Comment by delazeur | Hacker News Reader

Comment by delazeur | Hacker News Reader

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> Isn't it equally cruel to talk like people want to be drones?

Well, I didn't append all the qualifiers I could have because I assumed that my comment would be read in a reasonable way.

Right now, those drone jobs are the difference between eating and not eating for a lot of people. I obviously want to see the eating problem solved before the drone job problem is solved. Until then, saying that these people should be happy to lose their drone jobs is cruel. I encourage you to go present your theory to some of those drones. Tell them about how they can cast off the chains of their slavery and be free to starve.

Talk about failures of the social safety net is nice (and I agree, as far as that goes), but it's just talk. Talk is not going to fix the social safety net. These are real lives that depend on this issue.

Difference is, in this case, nobody loses their jobs and no one is starving. What you are saying, is the loss of future drone jobs. Should it be that case, we should never automate agriculture ever, since it had been the major sector of employment for many many centuries.

I think in this article's case, it is good automation, not the aggressive kind, so I want to know why people would lament over the loss of the those non-existed shitty jobs.

First of all, the "no layoffs" claim can easily be achieved through attrition, as covered elsewhere in this thread. That means that someone would have been hired to replace a departing worker but now isn't getting that job.

Second, even aside from attrition, there are absolutely people who would have wanted the jobs that the robots are doing. Some of those people would have wanted those jobs because it would have been their only option. I would rather they had other options (via a social safety net, presumably), but that's not the world we live in right now.

At this point, I suspect you are intentionally reading me in the worst sense you can manage. I think I have adequately explained my position, and if you really want to continue this discussion, I encourage you to go back and re-read my comments. Engage the statements I made or ask questions about the points you don't understand. Otherwise, have a good one.

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