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I have three sort of paradoxical reactions to this:

1. Provenance is an inimitable form of status that is as intrinsic to human culture as scarcity.

High-dollar trades like antiques, art, diamonds, and collecting all rely on the story of where things came from, where they have been. Two reasons: first, the story of their human or historical context is compelling to us. Second, we often rely upon this provenance (and verification thereof) as an assurance of quality or value. Sometimes these beliefs are well-founded. 50s factory goods are fantastically made; remakes of the AK-47 often cut corners on Kalashnikov's manufacturing method. Other times, exclusivity alone is a signal of status. This is why there was a market for the I Am Rich app, and why luxury brands artificially limit the number of each season's "it" handbag styles. This is wasteful but effective marketing. You would think this makes me pro-handmade etc.

2. I believe creativity can manufacture the utility of provenance in an equal or better way.

There's no reason a company can't make high-quality furniture that satisfies an antique taste and commands an antique price. However, the company must give their product a mythology to compete. Good advertisers do this every day, and I believe it is a practice with nearly limitless possibilities. Warby Parker, for instance, has channeled the breezy, freewheeling, academic vibes of bygone Stand By Me-era classrooms, beat poets like Kerouac. Their glasses are signifiers that have no tangible connection to their referents beyond inspiration. This can massively enhance a good, even turning weaknesses (like the dryness of an Astronaut Ice Cream Sandwich) into enjoyable qualities.

Personalization and uniquing, in particular, can go a long way. Recently, many "fantasy" shoes (that is fake replicas of styles that never existed) have motivated sales equal or higher to real limited edition Nikes. This is predatory to the Nike brand of course. However, benevolent confabulation, cryptohistory, and counterfeiting have an advantage over real memory.

3. I believe machines will be terrible at faking provenance for a long time.

Because the value of provenance and product mythology is subjective, it is difficult for a machine to do it well without tons of human input. Humans like stories told by humans AND stories about humans. The Zune had a story just like the iPod did, but the iPod's success relied on the mythology of Steve Jobs (among many other things). The story of provenance is shorthand for a human story. That is why I think it will be one of the last bastions of valued human creativity.

And we love provenance. We can't do away with provenance without replacing it with something equally meaningful.

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I worked for many years on automating other people's jobs, including air traffic controllers, computer network security specialists, inspection mechanics, abstract summarizers, and genome analysts. Every project I completed, every advance that I made, and every program I wrote, which might automate any part of anyone's job, was killed by people who felt threatened by it.

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Of course the advertisement counts as utility but the point is you get the same utility regardless of how much resources go into making the thing. For instance, the person with the fancy watch gets utility from showing off they purchased a 40k watch so if you lived in a world where a 40k watch required half the resources to make everyone would be just as happy. The question is how to achieve that so there is less wasted resources.

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Often when someone gets more efficient, works faster or better. That person creates free time for themselves and starts taking on work from others. When they are doing that it, becomes harder to fire them. I don't see why it would be different with jobs that got automated. So I don't share your expectation that the effect on overlapping jobs is weaker.

There might also be a problem with defining who's job got automated and also a high overestimation of the increase in efficiency the automation will bring. Sometimes automation is aimed at higher quality and not cost/labor reduction. In these cases, overall work/jobs actually increase.I see this happening in my job (healthcare it).

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You'd expect the same sort of effect of overlapping jobs as on this job itself, just weaker. So if you see no effect on the job itself, hard to expect to see it for overlapping ones.

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Could there be a effect on substitute or overlapping jobs?

If there are substitute products but one product is more suitable to automation of jobs and gets automated, the result could be that the price of the automated product goes down and the substitute product is out-competed, resulting in an increased amount of jobs for the more automated product but decreased jobs for the non automated substitute.

Similarly, more automated jobs might take work from overlapping jobs resulting in decreased demand for those jobs while the demand for the automated job increases.

Finally I wonder about new highly automated job types. They didn't exist or were uncommon at first so demand goes up for those. Or not?

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What counts as utility, and why does advertisement of status not count as utility?

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Ummm 62.7% labor participation rate for March 2020? That's 37.3% of eligible workers in the US jobless or engaged in blackmarkets before the panicdemic.

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No matter how much automation we get it won’t eliminate jobs and that’s a bad thing. People are willing to consume an infinite amount of other people’s labor and will substitute wasteful human work for machine work when they have some vague excuse about quality. We need a UBI to stop us all from working unautomated jobs which only exist to demonstrate the purchaser can afford them.

Unfortunately, having handmade goods is a status symbol. You can buy a digital watch that is in all ways better (ok could be made more stylish with a smidge of effort) than the handcrafted watches made with time consuming exactness by humans. But there is no utility increase here since the point of the watches is almost exclusively an advertisement of status and watches.

Indeed, the effect we should see from increasing automation is that more people go back to producing goods in an old fashioned manner that are sold at a premium. For instance, we should see more furniture made by hand even when it’s objectively not that much better or worse.That’s when we need a UBI.

In theory one might imagine a taxation solution but it is just too hard to convince people they aren’t really purchasing a better product and to constantly introduce such taxes every time some new way to waste human labor to display status is found. Far better just to give people money.

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Productivity growth is a circular measure in this case, because it measures money produced per hour worked. If you measure *capital* productivity that gives quite a different measure, helped a great deal by the collapse of the corporate tax system. But those profits go to capitalists, feeding into the problems Andrew Yang was concerned with albeit from a different angle.

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Automation isn't doing more now than it was in 1999, nor in any different ways.

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It's propaganda designed to make the peasants happy with being displaced by cheaper peasants. Amazing to me: they fall for it. The reason you're not getting any air is ... well, guess where the meme comes from?

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That automation is not taking away jobs has been clear for some time. The famous statistic is that there are more bank tellers today than 1970. (Though admittedly not per capita) and this is one of the jobs most people would cite as having been automated. And a lot of what bank tellers did in 1970 was automated. Automation is doing lots of stuff. Just not causing humans to lose jobs.

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Andrew Yang was heavily pushing UBI based on concerns about automation and it seemed to strongly resonate with young Americans. I think there is a widespread belief that we are living in an era of rapid tech progress, and since living standards are stagnant for most of the populace, people assume this must be due to changes in distribution. Automation seems to get blamed by the left, while the right blames outsourcing and immigration.

But from what I've seen there just isn't much technology progress, and productivity growth has slowed.

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