How exactly is "automation and robotics" taking the burden from our shoulders? I live in a single family house. I still need to hire plumbers, electricians, handy men to paint my house, etc. I still need to hover over a porcelain bowl a few times a day and clog it up a few times a year. Toilet augers and plungers to the rescue.

There was a time when if you wanted to know a phone number you had to manually consult a huge book, if you wanted to share a photo with family you had to manually carry the print to them, if you wanted to watch a movie at home you had to drive to blockbuster, and if you wanted to hurl abuse at a politician you had to wait for them to hold a rally in your city and queue for hours to get a front row seat.

Now I can find phone numbers, share photos with family, watch movies on demand and hurl abuse at politicians, all without leaving my chair.

Online phone books are not as complete. People lose their digital photos. Blockbuster had better stock of films than Netflix has now. Politicians don't read pleb Twitter accounts.

You lost me at "Blockbuster had better stock of films than Netflix has now". While "better" is debatable, my watch list of films I want to watch on Netflix will most likely outlive me

Obviously the 90s movie rental place had no movies made after the 90s.

A movie rental place had more or less all blockbusters (pun intended) and a huge stack of old movies. Netflix today, not the old postal order Netflix, has nowhere near the assortment of a kinda crappy movie rental place of the late 90s.

This really sounds like great progress. If a clogged up toilet is considered something of a big problem to highlight, we've come a long way.

Farming is highly automated both in terms of pre-made bulk chemicals and machines on the fields.

We mass-produce cars. Indeed, we have cars that we can leave months on end without maintenance. And they run both faster and further than a horse.

We have automated labs that can produce and test medicine in high pace.

We have seriously large industries (gaming, cruising, performing arts) that do nothing but give people something to do now that we don't have to worry about having enough food by end of winter.

In historical context, this is all thanks to industrialisation and the specialisation of industry. The effects of the change of agriculture should not be understated. The industrialization of agriculte has made it possible for the majority of the population to do something else then farming. (be it substance or tenant farming).

Having an abundance of food and not relying on substance farming for the majority of your needs also has the knock-on effect of kids not being needed on a farm, but getting education instead. Which in term will eventually lead to more industrialisation etc.

I didn't interpret the parent comment's reference to "automation and robotics" to include "industrialization and specialization". Sounds like a bunch of brogrammers coding up useless growth tech, funded by clueless VC funds. FTX and Upstart comes to mind.

...but what does Upstart do? https://youtu.be/WWxl4W_eVUA?t=110

Industrialization and specialization has been the direction of society since agriculture, if not earlier. Automation and robotics is supposed to be the stage that came with industrialization, then digitalization. Those brogrammers coding up useless growth tech are just a big soap bubble in a much larger stream of the direction of society.

You are mistaking a (large, obnoxious, all-encompassing) trend of the economic moment (albeit a moment that has existed for 1.5 to 2 decades now) for the greater direction of civilization. A mistake in scale.

Porcelain bowl technology has improved greatly in the last couple of decades. Updating that might save you the effort with the auger and plunger, and make the regular use a little more pleasant as well.

Yeah service jobs haven't budged much. Except for automatic checkout, kiosks at the airport, that touch-panel at McD's, and so on.

But < 2% of Americans anyway work in agriculture. Down from 98% a century or two ago.

And US population grew by what, 50% in 30 years? But jobs by 25%. Manufacturing jobs dropped steadily as a pct of population. Because, automation?

It's often repeated that automation just allows people to get better jobs running the robots. Trouble is, 2 people run a robot that replaced 200.

Just ask Detroit how much automation benefitted jobs.

I agree the automation is happening, but I'm not seeing the part where it leads to better lives for the majority of people.

Just because you don't see it, doesn't mean it's not happening. IMO society in the developed regions of the world would collapse without automation.

I said for the majority if people. Tech people like us, with nice salaries, are able to enjoy these things more than those who have to do the grunt work.

No matter how good automation gets, the government is going to lag way behind. I don’t foresee a transition to any sort of utopian era where everyone enjoys the fruits of automation. I think those at the top will continue to hoard the wealth because they own those systems.

It’s subjective and there’s a pithy response to any argument. But for me it’s night and day.

I have far more time with my kids than my parents ever had with us, partly because I simply do not grocery shop or merchandise shop anymore. Yes there’s still plenty of humans involved but both are heavily automated with AMRs.

This is hours a week of freed time.

Again, to each their own. But for me it’s huge and I love and cherish it.

That's you moving up the class-ladder, not the results of automation. As you said, humans are the cornerstone of that resource chain you're describing, for most part.

Actually I moved down the class ladder. I make a fraction what my parents did. The home I grew up in is worth millions now. I could never afford it.

But a number of services exist now that didn’t 30 years ago. Largely in part to many forms of normalization and automation.

It is just fundamentally strange that you are including gig economy work in a discussion of automation. That isn't automation! The people shopping for you are not automatons just because your interaction with them is mediated by an app! They are doing your chores for you and have less time with their families so you can have more time with yours.

It’s heavily automated where I shop. I know because I write software for the robots at some of these customers and 3PLs. I watch the robots do their thing on a big board.

Right, the human+machine system is providing the scalable and convenient service, but the "human" part is usually some minimum-wage or gig worker. This kind of automation is helping the haves, but not so much the have-nots.

I guess countries are becoming more of what they already were: the US gets more unequal and exploitative. Other, more socialist countries are getting more so. China is getting totalitarian using automated facial recognition and censorship.

>But a number of services exist now that didn’t 30 years ago. Largely in part to many forms of normalization and automation.

The Ubers and doordashes and deliveroos of this world are predicated upon the growth of the precariat.

India had all this stuff 50 years ago, just without an app. I remember it not being unusual to have Starbucks delivered to your door in Buenos Aires in 2012. Again, no app.

True story from the early oughts: a friend spent some weeks at the India office of his big US-based software company.

When you sent a document to the printer, an employee called a "peon" would pick it up and bring it to your office. He would also bring around tea and cookies in the afternoon. Now that's service!

I mean, I just take my kids with me shopping. Usually alone. They're twins and they're 3. These things aren't hard, people just don't want to do them.

Given that the majority (as in around 90%) of people are no longer agricultural serfs or slaves toiling in the fields, I'd say that automation has definitely led to better lives.

IIRC, the breakdown was typically around 1% lords and priests, 9+% soldiers to protect the lords and priests against other lords and priests, and 90% unfree agricultural labor of one form or another (being a serf was slightly better than being a slave, but only a bit).

Kind of my point.

A UBI for instance could help with that. But there's nothing but FUD on that subject.

Exactly; maybe we can take from this that there is (some) truth in that "nobody wants to work", so we should do something about it with automation, but we also need redistribution so that we don't end up in a society where nobody has any money except a few trillionaires.

Or maybe, just maybe, people could find a way to break themself off a slice of that wealth by doing or creating something of value and nudging themselves along the number line between $0 and $1T. I know it sounds crazy, but it just might work.

Breaking off a slice of that wealth, which by your own admission, is limited. And so what happens to people who can't?

The additional problem to this framing is that anywhere between $0-[amount dictated to provide a stable life, including inflation] is a hellscape and has proven extremely difficult for majority of people to escape from for a variety of reasons.

But sure, the solution is everyone being their own boss hashtag entrepreneur... but wait if everyone is their own boss... who do the bosses exploit so they can nudge themselves further down the number line faster than others?

Yeah, all those people working three part-time jobs and skipping food so their children can eat should just work harder!

Becoming a billionaire is definitely from hard work and not at all luck and being born with the tight parents!

>Private capital tends to become concentrated in few hands… The result of these developments is an oligarchy of private capital the enormous power of which cannot be effectively checked even by a democratically organized political society. This is true since the members of legislative bodies are selected by political parties, largely financed or otherwise influenced by private capitalists who, for all practical purposes, separate the electorate from the legislature. The consequence is that the representatives of the people do not in fact sufficiently protect the interests of the underprivileged sections of the population. Moreover, under existing conditions, private capitalists inevitably control, directly or indirectly, the main sources of information (press, radio, education). It is thus extremely difficult, and indeed in most cases quite impossible, for the individual citizen to come to objective conclusions and to make intelligent use of his political rights.

-- some idiot 50 years ago. Glad things have changed!

Not even "maybe not", rather "definitely not".

The issue is not people working or not working; The issue is the distribution of power. If it's not a problem of the people in power, then it won't get solved, easy as that. This is not something that can be solved on the individual level, because due to the population numbers, we now exist in a huge, global, interconnected system of societies, governments, and such. And these issues, at the end of the day, could be solved by evolving, changing that system. And the individuals follow, as their incentives dictate.

Rather than seizing money and capital why not just make the automation affordable for everyone? That's what's worked in the past with washing machines, dryers, dishwashers, electric ovens, furnaces, cars, power tools, etc. All of those are labour saving devices that have replaced backbreaking physical work that everyone used to have to do on a daily basis. Instead of seizing the means of production you should be designing and selling the means of production to the largest possible audience. With cheap computation and electronics it's now possible to set up a small partially automated factory at home. Wasn't that literally the dream of past communists? The workers having ownership of the means of production and reaping all the rewards of their labour?

Wealth isn't zero sum.

The problem is we taught AI to make art before we taught it to make useful work. so when it finally catches up and we all have free time, but are we supposed to do? Just yell prompts into SD-9000?

The idea that people would be free to make art when automation obsoleted menial labor was because art was viewed as something inherently pleasurable to do, not because it is needed. You could yell prompts into SD-9000 if you want, or you can paint it yourself, you can even choose to do nothing at all. It doesn't matter which, as long as you are pleased with the result.

I think its a bit like starting a hobby programming project. If you google your idea, you're most likely going to see that someone else already did it and all the fun will be sucked out of what you're doing. Better to just not look and do it for your own enjoyment. If you want to make art, make it, don't look at what stable diffusion or others are doing.

I'm sure you can think of something better to do with your time than spend it on 'work'?

As it happens, gave a 5-min lightning talk on text-to-img yesterday, and from discussions with colleagues afterwards one thing that works well is 'Mr Blobby' in various situations.

Hmm, not on-topic for OP, but oh well.

What we mostly do with our free time: consume and not create.

Automation still requires workers.

And those workers would get more money. And have more stuff, better medical care, more experiences.

And then someone would say “thats unfair they have more money than me”.

Rinse and repeat.

Automation needs 1 or two people to run a machine that replaced 200.

Right, that’s my point.

So long as there remain any scarcities of necessities (housing, mostly) improvements in automation and robotics will only be put to use to help us outcompete our peers.

It's more galling when you realize these shortages, at least of housing, are artificially created in order to make sure people keep working as much as possible.

The housing shortages are artificial, but there is no organized thought of keeping people working behind it.

Mostly just homeowners voting in their self interest, and unintended consequences.

The connection between "I want my home price to go up" and "I want other people to have to work really really hard for me to sell them my home" should be less tenuous.

I have recently given up the notion of ever owning a house: it’s far too expensive.

Even with rent increases, I can live in 500 sqft apartments and basically retire in my 30s/40s.

If I buy a house I’ll work until I’m 70. And I’ll be house poor that whole time.

The price of single-family detached homes is so out of line that it is absurd.

> If I buy a house I’ll work until I’m 70. And I’ll be house poor that whole time.

How will you pay for the ever-increasing rent on apartments when you're 70 and beyond?

Owning a house is short-term pain but allows you to lock in a "rent" (mortgage) which will never increase and will at one point go to zero, hopefully before you retire.

It's been happening since the Industrial Revolution started ~250 years ago.

Today's luxuries becomes tomorrow's bare necessities.

Each generation ends up having more than the previous one could dream of, and yet they keep wanting more.

> Each generation ends up having more than the previous one could dream of, and yet they keep wanting more.

This makes sense though -- I think it's somewhat natural for people to want growth/progress. I've found that working towards goals is one of the things that makes me the happiest and most fulfilled in life.

Yeah, I think it's mostly human nature.

Not only do we always want more, we also want more than other people.