringing these up to point out that the robots create other jobs, because robots don't just spring from the earth fully formed and ready to run forever. They require an army of engineers to build/operate/maintain them.

> We're always focused on the some day maybe robots, but automation has been changing society and (I'd argue) increasing inequality for decades

Inequality is a political problem. I'd rather we tackled that for what it is: bring on the fully automated luxury communism and free us from our mindless toil that can be trivially performed by mindless robots. We have nothing to lose but our drudgery.

Agreed on your second point. Attack the inequality, not the automation.

Yep agreed, but there's a key difference. Unlike most other jobs, your labor continues to provide the company profits even after you leave. I think that's why software engineers are typically paid a lot and are often paid with a stock option component.

> Inequality is a political problem. I'd rather we tackled that for what it is: bring on the fully automated luxury communism and free us from our mindless toil that can be trivially performed by mindless robots. We have nothing to lose but our drudgery.

I think we could already do this. Obviously many workers would still be required, but they could be much more fairly compensated. Someone else mentioned Graeber's Bullshit Jobs, we're already inventing jobs just to keep people busy and spending. As Adam Curtis said[1], "your real job is shopping".

[1] https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=1414301661936421

That's certainly the engineer's sales pitch, but let me introduce you to the engineer's fine print, tech debt.

Maybe in terms of pure job function, but anyone who's ever solved a problem at their job in a way that is still used when they leave has continued to provide the company profits.

F U L L Y is Star Trek years away, not next Wednesday.

Leninism (and it's descendants) have a totalitarian state system (socialist, including non-Leninist Marxist Communist, critics tend to call it “state capitalism”) that replaces private capitalism as a hack to avoid the requirement of developing proletarian class identity in a developed capitalist system present in OG Marxism.

That this turns into a dystopian nightmare that mirrors and even exaggerates the horrors of private capitalism and fails to actually bypass private capitalism is a surprise to no one but Leninists, least of all non-Leninist Communists.

With automation though I think that obsoletes a lot of those ideas. Now there's less and less connection between labor input and productivity output.

We need some new ideas for distributing the fruits of automation - that take into account the productivity improvements thanks to machines, computers and efficiency improvement in general. While at the same time keeping some incentives to make things even more efficient.

I think that can be done within our current system with taxes, socialising things like healthcare and access to food and healthcare (and perhaps something like UBI). No need to completely overhaul the political system, although we could be heading towards that too if things don't change.

He explicitly argued that this was what he believed would make communism possible.

So whatever else one thinks about Marx it's clear he did not think in terms of a fixed ratio.

The comparison of Lenin and Marx is also flawed - Marx argued for the dismantling of the state, not a highly centralised state.

In Critique of the Gotha Programme he even pointed to the US as a better model for education (arguing that government-set standards but devolution of control over the actual provision of education was something to aim for) than the SPDs proposed state run education because he disapproved of giving the state control over even that, arguing that it was rather the state which needed to be educated by the public.

And in his work on the Paris Commune he lamented that one of the biggest errors he believed the commune made was to not go further and smash the rest of the state. The focus on centralised planning in the Soviet Union was Stalinist, not even Leninist, and certainly has nothing to do with Marx.

[1] E.g.: "The bourgeoisie, during its rule of scarce one hundred years, has created more massive and more colossal productive forces than have all preceding generations together. Subjection of Nature’s forces to man, machinery, application of chemistry to industry and agriculture, steam-navigation, railways, electric telegraphs, clearing of whole continents for cultivation, canalisation of rivers, whole populations conjured out of the ground — what earlier century had even a presentiment that such productive forces slumbered in the lap of social labour?"

Marx still believed in some sort of state-level synchronisation or command and control - otherwise he knew that you would just have lots of little communes / barracks-communists inefficiently working at cross purposes, e.g. with resource utilisation. But he never spelled out in detail how the central planning function should work - it was in effect an implementation detail. It was in this space of undefined behaviour that Lenin, Stalin and Mao created the totalitarian states that they did.

I think a lot of people forget that there was no actual collaboration between Marx and Lenin and the others. Lenin was only 13 years old when Marx died, ill and in a city on the other side of Europe.

Although there is a mass of academic detail in Marx's works, the communist manifesto itself is very thin in terms of the remedies to the problems it identifies. The 'call to action' part of the manifesto is essentially ten short bullet points, one of which is 'etc etc'.

The core distinction between Marxists and many forms of Anarchists, as early as during the dispute in the First International between Bukharin and Marx, was their view not on the long term dismantling of the state - where they agreed - but the role of the state in the transition from capitalism to socialism, where the anarchists wanted the state dismantled immediately, while Marx argued the state could serve a role in a transition, itself becoming a tool to execute the changes necessary to change society.

In his works on the Paris Commune he explicitly criticised the Communards for failing to take the next step and destroy the bourgeois state. While that could certainly have been replaced with a proposed federation, a key distinction was that he celebrated the bottom up delegation of authority, which is hardly compatible with "command and control" if any part can withdraw.

As such, libertarian Marxism directly opposed to the very existence of a state became a thing, based in large part on his writings on the Paris Commune.

Well, I mean, people “forget” because equating Leninism with Marxism served the purposes of both Leninists and Western opponents of Marxism, so it became a common element of propaganda of both the USSR and other authoritarian communist regimes and the capitalist west.

_Lenin_ called it "state capitalism." That was the official policy of the USSR under Lenin. State capitalism.

Lenin called a transitional phase that was intended to take 6 months to establish and another 6 months to phase out into socialism “state capitalism” (it may be the case that “war communism" of 1918-1921 was officially recognized as something of an extension of that phase necessitated by emergency), but state capitalism was never officially the long-term policy or the self-description of the state of the economy past that point; the criticism from non-Leninist Marxists is that what the steady state of what the USSR became was state capitalism, not socialism.

(Did he really say just 6 months?? That doesn't sound right. But anyway it would have only been a prediction -- which failed.)

"Joseph Stalin abandoned the NEP in 1928 with the Great Break."

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

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Break_(USSR)

That's not what wikipedia says. I can't argue as I am no expert in such matters myself having read almost none of the primary material (but I did read "The Tax In Kind"... which I was assuming outlined the theory of the NEP).

Wikipedia on NEP:

Lenin considered the NEP as a strategic retreat from socialism. He believed it was capitalism, but justified it by insisting that it was a different type of capitalism, "state capitalism", the last stage of capitalism before socialism evolved.[15]

In a market economy competition will squeeze down those newfound profits. The owner of the company benefits, the employee benefits, and all the customers benefit.

  * Providing food
  * Providing shelter
  * Providing healthcare

That divide became a lot more clear in the past 2 years with the acknowledgement of "essential workers". Without Google, Facebook, or auto insurance, we'd be inconvenienced. Without essential workers society as we know it would collapse. And almost all of those workers are paid less than an entry level Facebook engineer.

So now the question is, are we already post-scarcity? And perhaps we don't know it only because it hasn't been distributed equally.

Thanks to industrialization, in the first and second world yes for basic food, clothing and shelter, as well as other mass-consumed products.

Things that remain (increasingly) scarce in my view - globally - are broadly educated people, political/economic/behavioral freedoms, unspoiled nature and the temporal wealth and whim to access it regularly.

https://i.redd.it/k51q3zw8hn981.jpg

It's complicated.

Greater efficiency is good, because it makes society "richer".

If that societal wealth increase doesn't go to the average person, then why should they care about efficiency?

The luddites didn't hate efficiency, or machines, they sabotaged the machines because that was one of the few ways they could hurt the interests of the people who were mistreating them. Specific machines were targetted because of who owned them, and the way they were treating workers.

For wider context this time the royal families of Europe were waging war to prevent democracy spreading. A great deal of this funding came from the UK, yet at the same time their poor people were rioting due to lack of food, and tax increases to fund the war. Folk songs at the time tell tales of people signing up to fight the French because the other option was starvation.

It's convenient that we remember these people as "silly folk who were scared of machines" rather than "downtrodden masses revolting against a cruel dictatorship waging war against democracy".

But in the long run, competition between businesses leads to at least a short term equilibrium, where automation and labour exploitation rates are roughly equal, or monopolization has occurred. And then rates of profits can plummet and then it's really bad all around.

The point here is that I don't think it's automation itself that creates the unequal distribution of incomes. It's just the market economy. The market economy creates automation in order to gain competitive advantage.

Curtailing automation isn't going to improve wealth inequality. Might even make it worse.

Equalization of wealth requires the intervention of the working population either through unionization or forcing the state to intervene.

Deep learning will eventually eat 99% of office jobs, including software and hardware development. Self-programming and self-designing systems seem as inevitable as killer robots. These automation technologies can lead to a rapid collapse of standards of living in industrialized nations that most people "won't see coming."

As a consequence of massive efficiencies, regulatory capture, and political influence, the long-term vicious cycle trend is towards most of humanity becoming borderline homeless with a small middle class and a tiny strata of insanely rich royalty.

There is an obvious solution to spiraling inequality "pure" capitalists refuse to consider on "religious" grounds: take past, present, and future absurd gains from the billionaires and redistribute them according to a needs-based formula.

You appear to be denying the progress made over the past 30 years by deep learning, ML frameworks, constraint solvers, and immense computing power.

Prolog has been around for 50 years. I suggest you look at what it can do.

Programming languages exist only for humans to specify and discuss intended computing behavior. There are plenty of goal-solving algorithms and heuristics already. Turing completeness is all that's necessary. "Flying car" programming languages are unnecessary because they offer no additional intrinsic power, only convenience of expressiveness that could be provided by libraries.

Self-programming and -designing systems, if left unconstrained, will develop their own IRs, design, and manufacturing specification protocols that would likely become rapidly incomprehensible. They won't need anthropocentric programming languages after several iterations because it would be an inefficiency. That's what the technological singularity will look like.

"It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it." - Upton Sinclair

Most of the progress in the last 30 years was immense computing power, almost all foundations for todays ML are revised old concepts. What you propose is AGI, how you want to achieve that? We don't even know where to start in theory, this is not my opinion but current top names in ML world[1], which was discusses on HN many times.

1. https://venturebeat.com/2018/12/17/geoffrey-hinton-and-demis...

As a programmer and someone who's earned a computer science degree, I'm going to say you're wrong for many reasons but I'll point out a couple here. First, the problem with modern programming is the problem that all computing has struggled with: how do you define meaning (semantics). We've resolved almost all the issues of representation of syntactic reasoning (the ability to encode and process symbols) but to tell a computer the general meaning of a program, its limits, its problem space, and even potential issues that it will need to form strategies to resolve are the realm of pure research right now. And have been for decades, it's why most research has been focusing on things like machine learning, genetic algorithms, and neural networks because these can be trained on a specific set of problems with the hopes that given sufficient time that we can augment this via hardware improvements (it's why you see Google touting android phones with neural network processors and the like). The problem still remains that we can't just do a TNG science scene where you speak out constraints to a computer and it generates tentative results on those constraints.

Second, we have another problem that still persists to this day: how to get firms to fund such research. In the past, the military industrial complex (which still does to an extent) and monopolies would fund such research to keep ahead but in this day it seems most folks aren't keen to fund what won't produce profit within a few quarters and as such most research has been pared down to limited scopes. I believe this is an issue due to how much pure research in the past seventy years has resulted in the majority of gains seen in the private sector. Thus, the private sector assumed all progress was natural and not inevitable build up from decades, even centuries, of hard work. And without that pure research being allowed to exist and even fail in its pursuits, we've put ourselves at odds with the intergenerational aspect of all scientific research. Meaning, we're most likely only be able to achieve such gains many centuries from now.

>That's what the technological singularity will look like.

There won't be any technological singularity because in the past we never had one. People who think this are fools like Ray Kurzweil. Anyone with an inkling on the subjects of anthropology will know better. The advances of the human species before recorded history were building on the small steps of pre-human ancestors. There wasn't a magic Eureka moment for us and never will be.