[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.