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Comment by Practicality | Hacker News Reader

Maybe, but it doesn't need to be useless labor. In the town I grew up in we had automated trash collection for a few years. The town eventually voted to get rid of the automated trash collectors because of jobs.

Seriously. People that did those jobs HATED their jobs. Now a group of people have a job again that they hate. Surely we can find something that fulfills their desire to be helpful without a completely unnecessary and unfulfilling job.

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Just curious - how did the automated trash collection work?

There was still a driver, but all the bins and cans were ID tagged and had weight sensors installed. This was earlier technology (a lot of cities have similar things now), but it was basically a locking hydraulic lift that coupled with an interface on the cans. That picked the cans up over the truck and inverted them. So it just dumped things into the truck.

So there were no workers, just a driver.

Because of the jobs issue, they went back to having two men that pick up the cans by hand. But because everyone had the new cans with all the extra hardware now the work was harder. It was the worst of both worlds until they issued everyone new regular trash cans a few years later.

Imagine if your town took the savings from the automated trash collection and just gave them directly to the people who had to do those jobs manually. It costs the town exactly the same amount of money, and frees up those people to do whatever they want with their time. Instead, they made the system more inefficient on purpose, so that people had to perform an unnecessary manual task in order to get money.

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