[RealityVoid]

Huh, interesting, I think he's right on both ends.

1) I think nuclear is superior to renewables.

2) I think taxing automation would work because it could kickstart some sort of measure such as UBI. Automate enough and you need to tax more per productivity instead of per worker, beause you'll eventually be forced to implement UBI.

Something I wrote previously: "I tend to agree it would be a very good ideea. Initially, it would disincentivise automation a little longer and minimum wage could be raised a little more (and that's something I never thought I'd say, that is a good ideea to DISincentivize automation, I'be always been of the oppinion that automation is exceptionally usefull and be used asm much as possible, but the life-shock of people affected by it would be lowered somewhat, temporarily, by taxing it) and after a while, when it becomes standard norm and automations slowly takes over more jobs,it could be used to feed programs such as UBI. The ideea might have some merit."

[Fantastic_T]

So basically you believe in the Luddite fallacy that automation hurts workers.

http://www.economicshelp.org/blog/6717/economics/the-luddite...

Welfare hurts incentives and misallocates capital from those who invest it most effectively to those who reproduce most quickly.

[ska]

"The Luddite Fallacy" is a terrible name for this observation, because the Luddites weren't wrong. They were concerned that automation was going to destroy their economic prospects and way of life, and it did. For multiple generations, typically (we really should have a corollary, something like "The re-employment fallacy")

On the whole, it was still a net positive for the broader society, but you can't really blame the Luddites for not being concerned about that.

[edit] It's also worth noting that the Luddites themselves were not really pushing an anti-technology stance, or arguing against "technological unemployment" - it was more the threat of skilled work being replaced by less skilled work, quality goods replace by inferior but cheaper ones, and societal impact of the change in work and working conditions. They weren't arguing that newer methods wouldn't be more productive, but that this increase productivity wasn't worth it's price.

This could be referred to as "The Luddite Fallacy Fallacy", because the position attributed to the Luddites was never one they really held - their complaint was more nuanced than that, and one that nobody then or since has really come up with a good answer to.

[Fantastic_T]

I can't find anything to suggest that you are wrong. I can't find any evidence that the Luddites themselves believed in technological unemployment.

[RealityVoid]

But it did impovrish them. How big a percentage of the population needs to have it worse that automation becomes a burden on society?

I think automation will happen no matter what, but in the meantime, sometimes it might make sense to slow it down. Saying there is no such reason for slowing it down is a simplistic point of view.

EDIT: You edited your initial comment and I find it commendable you changed your stance based on new information. (relating to Luddites and technological unemployment)

[Fantastic_T]

Yep I assumed they believed in tech unemployment but I checked my assumption and couldn't find any evidence for it.

However I will say that in the long run it is very unlikely that the majority of Luddites were not far better off after the power loom than before. The quality of jobs available for the average person dramatically improved over the course industrialization, because automation increases human prosperity.

[ska]

But that is the actual point being missed, I think.

The "Luddites" themselves, who were a small majority of highly skilled, highly paid labor, were not better off. They were worse off. Their children had worse prospects because they grew up without the advantages they would have had, etc.

But they were not the average person. And eventually, everyone was on average better off.

So this is key lesson to take. It is perfectly reasonable to believe changes like this can lead to overall benefits that make it compelling. However, real people get really hurt in this process. Waving our hands about how "market forces" will sort things out doesn't help if that evolution takes longer than your working life to be effective.

And if a real person is standing up and saying "I'm going to get screwed by this" - it is incredibly naive to respond by saying "Don't worry, it will work itself out in the end". For that person, it is a very real possibility - in some cases a near certainty, that it won't.

From a policy point of view, as a society, you cannot avoid dealing with this. You either deal with it head on, or you deal with the fallout.

[RealityVoid]

Well, in one sense, the Luddites were right, it did hurt THEIR job. Society, as a whole, was better off, but not them.

And growing automation means a growing number of people that are affected by it. Where is the tipping point where a great enough number of people can't produce competitive economic output and a relatively small percentage produce the most value? What happens then? Growing inequality can mean trouble for all, regardless who invests more effectively.

[Fantastic_T]

The Luddites were wrong in the sense that they and their children for the most part had far better jobs than they did before the power loom. Automation has always caused improvements in the occupations that exist.

[ska]

I'll try and dig up a cite later, but I've read analysis that this is just wrong. The "croppers" themselves mostly had very much worse jobs than before, as did their children and in many cases their grandchildren.

The multi generational aspect is perhaps surprising, but the first generation shouldn't be. Automation may create "better" jobs in some sense, but as a rule they aren't usually accessible to the people who are displaced by it.

[Fantastic_T]

Please do dig it up, because I find it highly unlikely that in an environment where the average wage increases by 20% over a generation, that the children of those who had been in one of the many occupations that had been made obsolete by automation were not better off than their fathers were at the best of times.

If it was a general rule that the children of those who lose their job to automation are worse off than their parents, the majority of the population would have seen its quality of life degrade over the last two hundred years given most occupations that existed at the beginning of the period have been made obsolete or mostly obsolete since that time.

[Someone]

Average wage can go up while national income goes down.

Even if national income goes up, too, changes in the distribution of income still may make things worse for large groups. If you pay your robot maintenance team of 10 each $100k a year to be able to fire 30 workers who used to make $30k a year, total wages go up, average wage goes up, but the group of workers feels worse. Even if they could do the new robot maintenance job, not all of them can get one. Moreover, they now know that others make $100k a year. That makes the $30k they can make if they are lucky enough to get hold of one of the remaining 'worker' jobs look less.

This more or less already has happened for blue collar workers. They make more money as individuals, but there are far fewer of them.

Yes, there are replacement jobs and, historically, many of them payed better, but that isn't a guarantee that that will keep happening.

For me, the big question is: will there be replacement jobs this time, and will they pay well enough? If not, taxing capital (aka a 'robot tax') for me seems the best solution.

So, what are those replacement jobs? I wouldn't know. On the other hand, I doubt people knew at the start of the industrial revolution, either.

[ska]

See my other message about the problems of looking at population averages for something like this.

[artimaeis]

I constantly see the Luddites brought up during discussions of how to handle broad-scale automation and the economy of individual labor.

I understand in principle that they are similar in that, at the very reductive viewpoint, machines are taking jobs.

Industrial machines such as the Jacquard Loom could only affect one industry at a time. And in doing so we brought about the service economy. Service had always been around, though history it was mostly as slavery, but because of the industrial revolution we managed to slowly pivot to something stable.

The type of broad-scale automation we are on the verge of now threatens to take literally anything that is capable of being done by humans. Entertainment may remain safe, but the broad capabilities of modern robotics and its coming advancements are certainly worth worrying about and thinking through, right?

After all, if it turns out that us "automation Luddites" are just wrong and there is some panacea to our woes - will we have lost anything by trying to come up with means to protect the people?

[Kalium]

> After all, if it turns out that us "automation Luddites" are just wrong and there is some panacea to our woes - will we have lost anything by trying to come up with means to protect the people?

I get it. There's nothing wrong with protecting people. It's a good task for humans to take on. Protecting people from the ravages of heartless capital is a moral imperative!

The issue at hand is perhaps one of costs. What else might those resources have been used for? Very few things are free. To complicate matters further, pursuing the goal of protecting people has been known to lead governments into ill-informed policies that do great harm despite intentions good and pure. Democracies are known to be vulnerable to populist ideologies, whether they are good ideas or not.

I suppose that's a long-winded way of saying we might lose a lot and should step carefully.

[Fantastic_T]

>Industrial machines such as the Jacquard Loom could only affect one industry at a time. And in doing so we brought about the service economy.

The power loom was but one variation of a more fundamental technology: the steam engine, and more generally, the combustion engine.

Beyond engines, the Industrial Revolution saw a rapid shift to all kinds of mechanisation, almost all of which were made possible by combustion engines. This affected countless occupations. The occupation of the Luddites is but one example. It was not limited to them.

I am not at all concerned about the speed and breadth of soon-to-occur automation. Automation reduces costs, leading to people having more money to spend on new types of products/services. The cost of a product/service being roughly equal to the human labor needed to make it, we will always consume the same amount of human labor (subject to changes in the supply of labour, as people voluntarily drop out of the work force as their prosperity increases), because a reduction in the consumption of labour in one field (as a result of automation), leads to consumer savings, which are spent on consuming labour in another field.

[tzs]

> The cost of a product/service being roughly equal to the human labor needed to make it, [...]

The cost of a product/service is only roughly equal to the human labor needed to produce it when the human labor cost is significantly higher than the material costs of producing that product/service. When you heavily automate production, the cost of human labor becomes an insignificant factor in its cost.

[Fantastic_T]

The cost of automated processes approaches zero over time, because automation can be scaled up so easily, so the cost of human labour, and scarce natural resources, will always trend toward 100% of the cost of production inputs.