Standing in the same bread line creates an awful lot of solidarity.
Some people might argue that wealth concentrated in the top 1% is a net benefit if you look at it as one big pool of resources. But will the remaining 99% actually see any of that benefit? Or will the 1% simply tighten their grip, keeping the rest dependent on their “generosity”?
Also the regular yada yada that non-robot automation offset people, non-automated tools also reduce number of people needed.
You can tell what the Wall Street Journal's true feelings are about automation by reading an article about retirement and dividing the number of times they use the term "AI" by the number of times they use the phrase "demographic/retirement crisis" e.g. in https://www.wsj.com/finance/investing/blackrock-larry-fink-a...
Robot is a term with such a wide range of capabilities that a simple count is meaningless. Just like a tiny 4 bit micro that monitors a single sensor isn't comparable to a computer running a large LLM.
However what would be interesting is if they ever have a situation where the number of humanoid robot employees outnumbers human employees. Once someone is able to run an entire large corporation with no humans at all it will be a big milestone I guess.
But there's no real driving force for this to happen, because the humanoid form factor is not necessarily ideal for most kinds of industrial applications. And a lot of the "Automation" will be AI Agents, which have no form factor at all, being purely knowledge based.
What’s that you say? People with nothing left to lose tend to put the heads of Capitalists on pikes for all to see? Well maybe you should have thought of that before pillaging the commons and treating people like slaves? But “fiduciary duty to shareholder value” you say? You made that shit up in the 1950s and have been pushing it like it were true ever since. Saying a thing doesn’t make it true.
> The number of packages that Amazon ships itself per employee each year has also steadily increased since at least 2015 to about 3,870 from about 175...
But shipping about 0.5 packages per employee per day is not impressive to start...
It's no wonder Amazon didn't make money for a very long time.
I'm also under the impression that most of the Amazon delivery drivers are contractors, and wouldn't count in "per employee" metrics.
malfist•7mo ago
He has no vision beyond what is best for him personally. Other people aren't humans.
isoprophlex•7mo ago
IAmBroom•7mo ago
Case 1: I drive to the store to get a widget. There is a low chance Store-1 doesn't have it, and I have to keep shopping. Regardless, I am driving about 30 minutes total, conservatively.
Case 2: I order a widget from Amazon. The Amazon driver organizes their stops to minimize travel time, and it's undoubtedly less than 30 minutes driving from the previous stop.
Both cases require transport of goods from factory to the final storage location (shopfront or Amazon warehouse), so the difference there is negligible.
david-gpu•7mo ago
scarface_74•7mo ago
david-gpu•7mo ago
scarface_74•7mo ago
92% of the people in the US have access to at least one vehicle
https://www.fool.com/money/research/car-ownership-statistics...
And this is worldwide
https://www.visualcapitalist.com/vehicles-per-capita-by-coun...
The average driver in the US drives 40 miles per day
https://www.kbb.com/car-advice/average-miles-driven-per-year...
No most people don’t walk to the store
david-gpu•7mo ago
scarface_74•7mo ago
I literally just got back from a trip to London and Paris a couple of weeks ago.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44412439
Let’s just say I’m Platinum Medallion on Delta (also from racking up miles on partner airlines Virgin Atlantic and Air France) , for 3 years in a row…
Are you trying to really say that cars aren’t popular outside of the US?
Did I miss the statistic you cited where most people in first world countries walk and ride bikes every where?
sroussey•7mo ago
I’m from LA so every European city seems wild with tons of people walking (and biking in places like Amsterdam and Barcelona).
That said, I live in West Hollywood so I actually walk to the grocery stores, restaurants, services, gyms etc except when it’s too hot or too rainy (not that it rains much)
scarface_74•7mo ago
Yes I see many more people riding bikes and walking in London where I just left in June than DC when we went in May. But going to the big urban areas doesn’t tell you about the rest of the country. For instance in the UK it’s 603 cars per 1000 people.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_and_territ....
And yeah I chose a place where I can go to the gym, a convenience store, and a bar without ever walking outside. But I’m not going to say that’s common like the person I replied to seems to think.
ben_w•7mo ago
I'm in Berlin, so I'm a 25 minutes walk from three supermarkets a bike shop and a pharmacy, despite being in one of the remote corners of the city. Our previous place was much more central so it had a dozen or so supermarkets, a building supply store, and a shopping mall in that distance. Both new and old place have excellent public transport, I have literally seen someone transport a kitchen sink on one of the trams.
david-gpu•7mo ago
The sort of extreme car-centric urbanism often seen in the US is the exception around the world, not the norm.
MangoToupe•7mo ago
cynicalsecurity•7mo ago
Capitalism might not be perfect, but communism did not function at all. You can have the best of both worlds in socio-capitalist system.
Let Amazon automate everything. Does anyone here really want to do the manual labour in their warehouses?
MangoToupe•7mo ago
malfist•7mo ago
It would be interesting to quantify the carbon emissions from those two systems (they're not fully independent variable) I wouldn't be surprised if my intuition is wrong. Or yours
dfxm12•7mo ago
rybosworld•7mo ago
I think there's a non-zero chance of 95% unemployment within the next 20 years.
diggan•7mo ago
With that said, there is probably also a non-zero chance that something like that wouldn't be negative but something positive instead. I suppose that'd be the ideal scenario.
hshdhdhj4444•7mo ago
This is being accelerated by the bill passed the senate literally today.
Is there any reason to believe we will drastically reverse the trend?
Kon5ole•7mo ago
I do agree that wealth is not distributed particularly fairly but I don't understand the idea that it's mostly going to a select few. There are almost 20 million more jobs in the US now than there were 20 years ago, that's a lot of productivity right there.
Amazon employs 1.4 million people. Bezos has spent maybe the equivalent to a couple of weeks worth of Amazon payroll so far in his life. His yacht was the equivalent of a few days, his wedding maybe one hour. That money didn't come from Amazon either, it came from people wanting to own Amazon.
Leaving aside whether that's fair or not, surely it means that most of the productivity and money is going to the employees?
What am I missing here? How was this better before, what has changed recently that makes this such a big talking point now?
RichEO•7mo ago
Kon5ole•7mo ago
Many people seem convinced that the problems in society are caused by billionaires hoarding money, when they clearly aren't hoarding any relevant amounts of money. The problems with housing, healthcare and such are very obviously caused by other things (Home mortgages being a huge cornerstone of the entire economy for one, millions are placed in a situation where cheaper housing would be a catastrophe - including banks).
Maybe our parents, who were able to buy a house for like 5 years of a worker's salary, were just the luckiest generation? It sure hasn't been that easy to get a home before or after at any time in history.
Right now is one of the runner ups though, but we're comparing the situation with the best ever.
joquarky•7mo ago
There are 40 million more people in the USA than 20 years ago.
Kon5ole•7mo ago
Makes sense, 20 million more workers should mean about 40 million more people in total, accounting for children and elderly.
danjc•7mo ago
Henchman21•7mo ago
MangoToupe•7mo ago
I can't imagine this would last long with the social instability that would follow.
That also seems like a gross overestimate for many industries. Many supply chains are nowhere near able to be automated to the extent this ratio would imply.
ben_w•7mo ago
20 years ago, the state of the art in AI was so bad that it predates reCAPTCHA being a functional business model for how to get labelled training data for an OCR to read scans of books. In cars, the DARPA Grand Challenge (2004) had no cars able to complete the route, and the winner only got 11.78 km (of 240 km) before getting stuck, and the subsequent Grand Challenge had yet to happen because that was October 8, 2005.
I can't sensibly forecast past 2032, because that's when various things currently under exponential growth reach absolute levels that I think suggest the exponential assumption may stop working. But also, I don't expect wild AI-induced economic disruption* before then, because one of those exponential growths is renewable energy getting to near-parity with current global electricity supply by about then, and the fact that the current global electricity supply is "only" 250 watts/capita, which means** there's just not enough electricity to run enough computers to disrupt that many jobs.
But if the question is "when will the AI be good enough to do ${task}?", rather than "how fast can we deploy the AI when this happens?", I have seen both (1) people claim we're decades away from AI doing things mere months before AI did those things, and also (2) Musk repeatedly saying FSD is 0.5-2 years away every year for the last decade, and when he finally soft-launched his robotaxi it was 6.5 years behind Waymo's.
* by which I mean international >20% unemployment that's not just due to a war or a global financial crisis or a pandemic
** absent algorithmic breakthroughs; I don't expect enough of those to matter, but I do expect some. I am also accounting for computers getting more energy efficient, because that's still happening and we're a long way from the theoretical limits.
HardCodedBias•7mo ago
I had the privilege of working with him for a little over a year.
He was respectful, analytical, and only thought about what is best for Amazon and Amazon's customers.
I don't think his own aggrandizement or what's best for him enters into the calculus of his day-to-day work one itoa.
He's an untiring as well. I realized I had gone far beyond my peter principle when I was working with him.
malfist•7mo ago
He's a robber baron, not a captain of industry.
Don't have to look much past his "gobble gobble" email to see that, nor his announcement of RTO the day after an all hands where remote work was touted as the future.
HardCodedBias•7mo ago
At least he walks the walk. He was in the office 100% of the time.
malfist•7mo ago
exolymph•7mo ago
Arguably these are synonyms :P