Comment by m52go | Hacker News Reader

Comment by m52go | Hacker News Reader

"but but there is NO job humans can do that a robot cannot do"

this is the gist of the reactions i got to a comment i made on an article on a similar topic here a few days ago.

this article better articulated what i was trying to say there:

But machines are not effective at persuading, at developing advertising campaigns, at branding products or corporations, or at greeting you at the door in a charming manner, as is done so often in restaurants, even if you order on an iPad. Those activities will remain the province of human beings for a long time to come.

people here seem to forget that all this automation is being done to serve us better, the people (i guess you could argue it's really being done to better serve shareholders, but that's another discussion).

we're still weird, unpredictable creatures who eat, sleep, poop, and work in a 4-dimensional world...so there will ALWAYS be a human component to delivering products and services.

even if a good bit of the designing, building, and distribution of these services may be automated.

people here seem to forget that all this automation is being done to serve us better, the people (i guess you could argue it's really being done to better serve shareholders, but that's another discussion).

Well, it's being done to increase profit. That's a bit different.

Even if we eliminated money, we would be automating work to benefit us. That's the root motivation.

Right. As we accelerate, the divergence from shareholders' desires and consumers' increases.

How is that a bad thing? Why would you not want to increase profit?

For starters, it takes the priority away from "serving us better" as the GP's claim was.

Serving customers better is a means to an end (i.e. maximizing profits), not an end it itself.

Indeed. Which was, I think, sillysaurus3's point: That the development is not actually about serving people better but more about profit. With serving people better being a means to an end at most.

As for why profit on it's own is bad: Because - as established - it's only about improving the lifes of the people receiving the profits - but readily externalizes the cost to everyone else.

Exactly. And not the only possible mean to achieve that end. For example, we've discovered that marketing has a much better ROI than actually building quality things people want.

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