[9rx]

Obviously wages and productivity had to decouple. Wages measure human labor, while productivity measures all output, including that which comes from automation. ~50 years ago is when automation started to become more than a curiosity in industry.

Human productivity to wages have kept pace with each other, though, so there is nothing to suggest anything has changed for the human. It is not like the robots are seeking promotions (yet).

[contagiousflow]

> ~50 years ago is when automation started to become more than a curiosity in industry

Where did you get that idea from?

[bryanrasmussen]

The PLC, Programmable Logic Controller, was 1968. After which it started to become possible to have automated assembly lines with a few humans monitoring specialized robots.

[contagiousflow]

Yeah, that's one specialized piece of automation in a long line of automation throughout history. I'm not sure why taking humans off of the assembly line is a larger deal than taking humans out of agriculture, textile production, or printing?

[9rx]

The only thing that is significant is that shift brought us to reaching peak human productivity. Prior to that, humans were not able to be as productive. Consider agriculture: You might be able to be maximally productive some times of the year, but usually you were waiting on Mother Nature to do her thing. This is why wages were able to grow alongside productivity as we started moving away from a pure agrarian world — having less reliance on external factors limiting what humans could produce. Once humans reached peak human productivity their human-based measures stagnated, but productivity itself did not stop as automation advances have kept that ball rolling. Taking people off the assembly line saw them move into jobs, mostly "knowledge-based" ones, where there was no way to become even more productive. You can only sit around in so many meetings each day, so to speak.

Maybe there is a new frontier where humans can start to become more productive again. Some say that is AI, but that remains to be seen. For now, we've hit our known limit. There is no longer anything outside of human control, like waiting for a crop to grow, that limits our human productivity. The only limiting us is ourselves, and it may be a fundamental limit.

[contagiousflow]

> You might be able to be maximally productive some times of the year, but usually you were waiting on Mother Nature to do her thing.

I don't know what that means. When did we have to stop waiting for crops to grow? The only thing that changed for the production side was requiring less humans as machines could do the work of many laborers.

[bryanrasmussen]

Although I agree with 9rx's points mainly, here

> When did we have to stop waiting for crops to grow?

part of modern agricultural automation includes year round seasons, which means essentially you are no longer waiting for crops to grow in the way that was first discussed.

This of course is what allows us to have fresh tomatoes year round, and many other fruits and vegetables. Obviously these are not perfect, tomatoes as the example already given, quality of the automated output is significantly less in comparison to the natural - nonetheless we do not wait for many crops to grow in the same way that people did before the 1990s (when computerized climate management, hydroponics and advanced greenhouse tech took off, as some later advances on the already mentioned PLC, and enabled automation in that field of human endeavor)

[9rx]

> When did we have to stop waiting for crops to grow?

When we started producing more than basic things like food that are heavily dependent on the environment. In the knowledge-based economy, the only thing that meaningfully stops you from producing continually is you collapsing from exhaustion. However, even if you never got tired, you can still only produce so much per second, if you will, which caps your total productivity. That is the human limit; probably a fundamental one.

Only a tiny, tiny fraction of the population have to wait on crops growing now in order to offer that line of productivity. And of them, like myself, we can now do other productive things while we're waiting. I, for one, work in the tech industry when I'm not farming. Today, 96% of farmers in the USA are productive off of the farm in at least some capacity. Whereas, historically, farmers were busy trying to survive when they weren't being productive on the farm. Many a day were spent in the bush chopping wood so that they didn't freeze in the winter, for example. Interestingly, idle farmers staring to produce salable things during that cold winter downtime is when we first started seeing early signs of human productivity gains over the stagnant agricultural baseline.

Productivity can keep increasing beyond the human limit, but we have achieved that by introducing more and more non-human workers. Humans are already at the very top of their game, at least as we know it. 17th century farmers probably thought they were also as productive as humanly possible, so who knows what the future holds, but for now we have no idea how to make humans even more productive than they already are. We don't have any more obvious "winter downtimes" to expand into. Hence why the measure of human productivity is no longer increasing.

This was recognized a long time ago. It was the basis of the "go to college to make more money" script you may be familiar with if you are old enough to remember. It was well understood way back then that relying on human productivity gains had reached a dead end. The thinking was that colleges would enable people to move away from labor and into leveraging automation, where productivity is effectively unbounded, with college research labs having played and still playing a pivotal role in that, but somehow along the way that got twisted into "go to college to get a job", so here we are... Now people spend god knows how much money to go to college to get the same job, at the same pay, that they would have gotten anyway. Which is pretty hilarious, but also sad.

[mullingitover]

> Wages measure human labor, while productivity measures all output, including that which comes from automation.

Until we have sentient robots, all that automation is simply a lever with a human laborer at the end of it.

[sitkack]

What limits the length of the lever? The agricultural lever is already crazy long, the manufacturing lever, same. We could be doing the same with less, not more with the same.

When do we stop?

[mullingitover]

> The agricultural lever is already crazy long

Depends on where in the world you're looking. In India, something like 50% of the population works in agriculture. At the scale of India's population that's a significant fraction of the population of the planet, it's more than twice the population of the entire US.