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Comment by lm28469 | Hacker News Reader

Yeah I just don't get how people miss this elephant in the room.

Automation as it was sold to us since the 60s is a complete failure on the social aspect. Wages stagnate, we work as much if not more than 40 years ago, retirement age is going up, job security is dead, inequalities are growing, poverty is rising, virtually everywhere in the west.

It's cool to automate factory jobs but if it's to push factory workers into amazon warehouses, uber, e-scooter juicers or food delivery jobs I don't see it as a net positive, capital owners sure generate more capital but that's the last thing I'd like to see increasing.

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While this may be true, there's no practical opposition to the force of automation. What can be automated, inevitably will be automated. The efficiencies offered by machines doing what people can do is too irresistible, even to the people who consume the technology, and even more so to those that employ or implement it. People increasingly want more with less labor and consumers most often choose those things that are automated and available without human labor over those that are. There's very little that can practically counterweight the increasing automation of all the things.

The real issue is in your last phrase. It's not the automation itself which didn't deliver, but the fact that the general folk doesn't see much of the benefits. Yeah okay we got automated and have to retrain towards other jobs, but those new jobs look just as shitty as the previous ones.

Except a more diverse range of products and services that are cheaper and higher quality.

Not food and housing. Getting a brand new AAA video game mostly generated by AI dirt cheap is awesome, but that's not going to matter much when you can barely afford rent and groceries

Good thing life is all about owning products and consuming services!

What periods of time are we comparing? Sure, products and services are better than before the industrial revolution. But within my lifetime, I noticed certain goods in categories like food, furniture, electronic appliances, got worse. Customer service also took a nosedive.

There are two issues here: On one hand, the required amount of actual work is decreasing. This is cool and good.

On the other hand, the demanded amount of fictional work (i.e. things that don't need to happen except folks must "make money") is not decreasing at all. This is stupid and bad.

It's not clear to me why it is fair to demand that the former stops as a response to the latter. The latter is what should be addressed, because addressing it is what gets us to luxury gay space communism when combined with the former. Which would be a nice place to be.

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