[JoeAltmaier]

Not really a realistic view of the western economy. Or economics.

Things like 'compensation' are fluid, fairly arbitrary and largely unrelated to the industrial complex. It's whatever we decide it is, pretty much.

Automation is in full swing, has been for twenty years and is only accelerating. Ignore that at your peril. Everybody will continue to have toasters, computers, cars even when we've automated most of us out of an industrial/manufacturing job.

How do I know? Because that already happened. Instead of tens of thousands of people on assembly lines, we have tens of engineers and managers overseeing automation. If it hasn't happened in some cherry-picked example, it will very soon.

We have to plan something for the majority of us to do, some way to participate in the resulting economy, without just throwing up our hands and saying "It's too hard!"

So much to say on this subject, that doesn't fit in an HN text field. There's a long history of thought on this subject, and the comments here indicate most folks are still on the first page in their thinking.

[Ajedi32]

Perhaps you could link to some information on this "long history of thought on this subject" because to me everything you just wrote sounds like nonsense.

The idea that we can just double people's compensation and thereby double our total economic output (because compensation is "whatever we decide it is") is so wrong headed I don't even know where to begin. Maybe that's a misunderstanding of your position, but I don't know how else to interpret what you just said.

[AnthonyMouse]

Right now we have a lot of jobs that are extremely low efficiency, if not outright net negatives. These are the sorts of jobs that markets tend to eliminate, because the company that gets rid of them can charge lower prices than the one that doesn't. But that doesn't work when the job exists as a result of regulatory rules, or the company is a monopoly not subject to competitive pressure.

What does work is to improve the efficiency of the regulations. For the ones that are net negative you can just get rid of them. For the ones that are net positive but still poorly constructed, you can reduce their overhead.

This doesn't increase economic output, it reduces waste. Then you can work half as many hours for the same money, or the same number of hours for twice as much, not because anything more is being created but because people are spending half as much time on useless tasks. If they then spend that time doing something productive, output would increase, but that's a personal choice. If you could work 10 hours a week and that was enough to earn a living and own a home, would everybody still want to work 40 hours just so they could also own six cars and two boats? Some people would, which is fine, but some people wouldn't.

[Ajedi32]

Sure, if you can somehow find a way to double the efficiency of labor then you can either double your standard of living or half your number of hours. We've already done that multiple times since the industrial revolution. That's why modern first world society is so rich compared to the past.

And there are certainly significant inefficiencies created due to government regulation, though probably not enough to double our productivity even if you did have the knowledge and political capitol fix all those issues perfectly. It is also worth noting that sometimes regulations, though costly and inefficient, can still be nice things to have. Building codes undoubtedly make housing significantly more expensive, but I'd still rather live in a society with expensive housing where I don't have to worry about the floor collapsing on me than a society with cheap housing where I do. There's a balance there obviously, but my point is sometimes the extra expense can be worth it even if its not "net positive" in a purely economical sense.

> If you could work 10 hours a week and that was enough to earn a living and own a home, would everybody still want to work 40 hours just so they could also own six cars and two boats?

I think you'd be surprised. There are so many things we consider necessities now that would be considered luxuries 100 years ago. I see no reason why things won't continue to move mostly in that direction as technology improves.

I know a lot of people who earn enough that they could match my standard of living working only 10 hours a week. They mostly don't, and instead spend the extra wealth on things like larger houses, fancier cars, exotic vacations, etc.

[AnthonyMouse]

> And there are certainly significant inefficiencies created due to government regulation, though probably not enough to double our productivity even if you did have the knowledge and political capitol fix all those issues perfectly.

Keep in mind that a lot of these rules are multiplicative. Zoning rules limit the amount of new housing construction and increase construction costs because now you have to e.g. replace a 10 story building with a 20 story building, bulldozing the 10 story building, instead of replacing a single family home with a 10 story building to add the same number of units. Professional licensing apprenticeship requirements limit the supply of licensed tradesmen, increasing construction costs. These multiply together: You have to do more construction and the construction has a higher labor cost.

Then housing costs more, so you have to pay higher salaries for the same cost of living -- including to tradesmen, which makes construction cost even more, multiplying the effect again. But not just tradesmen, also the salaries of compliance bureaucrats needed by any other form of regulation, and the cost of commercial real estate for their offices.

Double is, if anything, an underestimate. These costs are quadratic.

> Building codes undoubtedly make housing significantly more expensive, but I'd still rather live in a society with expensive housing where I don't have to worry about the floor collapsing on me than a society with cheap housing where I do.

The building codes from decades ago were sufficient to prevent buildings from collapsing. Since then they've been accumulating cruft. Many of these individual requirements each add hundreds to thousands of dollars to the cost of a new house in exchange for a marginal safety improvement with a negative expected value.

And then you don't even get the safety improvement, because making new construction prohibitively expensive causes people to continue to live in old houses that weren't subject to the new requirements anyway. All you do is make housing more scarce.

> There's a balance there obviously, but my point is sometimes the extra expense can be worth it even if its not "net positive" in a purely economical sense.

"Net positive" is the measure of if it's worth it. You have a measure that can prevent a 1 in 1000 chance of $50,000 in damage but it costs $1000. You're spending an average of $1,000,000 to prevent $50,000 in damage. It's not worth it.

> There are so many things we consider necessities now that would be considered luxuries 100 years ago. I see no reason why things won't continue to move mostly in that direction as technology improves.

Most of these things are things that didn't previously exist, like cellphones or computers. Now you need one because it has replaced certain ways of interacting with people and institutions and the old ways are no longer available.

But let's suppose the definition of necessities expands over time. It used to be food and shelter, then we added medicine and transportation, then we added internet. Maybe tomorrow we add a personal robot or something else. But what if all of those things together cost $10,000/year? Would everyone choose to work full time if the surplus was solely to purchase luxury goods?

> I know a lot of people who earn enough that they could match my standard of living working only 10 hours a week. They mostly don't, and instead spend the extra wealth on things like larger houses, fancier cars, exotic vacations, etc.

There are also people who sell their startup and then choose to retire in their 20s or 30s. Different people make different choices.

[Ajedi32]

It seems to me like we're mostly in agreement. I agree regulations can have compounding negative effects, though whether that's enough to account for a potential 2x improvement in overall economic output is something I would still dispute without any hard numbers to back up that claim.

I also think you've misunderstood my point about regulations. What I'm saying is that sometimes regulations can serve as a sort of "luxury good", where even if they're a net negative economically (like in your example of the uneconomical safety improvements) the quality of life benefits can still make them worth the cost in a society that's wealthy enough to absorb those costs.

I'm not saying that's always the case. Sometimes the costs clearly aren't worth it even factoring in subjective benefits. Just that its another thing to consider.

I also agree that there's probably a certain point where people would start to value their time more than what we today would consider "luxury goods". Just that that point is probably a lot further out than you might expect, because what's considered a luxury is relative to the cultural standards of the society you live in. Some people do chose to retire in their 30s, but I know a lot more people who didn't do that even though they probably could have.

[JoeAltmaier]

Let's not put words into my mouth.

Everybody loves to calculate worker productivity, like it's the 1800's and we're hand-making buggy whips. No, its a large industrial machine turning out goods like clockwork.

Paying people is arbitrary. We pay somebody to spend time fixing a conveyor belt, and pay them nearly nothing. Some guy sits in an office doing nothing, but he owns the factory so he gets all the profit from that factory forever, yet has little or nothing to do with it's operation.

It's arbitrary, a direct result of some choices we made about our economic system. Those choices have quit working for most of us - a tiny percent (way less than 1%) have managed to jigger the rules so they skim off of every transaction. The end result of that kind of feedback loop is, they have all the money and we continue to work hourly for peanuts.

We can just decide to change it. Doesn't require magic or even much imagination.

[ben_w]

That's a very mid-1800s position to take, given you're complaining about "calculating productivity like it's the 1800s" — owners getting rich from reinvesting the profits of labour is one of the big things that Marx was cross about.

> We can just decide to change it. Doesn't require magic or even much imagination.

Many have tried. What's the quote?

“For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple and wrong.” ― H. L. Mencken

Some attempts have been more successful, some less successful, but the governments which think economics is easy have done the worst, regardless of if they were Communist or Capitalist.

[pdfernhout]

To support your point that we we make choices among alternative, see this document I put together circa 2010 with about 50 alternatives -- some good, some obviously bad -- we can use to address the socio-economic changes needed to maintain healthy human communities in the face of increased automation: https://pdfernhout.net/beyond-a-jobless-recovery-knol.html "This article explores the issue of a "Jobless Recovery" mainly from a heterodox economic perspective. It emphasizes the implications of ideas by Marshall Brain and others that improvements in robotics, automation, design, and voluntary social networks are fundamentally changing the structure of the economic landscape. It outlines towards the end four major alternatives to mainstream economic practice (a basic income, a gift economy, stronger local subsistence economies, and resource-based planning). These alternatives could be used in combination to address what, even as far back as 1964, has been described as a breaking "income-through-jobs link". This link between jobs and income is breaking because of the declining value of most paid human labor relative to capital investments in automation and better design. Or, as is now the case, the value of paid human labor like at some newspapers or universities is also declining relative to the output of voluntary social networks such as for digital content production (like represented by this document). It is suggested that we will need to fundamentally reevaluate our economic theories and practices to adjust to these new realities emerging from exponential trends in technology and society."

It covers a bit of the history which you alluded to earlier in a previous post, such as the "Triple Revolution Memorandum" from 1964. But the root of all this thinking go way back -- whether to the original communal Christians in the face of the Roman Empire, various Utopian communities (including ones inspired by Charles Fourier) to Marxism, Socialism, Luddites, resistance to "Enclosure Acts", Henry George, Elizabeth Magie (her educational cautionary Landlord's Game ripped off in part as dystopian Monopoly), Bucky Fuller, Bob Black ("The Abolition of work"), Ursula K. Le Guinn, James P. Hogan, Paolo Soleri / Arcosanti, Marshal Sahlins, Amory & Hunter Lovins, John and Nancy Jack Todd of The New Alchemy Institute, Martin Ford, and many more. Not all the alternative ideas worked out or even got started for all sorts of reasons, but there are a lot of alternatives are out there.

See especially: "The Dictionary of Alternatives: Utopianism and Organization" https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/dictionary-of-alternatives-978... "'There is no alternative to free market liberalism and managerialism', is the orthodoxy of the twenty-first century. All too often, ordinary people across the world are being told that the problem of organization is already solved, or that it is being solved somewhere else, or that it need not concern them because they have no choices. This dictionary provides those who disagree with the evidence. Using hundreds of entries and cross-references, it proves that there are many alternatives to the way that we currently organize ourselves. These alternatives could be expressed as fictional utopias, they could be excavated from the past, or they could be described in terms of the contemporary politics of anti-corporate protest, environmentalism, feminism and localism. Part reference work, part source book, and part polemic, this dictionary provides a rich understanding of the ways in which fiction, history and today's politics provide different ways of thinking about how we can and should organize for the coming century."

Indeed, I was in a way surprised (and yet also hopeful) in reading all the comments here in that many people are slowly rediscovering all these ideas for themselves as the issue grows more pressing.

For some other ideas on improving and transforming current organizations, see also this other resource I put together: https://github.com/pdfernhout/High-Performance-Organizations...

Essentially, I have been dealing with "AI/Robotics Anxiety" for about forty years, and collected many ideas for coping with it along the way. I'm working in a broader document more specific to that which I may put up on my website at some point.

Ironically, while I won awards for robotics projects before attending Princeton as an undergrad, and my undergrad work at Princeton in AI and cognitive psychology helped inspire WordNet which led to Simpli and the core of Gogole AdSense, it was maybe conversations with Jeff in passing at Princeton about the potential to use robots in commerce and space exploration --- which I doubt he remembers -- that might have had the biggest impact of my career to-date in a robotics sense given Amazon and its emulators. Not to take any credit away from George or Jeff in terms of their specific vision, hard work, improvisations, and persistence in the face of adversity, and also to accept that a place like Princeton can be a Brian-Eno-style "scenius" where ideas bounce around and transform as they are reflected on and refined by different people with different perspectives. https://austinkleon.com/2017/05/12/scenius/ "There’s a healthier way of thinking about creativity that the musician Brian Eno refers to as “scenius.” Under this model, great ideas are often birthed by a group of creative individuals—artists, curators, thinkers, theorists, and other tastemakers—who make up an “ecology of talent.” If you look back closely at history, many of the people who we think of as lone geniuses were actually part of “a whole scene of people who were supporting each other, looking at each other’s work, copying from each other, stealing ideas, and contributing ideas.” Scenius doesn’t take away from the achievements of those great individuals: it just acknowledges that good work isn’t created in a vacuum, and that creativity is always, in some sense, a collaboration, the result of a mind connected to other minds. What I love about the idea of scenius is that it makes room in the story of creativity for the rest of us: the people who don’t consider ourselves geniuses. Being a valuable part of a scenius is not necessarily about how smart or talented you are, but about what you have to contribute—the ideas you share, the quality of the connections you make, and the conversations you start. If we forget about genius and think more about how we can nurture and contribute to a scenius, we can adjust our own expectations and the expectations of the worlds we want to accept us. We can stop asking what others can do for us, and start asking what we can do for others."

But I am a bit sad about the results so far though, given how robotics, AI, and other automation are turning out to do so much damage in practice to so many people's lives when used from a scarcity-oriented mindset. It was always my intent -- especially having read so much sci-fi like Isaac Asimov robot stories, "The Skills of Xanadu" by Theodore Sturgeon, and also James P. Hogan's "The Two Faces of Tomorrow" and also his "Voyage from Yesteryear" -- that way more positives than negatives would come out of the abundance that robotics, AI, and other automation (including information technology) can provide.

A related video parable I made on such themes circa 2010: "The Richest Man in the World: A parable about structural unemployment and a basic income" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p14bAe6AzhA

As with my sig (first sent in an email to Marvin Minsky) of "The biggest challenge of the 21st century is the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity", I have realized -- as Einstein suggested about nuclear weapons or Lewis Mumford about technology in general or James P. Hogan essentially says through his novels -- it takes change of heart and mindset to realize the benefits of what is possible using automation without otherwise creating a terrible human calamity.

An example of things going wrong is creating problematical working conditions when automation is used to make humans work like micromanaged robots centralizing wealth for a few people. Related US DOL citation for Amazon essentially for not automating enough: https://www.dol.gov/newsroom/releases/osha/osha20230201-0

As I've reflected on, if you get up in the early morning in the dark and turn a light on in the kitchen, the light may seem so bright you can't look at it even as it even as it makes it possible for you to get your day started. And by the time the sun comes up and lights your entire home and landscape, you may forget the kitchen light is even on because it is no longer noticeable relative to the surrounding broad illumination. Gary Kildall no doubt faced that with CPM. So that is kind of how I see the comments overall on the story. The sun is coming up as millions of people are starting to think about robotics, AI, and other automation and its likely near-term effect on themselves and society, and all the "bright lights" from decades past are just not noticeable from all the ongoing thinking and chatter. And that is maybe a good thing -- even if there are still ideas from then which might be useful now and will either be remembered, reread, or rediscovered.