🤖 Expensive labour pulls forward automation capex

Friedberg tech w=1.08 · n=65 · E51 (2021-10-16) · explicit_prediction · strength 2 ▶ 10:57 SUPPORT

“The other free market argument that could be made is that these current trends will accelerate a trend towards more automation of low cost labor ... So there's a number of these automation industries that may significantly benefit and that ends up ultimately being deflationary and the market comes into balance.”

Friedberg tech w=1.08 · n=65 · E58 (2021-12-11) · explicit_prediction · strength 2 ▶ 44:22 SUPPORT

“So the low-cost model of consumerism in the United States, which has been a stronghold for our economy for 100 years at this point, may be coming to an end, or it will accelerate the implementation of automation across that sector of the economy.”

Ryan Petersen (regular guest ×1.0) tech: 2 resolved, unproven · E66 (2022-02-05) · explicit_prediction · strength 2 ▶ 31:21 OPPOSE

“Flexport already made this technology. We could 10x the throughput of one of these ports overnight ... We already have this tech. So it's a matter of implementation, deployment, and how do you get around a lot of people that don't really want to see better running ports. And it's pretty sad to sit where I sit.”

Friedberg tech w=1.08 · n=65 · E88 (2022-07-22) · explicit_prediction · strength 2 ▶ 1:09:43 SUPPORT

“But generally speaking, technology drives productivity gains, but it's deflationary in the short term.”

Friedberg tech w=1.08 · n=65 · E94 (2022-09-01) · explicit_prediction · strength 3 ▶ 15:04 SUPPORT

“Number two, businesses are going to automate. So new businesses will emerge that actually do the fast food work or do the car building work or do the dock loading and unloading work that are automated and they'll have an inherent advantage in the economy and they'll win.”

Chamath tech w=0.90 · n=83 · E94 (2022-09-01) · explicit_prediction · strength 3 ▶ 31:05 SUPPORT

“And so to think that they're not going to just invest heavily now at the corporate level, the next franchisee of McDonald's will still pay a million dollars for franchise fee but will give will be given a bevy of robots that they rent for McDonald's and they'll have to hire half or third less.”

Sacks tech w=0.77 · n=53 · E94 (2022-09-01) · explicit_prediction · strength 2 ▶ 22:32 SUPPORT

“Well, the reason is because if you raise the minimum wage too much, then these employers have a huge incentive to replace that labor with automation. And so the unintended consequence that Chamath is talking about is that these big chain restaurants are going to rely even more heavily on automation now.”

Jason tech w=1.05 · n=56 · E94 (2022-09-01) · explicit_prediction · strength 3 ▶ 34:28 SUPPORT · horizon 120mo

“We are within, I think, five, 10 years of a lot of these jobs. We're talking tens of millions of manual labor jobs being gone. And we're going to look at this moment in time where we try to squeeze an extra 10 or 20 percent out of these employers. And then you're going to see these employers say, you know what? 24-hour-a-day robot. Yeah, it's a little bit upfront cost. I'll put it on the lease and they're just going to move to these robots. It's really very close to being game over for manual labor.”

Jason tech w=1.05 · n=56 · E99 (2022-10-07) · sentiment · strength 2 ▶ 44:55 SUPPORT

“I think that's going to be the very interesting thing with the robots as well, is all of these decisions they're making, moving cars through roads, all of a sudden we're going to see that with VTOLs, vertical takeoff and landing, you know, aircraft, and we're going to see it with this general robot.”