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Comment by glasz | Hacker News Reader

why can't pundits stop saying "destroy jobs" and start saying "liberate humans"? why are supposedly intellectual people just unable to see the slavery and imagine utopia where every stupid job nobody wants to do anyway is automated? where people are not so much running in circles for gains of their capitalistic overlord? it's all just everyday shitchattheory and donttouchtheholygrailofjobs gospel. bores me.

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Because a technology which competes with and reduces market clearing quantity of human labor does not, in a basically capitalist economy, liberate humans, except those already situated as capitalists, who are “liberated” from paying wages.

For those who don't have huge capital stocks and thus have little but wage labor to turn to earn a living, technology that competes with labor deepens their economic subjugation rather than effecting liberation.

Now, obviously, getting farther away from capitalism in the economic structure may change this, but that isn't an automatic consequence of the technology.

I think the perspective you're applying here is an important one.

That said, if we imagine that there is productive marginal work to be done, then replacing drudgery with automation frees up the money being spent there to be spent elsewhere, and presumably increases demand for the better work.

Obviously there are some assumptions, and "liberation" may still be hyperbole, but it doesn't necessarily benefit only the capitalists.

It would be all well and good if either better jobs came to replace he drudgery of old (honestly, worked in light industrial and plastics so I can't imagine anyone doing the work if they could get a better paying job with fewer hours) or that the over all price of goods dropped to reflect the actual material intensity of production. But neither has occurred, especially in former industrial centers in the US. Until that happens the benefit of automation will always go to those who own the majority of the companies in question. Which is why I think they either need to be taxed or their means of production held in common ownership by the state.

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