Henry Ford famously wanted his workers to be able to afford his cars. When Bezos replaces everyone with robots, who will be left to buy his junk?
replies(18):
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.
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.
Casinos provide free drinks, cartels offer free prostitutes, it's not unprecedented.
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.
Because people will spend money. The premise here is no-one has money, but somehow adverts exist.
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.
All those jobs in Detroit that went away were replaced by…? As best I can tell they were replaced by poverty and crime.
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.)
See: Dodge vs Ford
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.
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...
The Dodge brothers were major investors in Ford Motor Company, and thus entitled to a large share of dividends. Henry Ford tried to bankrupt the Dodge Motor Company by avoiding to pay FoMoCo dividends and thus starve his competitor of cash. The fact that the mechanism Ford used to make his own company unprofitable (and thus avoid paying dividends) also benefited the workers is just coincidence.
In fact the reason we have the modern precedent "companies must operate for the benefit of shareholders" is precisely because Henry Ford's defense in Dodge v. Ford was "I can do this because I want to and I am king". If he had argued "paying workers more makes them happier and thus makes Ford more profitable in the long term", Ford probably would have won that lawsuit. He didn't make that argument because it just wasn't on his radar: His goal was screwing Dodge.
It's a bit more nuanced than that. The court held that company directors have to be acting for the benefit of shareholders. They still have wide latitude about how to do that.
The reason Ford lost is because his legal position was essentially "I am king, therefore I can do whatever I want". But you can't do whatever you want. You can't lock the workers in the factory and burn it down with them inside, for example. You need to have some kind of colorable argument that what you are doing is somehow in the interest of shareholders (either long or short term).
The problem for Ford was that he couldn't articulate any reason for how his actions were beneficial to shareholders (probably because the real reason, killing the Dodge Brothers Company, would have been illegal under the antitrust laws of the time).
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.
So the easy solution is just to pay a lot and threaten to fire (and possibly blacklist) anyone who no-shows. Since the pay is much higher than they can get elsewhere, the people are much more likely to show up.
The high pay probably also helped find people who would tolerate the extremely intrusive practices of Ford's "morality police" (my term), who would inspect worker's homes to ensure they were living "the right way".
Inflation-adjusted wages are at all time highs in the middle.
Inflation-adjusted wages are at all time highs at the bottom.
https://data.epi.org/wages/hourly_wage_percentiles/line/year...
https://data.epi.org/wages/hourly_wage_percentiles/line/year...
It's more an example of how racism and reliance on singular industry can quickly create pits that are largely insurmountable. Similar cases can be found in coal country in Appalachia. The lesson isn't to prop up local industry to maintain job and economic stability. The lesson is to stage out disruption. ILA recently took this on with automation in shipping. The goal isn't to prevent automation but to not give companies a blank check to mass fire workers and replace them with automation.
But there's a very, very big difference between "automate dumb task with unimpressive efficiency that beats humans because humans have to pee, eat and sleep", and AI supplanting humans in society.
Robots isn't an important step in that path tbh. Intelligence is, and we still aren't close, even when throwing entire hyperscale datacenters at the problem...
[citation needed]
We've been at it for more than a century now and it seems to be working pretty well for nearly everyone!
Our goal is not to preserve jobs. Our goal is to be more productive for fewer resources.
Jobs in Detroit went away - but so did the people, who found new jobs in other cities. There has been no lasting unemployment from automation, ever.
Human beings are good for more than pulling levers and carrying heavy objects and we do each other a disservice by pretending otherwise.
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.
Do you have some citations? There’s absolutely no indication they “found new jobs in other cities” but there is plenty of proof they just never found another well paying job and moved into welfare or became homeless.
That would not be the case if they "moved into welfare" or became homeless.
You seem to have the idea that welfare systems in US cities can handle 40% of the city becoming jobless. I assure you this is not the case.
Unless you're trying to convince me that several hundred thousand people just died, they very obviously moved out.
I can't prove that Detroiters specifically all found better paying jobs, but there is ample evidence online that shows that the real factor crushing the middle class is the sheer number of Americans being catapulted upwards.
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.
Automation helps reduce product costs and improves standard-of-living, and sort of then directly boosts investments/jobs in other sectors.
Most cutting edge technologies like advanced rocketry are not requirements for a century- to millenium-scale survival at all-around medieval technology level.
Done. I doubt Henry Ford had trouble coming up with a fig leaf explanation if that’s all that was truly needed.