You would think that automating your job would make you free to work less. No, of course not, you end up either unemployed or working at least as much as you used to or more.
A lot of the comments here on this thread are already pessimistic in relation to the automation because people low key know that in the last decades almost all societal changes have come to the detriment of general population.
In capitalist west, capitalism was also about distribution of goods but literally being nice about it. Working together.
The language is meaningless gibberish. The tone and emotional spin, roleplay are what’s important.
In the US we’re enabling iron fisted oligarchs like the USSR once had. Those who refuse to share without extreme deference and idolatry, not because they’re that important to the well being of billions (they’re not) but because they’re important to the political actors that insulate them from taxation.
The USSR et al had many more problems than most people in the west, at least of my generation, properly appreciate — the Holomodor and the irony of the Berlin Wall's official name (≈ anti-fascist protection barrier) being the most pertinent in my mind.
Conversely, while the USA was a symbol of hope and freedom in my childhood, that childhood was oblivious to the official segregation of the USA even in the 60s, let alone the unofficial segregation whose continued existence was the basis for the term "woke" prior to it being appropriated by all the political talking heads to mean everything and nothing.
The oligarchy in the USA today is not one I favour, but it is kinder than the… I was going to reference the events of the Homestead strike, but it turns out I must remember my own words, for that too is less clear-cut than I had heard: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homestead_strike
But yeah, reality is a complicated mess.
My opinion is that laissez-faire capitalism is BS, that the Roosevelt New Deal marked an end to that era for the same reason that the equivalent living conditions ended Soviet-style communism; that other forms of communism and capitalism exist; that both over-simplify human nature and that a superior alternative to both can be designed with careful effort; that such a thing probably won't be taken seriously until the current system is utterly broken because of those with power in the current system; and that by default AI and robotics is a lot closer to communism than anything else because "from each according to ability" requires much less personal consideration when everyone has a dozen droid servitors at their disposal.
Yeah, ask my grand grand father how great that worked. Oh sorry, you can’t, he was shot in the gulag in 1937 for anti revolution activities (and rehabilitated in 60s, saying it was a terrible mistake, that’s a relief, right?).
Its intrinsic economic woes were overplayed by western elites who were terrified of communist contagion.
Western ideology is about the primacy of property ownership. It's not economically efficient in the slightest but it's the only game in town these days.
The Fed and the financial class have been printing money relentlessly and have been squeezing all the juice of the economic benefits of automation by taxing it with inflation. The zero rates of the last 20 years have not reflected price stability, they reflected moving goalposts and strong technological deflation (which should've benefited the common people) coupled to high monetary inflation which was only allowed because of the technological deflation.
When you look at where did most of the money gained from technological innovation went - where all the newly found wealth was spent - the answer is obviously houses. The landlord / banking class have been printing money relentlessly inflating a bubble of the assets they hold, and they could only afford to do it because they absorbed the rising economic power of technology. You slave away while they get to print money.
We have effectively two tiered society. For the common people, a dollar is a dollar. For the financial class, a dollar is actually ten dollars, held with leverage and then bailed out by the Fed when it blows up.
They've been automated for so long and so thoroughly that you didn't even think of them as 'having been automated away'.
Look at any commercial kitchen, any farm, inside any factory. Look at the grocery store, and its self-checkout machines. Look at parking attendants and toll booths. Look at the labour-saving devices employed at any construction site. Look at the demise of cottage industries - which used to be the economic driver of productive output, and are now limited to kitschy crafts on Etsy. Look at the cargo-container shipping yard, where a hundred dock-workers are now do the work that used to take tens of thousands. Look at the answering machine, and the utter insanity that is the modern automated customer support directory.
What hasn't been automated are jobs like janitors - where the work that they do is highly varied, and requires manipulation of different tools, in different spaces. We can automate a floor-mopping machine, or a vaccum cleaner, but we can't (yet) build a robot that will vaccum, and water the plants, and scrub a toilet, and clean up vomit, and refill the paper towel dispenser, all in one package.
Which aren’t automation or even new technology. The stores just cleverly moved the work that must be done to unpaid laborers. The self-checkout machines are an inferior tool with an escape hatch (customer service is on the way) to the real tool which must be operated by an employee.
I find self checkout very beneficial, as I frequently have few items to purchase, and there are more self checkout registers available more consistently than there would be staff.
For the same ~20 to 30 items I normally purchase, it takes me very little time to self checkout. For people with cartloads of items, they can go to the manned conveyor belts. For everyone else, they can go to one of the many self checkouts.
Except if they have never used self checkout before. Or if they have 15 items in the store's cart but they haven't brought their shopping bags so they take 15 minutes to fill their arms and pockets and hats with their groceries.
Those people are eating time saved by self-checkout !
I tolerate the young ones who comes in pack of 6 individuals, especially if only one of them buy their unique can of coke. It makes the queue looks longer than it is and I am out sooner than the SUCKERS in the other queue.
HA ! (/s ? /s)
Manual jobs that are relatively safe, close to home, steady, and easy to learn will probably have a lot of people vying for them, hence lower pay.
In the U.S. I believe it's through Social Security.
So as more jobs are automated and the base level of ability required to get hired goes up so does the need to expand who qualifies for social programs.
Productivity will be increasing with automation so it's a matter of distributing resources more efficiently and fairly than it is about making sure there is labor for everyone to get a job.
If you don’t live in the U.S. it’s hard to grasp just how hostile the political/economic system is towards the lower and middle classes. The idea of a UBI program to support people whose jobs get automated and lack the skills to work elsewhere is completely out of the question. A trip to the hospital can easily bankrupt the average American family ffs, but we can’t even fix that. There is zero political will to provide robust social programs here, despite any evidence that shows it might improve society.
Sorry for the rant. TL;DR if you look at the last few decades of politics in the U.S. you can see there is close to zero chance of the solutions you’re describing.
Being conscious intelligent creatures, humans ought to be able to learn from their mistakes and implement change accordingly.
This presupposes one refrains from defeatist refusal to engage those problems of course.
> Being conscious intelligent creatures, humans ought to be able to learn from their mistakes and implement change accordingly.
We sure ought to, I agree with you there.
The contemporary habit of envisioning people as some sort of disposable artifice is dehumanising at its core and just serves to rid those in lucky positions of superfluence from responsibility.
Society needs to learn to recognize interpersonal differences in terms other than self-serving judgemental dismissal.
Someone in a wheelchair 50 years ago could not do a lot of jobs vs now that's not even a factor in a software job.
Hopefully, we would reach a Star Trek-like utopia where people aren't required to work in order to live.
More realistically, the middle class just disappears, and we have nothing but the super-rich and the destitute left.
2. Capitalists require consumers to actually buy shit, owning capital doesn't get you anything if you don't have proles to sell to.