Hacker News Reader

Comment by Svip | Hacker News Reader

I hate the usage of the word 'inevitable' like this. Nothing is inevitable. There are some events that are going to be hard to prevent, like say the Earth being swallowed by the Sun (unless we could move the Earth out of harm's way?), but automation is not one of those. That's an easy one to prevent. We can just decide not to.

View on HN

That's not how things work. There is an advantage to automation. If you decide not to you are just leaving it to someone else to do it an be more competitive than you.

That's what is meant with inevitability in this context.

If you want to survive you don't have a choice.

> but automation is not one of those. That's an easy one to prevent. We can just decide not to.

I agree with you in sentiment, however that last sentence contains a deceptive concept in it- who is the collective "we" that would have to do the deciding, and do they have a history of taking such choices?

Of course I was trying to keep the comment brief, but "we" in this case is humanity. And the "choice" in this scenario is not automating every job, as the article suggests. If we automate 99% of jobs, it would still not meet the proposed conclusion of the article.

In a more realistic sense of 'choosing' not to automate, it will largely come from disagreements over the subject itself. It will not be that all humans get together and decide it, but rather that a significant portion of humans won't have any part in it.

But from a pure historical viewpoint, inevitability is a fallacy.

Maybe "inevitable" is too strong, but only slightly...

Those entities that don't adopt automation will be outperformed and supplanted by those that do.

It's a similar phenomenon with many technologies. Many people opposed cars, looms, cell phones... what happened to them?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com