Comment by jimmydean12 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jimmydean12 | Hacker News Reader

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I went to college for a number of years in electrical engineering technology. I started working even before I finished my degree. My first gig was PLC programming material handling systems for the pharmaceutical industry. It made sense, in order to maintain safety and a sterile environment it’s much better to have a stainless steel robot handle pails, jars, drums, etc of pills in a clean room instead of people touching them.

Next up was a table to help workers move large objects with hydraulic movement and pins to hold the material in place via compressed air activation, and all the associated limit switches electronic eyes etc. cool enough.

Then the big leagues, a 300k (17 years ago) A-B (Allen-Bradley) robotic arm in an auto parts plant. Day 3 inside / outside / on top of the cage, I become aware of a number of people standing behind the yellow line staring at me, later cursing me, one threw some crumpled paper at me… I’m asking the plant foreman wtf is with those guys. He says well as soon as your robot works they’re all laid off. I left that day and never went back. Someone finished programming and set up I’m sure, I could care less, I didn’t. I thought one day I’ll get stabbed in the parking lot.

I realize that my automation didn’t take jobs away from society, I didn’t do anything evil. Those jobs would just move and hopefully spawn better jobs in the community (medium to long term). But in that small short term microeconomic moment, there were real consequences, and I was the face of them. I was not happy, I changed careers that exact day.

I think I'd feel a lot better about job-taking automation if governments would require that companies adopting automation pay to retrain workers, including salary (since you still have to go on living while you're learning a new job skill). I expect this would basically kill any company's desire to automate (unless it's financially worth it in a relatively short amount of time, which I suspect wouldn't be often), so it'd probably make sense for the government to subsidize this somehow. Or maybe the government should just administer this kind of program itself, since I imagine companies would try to abuse it.

It just seems obvious to me that society benefits when people don't have to do automate-able jobs anymore, and can retrain to do something more interesting/useful without simultaneously having to deal with crippling financial insecurity. My version of utopia is one where there's so much abundance and automation that no one has to work at all if they don't want to, but can still live incredibly comfortable -- extravagant, even -- lives.

Of course, some people will still fight tooth and nail to keep doing what they're doing, regardless of how obsolete it is, and regardless of what incentives and help they're given to learn to do something new. But the least we could do would be to help those who are more forward-thinking.

Many regions offer free community college as a way to handle this. Often, community colleges will partner with local manufacturing companies to develop training plans that give those people new technical skills (win for that person) and training on the systems used at the manufacturing plant (win for the company).

I think this is the best way as its solved at the local levels which means the solution is customized for the local area instead of a one-size fits all solution that the federal government would have to create.

> My version of utopia is one where there's so much abundance and automation that no one has to work at all if they don't want to, but can still live incredibly comfortable -- extravagant, even -- lives.

Or, as we call it, Fully Automated Luxury Gay Space Communism, or FALGSC.

Which is either a very long, or a rather unpronounceable, way to spell "Star Trek".

If that happened today you'd be famous online.

Anyway, I think automation and its consequences are much more complex these days and beyond the understanding of any non-technical / "not in the know" person. People used to know that "robots would take our jobs" but now that's not always true. The people writing completely "harmless" software are likely responsible for many, many bad things that would be difficult to even assign the blame for.

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