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Comment by hellbanner | Hacker News Reader

Automation can automate manual labor jobs the easiest. Maintaining cities, crafting medicine, colonizing space -- these are important jobs that humanity has.

I think the bigger issue is that most people don't have resources to pursue training to tackle this kind of work.

There are so many problems left to solve in the world it's a joke to say "there isn't work to be done"

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> There are so many problems left to solve in the world it's a joke to say "there isn't work to be done"

There is a lot of work to be done, and there will be in the conceivable future - but it doesn't mean there's profitable work to be done by humans. a) machines keep replacing us doing more work and doing it better than us, and b) capitalism doesn't optimize for useful work, it optimizes for profitable work - so even if there's a lot of world problems to solve that could be tackled by the poor and uneducated, they're still screwed if they can't feed themselves from that work.

Of course there is work to be done. It's just work that a smaller and smaller percentage of the most competent people + technology can be useful in. This isn't just an issue of providing more training resources, technology allows people more access to the work of the most competent so there is less and less work for people who are not the best at things or capable of learning really quickly to fill the new wide open niches that are popping up before technology narrows them too.

there isn't profitable work to be done

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