I imagine this feels slightly worse than training your replacement in a different country, where the labor is cheaper, which is something I have done before. At least in that case, another human is making a living.
I'm nervous that in the short term, fewer people will continue to get very rich, and more people will fall out of the middle class.
>we must rapidly begin the shift from a thing-oriented society to a person-oriented society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism and militarism are incapable of being conquered.
>A true revolution of values will soon cause us to question the fairness and justice of many of our past and present policies. On the one hand, we are called to play the Good Samaritan on life’s roadside, but that will be only an initial act. One day we must come to see that the whole Jericho road must be transformed so that men and women will not be constantly beaten and robbed as they make their journey on life’s highway. True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar. It comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring.
The purpose of automation is humanitarian in the same way that politicians serve the needs of their constituents, and police protect their communities.
While I reap the positive benefits of all of the above, there are plenty of marginalized people who are harmed by exactly the same forces.
In the gap between theory and reality, there's a lot of misery.
If "we as a society" don't understand the supposed purpose of something that we as a society are enacting, then that supposed purpose is academic and ultimately meaningless. There is no universal agency or purpose behind automation other than that of those who are building it, who to date have largely been capitalists and not utopians.
If they have the resources, then retraining themselves for another job might be worthwhile, but just leaving their current job probably won't help them much.
If you're going to leave anyways, then what incentive is there to say no to getting that double or triple pay