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Comment by Gibbon1 | Hacker News Reader

I remember an old throw away scifi book.

Almost everything was automated except for bars[1]. Having an actually job required an inane mount of schooling, testing and credentials. But gave you a life where you got to live and associate with people with somewhat meaningful lives.

[1] Automated bars existed, but to the authorities dismay, few people would patronize them.

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Yeah, this is another serious issue. People have intellectual, social and emotional needs. Merely satisfying their basic physical needs is not enough.

Domino Harvey* comes to mind. She was supposedly a model turned bounty hunter. A lot of adrenaline junkies currently get their thrills doing EMS work and similar jobs. Or they have dangerous hobbies. If you take away all the constructive outlets for adrenaline junkies, you are basically left with dangerous hobbies and fomenting revolution or pursuing illegal activities merely to feel alive once in a while. This will likely not go good places.

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domino_Harvey

> People have intellectual, social and emotional needs. Merely satisfying their basic physical needs is not enough.

This is one thing I think went wrong with all the 20th century modernisms. The thinking that social and emotional needs didn't matter infected all sorts of fields[1] like a cancer. Before 1960 they used to keep sick infants in sterile boxes where they failed to thrive and eventually died. Okay they don't do that now. But the equivalent exists in all sort of other places.

Player Piano by Kurt Vonnegut. Barbers, too, until some enterprising barber automated his own job and retired and forced the others out of a job too.

Excellent book.

Reminds me of how we have perfectly good machines for automatically producing espresso drinks, but they still have Starbucks stores with baristas doing it manually on every corner. At least that's what I would have commented three years ago. My last two jobs have had espresso machines and I never go to Starbucks anymore.

And this, surely, is the end game. We're now working on autonomous vehicles; there's no reason to think drivers will be required beyond maybe ten years hence. So, they're on the scrapheap. Store assistants, fast food cooks? Same deal, maybe another few years for legal assurances (hot oil can be unfriendly).

How many professions do you come in contact with who seem unlikely to be candidates for automation?

At some point - and we're unfortunately rather a long way from that societally - we need to take stock, and consider: who, exactly, is all of this for?

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