https://12ft.io/

> Why?

> I believe Google Adwords killed the web. Google Adwords incentivized sites to peddle SEO optimized garbage. Sites who aren't are forced to optimize for email capture so they can market directly to you. Search results now show "news", ads, and SEO spam instead of surfacing information.

> You ought to be able to search something on Google and get an answer to your question without signing up for some newsletter.

I find the current state of the web, post-AdWords, disappointing too.

edit: apologies, it was submitted and discussed a month ago

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29679716

Do we want to make sites attempting to do something other than SEO-spam harder to find in search?

I don't think that's totally fair. I would love to be able to pay for a single day of the NY Times or Wall Street Journal, the same way I can buy a copy of the print edition on a given day. But, it's all or nothing with the paywalls - I have to buy a full annual subscription just so I can read half a dozen articles one or two days a week.

I don't think most people are opposed to paying for content - look at kindle sales. But that doesn't mean most people want to commit to an annual subscription that runs in the 100's of dollars.

I honestly have no solution for their problem. It's a bad position to be in. Their content is just not valuable enough to pay for. At least for me.

I pay for books and ebooks all the time, so I'm not opposed to paying for reading material. It's just that I value books much higher than news or opinion pieces.

Perhaps if Google didn't treat every other party as a source of wealth to plunder, by hook or by crook, but rather shared the spoils with the very content generators so crucial to their own existence, out of some sense of fair play, we'd have a marginally more healthy ecosystem today.

Perhaps.

But I'm content to burn the whole thing down. All ad-supported business models are eventually utterly toxic. Well, at least the ones that succeed.

Think about what you're asking. You want the government to take your money and give it to media outlets of their choosing? Just give your own money to the media outlets of your choosing.

No, that's a benefit journalist enterprises sell.

The primary purpose of journalism (at least, in a capitalist society), is, as for any other industry, to capture and deliver value to the capitalist class.

No, I said that the primary purpose of the industry was one thing, not the primary purpose of a particular one man operation that is inherently made marginal by the structure of the economy, and is not the typical of the industry as a whole.

There is already RFERL aka Radio Freedom.

OTOH:

In UK, Germany and a bunch of other countries there is state-funded media.

One can argue that in France or Russia all media is state funded and state controlled.

If digital advertising was banned and good journalism could be identified by "I have to pay a small amount for this", competition would drive the costs down in a way which makes proper use of that scalability, and we would all be better off.

I think modern professional journalism was a fluke of history. Without independent funding it's going right back to its original state. And the only way that independent funding will happen is with a highly educated and involved citizenry, which scares the living crap out of the powerful.

They don't give you the option to pay for an article. The only two choices are pay a couple hundred bucks for an annual subscription that you likely won't use more than a few times, or bypass the paywall.

To follow your analogy, this would be like if the gas station only sold gum in packs of 365 - you want a day's worth of gum, but you can only buy a yearly supply. I'll bet you'd see a lot more people stealing gum.

The benefits of those efficiency improvements are already going to the owners of the capital, not to workers, and this has been going on for decades. If in 1980 you were able to replace 4 clerks handwriting transactions in an accounting ledger with one clerk typing them into a spreadsheet but pay that one clerk marginally more than a handwriting clerk, who benefits most in that equation?

We're always focused on the some day maybe robots, but automation has been changing society and (I'd argue) increasing inequality for decades, and we've been completely blind to it because we're always talking about "the robots that are coming to take our jobs". We already need to find ways to distribute the benefits of these efficiency improvements more equally. In fact, we needed to years ago.

I wouldn't be surprised if this explains a lot of the productivity-pay gap [1]

[1] https://www.epi.org/productivity-pay-gap/

Instead, I’d argue that returns are going to IP holders.

The returns go to cheaper items, because there is less labour time going into each item as productivity improves.

If you redenominate in the 'labour hour' currency, then it all starts to make sense. As does the apparent increase in pay of a concert violin player. Ultimately a concert level violin player doing their thing still takes the same amount of time top produce as it always did, society still likes concerts, and they haven't yet become fond of AI violin players. They exchange those hours for products with less hours in them. So they appear to get a wage increase. Classically this is known as the Baumol effect.

This goes beyond 'real wages', to 'real stuff'. People are definitely getting more stuff than they did 40 years ago. My iPhone is testament to that. As is the lack of power cuts.

Underlying everything is essentially an exchange of labour hours.

As to returns to IP holders, those are often the pension fund, who then pay the pensions to pensioners who then spend it on stuff.

Since we have an ageing population there will definitely be an increase in the transfer to the elderly. It can't be any other way. Is that a fair transfer? Well that's the debate.

Yeah, we can get much more and much cheaper stuff than before thanks to the 'Made in China' boom, but what we can't get now is affordable real-estate. Too bad we can't go live inside our iPhones. /s

During the pandemic the price of used cars started to rise. Did we attribute that to people with more money who can then get higher credit on the now more expensive cars?

No, we attributed it to a lack of supply of cars, and worked to free up the blockages so that the market would return to its correct state where cars depreciated.

It's the same problem with housing. We need to build an awful lot more, and we need to move the work to where we build the houses.

Once we cross the rubicon and house prices start to depreciate, as they should because they wear out, then we'll see a phase shift in the market and vastly more supply. It'll be like the latent heat of condensation.

In 2015, of all renter households:

* 38% were rent burdened (defined as spending 30% or more of pretax income on rent), an increase of about 19% from 2001.

* 17% were severely rent burdened (spending 50% or more), an increase of 42% from 2001 (the 38% rent burdened includes the 17% severely burdened).

For households headed by someone 65+, 50% are rent burdened, ~20% severely rent burdened.

https://www.pewtrusts.org/-/media/assets/2018/04/rent-burden...

Real estate, education, healthcare...

And that was entirely predictable, when a country allows the free flow of capital, and goods but not people then it becomes a race to the bottom in sectors which can move to lower cost areas. There is a certain amount of price suppression for some local goods and the demand dries up, but for things which aren't optional the price will continue to inflate until the system breaks. Infant child care is in this position, the workers competing internationally can't afford to pay for the care of their infants because its local labor intensive.

Basically its broken economic policy and its just a matter of time before it explodes. And its probably not fixable because if the cost of labor ever gets equal, then capital is just going to move to the country that say has the smallest carbon tax/whatever.

Basically a prereq for free trade should be a common government, and free movement of people.

The only exception is the US because it has a structural deficit.

It's actually the opposite. Countries have tried to artificially raise interest rates above liquidiry preference via inflation targeting and stimulus for the last 40 years.

Median housing in the US has been around inflation adjusted $100/sq ft for decades.

Houses today are massively larger than in the past, making the costs look higher. And what you get today is also a lot better - more efficient, cheaper to heat and cool, safer, better electrical, water, etc.

I was talking about the European real-estate market. I don't know the US market but I heard it's much more affordable than here, at least outside of SF/NY/etc.

I don't see evidence across all of Europe any data for much difference than in the US. Dense places cost more, sparse places are amazingly cheap. Poorer countries, like poor states, have even cheaper housing.

Maybe we need more housing options

Pensions aren't distributed evenly across the population, it tends to be that the richer you are, the bigger the pension. That means that IP has the effect of making the rich richer, increasing inequality.

The rosy side of the equation happens when we look at the price of useful products that can be automated, like fridges or computers, where labourers are much richer in such products than they were 100 years ago. However, the ugly side is visible when looking at the price of products that can't be automated, like land, where labourers are much poorer then they were 100 years ago. The difference is often made up of useless products that could be automated, like cheap fashion or fast food, which marketing keeps pushing as hard as possible.

Here the Labour hour is valued only in terms of its exchange rate to the denomination that the area pays tax in.

Potentially yes, as long as the competition doesn't destroy the manufacturing landscape, e.g. by emergence of lowest-common-denominator or monopoly suppliers.

Somehow there is also a systematic economic double-standard that works for some but not others: "free markets" of dog-eat-dog inputs (i.e., suppliers), but less free markets on outputs (i.e., monopolies, mega corporations, patents, proprietary-ness, closed-source). Unregulated greed fixes all problems by the "invisible hand", right?

And to the overall economy - more stuff with less resources is growth. But that's all going to capital, look at the s&p500 vs wages over the same time period.

I agree the parent comment should be more specific, but his point stands: gains are going to a few companies that automate everyone else's processes or benefit from the huge economies of scale that automation provides.

I've recently been thinking a lot about policy changes that might help with housing affordability, and the same thing keeps happening: every time I think I've come up with something clever, I eventually realize that I've just accidentally made things even better for people that started off with a lot of capital.

It feels like aside from explicit redistribution of wealth (raise minimum wage, tax high income earners more, raise high-end property taxes), you can't change _anything_ without making the rich richer and the poor poorer.

(You can certainly have the input to one feedback loop be the output of another).

Then structural deflationary forces would manifest as UBI increases instead of interest rate decreases.

I think the positive real interest rates would ensure the UBI isn't all captured by rent increases, although it's hard to be certain unless it's tested.

We got at least two world wars out of "deflationary spirals" and every single gold standard that was attempted failed during deflation.

Also, liquidity preference is a systemic redistribution from the bottom 90% to the top 10%.

The people that benefit from inflation are the savers and bankers in the top 10% because they can live off the interest or capital yields which must be higher than interest.

Bankers and savers benefit because governments, people and companies pay debts first before they pay anyone else. If the cantillon effect exists it exists in the boring form of those who own the most get paid the most. The proximity argument is nonsense because there are banks in every city. You can "print" money yourself by getting a mortgage to buy a house and many people do.

This is pop psychology and there is ample counter-evidence for it.

World War 2 was not caused by monetary policy! A hypothesised, partial cause that Hitler certainly exploited was crippling debts. But that wasn't solvable by economists. Do you think the allied powers that defeated Germany in WW1 would have sat back and tolerated Germany inflating away its war debts?

Every single, new building puts downward pressure on the average price. The moment supply outstrips demand, prices goes down, housing market stops being reasonable asset, money outflows causing further collapse of the market and houses are dirt cheap.

At the very least, a supply-solution proponent would need to explain how China's property supply glut didn't bring prices down until the government cracked down on credit.

A lot of equity derives its value from real estate so the obvious escape into stocks won't work in practice.

That said, deflation only ends up happening in specific goods categories like TVs and computers, which are at a particularly sharp point in the technology curve, such that they deflate even faster than average. That's again because the average CPI growth is governed by a feedback loop, where the central bank adjusts interest rates to target 2% inflation, so as, say, food gets cheaper to produce, monetary stimulus is gradually added to the system to combat the falling costs and encourage more consumption. This is done to avoid the kind of deflationary cycle that you're talking about. (Central banks want to avoid deflation so that debts don't become onerous to repay, which can create a depression).

But the result is that while technology is deflationary, it does not create deflation, because that's maintained by a feedback loop; instead it manifests in gradually declining interest rates (and thus increasing valuations and real estate prices, as I mentioned).

That's what it's like to be in a feedback loop. Your computer may act as a heat source for your home but as long as the thermostat is maintaining temperature at a setpoint, the computer won't change that average temperature -- heat it produces will be offset by reduced furnace activity.

(Of course there are also long-term structurally inflationary forces as well. Environmental damage and resource scarcity, like declining fish stocks for example, are structurally inflationary forces. Demographics can go either way. Short term things like wars, debt crises, earthquakes, or pandemics can obviously have a huge impact, and irresponsible monetary policy can throw things right out the window.)

> Central banks want to avoid deflation so that debts don't become onerous to repay, which can create a depression.

Agreed. In other words I didn't realize the 19th century was so bad!

Also, since its hard to imagine technology process with out debt in a market economy, we have have an interesting interaction here.

This is still true today. Interest is at zero, people keep their money in bank accounts of banks who are so heavily overleveraged vs their demand deposits that they are unable to take the risk of lending.

Money is stuck and has to be replenished by more borrowing i.e. QE asset purchases give banks more reserve assets and let them pretend their balance sheet is clean.

Someone who is capable of cleaning a machine and loading materials and tools as well as unloading product is valued different than someone who actually knows how to make any kind of object that is within reason to be fabricated with lathes, mills and other shoptools, which is what a master machinist is. Those people are rare, they always were rare and historically they were valued as much in the past as they are today. Using them to operate a CNC machine is a complete waste of their skills. Typically those people are making one-offs that CNC jockeys would not be able to due to the difficulty of setting things up and/or the need to get it right the first time because the part is irreplaceable.

Profit isn't a reward, it is a reallocation of capital to a new sector. At some point growth stops and there are no new sectors meaning there is nothing to reallocate existing capital to.

They reduce the number of workers needed to produce the same amount of output. What is slightly counterintuitive is that having done so, they may actually increase the demand for workers, because they now can produce far more output in the same amount of time.

Modern languages and tools have made programming much more productive, and now there are lots more programmers and they get paid more.

They may do that.

Too many people take it for a guarantee that technology by itself must do that, and can never result in a situation that a human hand is needed to steer us away from.

Well not really. Computer industry pay is increasingly becoming bi-modal at least for a decade. The highly paid programmer is just a US phenomenon and that too in few major IT hubs.

There are lot of programers/IT admins who would make pretty decent money in late 90s to 2000s. And they make less than they were 20 years ago and yes all hadoop/big data training did not really make any better paid.

Inflation adjusted IT salaries have gone down in lot of places in the world. Of course 1 percenters of IT in FAANG+ make it sound like IT salaries are going up heavily for everyone.

That's simply not true. Programmers around the EU are among the best paid professionals in their local markets, even more so for young people (out of college/school/university). The salaries are far away from Silicon Valley levels, but are still very high locally.

I've heard from a lot of my colleagues that they couldn't afford to have the same lifestyle in an Western capital city with equivalent IT salaries. I know I wouldn't be able to rent in downtown Amsterdam, Paris or Milano with my equivalent IT earnings were I to live in those cities the same way I now do in Bucharest.

It's true. Unless you work for a FAANG, or some Fin-Tech or a unicorn flush with cash, dev wages in Western EU are not higher than Eastern EU anymore.

I know devs in Poland and Romania making way more than me and some friends do in Austria/France/Belgium.

It's because of huge amount of outsourcing from US companies moving directly to Eastern EU, pushing the wages higher than what Western EU based companies can offer locally, coupled with the higher taxes in the Western countries, meaning devs in the West taking home lower wages than their counterparts in the East.

Someone here said it well, but I don't have the original post to quote anymore: {a cleaner in Sweden makes way more than a cleaner in Poland, but a dev in Poland can end up making as much or more than a dev in Sweden}. That's whack but that's the reality of supply and demand caused by the bleed from the US tech boom to certain regions.

That's not really true. I live in Austria and many more skilled professions earn better than most devs here as the local SW industry sucks, almost no product-based companies and a market overabundant with talent.

I'm sure in hot markets with plenty of product based companies like London, Berlin, Amsterdam or Eastern Europe the situation is better.

0 - https://www.payscale.com/research/IT/Job=Junior_Software_Eng...

1 - https://www.statista.com/statistics/708972/average-annual-no...

2 - https://www.paylab.com/it/salaryinfo

The thing about management is what I've heard Italian devs complain about (and it's a common complaint is tech-weaker countries), that to get decent money you have to transition to management, whereas countries with stronger tech sectors like the US have more companies that let engineers continue to grow as engineers (or architects).

Was my original comment and point. Salaries for tech are very good for the local markets, even if they might be considered low compared to other markets.

Of course, part of this may be that the wage spectrum as a whole is compressed compared to the US, but that's an explanation, not a contradiction.

Yes, it is in any capitalist economy, because income distribution isn't normal. In the US, for instance, per capita GDP is about $64k, but median personal income is a little over $35k, and median pay of a full-time worker income, annualized, is just under $45k. An individual worker making just over the per capita GDP is doing quite well.

This is the main Problem. Technical excellence is not valued and rewarded enough. The best Engineers get promoted to Mediocre managers because that's the only way to move forward. The result is an economy focused on micromanaging for small gains instead of innovation for big gains.

The situation in the EU is the same as in the US, and outside the local hubs, wages are lower.

Any evidence?

Source?

And not all automation increases worker productivity, lots of it just eliminates workers from certain jobs altogether, e.g. self driving cars / trucks.

On the other hand, turns out that once a shirt is cheap humans will buy not just one extra so there's one to wear and one to wash, but a dozen, or hundreds. And they'll throw it away when it's a little worn not when it falls apart. So while industrialisation of fabric and clothing production made clothes cheap, the result wasn't that fewer people were employed in that work but that we just all bought more clothes.

I hope he's not listening to tunes. A change in the sound it's making is often the first warning that your $500,000 piece of machinery is about to self destruct.

Whose machine?

Think: there used to be a theoretical limit to how much regulation could exist, because the regs had to be known by a person (otherwise how are they enforced?).

Now we have regtech. A whole industry built on automating compliance.

How long before each individual needs a regtech software program (or two!) just to function in society? I'm not talking about tax filing, that's just the start.

We don’t even have self-driving cars yet, how can you know what effect they have?

When there's an inequality in productivity, more productive firma will see an increase in labour, bit that doesn't mean the whole sector does.

In practice some people want money itself, which is an empirical contradiction of says law. There are also people who hoard jobs because they like them, which is bad for people who want the money to actually spend it.

The assumption is that blue collar work is the stuff that gets automated away. The reality is that blue collar workers are getting more productive instead but are still essential. And we already have vastly less of them than we used to due to the industrial revolution and the wave of automation in the last centuries. Meanwhile a lot of white collar work is melting away or increasingly of the "bullshit job" variety where the added value is dubious. So, a strange side effect of automation is that we've created a lot of bullshit jobs instead of creating mass unemployment.

An even stranger side effect is that a lot of people with college degrees are now doing artisanal stuff instead of committing to a life long of a meaning-less and soul crushing office dwelling existence. So, they're choosing to become blue collar workers. And artisanal here of course means "choosing to do things by hand" instead of maximizing quantity and revenue through industrialized processes. Artisanal is more fun to do and quality of the goods means they are worth more. You can buy bread from a factory, or buy a sour dough bread from a hipster with a college degree. Lack of automation is the whole point there.

What the lockdown last year showed quite convincingly is that a lot of white collar jobs are not really that essential and it doesn't matter that much if productivity there drops by few tens of a percent. The economy suffered a little but mostly that's because of reduced consumption and not of reduced production. And even that is hardly proportional to the productivity loss of masses of people suddenly no longer doing what they were supposed to be doing or doing a lot less of it. A lot of those people never got back to their former level of "productivity" and it continues to not matter economically. Their most important job is spending the money they earn. The labor performed earning that money is secondary.

It's a great argument for basic income: give people money and get them to spend it in order to boost the economy. It's a lot more effective than funneling it to the offshore accounts of the 1 per-centers. They hoard rather than spend their money.

And it frees people up to do something more valuable than stare at a cubicle wall doing something that absolutely and provably does not matter economically. Like bake bread, create art, or do something else that people might spend on.

Per your source, the "productivity-pay gap" largely explainable through increases in pay inequality while the change in labor's share of income is a much smaller factor (and it's worth mentioning EPI is probably overstating the size of the gap in the first place[1]).

As an alternative to your hypothesis, my guess is that workers in jobs amenable to automation are reaping huge increases in pay (e.g. engineers) while jobs that are more difficult to automate are falling behind.

> We already need to find ways to distribute the benefits of these efficiency improvements more equally.

I wholeheartedly agree. I propose we find ways to automate low productivity jobs so all workers can enjoy the associated benefits.

[1] https://fee.org/articles/the-myth-of-the-pay-productivity-ga...

[1] https://global.oup.com/academic/product/the-new-ruthless-eco...

The effect of productivity improvements on the real incomes of workers ultimately depend on how the change affects productivity of the marginal worker. You need to look at more than a single firm to figure this out. If the availability of spreadsheets makes clerical workers so much more productive that overall demand for their services increases more than four-fold (which might be definitely possible), the marginal spreadsheet-tweaking activity will be paid quite a lot, and workers' income will increase.

Mostly because automation isn’t making that person more valuable, it’s just removing it from that persons role. Skilled labor becomes unskilled labor. Supply goes way up. Clerks are a great example.

They used to do a lot for a store and had to know all the products. Now a clerk is just a last mile button presser. They don’t add much value at all. They’re not doing 4x the work. They’re doing 0.1x the work. Trying to say “but the value couldn’t be captured without that guy” is wishful thinking.

Not to detract from your overall point, which is absolutely correct, but having been a grocery clerk there's a slightly different phenomenon in play there. Having a clerk who knows the products well is a big help, but you really only need one available at a time. So rather than make acquiring that knowledge an actual part of the job, they rely on scale to have enough workers who learn it through their own initiative.

Which is bad for skilled labor (wrt. that set of skills) but good for unskilled labor.

That depends on how the extra profit is distributed, aka taxation and social welfare. Slaving away 40 hours a week on a bullshit job that can be trivially automated is not a benefit per se.

For some workers, that's a huge benefit. If they get ousted they have to find another degenerate position or work for a lower salary. Usually it's both.

At first I thought you were bringing these up to point out that the robots create other jobs, because robots don't just spring from the earth fully formed and ready to run forever. They require an army of engineers to build/operate/maintain them.

> We're always focused on the some day maybe robots, but automation has been changing society and (I'd argue) increasing inequality for decades

Inequality is a political problem. I'd rather we tackled that for what it is: bring on the fully automated luxury communism and free us from our mindless toil that can be trivially performed by mindless robots. We have nothing to lose but our drudgery.

Agreed on your second point. Attack the inequality, not the automation.

Yep agreed, but there's a key difference. Unlike most other jobs, your labor continues to provide the company profits even after you leave. I think that's why software engineers are typically paid a lot and are often paid with a stock option component.

> Inequality is a political problem. I'd rather we tackled that for what it is: bring on the fully automated luxury communism and free us from our mindless toil that can be trivially performed by mindless robots. We have nothing to lose but our drudgery.

I think we could already do this. Obviously many workers would still be required, but they could be much more fairly compensated. Someone else mentioned Graeber's Bullshit Jobs, we're already inventing jobs just to keep people busy and spending. As Adam Curtis said[1], "your real job is shopping".

[1] https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=1414301661936421

That's certainly the engineer's sales pitch, but let me introduce you to the engineer's fine print, tech debt.

Maybe in terms of pure job function, but anyone who's ever solved a problem at their job in a way that is still used when they leave has continued to provide the company profits.

F U L L Y is Star Trek years away, not next Wednesday.

Leninism (and it's descendants) have a totalitarian state system (socialist, including non-Leninist Marxist Communist, critics tend to call it “state capitalism”) that replaces private capitalism as a hack to avoid the requirement of developing proletarian class identity in a developed capitalist system present in OG Marxism.

That this turns into a dystopian nightmare that mirrors and even exaggerates the horrors of private capitalism and fails to actually bypass private capitalism is a surprise to no one but Leninists, least of all non-Leninist Communists.

With automation though I think that obsoletes a lot of those ideas. Now there's less and less connection between labor input and productivity output.

We need some new ideas for distributing the fruits of automation - that take into account the productivity improvements thanks to machines, computers and efficiency improvement in general. While at the same time keeping some incentives to make things even more efficient.

I think that can be done within our current system with taxes, socialising things like healthcare and access to food and healthcare (and perhaps something like UBI). No need to completely overhaul the political system, although we could be heading towards that too if things don't change.

He explicitly argued that this was what he believed would make communism possible.

So whatever else one thinks about Marx it's clear he did not think in terms of a fixed ratio.

The comparison of Lenin and Marx is also flawed - Marx argued for the dismantling of the state, not a highly centralised state.

In Critique of the Gotha Programme he even pointed to the US as a better model for education (arguing that government-set standards but devolution of control over the actual provision of education was something to aim for) than the SPDs proposed state run education because he disapproved of giving the state control over even that, arguing that it was rather the state which needed to be educated by the public.

And in his work on the Paris Commune he lamented that one of the biggest errors he believed the commune made was to not go further and smash the rest of the state. The focus on centralised planning in the Soviet Union was Stalinist, not even Leninist, and certainly has nothing to do with Marx.

[1] E.g.: "The bourgeoisie, during its rule of scarce one hundred years, has created more massive and more colossal productive forces than have all preceding generations together. Subjection of Nature’s forces to man, machinery, application of chemistry to industry and agriculture, steam-navigation, railways, electric telegraphs, clearing of whole continents for cultivation, canalisation of rivers, whole populations conjured out of the ground — what earlier century had even a presentiment that such productive forces slumbered in the lap of social labour?"

Marx still believed in some sort of state-level synchronisation or command and control - otherwise he knew that you would just have lots of little communes / barracks-communists inefficiently working at cross purposes, e.g. with resource utilisation. But he never spelled out in detail how the central planning function should work - it was in effect an implementation detail. It was in this space of undefined behaviour that Lenin, Stalin and Mao created the totalitarian states that they did.

I think a lot of people forget that there was no actual collaboration between Marx and Lenin and the others. Lenin was only 13 years old when Marx died, ill and in a city on the other side of Europe.

Although there is a mass of academic detail in Marx's works, the communist manifesto itself is very thin in terms of the remedies to the problems it identifies. The 'call to action' part of the manifesto is essentially ten short bullet points, one of which is 'etc etc'.

The core distinction between Marxists and many forms of Anarchists, as early as during the dispute in the First International between Bukharin and Marx, was their view not on the long term dismantling of the state - where they agreed - but the role of the state in the transition from capitalism to socialism, where the anarchists wanted the state dismantled immediately, while Marx argued the state could serve a role in a transition, itself becoming a tool to execute the changes necessary to change society.

In his works on the Paris Commune he explicitly criticised the Communards for failing to take the next step and destroy the bourgeois state. While that could certainly have been replaced with a proposed federation, a key distinction was that he celebrated the bottom up delegation of authority, which is hardly compatible with "command and control" if any part can withdraw.

As such, libertarian Marxism directly opposed to the very existence of a state became a thing, based in large part on his writings on the Paris Commune.

Well, I mean, people “forget” because equating Leninism with Marxism served the purposes of both Leninists and Western opponents of Marxism, so it became a common element of propaganda of both the USSR and other authoritarian communist regimes and the capitalist west.

_Lenin_ called it "state capitalism." That was the official policy of the USSR under Lenin. State capitalism.

(Did he really say just 6 months?? That doesn't sound right. But anyway it would have only been a prediction -- which failed.)

"Joseph Stalin abandoned the NEP in 1928 with the Great Break."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Economic_Policy

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Break_(USSR)

That's not what wikipedia says. I can't argue as I am no expert in such matters myself having read almost none of the primary material (but I did read "The Tax In Kind"... which I was assuming outlined the theory of the NEP).

Wikipedia on NEP:

Lenin considered the NEP as a strategic retreat from socialism. He believed it was capitalism, but justified it by insisting that it was a different type of capitalism, "state capitalism", the last stage of capitalism before socialism evolved.[15]

In a market economy competition will squeeze down those newfound profits. The owner of the company benefits, the employee benefits, and all the customers benefit.

  * Providing food
  * Providing shelter
  * Providing healthcare

That divide became a lot more clear in the past 2 years with the acknowledgement of "essential workers". Without Google, Facebook, or auto insurance, we'd be inconvenienced. Without essential workers society as we know it would collapse. And almost all of those workers are paid less than an entry level Facebook engineer.

So now the question is, are we already post-scarcity? And perhaps we don't know it only because it hasn't been distributed equally.

Thanks to industrialization, in the first and second world yes for basic food, clothing and shelter, as well as other mass-consumed products.

Things that remain (increasingly) scarce in my view - globally - are broadly educated people, political/economic/behavioral freedoms, unspoiled nature and the temporal wealth and whim to access it regularly.

https://i.redd.it/k51q3zw8hn981.jpg

It's complicated.

Greater efficiency is good, because it makes society "richer".

If that societal wealth increase doesn't go to the average person, then why should they care about efficiency?

The luddites didn't hate efficiency, or machines, they sabotaged the machines because that was one of the few ways they could hurt the interests of the people who were mistreating them. Specific machines were targetted because of who owned them, and the way they were treating workers.

For wider context this time the royal families of Europe were waging war to prevent democracy spreading. A great deal of this funding came from the UK, yet at the same time their poor people were rioting due to lack of food, and tax increases to fund the war. Folk songs at the time tell tales of people signing up to fight the French because the other option was starvation.

It's convenient that we remember these people as "silly folk who were scared of machines" rather than "downtrodden masses revolting against a cruel dictatorship waging war against democracy".

But in the long run, competition between businesses leads to at least a short term equilibrium, where automation and labour exploitation rates are roughly equal, or monopolization has occurred. And then rates of profits can plummet and then it's really bad all around.

The point here is that I don't think it's automation itself that creates the unequal distribution of incomes. It's just the market economy. The market economy creates automation in order to gain competitive advantage.

Curtailing automation isn't going to improve wealth inequality. Might even make it worse.

Equalization of wealth requires the intervention of the working population either through unionization or forcing the state to intervene.

You appear to be denying the progress made over the past 30 years by deep learning, ML frameworks, constraint solvers, and immense computing power.

Prolog has been around for 50 years. I suggest you look at what it can do.

Programming languages exist only for humans to specify and discuss intended computing behavior. There are plenty of goal-solving algorithms and heuristics already. Turing completeness is all that's necessary. "Flying car" programming languages are unnecessary because they offer no additional intrinsic power, only convenience of expressiveness that could be provided by libraries.

Self-programming and -designing systems, if left unconstrained, will develop their own IRs, design, and manufacturing specification protocols that would likely become rapidly incomprehensible. They won't need anthropocentric programming languages after several iterations because it would be an inefficiency. That's what the technological singularity will look like.

"It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it." - Upton Sinclair

Most of the progress in the last 30 years was immense computing power, almost all foundations for todays ML are revised old concepts. What you propose is AGI, how you want to achieve that? We don't even know where to start in theory, this is not my opinion but current top names in ML world[1], which was discusses on HN many times.

1. https://venturebeat.com/2018/12/17/geoffrey-hinton-and-demis...

As a programmer and someone who's earned a computer science degree, I'm going to say you're wrong for many reasons but I'll point out a couple here. First, the problem with modern programming is the problem that all computing has struggled with: how do you define meaning (semantics). We've resolved almost all the issues of representation of syntactic reasoning (the ability to encode and process symbols) but to tell a computer the general meaning of a program, its limits, its problem space, and even potential issues that it will need to form strategies to resolve are the realm of pure research right now. And have been for decades, it's why most research has been focusing on things like machine learning, genetic algorithms, and neural networks because these can be trained on a specific set of problems with the hopes that given sufficient time that we can augment this via hardware improvements (it's why you see Google touting android phones with neural network processors and the like). The problem still remains that we can't just do a TNG science scene where you speak out constraints to a computer and it generates tentative results on those constraints.

Second, we have another problem that still persists to this day: how to get firms to fund such research. In the past, the military industrial complex (which still does to an extent) and monopolies would fund such research to keep ahead but in this day it seems most folks aren't keen to fund what won't produce profit within a few quarters and as such most research has been pared down to limited scopes. I believe this is an issue due to how much pure research in the past seventy years has resulted in the majority of gains seen in the private sector. Thus, the private sector assumed all progress was natural and not inevitable build up from decades, even centuries, of hard work. And without that pure research being allowed to exist and even fail in its pursuits, we've put ourselves at odds with the intergenerational aspect of all scientific research. Meaning, we're most likely only be able to achieve such gains many centuries from now.

>That's what the technological singularity will look like.

There won't be any technological singularity because in the past we never had one. People who think this are fools like Ray Kurzweil. Anyone with an inkling on the subjects of anthropology will know better. The advances of the human species before recorded history were building on the small steps of pre-human ancestors. There wasn't a magic Eureka moment for us and never will be.

Regardless of how I order at a fast food joint, I have to see someone hand me food, and it is a bit dehumanizing if there is no line for me to walk in and use a machine instead of talk to them, especially when they hand me the food. (I’d definitely use a self-order if there was a line and saved time)

An app is different - there is a clear benefit to ordering ahead and having food ready. The only expected interaction is the pickup.

It's faster and more efficient ( mostly space-wise), for the restaurant and for customers.

I'm going to go out on a limb and guess you're living in the US, where I've heard there are some very weird ( for me) things expected from the service industry ( e.g. constant attention from a waiter in a restaurant, that the grocery store clerk will put your stuff in bags for you ( unless you're handicapped, what?!)), and that's probably what's driving a part of the reluctance you're seeing. Many people feel entitled to human service, above and beyond, and they feel that such jobs are beneath them ( "burger flipping"), hence their reluctance to do it themselves.

Your comment is a bit rude.

One reason I personally refuse to use these screens or the self-checkout line is to make sure the people working these jobs will still have a job...

> constant attention from a waiter in a restaurant

After being ignored in french restaurants (please, someone, anyone, give me water! please!!), I can only love and praise the professionalism of our waiters!

> some very weird ( for me) things expected

It's called good service. Something I was really not expecting in Europe, and something that, as expected, was not delivered :)

There were "fully automated" restaurants (obviously more of a mechanical turk type operation) well over a hundred years ago. Doesn't seem like they've caught on yet.

[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2018/11/29/mcdonalds-touchscreen-kiosks...

Thanks to the likes of the Economist.

Their story on how copilot will make programmers redundant exemplified the way they framed automation - as an answer to their executive readership's prayers - a deus ex machina that will let them fire half of their employees while maintaining their margins.

To be fair, there is a litany of trashy economics studies thumping the same drum. E.g. there was a famous one from Ball State U that mathematically conflated automation and outsourcing to prove that the robots already took over and one from Harvard, I think, that measured job automatability through surveys about how "creative" workers thought their jobs were.

>... a solid microeconomic foundation. ...more profitable and thus expand, leading to a hiring spree. Technology might also allow firms to move into new areas, or to focus on products and services that are more labour-intensive.

In my time spent studying economics, this is the sort of thing that micro-economists say all the time and it is not true.

The untrue bit is "solid foundation". It is post hock story told to give a quasi theoretical basis for an observation. The article, bless them, acknowledges separating causation and correlation is tricky.

Solid foundation, pfft!

At the same time, automation sometimes produces other results. Not many executives in medium sized companies have secretaries, rather the type their own messages, on a phone.

I also believe there's "safe" sectors where this is unlikely to ever happen. Good luck making a robot plumber. By the time you solve that, you've solved everything and we're entirely obsolete.

Package delivery, cash registry, retail jobs...there's plenty of high employment sectors at danger. And perhaps many office jobs are at even more danger.

One idea is that "as always" we simply move on to "higher order" work. This is nonsense. We don't need billions of AI programmers, it would be really crappy AI if that was the case. Nor is it realistic that everybody can do such a demanding job. We're talking about billions of relatively lowly educated workers here.

Another idea is UBI, or even better...post scarcity. For the optimists, I guess.

I expect that neither will happen, instead we're already experiencing the solution. You just inject trillions of stimulation money into the economy, which creates (artificial) demand, hence allowing for jobs that otherwise might not exist.

Right now, somebody is inventing potato chips flavor #31,122. Nobody asked for it, the world doesn't need it, and I hope we can agree that it's unimportant. But somebody invents it anyway, somebody designs the packaging, and somebody ships it. You buy it, and might just like it.

All these activities aren't really demand or need driven, they're more like "because we can" jobs. Our world is largely supply and marketing driven, not demand driven from the bottom up. Fluff and endless meaningless luxuries. When I walk through a mall I wonder...do people really buy all this garbage?

Put harshly, you can call all of this bullshit jobs. Keeping each other busy. And that's what we'll continue to do no matter the state of technology. It's just a few dials in the financial system.

Have you never wondered why everybody deeply cares that one has a job (at any and all costs) yet there's never any serious inquiry about the point of the job? Nobody cares if you have a meaningless job, the point is that you have a job. Any job. This reality gives away how the system works.

Great way to put it. I've felt this way for awhile.

Advertising, for example, is low-hanging fruit in the world of useless things, but it's so embedded in US culture that efforts to displace it are stopped at the door.

Importantly, I was super happy. There existed already lots of stuff, but I was mostly ignorant about it. To me this has been a key insight. Apparently, I can have limited stuff and be just fine and happy, but as soon as you're exposed to new options, advertising as you say, trouble arises.

Two decades later, I learned that at least 4 years of that decade consisted of a truly deep economic crisis. Really? I had no idea. Couldn't tell. I find that hilarious to reflect on.

Things are a whole lot more complicated now. Not only are we bombarded with stuff, it's also a social effect. Even if you manage to be an anti-consumer, you still may have a wife/husband, and you can't deny your kids the stuff their peers have.

But still I try. I have stuff but when it comes to durable goods, I try to buy what I call "forever" stuff. My furniture will attend my funeral. Actually, it's such heavy oak that nobody can move it, so there's that.

My TV is 17 years old and delivers a perfect picture at my viewing distance. My friends laugh at me for not replacing it, but I'm not the mad man. They are. The picture is fine and I engage with what I'm viewing.

I actually had a time capsule moment. I buy very little, and the little I buy, I do online. So it had been a decade since I visited a mall. Just like young me, I was largely ignorant of what was out there.

Unsuspecting I enter a home decoration shop. My mind was blown. Endless shelfs of garbage where for most items I feel sorry for the person needing to produce this. Angry about the misuse of resources in a world with so many issues. And disdain for the clueless people buying these absolutely meaningless products that have zero utility or quality.

I went on to visit a BBQ shop. Apparently it's a science now, you can buy about 17 trillion accessories just to show others how very advanced you are at grilling meat.

This isn't wealth. It's a pathetic fetishization of meaningless objects. None that make you happy, it's always about the next one. Until you have so many that you can't even keep track of it anymore.

People sit in bullshit jobs so that they can afford garbage made by other people in bullshit jobs. Our economy is about keeping this circle going, regardless of meaning or happiness.

Stop buying garbage. Cook a fresh meal and enjoy it with your family. Then go for a walk in the forest regardless of the weather and leave your silly devices at home. Take it slow, make time for friends, stop ignoring your pet and read a good book.

That's happiness. It worked in the 80s, it works now.

I'm much younger than you, so advertising really caught me in the ear with catchy jingles that rang through the playground.

With online advertising it's become a different playground. It's nearly impossible to find reputable products among the ocean of meaningless one-dimensional rating systems, virality speculation, and cloaked endorsements to name a few symptoms.

My only solution is the tried and true word of mouth.

I can point to maybe 5 personal items, all of which I could do without, that I discovered on my own, and I will stand by as my solid oaks.

As a rule, if I see an ad for your product, the only signal I get is that you have enough bankroll to get eyes on. I immediately distrust advertisements because desperation in market emergence or social manipulation is never an indicator of quality.

> Cook a fresh meal

Just made 5 servings of chicken curry tonight for about $10 ;) cheers.

> a recent paper ... put forward a “new view” of robots, saying that “the direct effect of automation may be to increase employment at the firm level, not to reduce it.”

"At the firm level" is quite the caveat! If a company can produce two widgets per worker instead of one by adding robots, it'll succeed and grow as a result - at the expense of its competitors. But if every widget maker adds those robots, and there's no more demand for widgets than before, a lot of factory staff will be out of work.

They touch on a related point near the end:

> Mr Aghion and his colleagues add that even if automation boosts employment at the level of the firm or industry, the effect across the economy as a whole is less clear. In theory robot-adopting companies could be so successful that they drive competitors out of business, reducing the total number of available jobs.

...but it seems to me like a major problem with the whole framing of the article, not just a "by the way".

Generic industrial automation solutions are still very expensive to integrate unless simplistic. Furthermore, if you automate one unit operation, the rest of your process line also needs automating or the adjacent operations will simply become the new choke points.

[1] https://harpers.org/archive/1932/10/in-praise-of-idleness/

It'd only be good if it came together with other social changes. So long as profit-seeking owners control employment, they will certainly not share the benefits of productivity improvements equitably. They'll cast some workers off to unemployment and pocket their wages, and the rest will be continued to be worked as hard as they are able.

"Why did Keynes’ promised utopia – still being eagerly awaited in the ‘60s – never materialise? The standard line today is that he didn’t figure in the massive increase in consumerism. Given the choice between less hours and more toys and pleasures, we’ve collectively chosen the latter. This presents a nice morality tale, but even a moment’s reflection shows it can’t really be true."

"But rather than allowing a massive reduction of working hours to free the world’s population to pursue their own projects, pleasures, visions, and ideas, we have seen the ballooning not even so much of the “service” sector as of the administrative sector, up to and including the creation of whole new industries like financial services or telemarketing, or the unprecedented expansion of sectors like corporate law, academic and health administration, human resources, and public relations. And these numbers do not even reflect on all those people whose job is to provide administrative, technical, or security support for these industries, or for that matter the whole host of ancillary industries (dog-washers, all-night pizza deliverymen) that only exist because everyone else is spending so much of their time working in all the other ones."

"These are what I propose to call “bullshit jobs.”"

and goes on to come to the following conclusion: "Clearly, the system was never consciously designed. It emerged from almost a century of trial and error. But it is the only explanation for why, despite our technological capacities, we are not all working 3-4 hour days."

Having just done Fritjof Capra's Systems View of Life course, channeling the ideas that:

a) "Nothing in Biology Makes Sense Except in the Light of Evolution" [2]

and

b) "All behaviour in complex systems is emergent"

A (vastly simplified) argument is that bullshit jobs is the emergent behaviour from a system compromising between the needs of:

a) People to work so they can earn money, be fulfilled and see a material increase in their wealth.

b) A political class keen to keep the workers busy less they revolt and upset the system.

c) A system of economics/a reductionist western/scientific worldview that increasingly externalised anything that didn't show everyone was better off (e.g. GDP).

d) Elites who were increasingly happy to take an increasing proportion of the wealth from the efficiency gains.

Everyone wins in relation to the amount of power they have relative to everyone else and the system sustains itself based on the fact no-one with enough power has enough incentive/will to overthrow it. Obviously the planet (which once indigenous peoples had been conquered) mostly lost it's voice in the conversation and so that's why we're where we are now.

[1] https://evonomics.com/why-capitalism-creates-pointless-jobs-...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theodosius_Dobzhansky

Home ownership is a way to keep people busy fixing the house, working or risk losing a basic need, and living at the edge of their means. Also invested in their own property and less willing to riot and revolt. Don’t get me wrong - I like my home a lot, but the cost is not much less expensive than rent after all the other associated expenses.

There are problems with land ownership but to me they seem related to inequality rather than anything else.

The cost is the same, but benefits include not just living space, but also equity. You can't sell a rental.

"No man who owns his own house and lot can be a communist. He has too much to do." - William Levitt

This "gloomy narrative" first and foremost served well for decades to depress wages and wage expectations and ensure a considerable supply of cheap labor exists.

The political argument was even spoken out quite freely from time to time, and it went like "well, if you [politicians] don't ensure labor is cheap, we [rich corporate owners] will simply automate away all the jobs and your voters will be left unemployed". The narrative of this development seemingly being "inevitable" and the necessary tech always being "just around the corner" for the automation of practically everything played so well into this, that it leads me to assume that interested circles knowingly pushed this narrative for exactly these political reasons. And a lot of technologists helped hugely in this push, often not because of political or economical gains (though quite some probably own tech stocks or work in the tech sector and thus stand to benefit potentially, but I also know tech enthusiasts for which these both don't apply) but because of tech fascination.

The truth however is that automation is a hard and costly business with clear limitations, and even many simple jobs are probably not automatable for decades to come. Automation often just helps to make certain jobs more efficient, but the efficiency gain is immediately being consumed by extensions in service and/or complexity that would not have been possible before, but leave us with a net zero in the change for the need for human employees (or even an increase!). But that did not stop the automation zealots from pushing their political agenda, because it's just too helpful in ensuring that most of the monetary value of the efficiency gains ends up with them and their shareholders instead of the human workforce.

So the newest paragraph in the book is "AI will automate away even all the complicated, brainy work!" and a surprising number of otherwise smart people fall for the same trap that has already been successfully used to "manage" the lower-paid untrained workforce for decades.

1: https://archive.md/L6TDA

It's also possible to stop being eligible for assistance, so they stop counting you as unemployed.

The point is, the unemployment rates rides a lot. Which is why politicians love it so.

But it's still helpful as a directional metric. If the U-3 unemployment rate goes up, it's likely the number of people in the other situations you mentioned has gone up as well.

For example, and we hear similar all the time, "...X jobs were created in the quarter and the unemployment rate fell to Y..."

But

1) What were those X jobs? Min wage (or less)? Or high paying?

2) Where were these jobs? Min wage in CA or NJ, or min wage where costs are less.

The quantity (i.e., direction) doesn't tell enough, we need quality - at least - as well.

Politicians love it as a metric because no one asks "what type of jobs? How well do they pay?" And that alone makes it suspect.

I could tell you my weight, and it wouldn't tell you if I'm a smoker or a drunk, if I eat my veggies or exercise. But if I'm 400 pounds you can still reasonably predict I'm unhealthy, and if I lose weight from there that's a decent sign I'm getting better.

This is up there with presenting Wall Street IS the economy (for the rest of us).

How do we hold people accountable when we allow their bullshit to be accepted and normalized?

The conventional wisdom from most economists (defined as professors of Econ at major Universities) is the opposite, that automation leads to more jobs. This article is based on a strawman.

Almost every job has to deal with the inconsistencies and constructs of society (including law, morality, history and creativity) while also navigating the decisions constrained by the physical world (perception, physics). This is more than any machine, ever, has managed. I'm just thinking about food service, crossing guard and roofing, which isn't even a statistical blip.

This phenomenon is obvious with e.g. grocery store checkout machines. For every 5-10 machines, there needs to be one person to confirm I'm old enough to buy alcohol, or assure the machine I'm not stealing when I bag my onions in a way it doesn't recognize.

+ Scales (bagging vs PoS) don't match

+ Temporary ID

The list goes on. There are lots of exceptions that can happen and those are trivial for a human and impossible for an AI.

We should not be optimising the number of jobs but the total output of society, while maintaining an equitable distribution of the said outputs. It may be the case that automation permanently makes some classes of workers unemployed, but with the increased benefits from automation we should still be more than capable of providing for them.

Well, if they are not having an income stream then they very well are not having their needs met given that engagement with the economic system for the delivery of needs has as a prerequisite that the individual or entity have a baseline level of monetary spending ability

There are two types of economists:

The ones that say what rich people want to hear, and the other ones that no one puts attention to

The result of this huge wave of automation was not profit for agricultural companies and farms. The average operating margin for farms is 11%. What else happened? The resulting plummeting food prices lifted billions out of poverty, to the point where extreme poverty is at the lowest level ever.

It's a little bit hard to see backroom fat cats with cigars behind this movement when automation has only ever brought massive benefits to society, including when 90% of the population worked in a vulnerable industry.

Your mistake is believing that humans have a fixed set of jobs and when jobs are removed from the job pool that the pool shrinks. In reality, the size of the pool is increasing while some jobs within the pool reduce in size and scope. From my perspective, it's also hard to see how automating back-breaking laborious jobs like cleaning, burger flipping or fruit picking is a bad thing. These jobs ruin your body. Ever see a manual laborer who was over 50 and didn't have at least one body ailment?

Actual automation is a comparison between workers, who are infinitely flexible, know their jobs better than their bosses, and are responsible for taking care of themselves, - and machines, which are morons that break down and require expensive workers to fix. Workers are better the vast majority of the time, and when we can get a machine to be cost-effective against them it's a good thing. It is just a rare, difficult thing.

I take it you've never stepped inside a modern factory?

Random example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ssZ_8cqfBlE

For sure what I have personally seen is backed by this article in that automation has not resulted on job losses.

It has however resulted in task losses - meaning tasks that humans would do are being done done by software autonomously - this has freed up time and the theory is this time is then deployed to more valuable tasks.

In my mind the jury is out how this is really working out but if the gain is shift from work -> leisure time without impact on growth then I also see that as a win but as we know the distribution of these gains is far from even across society which is a growing problem.

Of course those jobs are created, but many more jobs were destroyed in the process.

Not to mention education cannot make engineers out of thin air, it requires a lot of resources to educate people.

And for those who don't get educated, it's a net loss since the gains of productivity are not shared.

That is what Antiwork is about: there's enough shelter and food for everyone, so work can't be mandatory. What's the point of working in fast food or taxi driver as a permanent job?

The robots don't just create jobs for robot engineers. Entire new industries are built on their backs.

Look at the printing press. Did it destroy jobs hand copying books? Yes. Do we now have publishers, journalists, authors, distributors, illustrators, etc.? Also yes.

We sure do. When you obsolete labour, you free people up to do other things. However, I question how true this will be with the AI revolution.

The printing press is an example of mechanical automation which does not extend into either human creativity (content of writing) or other mechanical processes. It merely provides a means of making multiple copies and passing them along.

The printing press among others inventions from the industrial revolution are a false equivalence to the coming AI. AI with the ability to perform physical and mental tasks along with internet-like connectivity and an ability to learn will completely obsolete all work. If not immediately, that is the only foreseeable long-term outcome.

AI is not a printing press. It is a way to invent and apply the equivalent of a printing press to all existing and emerging labour markets in an exponential way. Very dangerous when you realize its impacts are not bounded like the industrial revolution. This is an existential threat that comments like yours waive away too easily.

I don't really see how you could possibly make this argument. When the printing press was invented people didn't know what would come of it... Do you know everything that will be possible with AI?

If AI makes programming obsolete, now everyone can create software that does cool things that people want. This would undoubtedly open up a plethora of new employment options.

My issue is more like "we and our F500 users are asking for more GPUs than azure can supply", vs job loss and stagnation.

Automation is the main cause of a 20 times growth in inflation-adjusted wages since 1820. Per capita GDP growth is mostly just labor saving innovation, which is primarily automation, and secondarily greater coordination, like division of labor and specialization, and that is mostly through trade.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30067249

This is a good argument as long as machine learning doesn't get too good. Unfortunately, improvements in ML are accelerating, so we'll see if that holds up.