Again this is tech hubris and a lack of understanding of economics and history.
No one ever disputed that. The principle still holds if we apply this logic to physical processes; by automating or reducing the labor necessary to conduct a physical process, I can enjoy the benefits of the process without having to engage in the labor of the process.
> How would you go about automating sewing a shirt?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oeSu9Vcu0DU
> How about picking strawberries?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H2gL6KC_W44
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M3SGScaShhw
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OyA9XnW6BV4
To respond to the edit you made to your comment:
> Anything that could be automated but isn’t automated is because it isn’t cost effective to do so or there is insufficient capital to invest. These are resource allocation issues. You can’t just wave that away.
This is true in the long run and I suppose the argument you are making is that any attempt to interfere with the present system of resource allocation will constitute a centralization that would be less effective than free market capitalism, so the notion that we could redistribute the surpluses generated by labor saving devices to the average person is inherently a call to economic centralization. This might be true, but I would propose an alternative reading:
The surplus of labor-saving devices has primarily accrued to the owners of these devices. You might then claim that these owners are owners because they have found a means of servicing a market demand. Each dollar they possess is a vote from the market that these guys really know what they are doing, and that the world wants more of it. If we were talking about spherical billionaires in a vacuum, I'd agree with you - but this issue is complicated by the compounding impacts of inheritance and its correlation with access to credit, as well as with the existence of competitive moats (e.g. network effects, intellectual property, sunk costs, natural monopolies, etc).
The optimistic read of the technology sector in the 2010s was that businesses would compete with one another to provide services that would ultimately improve people's lives. Instead, we got Windows 11. That wasn't a consequence of users voting with their dollars, it was a consequence of Microsoft entrenching itself into workflows that cannot be economically altered in the immediate future. There are lots of examples of the market not being particularly effective at economic allocation if we step outside of the logic that any purchase is a revealed preference which indicates approval of the good or service being purchased. Apply this logic to the purchases of gamblers, alcoholics, drug addicts, or murder-for-hire plots and the limitations of the logic become obvious.
To my minor aside, look at that shirt. You have to essentially glue the fabric into a board and all the robot can do is a rudimentary set of side seams and sleeves on the tshirt. There’s no finishing work on the collar or hem so it’s useless. That robot exists as a demo and is used precisely nowhere. You could in theory do this, but it makes no sense economically.
And yes I’m aware of Japanese strawberry picking robots. You’ve clearly misunderstood what I’m saying. These thing may be technically possible but they remain infeasible for other reasons.
This is exactly what I said you would say:
> I suppose the argument you are making is that any attempt to interfere with the present system of resource allocation will constitute a centralization that would be less effective than free market capitalism
Further:
> Trying like the op suggested to automate away work is utopian and improbable at best.
We are a long way off from the self-replicating systems that could feasibly make work effectively optional, but you haven't made a convincing argument as to why it is improbable that automation could reach that point.
> And yes I’m aware of Japanese strawberry picking robots.
You clearly were not aware of them or you would have picked better examples. Your original comment consisted solely of the statement: "It's the same thing." and now you're continuing with that flippant attitude by pretending that I'm misunderstanding your argument when I anticipated it in its entirety.
This Star Trek stuff is improbable because everything has to be coordinated somehow and waving your hand and saying magical future ai is the only proposal anyone ever has. So yeah, maybe super advanced AGI could do it, but probably not. We don’t even have good models now of how large economies work down to a granular level. People are like I said messy and respond in weird ways to their environments. The best we can do right now is working with prices as signals for the amount of effort other people are willing to put into something. And while that’s imperfect, it’s just improbable that we can do much better. Which is not to say that narrow objectives aren’t possible, only that the bigger and broader you aim the more impossible it becomes.
You cited them as examples of tasks that would be difficult to automate. The pickers have been commercially deployed for the last four years.
> This Star Trek stuff is improbable because everything has to be coordinated somehow and waving your hand and saying magical future ai is the only proposal anyone ever has.
Redistribution already occurs without the use of an AI.
Yes because they are. I specifically gave an example where a machine exists but it's impossible to use for the real world, and an example where economics generally prevent adoption. That gets to my whole point.
> The pickers have been commercially deployed for the last four years.
Yes narrowly, and in only a few places where there are extreme labor shortages.
You are clearly misunderstanding me.
> Redistribution already occurs without the use of an AI.
I didn't make the claim that it didn't happen.
I feel like you're willfully ignoring what I'm saying. These things are hard and rolling them out universally often doesn't work because it is either impractical or economically infeasible to automate things or you run up against regulatory/cultural/material issues. The best we can do is piecemeal progress where incentives align.
We've already established that you were wrong about that as these machines are in commercial deployment.
> Yes narrowly, and in only a few places where there are extreme labor shortages.
No, you're wrong. You clearly know nothing about this issue but you continue to double down on it instead of just admitting the examples you came up with were bad. Your whole thesis is that automation cannot be deployed until the resources are available for it. You then expanded this definition of resources from technical capacity and raw resources to basically all aspects of what would make be necessary for a technology to be adopted (institutional capacity, regulatory frameworks, organizational buy-in, etc). That is, the moment a technology is deployed is the moment we have the capacity to deploy it. We know we have the capacity to deploy it when we have deployed it. This is tautological and thus not interesting.
We have the technical capacity to build combine harvesters, yet there are still people toiling in fields because they cannot afford them. The whole argument being made is that the surpluses of this automation are distributed in such a way that they accumulate disproportionately (even exclusively, in the case of user-hostile companies like Microsoft) to equity holders. Your claim is that the only proposed solution to remedy this issue without running into the economic calculation problem is something like Project Cybersyn, when this isn't necessary at all. You can retain market functions while preventing equity holders from running away with the game, and this is done now with estate taxes and used to be done with antitrust enforcement actions.
No there are literally no companies using that sewing robot, you can't buy that shirt.
> No, you're wrong. You clearly know nothing about this issue
You're being very rude, this isn't twitter.