It's crazy you think we don't want our jobs automated away. The whole point of automation is to reduce human labor. Mind boggling people literally choose to want to have to labor even if it is no longer necessary.
If a job is so simple, repetitive and brainless that it can be automated, it's in humanity's best interest that it gets automated, and people are freed to do something more useful. Yes, this will suck if you're 50 years old and get laid off the assembly line, but we've been automating jobs out of existence for a few centuries now and the overall consequences have not been particularly terrifying.
This is something that confuses me about Americans. Why on earth wouldn't everyone want their job automated? The only thing we should be discussing is how you fairly distribute the proceeds in a world where humans don't need to work.
I was referring to automating "jobs" that are not even realistic jobs without automation, because they would be too labor-intensive/unpleasant/low-paying for anyone to want to do them, like the trash-sorting example.
This thinking seems to assume that employers are unable to choose how, when, and where they employ people. At some point it's cheaper to automate the job than hire someone to do it, or simply put money into higher ROI generators.
This sounds to me like a clever reframing to justify automating these jobs. It's not "we don't want to pay enough to get humans to do this". It's "nobody will do these jobs, so we built machines to do them instead".
I'm totally for job automation, and think we should find better solutions to the problems it causes than "be less efficient". But I also think we should own up to those negative effects instead of playing a game where we pretend not to understand how markets work.
Also want to add that I don't believe all jobs can be automated but resolving the issues would allow us to actively working towards more automation and not only because companies want to reduce their costs to maximise profits.
Yeah, we don't need people to work. This will incentivize people to automate work where possible. The ideal world is everything is automated and EVERYONE benefits, vs what we have now: much is automated and the rich benefit while others have to work shit jobs or die.
Because if a job is automted, it means that the person whose job is automated now is unemployed. Even if we have UBI, it means that the person DOING the automating will get a disproportionate share of the resources compared with the pittance given to the person who was automated.
Personally, I don't want my job to be automated. I write for a living and if AI takes my job, I won't get paid. I prefer to create value in the world that other people appreciate. I don't WANT to sit in a concrete cage (an apartment) and consume media, with no real purpose in society.
Believe it or not, the majority of people in the world need to feel like they are working for something. Yes, some people will be able to find other causes (mine will be the opposition of AI), but others won't. Of course, that will mean the necessity of drugging people with media (and physical substances...why do you think marijuana is becoming legal in more places?).
The end result is a mode of pure consumption for almost all except the elite who control all the production, and they will decide what happens with the world. Personally, I don't want that: I want land and autonomy to use it to grow food and preserve ecosystems. I want the world to be sustainable, and not just set up for the purpose of furthering technology.
You speak of societal changes on a year-scale. I'm talking about decades and the long-term. This level of automation is bad, and won't do any favours for humanity except the ultra-rich, who will eventually perish like everyone else.
You don't really touch at any point in your argument on even the possibility someone might be harmed, in the process of entire segments of the labor market being automated. Why is that?
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