Rideshare services - Uber, Lyft, Hailo, etc.

i used to have the smug attitude towards "libertarian bros" and "technology" that you guys have. while it's good to be critical of everything, i don't think it's a particularly healthy bias in thinking about the future & work and all this stuff.

I am occasionally surrounded by hordes of these people and they are the worst fucking people ever btw

everyone knows the problems with meritocracy. being able to rate your cab driver is still a good thing (what if he was a creep?) also driverless cars are a good thing

being able to provide feedback on service is important. rating a driver on a nebulous five star scale where anything less than a 5 means they are going to lose service means a weird negotiation of what "good service" really means

I am occasionally surrounded by hordes of these people and they are the worst fucking people ever btw
--Οὖτις

maybe so! i just think becoming cantankerous & vaguely self-righteous shaking our fists at every instance of the future is prob not the way

while it's good to be critical of everything, i don't think it's a particularly healthy bias in thinking about the future & work and all this stuff.

imo it pays to be critical and think about how and why things are useful and whether they are filling the right niche.

tbh I am straight-up dismissive of things I think are bad and I'm not going to debate what they're doing wrong

like I was just in yr city not long ago, flopson, and I did all my transport via train/bus/walking but if I did need on-demand transport I was sure as hell going to try uber

uber works really well for on-demand transport, I just think they're approaching the market from the angle of shitlords

these guys really think all manual labor, including driving cars, will be done by robots. as the idea leaders, they will be living in luxury, and the underclass will be the necessary but ostracized robot repairmen

― Upright Mammal (mh), Tuesday, June 30, 2015 10:07 AM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

kind of amazing how old-school this all is really. like this is basically how the forward-thinking bourgeois reassured themselves in the 1890s... reading bellamy, idealizing engineers as the clear-sighted makers of tomorrow's world. the national technocracy is just around the corner! no manual labor will be necessary, social strife will be resolved by my lifestyle actually getting more comfortable!

no manual labor will be necessary, social strife will be resolved by my lifestyle actually getting more comfortable!

i mean, they were kind of right? there is def less social strife and manual labour now than in 1890

Also eugenics.

there is definitely more manual labour now than in 1890

?

well there's more poor people that's for sure

http://worldhistoryforusall.sdsu.edu/images/Popn_Graph2.jpg

the extra few billion are not predominantly working white collar jobs

they are all adorable layabout moppets

I wonder if we have the technology to all live infinitely more creative and comfortable lives if we fully embraced wealth redistribution. Technocratic promises are real and we are all living cleaner healthier better lives than medieval kings but there's no real reason for most people to work other than some at the top want to be obscenely rich. We should be colonizing space and extending our lives to hundreds of years long.

i used to have the smug attitude towards "libertarian bros" and "technology" that you guys have.

I don't have a smug attitude towards them. In fact, I find the intersection of the two pretty terrifying in ways that preclude smugness fyi

only if it was distributed worldwide

if it was the US we'd all buy three phones and bigger cars
xp

Technocratic promises are real and we are all living cleaner healthier better lives than medieval kings but there's no real reason for most people to work other than some at the top want to be obscenely rich.

second part of this is not true

i mean, they were kind of right? there is def less social strife and manual labour now than in 1890

― flopson, Tuesday, June 30, 2015 12:07 PM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

they were "right" only in that the labor was moved overseas and that automation and electric motors eliminated tons of jobs that existed in 1890. pretty much nothing else about this scenario played out as expected - they really imagined the technocrats would displace the trusts and the cronyist government to run the economy directly, directing production and labor around in some "optimal" way. the closest we got was the new deal maybe - there's a pretty continuous line through hoover (who fits this persona to a T, right down to being a mining engineer -- super heroic turn of the century profession) to rexford tugwell and ultimately to all the postwar big-science, big-statistics, big-social-planning type agents. none of whom actually had as their real project the elimination of drudgery or the fundamental restructuring of society.

so what actually happened was the trusts stayed in power and resisted all but periodically-corrective planning of the economy. they just did some back of the envelope calculations and realized that with immigration capped, wages were going to be forced up anyway, and it made strategic sense to collaborate with unions, and shift increasingly to a consumerist model, to stabilize consumption and flatten out boom/bust jolts. the models were henry ford and henry kaiser, not bellamy or the visitor from altruria. so social strife went down and the unions ended up not permanently contesting the automation of jobs, but the surplus brought by new technology was not manifested as three-day work weeks and leisure for all. one might also refer to e.g. ruth cowan on household labor and automation -- it's a cliche to report it now, but the fact that time spent on household labor did not actually go down with all the new gadgets for sale, by itself, really destabilizes the conjecture that surely with this next go-round, technology will make everything so smooth and effortless that life will be better than ever! but ogmor is correct that the real shadow to this story (and integral to it) is the abused labor overseas. the smooth plane of existence enjoyed by the libertarian bro app designer is not just juxtaposed with the proletarianization of the global south, it's fundamentally made possible by it.

probably preaching an undergrad lecture to the choir here, sorry - just been thinking about this stuff a lot lately.

the extra few billion are not predominantly working white collar jobs
--ogmor

everything increases if you don't control for population. is your argument that things engineers invented didn't substitute for manual labor and the decrease is just from outsourcing manual labor to the convenient extra billions? cause that's wrong. also the increase in pop happened because of increases in agricultural productivity which is a technology that substitutes manual labor

Doctor Casino, my man

^heh yes

yup get that guy on Jeopardy or something

I could argue that tech has allowed an enormous increase of manual labour through population explosion or talk about cases where inefficient manual labour jobs are created for excess population but my point is just that the latter part of this - there is def less social strife and manual labour now than in 1890 - is really obviously untrue

but the surplus brought by new technology was not manifested as three-day work weeks and leisure for all.

people don't want to only substitute money for leisure though, they also want to use the extra money to consume more stuff. not all of this is conspicuous consumption by the rich. we also do work a lot less. you chose 3 day work week seemingly arbitrarily, but average weekly work hours in USA decreased by ~ 1/3

https://cdn2.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/5-x1snHWGCnZ150FU-w_2Rw6Rw4=/cdn0.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/2475084/hoursworked_per_engaged_person.0.png

couldn't find a graph going back the whole century, but look at table 2 in here https://eh.net/encyclopedia/hours-of-work-in-u-s-history/

in 1900 the three indexed have 59.6, 55.0 and 58.5 hours per week. in 1988 the census has 39.2. i think it's now 33 (http://www.gallup.com/poll/175286/hour-workweek-actually-longer-seven-hours.aspx)

tbh I think we are talking global here, unless all of your purchases come from yr own country

xpost to self, i think i kinda derailed a few times there but basically the echo i was picking up on, i think, is the idea that if only supply and demand were more precisely matched through technology/technologists, there would be this general benefit to everybody. this was a conservative and a 'progressive' position (witness the embrace of taylorism by the european left -- they figured that achieving efficiency would mean working less to achieve the same output, rather than working just as much to achieve a greater output, then arguing over how to distribute the surplus. or on the conservative side, the 1930s fantasies of frank lloyd wright - we'll all work a couple days in the factory but mostly be tending our virtuous farms.). from ~1890 forward, this was to be negotiated by the engineer. at some point it became the 'planner,' later armed with mainframe computers.

my gut feeling is that a version of the same sentiment is now present in a lot of 'app talk,' especially _____-on-demand stuff: connecting buyer and seller directly eliminates waste, and everybody wins! the implied benefit to society is different, obviously - no one is talking about reducing hours worked in the factory, or peacefully resolving the workers' uprisings. but there's still this faith that a magic technology, properly adminstered, will resolve society's problems. that's been debunked so many times it hardly bears reiterating but the main point must be held: technologies are shaped by society as much as the other way around, and powerful actors choose which kinds of technology to develop, what they're "for" and how to deploy them. blah blah blah, tl;dr sorry.

the "three day" thing was basically pulled out of the aforementioned 19th century discourse, can't give you a specific source i'm afraid, but this kind of thing was in the water.

also just to be clear, not just talking about 'conspicuous consumption' but your more classic, shopworn examples of how supply and demand get stabilized by encouraging more demand - getting this year's fridge, getting the government-backed mortgage for the cheap new house in levittown etc. this isn't to demonize anybody specific in the process -- i'm making really a kind of narrow and probably esoteric/pedantic point about the specific fantasies of certain people a hundred years ago, and i'm just saying that whatever did happen it wasn't what they thought would happen.

I could argue that tech has allowed an enormous increase of manual labour through population explosion or talk about cases where inefficient manual labour jobs are created for excess population but my point is just that the latter part of this - there is def less social strife and manual labour now than in 1890 - is really obviously untrue

― ogmor, Tuesday, June 30, 2015 1:01 PM (6 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

you think it's still true adjusted for population? unadjusted it's trivial, but do you think manual labor as a % of population has increased since 1890? for the whole world, rich world, USA, whatever

I'm not sure anyone knows, the data for 1890 is going to be incredibly patchy. Unadjusted isn't trivial at all, there are vastly more people now working huge hours doing low paid manual labour than ever before, if that changes it will involve enormous worldwide economic upheaval

Thinking technology will fix human suffering is much older than the 19th century though. Alchemists, occult scientists, and early globalists believed that too. Some of their wildest fantasies (speech travelling through the air as fire for instant communication) have come true to the point of ubiquitous banality.

2006: twitter invented
2008: black president

there's still this faith that a magic technology, properly adminstered, will resolve society's problems. that's been debunked so many times it hardly bears reiterating but the main point must be held: technologies are shaped by society as much as the other way around, and powerful actors choose which kinds of technology to develop, what they're "for" and how to deploy them. blah blah blah, tl;dr sorry.

idk i tend to think technology solves more problems than it creates and that ultimately no one person or group of people are powerful enough to control it, and that general attempts to thwart it are misguided. maybe some people are too optimistic, maybe rich people 100 years ago were too optimistic. so what?

The good thing about information technology is it is hard to keep closed. It seems to naturally want to be democratized and freely accessible. Which is a pretty optimistic position but sort of seems inevitable in most cases.

tbrr i ascribe to an acemoglu & robinson-ish view where technology & institutions are determined endogenously endogenously, good technology in the wrong institutional context can still be bad

*only one endogenously there

I'm not sure anyone knows, the data for 1890 is going to be incredibly patchy. Unadjusted isn't trivial at all, there are vastly more people now working huge hours doing low paid manual labour than ever before, if that changes it will involve enormous worldwide economic upheaval

― ogmor, Tuesday, June 30, 2015 1:25 PM (5 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

why would there be upheaval just because there's a larger absolute number of people doing anything? what if the absolute number of people low paid manual labor increased slower than the number of people doing well paid labor? why would that lead to an upheaval?

It was once believed that Johann Fust was working for the devil. After several of Gutenberg’s bibles were sold to King Louis XI of France, it was decided that Fust was performing witchcraft. This idea came about for a few reasons, including the fact that some of the type was printed in red ink, mistaken for blood. It was also discovered that all of the letters in these bibles, presented to the King and his courtiers as hand-copied manuscripts, were oddly identical. Fust had sold 50 bibles in Paris and the people there could not fathom the making and selling of so many bibles so quickly, because printing had not come to the forefront yet in France. Parisians figured that the devil had something to do with the making of these copies, and Fust was thrown into jail on charges of black magic. He was eventually released, since it was proved he was running a business in which printing enabled the rapid production of multiple copies of the same text.

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

presented to the King and his courtiers as hand-copied manuscripts

any sufficiently advanced technology etc

in many parts of the world the transition to a cash economy has led to longer working hours as people work to support their huge families (with lower infant mortality and more old people to care for). there are some places which have benefited due to specific resources, cash crops or whatever, but the extension of the global market, and with it, medicine & tech, has undermined a lot of local economies so that longer working hours (and mb less desirable work) are the only way people there can compete. under the current economic system I'm not really sure how this will change except perhaps 'very gradually'

population changes are v interesting but not necessarily the result of technology, even medical advances

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CApDu54UcAAzFSD.png

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CApDu3qUsAAXunG.png

i tend to think technology solves more problems than it creates

hahah this is perhaps the stupidest thing I've ever read on this board I mean have you noticed how the last 200 years of technological "progress" are on the verge of rendering life on this planet extinct - mass extinction underway, a century of previously unheard of genocide etc.

http://i.imgur.com/NfClEf0.gif

You never heard of the plague?

Why are we limiting this to 200 years? We are just ignoring all years before the invention of plumbing/sewage.

hahah this is perhaps the stupidest thing I've ever read on this board

very rude shakes smh

I mean have you noticed how the last 200 years of technological "progress" are on the verge of rendering life on this planet extinct - mass extinction underway, a century of previously unheard of genocide etc.

i mean this is an unfathomably big question none of us can really have an answer to. here's something though: even the richest place in the world was barely above subsistence for almost all of history

https://i2.wp.com/www.kevinbryanecon.com/Class11MaxPerCapitaGDP.png

the fact that some of the technology that allowed us to do that also allowed us to kill tonnes of people and threaten the livability of our planet are very troubling (the latter will be solved or at least greatly mitigated by technology). but i mean, solving the problem of an eternity of if-you're-lucky-subsistence-otherwise-starvation is also pretty important IMO

it's surprising to me that on a msgboard consisting of people sitting at the absolute pinnacle of historical & geographical personal income are so cynical about technology