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Future vacuum cleaners won't have a filter to clean. Modern fire alarms don't have batteries. You won't need to know how to change a light bulb because there will be no lightbulbs.

Everything is going to end up completely over-mechanized and over-robotized, but once people have gotten used to that, they never go back. The person who never learned to chop veggies and cook soup, won't retire at 65 and learn to chop veggies and cook soup. His brain will have completely atrophied, by then. He will be living off of factory-made pudding.

That's why people like me look smarter and smarter and have a higher and higher productivity advantage: we learned to do everything manually, so we get how things work, and we don't have to waste money on unnecessary machines, and we are better about using the machines available and maximizing their capacity. We didn't change; everyone else did.

Laeserin 7mo ago

I mean, think about the dishwasher, the washing machine, and the vacuum cleaner. Did they bring significant human productivity gains?

Nope. We just bought more dishes, more clothes, and bigger houses. And then we went to work to buy more highly-automated versions of them, and to purchase even more dishes, clothes, and house. The same type of work is being done, in the amount necessary for one household (and there are fewer people and more things and floor space in the household). Is the shifted labor more productive? Probably not, as it took women out of the home and collapsed the birth rate, and human production is the most-useful production.

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Discussion

Low Information Voter 7mo ago

I think they did bring productivity gains.

Many countries in Asia, even the middleclasses don't own washing machines because domestic staff are so cheap. Such a waste of human potential.

I would argue that we did become more productive and affluent, but social status is relative and that's what people thought they were buying and were thus disappointed.

That is getting worse, not better, and I don't have a solution. Culture is upstream of both politics and economics...

Laeserin 7mo ago

We simply have more and niftier versions of each thing, per person. This is greater affluence, but largely through redundancy. There used to be a house phone, a house TV, a house dishwasher, etc. and everyone shared it. Those things brought productivity gains. But then they incentivized people to purchase one of each and then to move to separate houses, and the gains reversed.

Why does my family have savings, unlike most Germans? None of us ever divorced and the kids stay at home until they are married, and we share cars and kitchens and bathrooms, and there is only one TV and one grill and one big freezer. We just buy fewer things because we share things, and save the difference, because employers pay us the wages that people who need to Buy All The Things require to subsist, but we don't require those things.

Low Information Voter 7mo ago

Your family has a dissident culture, and dissident attitudes to social status.

Don't change! 💖

Laeserin 7mo ago

Also, the mechanization took away specialization. There used to be one woman washing the dishes for 6 people, or so. She eventually got highly efficient at it. Now, there are 7 people, all in a different home, washing their own dishes.

And all of them need a dishwasher and a sink and dishes. So, you need 7 dishwashers and 7 sinks and 7 sets of dishes and 7 humans. Where you used to need 1 of each. So, the economic growth came from selling all of that excess stuff. But now, those things exist and the number of humans are declining. The factories keep pumping out the dishwashers, and they just sit around in the warehouse and eventually get written-off and crushed... and turned into more dishwashers. LOL

Low Information Voter 7mo ago

All true re specialisation.

But the global population is still rising, its just that purchasing power is less and less evenly distributed, because governments are redistributing more and more and distorting markets to breaking point.

Automation is neither the problem nor the solution...

Laeserin 7mo ago

Yes, but it's rising in an age where mechanization is on steroids. You can watch the Chinese producers struggle with their highly-efficient factories, to produce smaller numbers of products. It isn't possible. They have to flood the market with produce and destroy their own price point, or just throw half of the production into the furnace.

Same with German cars. Producing all of these cars for fewer and fewer drivers because the world population is still rising, but fewer of them are young or have families. Even building smaller cars won't solve the problem of the lack of drivers. So, it's less about the size of the population and more about the age-distribution through the populace. That's why the growth will suddenly reverse, when the oldest generation dies off en mass.

PAɃLO 7mo ago

Back in the 1700s, ruthless algorithms had a different name. They called them Rationalism—and the whole Western world was under the sway of the Age of Reason. But like today’s algorithms, the new systems of the Rationalists attempted to replace human wisdom and experience with intrusive and inflexible operating rules.

It didn’t work.

“This rationalistic philosophy, which had been expected to solve all the problems, had failed to rescue society from either despotism and poverty,” explains Edmund Wilson in his masterful study To the Finland Station.

“The mechanical inventions of which it had been expected that they would vastly improve the lot of humanity were obviously making many people miserable,”

Ted Gioia > https://open.substack.com/pub/tedgioia/p/we-really-are-entering-a-new-age

Lucas M 7mo ago

Yes, but only for a time (next two decades, is my guess). With the boomers continuing to die out, automation settling in, and the purchasing power of fiat currencies declining 2-3% on an annual basis, future generations won't be able to afford to raise a kid or support a family; hell, more and more people aren't even able to make rent or mortgage payments.

Also, it isn't just about liquidity redistribution. Newly printed money (or digital monetary issuance) misallocated into unproductive goods and services and nations' black budgets have severely crippled our ability to determine accurate foreign exchange rates. In short, it's all bullshit. They feed us only half the info, in hopes that we'll turn a blind eye to everything going on behind the curtain.