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Comment by socketcluster | Hacker News Reader

The thing that's missed here is that it's not clear that robot purchase, maintenance cost and depreciation would be cheaper than paying 7.5 people a salary... Not to mention that the robots aren't going to be spending part of their salaries at Amazon as a worker might. Also, robots won't be eligible to vote in elections to support Amazon's political aspirations which give it access to billions of government contracts.

It seems we have gone to the opposite extreme since the days of Henry Ford where he wanted to pay his workers enough for them to be able to afford the cars they made.

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That belief about Henry Ford is a myth. It doesn't even pass the smell test, if a company is only selling to their own workers they can never make a profit (note that any company, even a large one like Ford or Amazon, is different from an entire economy).

Ford raised wages and cut hours because his annual turnover was 300%. He ended up making more money through savings in hiring and training costs and workers staying long enough to gain experience.

In a way it was an expression of worker power. Which only applies because workers are humans, robots don't get tired, they don't have feelings, they don't leave for a competitor paying more. The best ones are more expensive than humans right now, but robots get cheaper over time. Ideally we don't want human labor to get cheaper over time.

I don't think it was implied that Ford's entire customer base was his own employees, just that he paid them enough to afford the cars the company manufactured. I agree with the rest of this though.

Ford was a ruthless capitalist and antisemite. He never cared for workers affording his cars, only that they bought them. His union busting gangs were some of the worst.

Ford offering higher pay and better working hours were for employee retention which was important at the time.

The jobs robots replace aren’t good for the human soul

Until investment funds can sell souls as a commodity they will remain without value.

Being homeless and unemployed isn't good for the human soul either.

We have record employment currently. There are other jobs.

Those two things don't have to be correlated. It is our choice as a society to make them so.

Apart from the possible cheaper cost of robots instead of human employees, one key aspect is that robots don’t unionize.

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