A few years ago I made a vow to myself that I wouldn't work on software that puts people out of jobs. When I worked on job automation projects I would get very depressed watching people lose jobs because of me. I can't imagine the damage of something at this scale.
Arguably the whole point of software is to automate tasks that would have been done by humans. How do you avoid this when making useful software?
That person playing the video game is choosing NOT to go to the movies, or the sports game, or the bar.
Book authors, most likely.
> I think you could argue that software like Adobe Creative Suite and Microsoft Office are net positive on job growth.
Yea, I can see that. It's still replacing earlier jobs typesetting, editing, printing, distributing, etc etc.
> Software can empower people to do entirely new kinds of jobs.
I agree with this too, though I don't know if it's a positive thing. This computer revolution was supposed to increase quality of life, not employment. I'd rather have sustainable income for everyone rather than shitty jobs for everyone, and it seems like automation encourages the latter.
The early Jeffersonian model of the United States pictured Americans as living largely self-sufficient lives on small farms, making everything they need for themselves like food, furniture, barns for livestock.
Except it also included slaves.
Are computers that much different than slaves? Perhaps only in that they are not regarded as a form of life, but they still serve us as we desire, they can be bought, sold, or smashed with a baseball bat by disgruntled office workers.
If most transportation can be done with autonomous cars, if most goods can be produced by 3D printers which source material from mines and facilities owned by robots, if there is no need for human labor on a massive scale, then it might become more of a cost than a benefit for people to be working. Most of us do not like to work, but we have to work. I like my job, but I would prefer a world in which I did not need to do it and could do other things instead.
Well that problem is fixed now! These workers are no longer being taken advantage of because they don't work there anymore.
how can you tell? what is the heuristic here?
That's not to say that there aren't ethical issues here. My boss wants to automate customer service operations with customer service bots. So I'm not even safe there.
The problem happens when it happens so quickly that we can't re-allocate workforce or if it happens at such a scale that we can't find use for masses of low-eductation/low-skill workers.
i think the larger point in this entire discussion is that nobody is safe anywhere, both on the receiving and delivering end of the job-killing.
That implies you can't do anything to make people more productive. If you produce software that makes people more productive, some companies will do more with the same people, but other companies will employ less people. Either way, though, you'll put some people out of jobs, and not all of those people will get the new jobs you create; even if you create more jobs than you destroy, you can't guarantee that everyone who had a job before will have one after. Improving productivity via some new tool has a similar effect to replacing low-skilled jobs with high-skilled jobs, just with a smaller scale and skill differential.
I don't think you can reasonably use "number of people put out of a job == 0" as a sole value metric, to the exclusion of all else. It's certainly worth including "number of people put out of a job" one of many factors you value, but not to the exclusion of all other values.
It's one of those thoughts that feels good, but really isn't practical.
http://www.reuters.com/article/us-global-economy-employment-... http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-gworxUlu27o/VPmu_-G-ykI/AAAAAAAAik... https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/9c/US_Unemp... etc...
Don't most software fall in this category though?