Cue Amazon putting in more robots!
Nearly everyone that posts on HN is in a situation where their employer holds vastly more power than themselves in their employer/employee relationship, statistically are you likely being screwed, and you aren't going to be Jeff Bezos one day either.
So either we continue to deny it isn't or we actually start those conversations now and figure out how we live in that world.
And there is a correlation between actions like this and the desire to have a more automated workforce. Not saying that as blame because there are many other reasons and you can look at the reasons their jobs are so bad right now anyways.
But we can't ignore it.
However, I still contend that, even with millions of dollars, most people would not have the foresight to invest. As evidenced by the fact that those who suffer from windfalls of money typically lose it very quickly.
No one has denied that this is not happening because it is. We can however, comment on them in a way that is empathetic to the workers who are protesting. Never know, might come for any one of us one day.
However, the problem with our government currently is that there are other outside factors that would get in the way (Like corporate lobbying.) of any kind of labor initiative.
I will say that boycotting used to be a viable means of getting your point across (Civil right boycotts of the 60s as an example.). The problem I think nowadays is that it has lost it's teeth due to lack of a collective follow through (See the most recent Gucci boycott/"protest" from a few months ago.).
Robots replacing humans is not new, we have been doing this for at least 40 years.
Resources continue to be spent on this technology (and related technology, even if not originally for this purpose).
Unless we stop any robotic research, its happening wether we like it or not.
Technologists are always hyperfocused on economic activity and insist that any problems technology creates will be solved by more technology. Well, all we appear to be doing is building an ever more complex and fragile civilization full of increasingly unhappy people racing towards Armageddon. What will trigger the ultimate systems collapse? I don't know, but I would be shocked if there isn't one within the next two centuries.
Yes, we probably would be better off without cars. Communities would be stronger, more tightly-knit. Urban sprawl would dramatically decrease. There'd be more multi-family housing. We would have spewed jillions of tons fewer of CO2 and other pollutants into the air (electric cars do not solve underlying environmental issues - they just shift them around to battery production and disposal and power generation.) One of the biggest causes of accidental death would be eradicated.
Instead of developing ICE/electric engines and understanding the best way to fit them into human society, we unleashed them willy-nilly and caused untold death, devastation, and misery. Such is the story of many if not most subsequent technological 'innovations'. (Yes, I have a car - two, even.)
Even now the 'ideal' Hacker News poster is hard at work at enriching fabulously wealthy companies intent on destroying privacy forever and creating dopamine addictions. We all say it's inevitable. But it's not. Every step of the way, it was individuals making decisions that led us to where we are now. We could have stopped it and we still can.
Or we can bury our heads in the sand.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luddite#Birth_of_the_movement
With progress comes new opportunities. It may not happen fr everyone, immediately, but it will happen.
The fact that, in the past, the economy created new jobs and new sectors that the majority of people were capable of working in does not guarantee that it always will. Nor when it does is that any consolation to the people un(der)employed for years on end or sometimes for the rest of their life.
In the long run, we are all dead.
The Industrial Revolution and its consequences are a hiccup in human history. Human history is a blip in the world's history. There are no laws when it comes to this. Unless you can provide some other very good reason for believing that more jobs, and good jobs, will be created than those are destroyed, I will have to doubt it given the evidence before me.
Indeed, even many 'good' jobs are actually economically unproductive and totally unfulfilling make-work. Today's situation is much worse than it appears at first glance.
The first wave was all about making people more efficient (higher output multipliers for effort); the next wave may very well make people redundant in the economic production equation. If one person is all that's required to scale infinitely (O(1)) OR people aren't required once the capital is built the share of gains to workers IMO erode substantially and mainly accrue to capital holders. Particularly if those gains result in a concentration of market power to one company.