This is probably where I should point out that I’m Danish, and, left leaning. Which means I’m more “eat the rich” than what most of you will encounter. Somewhat ironically I also worked with digitalisation in the public sector for about a decade, but that’s another story. Anyway, an example of things I really don’t think we should automate is public pool control. We did PoC on that because some bean counter decided we could save something like 5 hours a month if we automated it rather than have one of the janitors (which isn’t the correct work for these people but I simply can’t find the right English word) wouldn’t have to check once a week. The disadvantage of this was that you could remotely alter the chemicals in the pools. These days I work in the green energy industry where you could seriously disrupt a lot of plants and storage by entering through weakly protected inverters by gaining accesses to wholly unnecessary automation. Unnecessary because you already have a lot of greenfield engineers on site or nearby.
Now, I don’t know if dock work is vital infrastructure, but if it is, then automation might be an unnecessary risk.
Totally false. The benefits go to anyone who buys or sells goods that pass through the ports.
Mostly true. Only if there is huge competitive pressure will the prices be forced to go down. Otherwise, those owners simply make more profit now and keep prices the same.
With ports, you don't have much competitive pressure because a competitor can't just another mega-port next to the existing one, there is no such space available.
They do raise prices, gradually.
But raising prices is harder because users complain in many ways. Keeping prices the same while reducing your costs (thus improving profits) is much easier, nobody notices.
How many terminals are there on the West coast of the US that can handle the biggest vessels?
so, not the workers or the larger populace. Just more business that is continuing to make life more expensive.
These are all subjective, so this is neither true nor false.
In this case the original argument was that capital investments at the port will create value to the port users. It is likely correct - if the port invests in robots then it is extremely reasonable to expect that users of the port will get cheaper and better service. The port owners might make more money or they might get squeezed by economics, that part is much harder to work out.
Better, sure, cheaper? Almost certainly not.
Getting people food to eat is very important. Getting people slightly better software, not so much.
The further we push up and up the less importance the jobs become. Knowledge work is great, but it's necessarily less valuable from a humanity perspective than laborious work.
Of course this flaw isn't solved in a capitalist system, so we just ignore it. We just lie and pay knowledge workers more, because their work takes more human effort/investment, even if the product is less valuable. So we have a mismatch, where money value does not match real world value, and it's only getting worse. It's a bubble - eventually it will have to pop.
Where is the proof of this? How can you say that this is true?
> The further we push up and up the less importance the jobs become. Knowledge work is great, but it's necessarily less valuable from a humanity perspective than laborious work.
I reject this conclusion wholeheartedly. After food production and other such ventures, there really is only knowledge work. That you dismiss it so easily does not mean that it is not important. Indeed, the "slightly better software" of today can impact billions, billions who were not alive during the agricultural age. Even by that metric, yes, what we create today impacts many multitudes greater than us. We pay knowledge workers more because of this fact, which is matched in a capitalist system, which, need I remind you, is the single greatest contributor to the increasing of living standards in the world, something that is unmatched by any other system. You may have issues with it, but the facts are as they are.
> capitalist system, which, need I remind you, is the single greatest contributor to the increasing of living standards in the world
I reject this conclusion. The single greatest contributor is technology, which advances with or without capitalism. We can tell because the USSR had increasing standards of living too, because they too had technological advancements. In some areas, more advanced than the west.
It's merely a coincidence that capitalism was the vessel. Any somewhat reasonable economic system will do. Certainly, the areas today with the highest quality of life are qusai-socialist - and the capitalist nations, like the US, are left to the bottom of the barrel of the developed world. In spite of her massive wealth.
The simple reality is that inventions become less and less valuable as time goes on. The problems become smaller and smaller, less and less important, because we necessarily solved the biggest ones first.
A new medicine is remarkable yes, but nothing in the face of aseptic technique. A new phone is neat sure, but nothing in the face of the original global network, the telephony network.
Jumping from A to B is much greater than D to F and so on, because innovations build on the previous. It's a pyramid of humanity. If you take out the lowest levels though, it crumbles.
Without sanitation, food service, agriculture, you cannot have innovation. Ultimately everyone like you or I could die and that would be a blip. If every agriculturalist dies, then humanity is no more. To me, that is indicative of value - value in terms of service to humanity.
This problem will grow with time because not everyone can be knowledge workers. Not everyone can get a college degree just to be paid 20 bucks an hour. Our jobs are going to higher and higher levels of abstraction, but they're leaving people behind.
We've solved it as much as we can. We educate everyone now; we provide college assistance too. Suddenly most people can read and write, and we took it 1,000 steps further than that. But people as a whole are limited.
When the average person can no longer work the average job, the economy will collapse in on itself. Sure, we can automate and then provide new jobs. We don't know what to do if people cannot work those new jobs. Everything is based on people, like you and me, buying. If we cannot buy, if the average laborer cannot buy, nothing else matters. And it comes down like a house of cards.
Sorry, no. I know of many people who have suffered due to not having enough to eat under the communist regimes of the USSR and Maoist China, while places like West Germany, Japan, South Korea, and the US were thriving as usual. If you do not have personal experiences with these areas or the people in them, please do not act as if you do, because the statistics and personal experiences tell a different story. It is not simply technology but the distribution of technology, something that should've been done in a communist society, ironically.
> The simple reality is that inventions become less and less valuable as time goes on.
Again, I am simply unsure of where you came to this conclusion. Solving something like cancer is simply much more monumental than anything that came before. Knowledge work is obviously instrumental to understanding how such a disease works and spreads.
> When the average person can no longer work the average job, the economy will collapse in on itself
What a strange comment. It's as if you assume that the average person has some set of knowledge (and a corresponding upper threshold of knowledge that cannot be surpassed) whereas the opposite is true; we teach 8th graders advanced calculus concepts where it took Newton decades to understand. If anything, the limit (if it indeed exists within our normal belief of the future) is quite high.
I do, and of course there was suffering. I think you're taking me for a commie, that's not the case.
> Solving something like cancer is simply much more monumental than anything that came before
Um... no. No it's not.
It just seems that way now because we solved so much. If you go back 500 years and ask them what they need solved, they wouldn't say cancer.
This is actually evidence of my point. As time goes on, our problems become smaller, so thing appear bigger. Cancer appears now as HUGE deal, but historically people dealt with things like infant mortality - where HALF of all infants died. Could you even imagine that in the context of modern life?
We fixed that with aseptic technique and vit K. Now, because we did that, we have the opportunity to focus on problems like cancer, which wasn't even something we cared enough to look at in the past.
It's to the point where we're so far removed from fundamental flaws of humanity, they are literally unthinkable, unimaginable. You cannot even conceptualize them. Our own understanding of death has changed since we've eliminated so much death.
> What a strange comment. It's as if you assume that the average person has some set of knowledge
Incorrect, and if you noticed my paragraph above this, I don't know how you concluded that.
It's not a matter of knowledge, knowledge is infinite. It's a matter of aptitude or potential, and that is not infinite. We can teach everyone everything, but it won't stick, because not everyone can learn everything.
> If anything, the limit ... is quite high.
I disgaree, we're already reaching the limit with our current knowledge and technology.
In the past two decades, kids were forced essentially to go to college. However, some could not do it, and now they are subject to a life of menial jobs with poverty pay. This is in contrast to the prior generation, where high school grads could get decent jobs.
It's to a point where college grads, with bachelor's degrees, are now making 20 dollars an hour out of college (depends on the degree). Better than high school grads making 12, but not by much.
Masters will be the next bachelors in the next 10 years, probably sooner. The end result is large chunks of people being assigned to poverty. The newer advice for them is to simply turn to trades - I'm sure you've heard this. The idea being trading off your physical health for being able to perform a job that both pays okay and fits their level of aptitude.
This should be obvious to you. Truthfully, I don't know how you don't see it. Maybe it's just because I'm Gen Z so I got slapped in the face with this since birth. But every single day it was pounded into our heads we NEED to go to college or we will fail at life.
This WAS NOT the case of the prior generations. I am extremely lucky to have the ability to perform okay in college. If I was born, say, 20 years later it's likely I would not have the ability. If someone like my mother, bless her heart, was born today she would not make even a quarter what she makes now.
But, I know many people who did not or could not go to college. Some went anyway and got 'easy' degrees. Despite being educated, they are now making close to nothing. Some are now getting masters, because that's the only way to make money. And some didn't go and are now flipping burgers because that's all that's out there.
Sure, that's all well and good, but the amount of suffering caused by that versus cancer is not comparable.
> kids were forced essentially to go to college. However, some could not do it, and now they are subject to a life of menial jobs with poverty pay. This is in contrast to the prior generation, where high school grads could get decent jobs.
You should read Capital in the 21st Century. The conclusion is that the postwar period was a unique point of time where the US was not affected by destruction but could use the proceeds of the Marshall Plan to have cheap education and wealthy citizenry, something that has not been replicated prior or since. In reality, this was short lived and now we are living in an era where we must toil to survive, as we used to. That our close ancestors did not have to do so is not a conclusion about them, but about a conclusion about the wider socioeconomic climate. So many people take the post war period of their parents and grandparents are gospel. Those times were never to persist in reality.
> I disgaree, we're already reaching the limit with our current knowledge and technology.
In you current jobs? Sure, perhaps, but not in actuality of knowledge about the world and universe.
> Maybe it's just because I'm Gen Z so I got slapped in the face with this since birth. But every single day it was pounded into our heads we NEED to go to college or we will fail at life.
Ah, there is the rub. I take heart in your toil but again, you are not special. No human has been in the history of mankind. There have always been trials and tribulations to consider. If you disagree with me, so be it, but the truth does not change, just as it has not changed with me.
> Some went anyway and got 'easy' degrees. Despite being educated, they are now making close to nothing. Some are now getting masters, because that's the only way to make money. And some didn't go and are now flipping burgers because that's all that's out there.
I mean, yes, this has been repeated ad nauseum. The joke about underwater basketweaving has apparently been active since the '50s [0]. You are blaming the wrong people for this, and to be honest, I am not sure who you should blame, because as Piketty says, it is an emergent problem in the field.
You're correct - the amount of death we deal with now is so much less it's not even comparable. I'm not comparing an abstract here like "suffering" - although, if I wanted to, it would be easy to argue that has also gone down.
It's truly undebatable that less people die now.
> it is an emergent problem in the field
Correct, it's a simple consequence of our economic systems that we haven't solved. It's a fundamental flaw. In order to survive, you must work. What happens to those who cannot work? We have put bandaid after bandaid, but the fundamental problem remains.
I get the feeling you don't see this as a real problem because nobody is causing it directly. But it is real. It's real right now, and it's been getting progressively worse and nobody knows what to do.
If 10% of people cannot earn a college degree, what happens to them? This isn't a hypothetical. As time goes on, those people are reserved to a life of poverty. 50 years ago, they would be just fine, there was plenty of labor jobs that paid well.
Now peer 50 years into the future. 30% cannot get a master's degree or some hypothetical equivalent benchmark. And so 30% live in poverty? And now 100 years into the future. 70% cannot earn a phd or some hypothetical equivalent benchmark. And...? Our economy? They cannot buy. What happens then?
> There have always been trials and tribulations to consider
You're not thinking logically here. Humans have a limit, we all fall somewhere on a bell curve. If we push the jobs up and up and up the bell curve, as we have, we reach a tipping point!
If we automate any more than we currently have, I fear we won't have jobs left that people can do. Even you, too, have a limit. You are not the smartest human alive I take it. Prepose you must be in order to work. What will you do?
Sure, we can look at something like automatic phone directories replacing secretaries and say "well they can skill up and get a different job". What happens when AI replaces the entire bottom half of knowledge jobs? Can those people "skill up"? They barely passed school to be an accountant and now that job is automated, they're already at their limit. Or, at least, some of them are.
What if YOUR own job is automated? What will YOU do? What if the only way to progress is to be a top 10% engineer? Well, are you? If not, will you ever be? It's possible the answer is no, and you're just fucked. There's no other way to put it, a large amount of people are just fucked. Until the majority is fucked, and then the system implodes on itself because the bold assumptions it made can no longer be fulfilled.
No work, no capitalism, no economy, no humanity. We've gotten very lucky that initial assumption has held true. I don't believe it will hold true forever.
I am comparing suffering, not death. Death is not necessarily suffering.
> You're not thinking logically here. Humans have a limit, we all fall somewhere on a bell curve. If we push the jobs up and up and up the bell curve, as we have, we reach a tipping point!
> If we automate any more than we currently have, I fear we won't have jobs left that people can do. Even you, too, have a limit. You are not the smartest human alive I take it. Prepose you must be in order to work. What will you do?
You are still thinking that the amount of "knowledge" or "skill" that a human can hold is fixed, which is simply wrong. If you still believe that, then there really is nothing I can say that would disabuse you of this notion, in spite of the evidence to the contrary that the millennia of progress by, yes, humans, have led to more humans educated than ever. Why must there be a limit to the "jobs left that humans can do?" Please seriously ponder this question as to why, as it has not happened before in human history when other advances came.
I can tell by this conversation that you're very young, that you seem to see things in terms of black and white, yes and no, and I promise you, I have seen the same way years ago, but it is simply not reality. There are more shades of gray in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.
I don't think it is, or maybe we're thinking of this differently.
The quantity of knowledge is not fixed, it's infinite. The kind of knowledge IS fixed - this is your potential. I can learn to read, and to write, and to engineer. But I can't learn how to make a quantum computer, I simply don't have that potential.
But that's me. It varies from person to person, along a bell curve in my mind.
> Please seriously ponder this question as to why, as it has not happened before in human history when other advances came
Because the average potential is relatively high, and we already got the low hanging fruit out of the way.
For the vast, vast majority of human history, the average person could not read or write - they didn't need to. Eventually they did, but IMO the average human definitely has the potential to read and write, and I was proven right by that.
Some humans did not. We may consider them disabled. And yes, they were fucked and are fucked. I mentioned bandaids earlier, we provide help to these people. But the underlying problem exists, those that cannot read or write pretty much can't work any job, so they're fucked. 100 years ago they could be fine.
When other advancements came, we pushed human jobs up the bell curve of potential, and it was fine because there was SO much potential left.
But do you, honestly, think the average person can be an astrophysicist? If you answer no, as I would, then clearly there is a tipping point. We're not there yet, the average person does not need to be an astrophysicist. But they do need to graduate college, and some percentage of people can't, and they're simply fucked in our current society.
Of course. The difference is the level of education. Otherwise, do you really believe that those, all across the world, become astrophysicists? Everyone has the capacity to change, grow, and become more than they once were.
I know this applies to other people too because I've personally met people who can't read and never will. I've met people who couldn't graduate high school, and not from a lack of trying, and everyone in between. Based on that, and my own limits, I'm concluding there are limits to how "smart" someone can get and it varies. For me personally, I felt as though if I continued my education higher I would really be pushing it.
Perhaps you should speak for yourself then. It is not useful to extrapolate your experiences onto everyone else as it's comparable to someone with an IQ of 50 thinking everyone else is the same, not realizing that others might be much more intelligent than them. I simply do not agree that we have reached anywhere near the limit of human potential yet, as evidences by thousands of years of adaptation of work in the face of new technology that hunter gatherers could not have dreamed of, yet we are anatomically identical to them. To think that only today are we reaching the limits is a prime example of recency bias; it was famously said that in the early 1900s that everything that could've been invented had already been.
I feel I don't need to speak for myself when I say something so obvious as "not everyone can be an astrophysicist"
Rather, perhaps you should think more reasonably of yourself? I admire the confidence to believe you can truly do anything, but I'm definitely more confident in saying, no, you can't.
For the vast, vast, VAST majority of human history you could live simply by performing labor. This is no longer the case in modern societies.
Only KNOWLEDGE jobs now provide, IMO, an adequate income.
We have ALREADY left a lot of people behind. People who cannot read, or write, are completely fucked.
We are LUCKY that most people are able to read and write. As time goes on and this trend continues and we continue to cut off the bottom X% of jobs, what happens to those people?
Imagine a hypothetical secretary. This is all she is capable of doing, and she barely passed high school, and not from a lack of trying. Her job is then automated.
What does she do? This isn't a hypothetical question - spell it out for me. There are no jobs below her. What does she do?
To expand further, assuming some automate X removes the bottom Y percent of jobs, the lowest hanging of fruit, that means the jobs left MUST BE > Y. If someone can only do up to Y, then they cannot work a job. As Y approaches infinity, nobody on planet Earth will be able to work.
You're able to work right now because you happen to be smart enough to perform the average jobs available. When some automation, AI or not, doesn't matter, eliminates the bottom 90% of knowledge jobs, only the top 10% will be left. You will not be able to work one of those jobs, because you aren't working one right now and I'm assuming you've already pushed your brain to its limits. If you haven't, you're leaving money on the table, and you should be a rocket scientist.
It has nothing to do with automation here, it's actually everyone's fault here in starting a race to the bottom. Personally I'd rather do a lottery after basic competence but that's more of a regulation issue.
If SWE were to fully automated, I'd be busy running my own startup to implement all the ideas in my head. I think many also would. As a result, there would a boom of startups and an increase of job demand for lawyers, IBs or accountants. That's the thing with automation, as it improves the cost of running a business should decrease proportionally that everyone could eventually transition to the capitalist class themselves. Those who aren't would be working lucrative jobs.
This doesn't work, we go right back to "economy imploding"
The capital class only exists because it can harvest the resources of the non-capital class. If everyone is in the capital class, that means there's no extraction, nobody is buying. House of cards falls down.
We can make it work, don't get me wrong. But not in our current economic system, we would need something novel. And that's really my entire point here.
It's capitalism, not laborism, or humanism. Those with the capital are who the system serves.
But in the process of doing so the rest of us benefit from all of the goods and services this capital use created. The economy is not about money, it's about stuff. I would much rather Ozempic exist and make somebody rich rather than it not exist, because there are millions of people that benefit from its existence.
Only capitalism has driven the single greatest increase in living standards in history, something that should be tamed, yes, but not extinguished outright. There is a reason why even the most ardent communist states have now reverted to capitalism in order to grow and prosper.
Look what capitalism has done for tech. The general public now distrusts and is frustrated by silicon valley. Privacy and rights to repair have encouraged rent-seeking and fabrication of get-rich-quick schemes at the expense of natural resources and public health. User experiences and software quality trend downward. The primary purpose of new technology like AI is transparently to enrich the owners rather than to provide real benefits or services, and the first thing they all did was purge their ethics committees. Oh, yes, capitalism is doing great things for computers. Just look at the great advancements in the fields of wealth extraction, resource consumption, energy expenditure, and legislative capture.
But don't worry, it's not their fault because "corporations have a fiduciary duty to maximize profits," a phrase which is sure to be writ on the tombstone of the founding ideals of this country.
The outcome was that the ports were forced to accelerate containerisation and automation in order to cover the labour shortage, and many jobs were then lost.
Honestly, if they think the outcome will be different this time, I’d love to understand their rationale.
LOL. Yeah right. Come back with your "eat the rich" attitude after actually living in an impoverished country. You'll still want to, but you might actually know how.
I don’t think this is quite as guaranteed as people think.
When we mechanized farming the manufacturing sector had already existed for decades, it was clear what kinds of jobs the ex-farm-workers would move into. When we automated/offshored manufacturing, it seemed plausible that those ex-manufacturing-workers could move into service sector jobs (though that didn’t work out as well in practice, many people took a large cut to their household income).
Nowadays we don’t have a sector hungry to absorb the laborers whose manufacturing and service jobs are being automated away. A lot of people act like the market will come up with jobs we can’t conceive of today, but that’s not how this has worked in the past. Even when there’s a sector with tons of existing job opportunities, the transition isn’t guaranteed to work. We don’t really have a precedent for what happens if we automate away a sector (or two) and don’t have an extra sectors-worth of job opportunities to replace it.
I think the bigger problem is that folks often take wage cuts whenever they change sectors - you lose lots of your human capital and unique skills.
Look at top 10 jobs by employment, all of them are 100+ years old. Name a job that was created in the last 50 years - real jobs that employ at least 1 million people, not ‘leveraged crypto-equity portfolio manager’
C dates back to the early 70s, and computers weren't really ubiquitous until the 90s or so. So does computer programming in general make your cutoff?
Or does it date back to Babbage in the 1800s?
Art is still art, whether you paint with oil or on an iPad. Doesn’t quite count.
If you think the skills acquired as a dockworker translate directly to being able to get a job in manufacturing, you don't know anything about either one.
That there are jobs available is only one part of the problem. Where are the jobs relative to the people about to be unemployed? How many people are we about to, under the threat of starvation, tell to move possibly across the country for work? How many communities will be destroyed? How many people will be utterly severed from any and all social support systems that they now have?
For that matter, how many of those jobs are themselves stable? Or will they need to repeat this traumatic process in another ten years after another industry "disruption" leads to yet more automation?
This whole system was supposed to be for people, right? Because it sure seems to me that the human factors in all these discussions get shockingly lost quite quickly and we revert to treating people like rack nodes that can be moved to a different part of our server farm at a moment's notice, should the need for compute be higher over there than it is here, and there are no side effects to that, nothing lost in the transition. Nothing could be further from the truth.
If you're the type of person who's comfortable moving cross country to chase a higher salary or a dream job, more power to you. I certainly was. Now ask yourself if you would be so enthusiastic if it wasn't your decision and was, in fact, imposed on you by the actions of your employer. I wonder if automation would make so much tremendous sense to you if you yourself were the one on the chopping block, who's live was about to be upended so widgets could be made 80 cents cheaper each.
We should thank our lucky stars if a robot takes all their job. That's progress.
I've met a lot of people who couldn't find the job they wanted in the place they wanted anymore and joined Tech along the US coast, for the predominant wages which are a factor of supply and demand.
This is exactly what he meant by "you lose lots of your human capital and unique skills." You don't start at the same rank when you change careers. You start at the bottom.
we have disability and unemployment insurance. Why not have automated-away-job-insurance with addition of government money to pay for retraining programs. Everybody would be better off - society gets efficiency of automation, and the workers gets new skills and new jobs. My understanding is that there is shortage of various blue collar jobs in particular in construction, green energy, etc. And in general, i think society would be better off sponsoring in major part, if not in full, any retraining a worker wants to take, like with some minimal conditions, say 2-4 years in new job before eligible for retraining. We do see how constant upskilling (even just staying up-to-date with new frameworks) is valuable for everybody in tech, employees as well as employers.
It’s true that if UBI was really on the table, this conversation could go in much more interesting directions. Unfortunately right now it’s nowhere near politically viable (at least in America, where these strikes are happening) which makes it a non-solution to the immediate problems facing workers.
I think your guess about the overlap between UBI supporters and supporters of these union demands is way off base, and is serving to distract from the substance of the matter.
The unions should be advocating for fair pay for employed union members, but not for unlimited jobs forever. If anything, the union has money and can provide a salary to laid-off employees.
Alternatively, maybe unions should be advocating for UBI and advocating for their members to do the same, and to vote for the politicians more likely to support UBI.
It is, actually. People have infinite wants. Productivity increases lead to lower prices in the sector where the productivity increases happened.
Lower prices lead people to spend the difference on something else ("private taxi for my burrito" is the meme example.)
Spending the money on something else creates the other jobs.
This is why we have 150 years of unemployment and labor force participation data, and the peaks and valleys have zero correlation with internal-combustion, electrification, or IT.
Now....are those other jobs ones represented by a 100 year old union that is used to having the entire US economy in stranglehold?
No, probably not. The overall economy gets vastly wealthier.
But, if you are a 50 year old longshoreman, that's small comfort.
idk, citation needed.
Plenty of people I've met had pretty finite wants. A lot of people really are very happy with their small apartment in the city, going to work, doing misc recreation, and then drinking a bit. They don't need a Rolls-Royce or a couple of yachts.
A big problem with the argument that everybody wins from trading is that sure a pair of countries can go from 5 apples and 5 pears combined to 10 apples and 10 pears combined but what happens when there's only demand for 8 apples and 8 pears? People don't work as much.
Perhaps a 50 year old longshoreman can be retrained to install solar panels or w/e. But I suspect much more they'll find an early retirement or a greeter job somewhere and the up and coming 18 yr old will install solar panels and the labor stats will show a decrease in longshoreman and an increase in installers even if the population isn't transferring between them.
It was hyperbole, I'm sure there is a limit, but most people are nowhere near it. Your hypothetical content person with a small apartment isn't prepared to sacrifice for more money to buy a fancier car, sure yeah.
But, don't they sound exactly like the sort of person who saw that they could hire a taxi for their burrito at a reasonable price said "Sign me up?"
> what happens when there's only demand for 8 apples and 8 pears? People don't work as much.
I think what happens when there's only demand for 8 apples and 8 pears is people stop dreaming about finally getting enough to eat and start dreaming about having a car. And when they have the car, they dream about having 2, so mom and dad can both go somewhere. And then, they dream about having karate lessons for their kids. And once their kids are in karate and soccer and dance and track (this is where I'm at right now), the kids want to add horse-riding lessons to the mix.
Edit: I think your broader point really was that an individual, especially mid and late career can really get screwed by it. And yeah, I agree. Let's help them with the extra taxes we collect from modernizing our infrastructure.
Are you talking about fact that people order take out? That’s not exactly a new or innovative phenomenon and I’m not sure what it has to do with this conversation.
Overall it sounds like you underestimate the magnitude of the issue. There are millions of Americans who have trouble making rent/mortgage while paying for groceries and healthcare costs. The current solutions aren’t working, we can’t just pour neoliberalism on this situation and expect it to solve itself.
It doesn’t matter if the overall economy gets wealthier if the median laborer is suffering.
On the long run, increased efficiency in economies is what allows massive surplus vlaue to be created, making alot of luxuries once fit for kings now available for the masses. And so living standards improve and everyone benefits. If one is capable of automating an entire sector away, it also stands to reason that the massive surplus value created would make it trivial to restribute gains to those affected. And so forth for automation.
Maybe you think the corporations and rich will not do even that, that they would rather (somehow bypassing the government) keep all the profits, but profits are only realised so long as there are customers capable of affording such goods. And richer median customers produce much larger profits.
The idea and implementation started in the 1500s. It wasn't wide spread (Spain and America and not for every industry). Working in a mine was only 7 hours not 8. It was sometimes even applied to the Native Americans.
(I also had a good laugh when they described "shape up," or the process of choosing workers from those who assembled for the day. It was horribly corrupt. And, of course, the term is now used as a software planning process.)
that's why context is important. For Generative AI I'm not against the technology. I'm against the outright theft of content and abuse of current and future contracts for talent. Generative AI as it is still relies on the human element to be useful at all, and companies steal instead of following the 3C's. Even though I bet they'd still be profitable with the latter way. It's just greed and utter disregard for labor.
The story here wasn't clear on what was being automated here and how, though. It sounds like some sort of mechanical automation, so there's less ground to stand on. Especialyl since physical automata isn't exactly cheap to maintain to begin with (and of course, current iterations still require human assistance. If only for liability's sake).
regardless I don't really pity big industries these days. If jobs are going to be automated then you may as well get a few licks in before the inevitable.
Regulation to properly make sure wages scale to be a living wage, and a proper safety net for those who lose jobs, including retraining support. Or even just capping executive pay based on the lowest wages of the labor they pay.
But I live in fairy tales. Unions are indeed the best of the worst.
I really don’t see a problem with this, executives are employees too. Make their incentives align
We already see it in most companies - they buy in cleaning services rather than employing the cleaners for example.
Admittedly, that doesn't really hold true for the initial "small company to large company" growth, but that's not really what we're talking about; and _that_ hasn't really changed at all in a long time.
Are they personally accountable?
I think at the very least a company should be taxed for contracting a service they are able to pay for in-house. But there's a lot of factors to consider.
If the workers had banded together and put their efforts into creating a path to become part-owners of the businesses they worked in (and taken on some of the risk involved in that) they'd have made real progress over the last however long. Instead they put their efforts into fighting for wage raises and have basically achieved nothing except, as showcased today, big demonstrations about how they are making everyone worse off.
There are countless models of how workers could be better off that the unions have not explored. They're horrible institutions that strategically lock workers in to being the losing side of a conflict that didn't need to be fought in the first place.
Unless that part-ownership comes with actual control over the workplace it's a worse deal than the wage increases (which you can just re-invest in a more diverse portfolio anyways, if all you're after is the type of financial gains typically seen through investment). Stockholder-employees are in double jeopardy, since they can lose both savings and income if the company takes a tumble. This is even more perilous for the typical wage worker, who is way closer to the bone than your typical big capital investor. To make this level of risk worth it you need (a lot) more than 1-share=1-vote, which is usually how part-ownership works in the US, otherwise you're going to get clowned by the 51% as soon as the chips are down. Here's an example of what happens to workers in the US who've pursued this model: https://labornotes.org/2009/05/employee-stock-ownership-not-...
I would point to Germany as a place where this is done way better, but importantly there are regulations in place that force management to cede a big chunk of tangible power to labor unions (and even non-union workers): https://blog.dol.gov/2024/09/18/labor-management-cooperation....
Co-ownership is definitely viable IMO, but it needs to paired with legitimate co-management to succeed, otherwise workers are just taking on way more risk than they can reasonably survive, and without any assurances that someone is actually looking out for their interests when times get lean.
Maybe, but automation can also be used to run the remaining workers ragged. See the current issues with high frequency train scheduling and the attendant accidents due to fatigue.
The reason strike has happened because the dock companies themselves profit off of a strike. They charge extra fees money for storage etc.
So ... sure? Apparently, we're in agreement.
And maybe, if we all bend over hard enough, ticket prices might even go down a cent or two! Those silly people who want to eat, they don't see the big picture like me!
What problems are you referring to, specifically?
> I specifically take issue with the demand for a complete ban on automation
So there are two ways automation could affect a workplace.
The first way is that it replaces and displaces workers. With layoffs comes downward pressure on the wages for existing workers who, for fear of losing their jobs, now do more labor for the same or less money.
The second way is that automation makes your job easier, ideally so it's safer, less physically strenuous and you have to work fewer hours.
In the coming decades, this is a problem we're going to increasingly face as the more menial jobs increasingly get automated. That automation is going to get more and more sophisticated. What do we, as a society, do if we only need 20% of the labor pool to perform all the jobs?
That could either be fantastic or dystopian.
at the end of the day, unions are still ran by people. So it can be corrupted from the inside or out. They could raise dues on a whim and spend it recklessly instead of saving up for a strike or for other resources needed to advertise.
And union means that non-union (aka new workers to the industry like graduates or people making a switch to a new career) have another layer of beauracracy to go through. Beauracracy with their own whims. Elevator workers pay very well thanks to union, but it also basically means you wont be getting into that industry without knowing someone. So, double the nepotism needed.
Then the last ambivalent argument is that unions can indeed hold back technological progress. It's a hard issue to talk about because that's the exact thing opponents will argue when unions strike, but in some industries the workers have the biggest incentive not to use the most efficient means of work. Especially for businesses that can have slow times or simply run out of work to do. Basically your first point.
the second way is ideal, but we've seen over the decades that efficiency ever rewards the workers. We're something like over twice as efficient as workers 50 years ago, but our buying power has gotten worse, and we work more hours. Companies has shown we can't trust them to achieve that Jetson Utopia of doing an hour of work a day at efficiencies of entire 20th century factories as an individual. Our reward is just to manage 100 factories instead.
Same for companies and gouvernements and were better with them and their drawbacks than nothing.
> in some industries the workers have the biggest incentive not to use the most efficient means of work.
… especially on an hourly wage.
But I agree with the "secret ingredient" as another has put it. Crime will skyrocket if the only way to survive is to take. underground markets will help make ends meets (that the government won't get taxes off of, hence the above). And there will be riots, very violent riots, and a lot more of them. A cornered rat strikes back, and millions of cornered rats becomes a miniature civil war.
But, to your point, the ultimate forms of wealth redistribution are wars and revolution. What happened 200+ years ago in France can happen again. And it will if we don't start being just a little bit fairer in the distirbution of profits.
The alternative was not and would not be pretty.
Whether we like it or not, but eventually this spending is going to grow high enough that it can't grow anymore.
you're hand waving over two world wars, the discovery of nuclear weapons, microwaves, and transistors the invention of automobiles, financialization of the economy, massive concentrations of wealth in a tiny percentage of ultra-wealthy people and corporation in America.
There is no need to jerk your knee so sharply at the mere mention of a historic fact.
> What do we, as a society, do if we only need 20% of the labor pool to perform all the jobs?
We wind up having other things for them to do, the exact same as we always have, when we've faced this exact problem in the past.
Sucks for them, but they can't complain when they were happy to charge the poor and lesser working class through the nose to unload their goods. They can't both have their capitalism and eat it.
The same can be said about unions and market power. Sure deadweight loss exists. Someone will absorb the cost, but it’s not necessarily “the people”.
Companies cannot pass costs onto consumers as easily as economists claim, so often profits take the brunt of the deadweight loss. Think of it this way: if companies could just pass on the cost, why go through the expense of fighting the union when they could do just that?
Mind you, I’m talking about unions in general: it’s nuanced. I honestly don’t know enough about the specific demands here to have an opinion, but I encourage everyone to listen to an interview with the longshoremen.
Why can't they pass it on? It's not like consumers would have other options, because you know, globalization just got killed.
Try selling products on Amazon, and you’ll experience this. There’s a clearing price for your product, your costs be damned. If you try to “pass it on” some other product—-probably in a different category—-will out compete you, so you must forgo profit to stay competitive.
It’s a little different when the price goes up across the board (COVID inflation), because everyone experiences the same increase and everyone passes along the cost.
As a concrete example, I sell a card game on Amazon. If I shift the price up and down, I can see supply and demand in action: there’s an optimal price for my product where I maximize units sold. If I try to raise my price customers will go buy another card game. If we all raise our prices, customers will switch to some other toy. If all toy prices go up too far, people will send their kids to the park.
My point is that unions are a nuanced topic. I disagree with the terms of this strike, but if you listen to the longshoremen you can hear their anxiety.
There’s some middle ground we need to find, and throwing supply and demand curves around in absolutist terms won’t do that.
Often times this is because they don't have enough money because some jackoff keeps cutting their wages.
What do you think will happen if globalization was killed? Given how interlinked economies are right now and how much US imports, widespread price rises like you described is almost inevitable.
unions also exist because employees are almost always where the cost goes if corporations have a choice. lower wages, less hours, or straight up cutting staff while forcing remaining staff to work harder under duress.
you can cynically call unions "blame shifting", but everyone is simply playing their best cards, since loyalty is not longer a center ideal for a modern company.
Previous means of automation managed to create jobs and boost productivity to unseen levels, but I think we're approaching the physical version of "speed of light" on how productive we can get in manufacturing by vertically optimizing. So automation will soon start to remove jobs instead of add them.
>You guys act like corporate abuses are bad and labor abuses are virtuous
In a general concept, yes. Because corporate abuses always benefit the people who need the money the least for survival. That's a pretty hard notion to shake.
Likewise, you can consider civil disobedience (which strikes are) "bad", but we only get there due to the former happening for too long. When it's easier to collectively walk out than to petition your representatives to give society a living wage, that's says a lot about "society"
Well, everyone except the people who work for money.
> Then one has to ask themselves in which situations could a union pushing up labor prices make things better?
In the situation where people get paid that higher labor price, those people are better off.
- Infinite(or unlimited amount) of both homogeneous employeers and employees.
- Unlimited information about... everything.
- Changing jobs is cost-free for everyone (employeers, employees, and society at large).
- No participant in the market is large enough to influence any prices (for goods or wages).
- Everyone is perfectly rational.
- No barriers to entry for anyone.
- That all utility-spaces are convex and compact
- No externalities.
The perfect market is the "spherical cow in a vacuum" of economy. Not to say that game theory, and economy at large, is not usefull! But there are major steps from theory to practice, and to actually do that step you need impossible assumptions about how much the "imperfection of reality" influences the conclusions you make.
(Sorry about spelling misstakes, take it as proof that GTP was not involved;-)
Of course there are assumptions in the theory, those drive the corner cases (of which I mentioned the most relevant one in my first post) and is also present in the theory you are relying on to say what the corporations are doing is bad. You can't like the stuff that says monopoly is bad when it applies to corporations and then turn around and think it's good when it is clearly happening in labor via unions, that's utterly illogical. It's either clearly bad in both cases, or the theory is worth nothing and we have no justification for any market intervention, which is obviously not true. We need market interventions (arguably a lot more than we are currently doing, but likely less than we used to do pre Rhenquist supreme court) to correct market power abuse and there are no sacred cows. It is largely bad both when capital and when labor does it.
Nothing is more deranged than people who spent their entire lives working in economics, and who get nobel prizes, or worse - fame for their writings.
Karl Marx's writings literally killed billions, and he studied the everloving shit out of economics. This asshole is pretty down with Hitler (economics nobel prize winner: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Forbes_Nash_Jr.) and this asshole is pretty down with "greed is good" crony capitalism: (economics nobel prize winner: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milton_Friedman)
Econ 101 kids larping online kill zero people. Get off your high horse.
One of the first things I learned when I started to seriously study economics is that economists never let objective reality interfere with their theories or charts.
Yes, and they’re bullshit, as are the ones that suggest firms price competitively, that markets tend towards competition and not consolidation, that government spending is inherently bad, and all the other Chicago-school Reagan-revolution bullshit that’s left this country with third-world infrastructure, income inequality that would embarrass a Rockefeller, and no industrial base to speak of.
These are Dockworkers.
The people whose exclusive skill was previously throwing a football, and when they couldn't make D1, pushing a crane lever.
They had their time in the sun, racking up social status points while ostracizing, and sneering at, the people who would ultimately build the systems to replace them.
The absolute uselessness of former jocks in the face of their replacements is not something anyone, especially on HN, should shed a single tear for. If you're old enough, you'll remember how these people treated you. If a robot can do their job better, so be it.
Some of us will NEVER forget the true character of these people, and we look forward to their misery.
This seems to make an optimistic implication that "market price" is 1) reasonable and 2) realistic. Of course a business wants skilled labor to be paid peanuts to do 168 hours of highly profitable labor a week. But there's multiple layers of barriers here that stop that reality.
For the former, the rising cost of living everywhere is why strikes are starting to happen more frequently now. If you cannot pay your expenses while giving half your waking hours to a job, you either ask for more money or leave. that CoL may or may not be that Companie's fault, but what was reasonable in 2019 is not reasonable in 2024. Yet compensation has fallen far under inflation, let alone what is "reasonable" to survive now.
unions have flaws, but they are made to make sure workers are "reasonably" compensated and treated well. That's how they make things better.
>when one looks at the contracts being offered it's really hard to say labour prices are being pushed below market clearing rate
What are these contracts, and are they reasonable by 2024 standards?
Everyone else. That is the point. But only in a theoretical sense.
The corporations might benefit from stability in the workforce and the owners might benefit from the workers being able to have the faintest possibility to keep the manager class in check.
Banning slavery eliminated massive dead weight loss. Slavery used violence to force labor from people below the clearing price - it compelled them to work for free.
All liberals should oppose slavery. We should want free people, free markets, and a generous social safety net for all.
To be clear: I'm not for minimizing deadweight loss because free markets are horrible for humans. Free markets don't care about human suffering.
Regulated markets can be OK, but then you shouldn't talk about free markets or deadweight losses.
That indisputable, right? You don't disagree with that statement?
Unless you're one of those billionaires, attacking one of the few mechanisms for correcting that imbalance seems counter-productive to sanely discussing this.
A mechanism that programmes are bizarrely hostile to, even though their work is one of the nost exploited.
Warren Buffett
It's not wrong, it just assumes that business owners are behaving well.
Another thing that seems troubling is how a small group of people can hold a majority of the country by the bXlls. Given how this is an election year, I can see this turning into huge fiasco. The rest of the economy is collateral damage.
The small minority that keeps a country by the balls is not the unions but the owning class. The 2008 crash that put the whole world in a decade recession is collateral damage.
What makes life better for everyone is competition. Canada's stagnation can be be summed up in a single phrase - lack of competition. Generally, the US has been a free-for-all when it comes to competition and hence its populace enjoys some of the best living standards.
I'll also relate my experience traveling the subway in Asia vs. Manhattan. Asian transit seems like space-age compared to what we have in the West. I think UBI won't save us as the income must come from somewhere. Hiking taxes kills incentives. The better way is to have more freedom/efficiencies in my humble opinion.
Even with all that oil money gushing through Alberta, it still takes 9.5 hours to drive from Medicine Hat to Grand Prairie - which is the same distance as Barcelona to Seville, a train journey of 5.5 hours including the changing of trains in Madrid.
I guess we're at a stalemate now?
I have been working my way through this paper, [1], and it has plenty of good food for thought around this.
[1] - https://consilienceproject.org/development-in-progress/
If the port operators were smart, they would have done this already and avoided the massive strike that will cost them billions of dollars, by using a small portion of that savings to keep their workers happy and on the job.
"Ok, Ok, we will give up on the anti-automation demands but we aren't budging on the wage increase demands!"
You're not pro-union. You're anti-union with rhetoric.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I%27m_not_racist%2C_but...
A free labor market means laborers are free to go. If this means you have no ports, then you are not competitive on the labor market.
Corporations have gotten extremely comfortable with existing in an extremely skewed labor market. One where they do not have to pay because they don't have to be competitive - workers have zero mobility, zero visibility, and need to eat.
If the corporations cannot meet the Unions demands and that results in failure to buy or sell, that is the free market at play. They can simply pay more. Clearly, the demand for this labor is extremely high and the supply is what it is. That means pay up.
As for "I'm not racist but..." I don't need a wiki link. I'm black and well aware of that kind of idiocy. This is not that. Nice try though.
"I'm not racist, I have black friends" applied to labor.
The only reason unions exist is to protect the jobs of the union at the expense of the whole economy through collective bargaining and striking when leverage exists. If it's not doing that, it's not a union, it's a professional club.
When you say:
>I understand that automation costs jobs and a union's primary responsibility is to protect the jobs of its members but what are we really supposed to do here? Continue with antiquated processes that affect an entire economy just to protect the jobs of a relatively small number of people?
If you're pro-union, the answer is yes, categorically. You don't get to decide whether their demands are reasonable or not. It's their union and their industry. You support them if they decide to strike.
If you don't, well, that's your right, but it puts you outside the camp of labor and being pro-union.
Being pro-union between strikes is like being a pacifist between wars. Cheap, unprincipled, and contemptible.
I absolutely believe in a right to strike and made no comment suggesting that I don't believe in the idea generally or in this instance specifically. I just said that I disagreed with the idea that all automation should be banned. You keep trying to imagine that I said something that I didn't. It's a little funny tbh.
FWIW, I hope they get the pay increase that they are asking for _and_ I hope they can compromise on the automation thing. I'm not informed enough on what that compromise might look like but everyone knows a compromise can be made. That's why they're negotiating.
When you say you disagree with banning automation, you’re not just disagreeing with one policy detail—you’re questioning the union’s core function, which is to protect jobs even when the broader economic context pushes for technological progress. Unions draw a hard line on these issues because, from their perspective, any concession on something like automation opens the door to undermining workers' rights and security long-term, which if given must have something of equal worth exchanged. Supporting unions means recognizing that sometimes their stance will be uncompromising when it comes to preserving jobs, even if it is economically inconvenient or outdated.
As for compromise, yes, negotiation is part of the process, and unions do make concessions. But at the same time, there’s a reason why they take strong positions initially—to ensure they have leverage and to protect their members' jobs to the fullest extent possible. Suggesting that there must be a compromise on automation puts you in a position of advocating for a middle ground that the union may see as fundamentally compromising its mission.
So, while you say you support the right to strike and hope for the pay increase, your stance on automation implies a conditional form of support that’s more aligned with the mainstream neoliberal economic view than with labor’s mission. That’s the core of the issue here—not whether you support striking in general, but whether you fully back the union’s approach when it’s at odds with broader economic concerns. If that’s not something you’re comfortable with, it’s worth reflecting on where your support for unions actually begins and ends.
The obvious, simple, everyone-wins solution is for the ports to offer to continue to pay every worker who gets replaced by automation for some negotiated period of time where they don't have to show up to work and can instead focus entirely on re-skilling or starting their own business or whatever else they want without needing to worry about winding up on the street or going hungry. The initial double cost for the business is an investment in long term savings. Literally everyone wins in this scenario.
I get that that's unfortunate and perhaps a very serious problem for people working in that industry but what choice do we really have? I'm reminded of something a teacher said to me in high school about how one day many of my classmates and I would have jobs that didn't exist when he was a kid. Isn't that how this works? As time goes on some jobs go away and new jobs come about and there is some pain in the interim? I'm all for figuring out some way to ease that pain for the people in the transitional period but I don't know who's really responsible for that.