[aminok]

>But as things stand now, the owners of the machines get richer, and the displaced workers get significantly poorer.

No they don't. We've had 200 years of massive automation fueled job destruction, and wages and the demand for labour are massively greater now than 200 years ago.

The last 20 years in particular have overseen the most rapid wage growth in human history.

[dang]

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13594877 and marked it off-topic.

We've also banned this account for seriously abusing HN, which you can read about here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13600908.

[MarkMc]

In 1995 the real median US household income was $52,664. In 2015 it was $56,516 [1].

US Hourly Wages for nonsupervisory workers has certainly grown over the last 20 years, but not in the past 40 years [2].

[1] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEHOINUSA672N

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

[aminok]

The US isn't the world. The US has many traits that are peculiar to it, and not universal to economies that are becoming increasingly automated. The world has seen more wage growth over the last 20 years than any other period in history:

http://csmonitor.com/World/2016/0207/Progress-in-the-global-...

[aylmao]

Well, but doesn't that mean that you already have a counter-example? In the US it IS the case that rich is getting richer and the rest aren't really benefiting too much from all this automation.

The world is certainly doing better, but I also have to wonder how much of this is thanks to automation, and how much thanks to the fall of colonialism over the past century.

[FullMtlAlcoholc]

> No they don't. We've had 200 years of massive automation fueled job destruction, and wages and the demand for labour are massively greater now than 200 years ago.

This is different. In the past, technology has been a multiplier for the productivity of workers. The confluence of robotics and AI will mean the eventual evaporation of low-skill and/or laborious jobs as they are completely replaced by automated agents.

Unless we somehow go through a revolution in education in one generation, start augmenting humans, or place greater value and importance on artistic/creative endeavors, there simply won't be many things that humans are better/more cost-effective at than machines. Certainly not enough to make up for the displacement of jobs.

For example, there are ~3.5 million truck drivers in the US currently. Add those to the number of Lyft, Uber, taxi, etc. drivers. In less than 10 years, those jobs will most likely be completely gone except for bespoke, upscale professional drivers as a luxury. These people do not have a unique skill set they can apply to something else. Remember, low-hanging fruit jobs like working at fast food restaurants and jobs involving manual labor are also gone. That's not even mentioning jobs like customer service via phone or online chat, air traffic controllers, etc. which will be gone.

> The last 20 years in particular have overseen the most rapid wage growth in human history.

Globalization can only happen once.