HN Explorer

Ask HN: Future Socioeconomic Impacts of automation

11 points by emestifs ↗ HN
Once the AI overhype cycle fades, we'll continue with high probability towards a future we slowly but surely replace a lot of jobs and human tasks with automation. Whether robotics and digital automation through LLM or other "big data" driven algorithms.

We can already see this happening from factories to McDonalds to software. All of these are limited, and to varying degrees. Humans still for now need to oversee these forms of automation.

But the likelihood of further consolidation of wealth and power are likely to follow in the coming decades if the past is any indicator. Government regulations may or may not work effectively enough.

But what happens when a significant portion of the population has no reliable work or fulfilling work. Capitalist societies need consumer spending and growth. What happens when consumers are unemployed due to automation?

UBI/BI (universal basic income) gets thrown around, but it will cost hundreds of billions if not trillion(s) in the future. Companies already lobby for things, I can only imagine the lobbying will intensify a lot more if governments try to further increase corporate taxes to offset the unemployment benefits/(U)BI they will need to provide.

It's easy to say, we'll figure it out. But when trillions of dollars are at stake, it seems likely they will be a lot of push back from the top N% to ensure they're not force to give away a bigger share of their money pie.

What are your thoughts? Try to provide deeper and thoughtful responses here rather than shallow comments.

10 comments

[ 4.7 ms ] story [ 30.8 ms ] thread
mikewarot
BBC Radio 4 was just talking about the Luddites as a response to automation, and though they managed the social media of the day, and maintained their message far better than you'd expect, damaging only the machines that displaced the workers the most, and leaving others alone... in the end, the owners won.

To me, the only sane way we can survive this, is to make it possible for anyone to own their own AI, to distribute the means of production widely. If everyone has labor saving technology, at least there's a bit of a balance against the power of the 0.001%.

It's a dim hope, though. Given the state of computer insecurity, which has forced more and more of us into the walled gardens on the internet, I fear the same will be true of the use of AI, etc.

Computers CAN be made secure, but most of us on HN don't seem to believe it, what hope is there of fixing it for the world at large? If we can't control our own machines before AGI, what hope is there after it?

I've been pushing, in small but persistent amounts, this issue, but I feel pretty hopeless at times. We need capability based security at the foundation of things, in a profoundly desperate way. If general purpose computing is lost, all of the benefits of computing go to those who can afford to throw manpower at maintaining the status quo, while reaping all the benefits.

LUmBULtERA
Automation will make it possible for continued economic growth even with our population plateauing or even declining until a lower steady-state. I think income for many manual labor positions will increase for jobs that aren't easily automated. The rich will get richer and the poor will get richer but not as fast, so the complaints of inequality will continue as they always have. Talk about basic income will continue but it won't be adopted for a long time.
AnimalMuppet
Automation means we get to level up. We get to work at a higher level. We get bigger building blocks to work from.

This has been going on for a long time. We used to spend 30% of our people on growing food. Now we spend 3%, because we have combines instead of a bunch of field workers. A bunch of people could do something else - something more productive than field work. As a result, our society got richer, because of what those other people could do now that they weren't having to work in the fields.

What could you do if you didn't have to waste time, say, chasing memory leaks or core dumps or whatever? Could you do something a level up from what you're currently doing?

So for society as a whole, the impact is that we get richer. We can produce the same stuff with less human effort, so we can put more people onto inventing and building new things.

But for individuals, there's going to be a divide. Can you level up, or not? For those who can't or won't, they're going to be left behind, the way someone was left behind who is still trying to farm 40 acres with a horse-drawn plow. They can survive that way, but they're not going to prosper in the way that the surrounding society prospers.

I say that without any judgment on either the skills or the effort of those left behind. I am just saying that there will be people in that category. Society has to figure out how to minimize how many people are in that category. And for those in that category, society has to figure out what to do with them that preserves their human dignity and value, while not letting them impede progress.

giantg2
Leveling up as you are presenting it tends to deal with efficiency and task allocation. In the case of increased efficiency, this leads to a need for fewer of those employees (eg your move from 30% to 3%). So 90% of those people, or 27% of the overall population needs a new job. Maybe a lot of those people move from the primary sector of farming to the secondary sector of manufacturing. But even with shuffling with other people in other jobs, a some will not be able to make that switch. As you move from a secondary to tertiary sector economy (people designing the machines), the number of people unable to make that jump increases.

I believe that economies making jumps from 1st to 2nd and 2nd to 3rd will be able to benefit. However, I'm skeptical that 3rd level economies will be able to benefit without significant pains due to population level mismatches of required skills to competencies.

AnimalMuppet
Well, we went through pains going from 1st to 2nd and 2nd to 3rd, too. It wasn't smooth. This won't be, either.

The question is, is there something more or less stable at the end of the transition? Are there enough 4th level jobs for the people that can make the switch, and are there enough 1st, 2nd, and 3rd level jobs for the people who can't move up to 4th? Or is there no smooth road after all the bumps of the transition?

emestifs
> Or is there [or is there not a] no smooth road after all the bumps of the transition?

That's the trillion dollar question

giantg2
It doesn't look good to me. I'm not sure what I should be preparing my kids to do for work in a couple decades from now. It can't look that much different than today, but I still can't imagine what the good jobs with long futures might be. I make fun of the surveys that say Gen Z want to be influencers and stuff, but that's probably just as realistic as believing they can build a software career building CRUD apps that could last until 2060.
giantg2
Is there a 4th level? The 3rd is supposed to be the top - knowledge based economy focused on providing services rather than resources or manufacturing. That's why it seems once you're in a 3rd level economy, there's not other massive jump. It's all efficiency gains or shifting to other problem areas. Then you add in the other economies that are moving up to 3rd level and it seems there's an oversupply at that level where not locally confined such as a plumber.
giantg2
I share those same thoughts/questions.

Even if the cost thing is figured out, UBI has other issues. If it's truly universal, recipents will be priced out of just about everything that involves competition, including housing. If it's needs based, it's hard to determine the proper recipients. This may also lead to underutilization of talent when the benefits are close enough to what a person who could get a job would end up receiving. It would be nice to see some large scale tests, but that still hasn't happened.

emestifs
The closest to a large scale test was Covid stimulus across multiple countries, which at face value didn't yield great results and had some short term (<5 year) negative economic implications. But that was an emergency measure and done without planning ahead of time, so comparison may not be totally one-to-one with a "proper" U/BI system.