Plenty of people who don’t work for Amazon already buy stuff from there. I guess I mostly see the jobs as exchanging labour for something that society values and so by automating, there is more labour available to do things society values and so society gets more of what it values. And if you think working for Amazon is bad for people then you should be happy if automation is decreasing the number of people suffering that bad thing (though automation won’t always decrease this, eg see rise in number of bank tellers/branches in the US). But that isn’t really the way that lots of people talk about jobs and so if what you want is for people to have somewhere local where they can exchange their time for money to spend on goods and services then I guess automation and efficiency don’t really matter because the point of the job is to ensure the worker has money coming in rather than to ensure that something useful comes out of it. That latter point of view is pretty popular and I think I’m describing it pretty terribly – I’m sure there is a much more reasonable argument for it.
The ultimate endgame is either a significant reduction in global population, or UBI. You can’t just keep automating every non-knowledge job away and just hope people find something else to do.
All those jobs in Detroit that went away were replaced by…? As best I can tell they were replaced by poverty and crime.
I think the latter view is usually held by people who know they won't experience productivity gains from automation.
Say someone who is has driven a taxi all their life or driven a forklift. They can appreciate how adding air-conditioning to their vehicle allows them to drive in hotter days, therefore they can do more work. But automating their whole job away with autonomous vehicles doesn't benefit them, so they don't want it.
Personally, I think those people can't be picky about their jobs. If you do something that is automatable, you will be out of a job sooner or later. When that happens, don't get mad and go find another soon-to-be automated job.
>Henry Ford famously wanted his workers to be able to afford his cars.
Amazing how that bit of PR is still being quoted over 100 years later. In reality, Ford had huge turnover problems with his workers - one estimate is over 370% annual turnover. One way to help prevent turnover is to pay more, and it solved the problem. (Even so, the base pay was still actually $2.30 and to get the extra $2.70 you had to abstain from alcohol, keep your home clean, etc.)
The point wasn't really that workers should be the primary clientele, just that the average worker should be able to afford it, and if that wasn't the case the price of the goods should be lowered, or a trend started for higher worker compensation.
Robotic workers lower operational costs and can make goods more accessible, and it's common for various manual labour jobs to be lost when industries change - the labour shifts elsewhere, and generally higher.
(If this wasn't true, unemployment would have constantly grown worldwide since the first automaton replaced a human job or government outlawed certain manual industries, which isn't the case. Workforces do and must adapt to needs and trends.)
I think the point is that once robots can do everything human bodies do and AIs can do everything human minds do, there is nowhere left for humans to go. Just like horses didn't find new employment when internal combustion engines reached the point where they could do everything a horse does but better and cheaper.
Didn't he pay more than his competitors and get sued by his competitors for not acting in the the best interest of his shareholders (by wanting to pay his workers even more)?
New types of jobs are created every year. When I was young, there was no such thing as streaming video games and getting paid for it. Now, young kids and adults are making bank by playing video games and letting the whole world watch
For every person who makes any meaningful amount of money doing that you need many 1000s of viewers consuming their content. So it’s not exactly sustainable as a career option for any besides a tiny handful of people in any meaningful way..
Also consumer has a limited amount of time to consume content in any given day so to some extent it’s zero-sum.
I’m all for creative disruption, but what worries me is when I see a pattern of stable employment being displaced by algorithmically mediated gig work and viral entertainer lotto tickets. This is a dangerous trend in general, but the US is especially poorly positioned because of its lack of strong safety nets. When the foundation of your economy is hollowed out to make it ever more top-heavy, you’re destined for collapse.
CPG food and beverage companies rely hugely on automation (source: see YouTube factory videos on anything packaged food related). I was told by my automation consultant that Heineken runs an entirely “dark factory” with no human labor (at least in-line).
Automation helps reduce product costs and improves standard-of-living, and sort of then directly boosts investments/jobs in other sectors.
As long as the pace of automation does not exceed some max rate that people can't figure out what to do with the excess labor, we should be ok.
Though I suppose it's always possible that we'll reach something of a "singularity" where we enter the realm of The Phools, by Stanislaw Lem. I can't find a copy of it online, so you might just have to buy the book in which that short story appears.
Briefly and to spoil it: In the story there is a planet with human-like people called Phools and a very stratified, hyper-capitalistic society with three classes, workers, priests, and owners, and someone invents computer that fully automates all factories which then causes 100% unemployment among the workers who then start starving to death. In the story the owners and priests ask the inventor to ask the computer to come up with a solution. You can imagine what the computer came up with... At the end the traveler screams at them something like "Phools! All you had to do was redistribute your income!".
Today -and on this planet- there are certainly a few people today who speak of "useless eaters" and who would like the outcome from that short story. And I can imagine that happening almost naturally. Already fertility rates are crashing worldwide, and we're on a path towards a crashing human population worldwide, and if that happens naturally then I think it means that humans respond to price and other signals and adjust their family planning accordingly, and that would not be a bad thing. Pray though that it's not like in The Phools where the population crashed in a much more dramatic and speedy way, and not at all naturally.
We're more automated than we've ever been & unemployment is close to all-time lows. Why don't you get back to us with this when it's at least 6 or 7 percent...
Job quality is deteriorating, more people are holding more than one job, part time jobs are increasingly common, almost half of US workers are in low-wage jobs, wages have stagnated... It's a nice statistic, but unemployment rates don't tell much of the story on the ground, in people's lived experiences. That side of the story is overwhelmingly getting worse.
Unemployment being at all time lows means nothing if those employed with the minimum wage cannot afford the same quality of life than people did in the past earning the minimum wage of their time, because it means you aren't really comparing the same thing.
There will be plenty of money to be made serving the needs and interests of the wealthy, while the rest of us are serviced by an informal economy that doesn't see institutional investment.
Look at street markets in countries with high wealth disparity. The well-off wouldn't shop or eat there, and they certainly wouldn't invest in a street vendor, the vendors are meant to serve the needs of people in poverty.
See Citigroup's plutonomy paper[1] that explores what that would look like and what investment strategies investors should take. The tl;dr is that the formal economy will abandon lower classes in favor of making a ton of money serving plutocrats and their friends and families instead.
If someone else replaces all workers with robots first instead, what will Bezos do then?
What you are describing is a political problem, not one for entrepreneurs. IMO the solution would be a form of UBI that we can smoothly increase as automation in fact removes jobs or lowers wages. I'd like to see that start ASAP, but OTOH we are still close to record-low unemployment and the last years saw the largest wage increases at the lower end in decades.
> What you are describing is a political problem, not one for entrepreneurs. IMO the solution would be a form of UBI that we can smoothly increase as automation in fact removes jobs or lowers wages.
The most successful entrepreneurs like Bezos are also the biggest political influencers, and instead of UBI they are advocating for less tax for themselves.
>I'd like to see that start ASAP, but OTOH we are still close to record-low unemployment and the last years saw the largest wage increases at the lower end in decades.
The last years also saw the highest rates of inflation in decades. Even basic necessities are the least affordable they've been in a long time, let alone something like housing.
dan-robertson|9 months ago
tw04|9 months ago
All those jobs in Detroit that went away were replaced by…? As best I can tell they were replaced by poverty and crime.
guhidalg|9 months ago
Say someone who is has driven a taxi all their life or driven a forklift. They can appreciate how adding air-conditioning to their vehicle allows them to drive in hotter days, therefore they can do more work. But automating their whole job away with autonomous vehicles doesn't benefit them, so they don't want it.
Personally, I think those people can't be picky about their jobs. If you do something that is automatable, you will be out of a job sooner or later. When that happens, don't get mad and go find another soon-to-be automated job.
opo|9 months ago
Amazing how that bit of PR is still being quoted over 100 years later. In reality, Ford had huge turnover problems with his workers - one estimate is over 370% annual turnover. One way to help prevent turnover is to pay more, and it solved the problem. (Even so, the base pay was still actually $2.30 and to get the extra $2.70 you had to abstain from alcohol, keep your home clean, etc.)
https://www.cbsnews.com/detroit/news/henry-ford-implements-5...
arghwhat|9 months ago
Robotic workers lower operational costs and can make goods more accessible, and it's common for various manual labour jobs to be lost when industries change - the labour shifts elsewhere, and generally higher.
(If this wasn't true, unemployment would have constantly grown worldwide since the first automaton replaced a human job or government outlawed certain manual industries, which isn't the case. Workforces do and must adapt to needs and trends.)
allturtles|9 months ago
disambiguation|9 months ago
dh2022|9 months ago
vlovich123|9 months ago
vishalontheline|9 months ago
hashiyakshmi|9 months ago
kajumix|9 months ago
iamtheworstdev|9 months ago
MangoCoffee|9 months ago
wqaatwt|9 months ago
For every person who makes any meaningful amount of money doing that you need many 1000s of viewers consuming their content. So it’s not exactly sustainable as a career option for any besides a tiny handful of people in any meaningful way..
Also consumer has a limited amount of time to consume content in any given day so to some extent it’s zero-sum.
pixelready|9 months ago
mannyv|9 months ago
rajnathani|9 months ago
Automation helps reduce product costs and improves standard-of-living, and sort of then directly boosts investments/jobs in other sectors.
cryptonector|9 months ago
Though I suppose it's always possible that we'll reach something of a "singularity" where we enter the realm of The Phools, by Stanislaw Lem. I can't find a copy of it online, so you might just have to buy the book in which that short story appears.
Briefly and to spoil it: In the story there is a planet with human-like people called Phools and a very stratified, hyper-capitalistic society with three classes, workers, priests, and owners, and someone invents computer that fully automates all factories which then causes 100% unemployment among the workers who then start starving to death. In the story the owners and priests ask the inventor to ask the computer to come up with a solution. You can imagine what the computer came up with... At the end the traveler screams at them something like "Phools! All you had to do was redistribute your income!".
Today -and on this planet- there are certainly a few people today who speak of "useless eaters" and who would like the outcome from that short story. And I can imagine that happening almost naturally. Already fertility rates are crashing worldwide, and we're on a path towards a crashing human population worldwide, and if that happens naturally then I think it means that humans respond to price and other signals and adjust their family planning accordingly, and that would not be a bad thing. Pray though that it's not like in The Phools where the population crashed in a much more dramatic and speedy way, and not at all naturally.
rendang|9 months ago
steve_adams_86|9 months ago
Job quality is deteriorating, more people are holding more than one job, part time jobs are increasingly common, almost half of US workers are in low-wage jobs, wages have stagnated... It's a nice statistic, but unemployment rates don't tell much of the story on the ground, in people's lived experiences. That side of the story is overwhelmingly getting worse.
mattigames|9 months ago
antisthenes|9 months ago
uniq7|9 months ago
In exchange, in the long term they won't be able to afford the cars they produce anymore.
godelski|9 months ago
heavyset_go|9 months ago
Look at street markets in countries with high wealth disparity. The well-off wouldn't shop or eat there, and they certainly wouldn't invest in a street vendor, the vendors are meant to serve the needs of people in poverty.
See Citigroup's plutonomy paper[1] that explores what that would look like and what investment strategies investors should take. The tl;dr is that the formal economy will abandon lower classes in favor of making a ton of money serving plutocrats and their friends and families instead.
[1] https://delong.typepad.com/plutonomy-1.pdf
econ|9 months ago
bdangubic|9 months ago
noisy_boy|9 months ago
SubiculumCode|9 months ago
ck2|9 months ago
He routinely would keep dialing it up and up and up until too many people rage quit and then dial it down just a notch.
One of the first things unions negotiated for when they stated was control of that knob.
ajmurmann|9 months ago
What you are describing is a political problem, not one for entrepreneurs. IMO the solution would be a form of UBI that we can smoothly increase as automation in fact removes jobs or lowers wages. I'd like to see that start ASAP, but OTOH we are still close to record-low unemployment and the last years saw the largest wage increases at the lower end in decades.
HighGoldstein|9 months ago
The most successful entrepreneurs like Bezos are also the biggest political influencers, and instead of UBI they are advocating for less tax for themselves.
>I'd like to see that start ASAP, but OTOH we are still close to record-low unemployment and the last years saw the largest wage increases at the lower end in decades.
The last years also saw the highest rates of inflation in decades. Even basic necessities are the least affordable they've been in a long time, let alone something like housing.