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Comment by ranci | Hacker News Reader

"Free" them? They need that work in order to survive, mostly. They were "free" before having that menial job and that freedom didn't seem to help turn them into software engineers or nurses before...

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Which is why we should immediately un-mechanize mines and bring back hurriers and trappers!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hurrying

https://thoroglove.wordpress.com/2015/03/12/trappers-hurrier...

Simply put: if a job is so repetitive that it can be automated out of existence, it's in the interest of humanity overall that it should be.

Seems like it's in the interests of the owners to automate, not in the interests of those who work jobs that will be automated.

No, it seems like it's in everyone's interest. Or would you really prefer to live in the conditions people lived in 200 years ago?

To be honest, everyone would have been better off if coal extraction remained a manual process.

> Simply put: if a job is so repetitive that it can be automated out of existence, it's in the interest of humanity overall that it should be.

Quite a different way of framing it than your original comment. Here you tout how it's good for "humanity" in general. Before you were touting how this is good for the people being put out of work.

Um, the original comment wasn't mine.

Flipping burgers every day for the rest of your life is a sad waste of human potential. We as a society can do better. This robot is one step, other steps are involved like Universal Basic Income or actually paying content creators.

I made fast food for years before I became a software engineer.

thanks for your survivorship bias

We may find ourselves wondering where experienced people are going to come from in future when the jobs that previously gave them the ability to independently support themselves while studying disappear.

It's a common problem. I know of a lot of situations where businesses are fucked when boomer millwrights and mechanics retire, because they never bothered to keep an apprentice around. So much institutional knowledge going out the door, with no replacement

That's a US problem though, lots of countries provide free education.

Is it really your understanding that fast food workers never or rarely go on to do anything else?

Perhaps if enough people become unemployed, they could force some changes in society. Right now they are busy flipping burgers and cleaning toilets.

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