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Comment by onion2k | Hacker News Reader

Is humanity really at a point where we can't think of anything more useful than "carry things about" and "put things in a box" for those people to do? If that's really the state we're in then a bunch of robots doing it instead is the least of our problems.

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I think getting adequate housing, food, and Healthcare is useful for workers.

Perhaps if people didn't need to prove that they deserve these necessities this conversation about robots replacing humans wouldn't be so dire.

It doesn't seem like we are close to robotics providing housing, food, and healthcare for nominal costs to everyone. Seems like we still need a lot of humans working in those spaces.

In particular, durable goods (and human bodies and even hair) need a lot of maintenance. So far, at least, robots aren't especially gifted at maintenance tasks.

Isn't it also a problem that we've put people who's capabilities are equal to those kind of tasks into the "useless" category? Not everyone is cut out to be a programmer, which by the way, will also eventually be in the "useless" bucket. In reality, "better things to do" usually means just a lot of people in poverty.

Welfare systems are nationalistic. The US will tax companies using robots and redistribute it to Americans while the people assembling widgets in developing countries will be out of a job. I'm still optimistic that the raw increase in economic productivity will somehow sort everyone out eventually, but it could be bumpy.

That corporate taxation though hasn’t worked too well so far. What makes you think that having robots would change anything?

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