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Comment by aaviator42 | Hacker News Reader

I was thinking last night. Shouldn't software we make help people instead of replacing them? Why must innovation be in the direction of and at the cost of replacing humans?

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"I was thinking last night. Shouldn't <all innovation> we make help people instead of replacing them? Why must innovation be in the direction of and at the cost of replacing humans?"

-Humans when electricity replaced lamplighter jobs [1]

[1]: https://sloanreview.mit.edu/article/learning-from-automation...

True then, still true now.

I really don't care if jobs are replaced, so long that people are still able to make a living.

It really becomes a problem if you replace humans as a whole, and don't come up with something to allow them to make a living still such as UBI or others.

I think that is the big difference between the lamplighter situation, and the situation at hand.

I've seen no evidence for there being "not enough jobs". The problem (as always) is the status associated with the job.

There is a real dearth of people wanting to work the trades, but no one wants those jobs. I'm not sure how to solve that problem, even I don't want that job.

A smart society would give status to people who take jobs that are needed but undesirable. We do not live in a smart society.

Related is the fact that other jobs existing, even IF desirable, doesn't mean they can be learned over night. Many jobs worth having take years of training. Switching careers overnight is not realistic for nearly anyone who gets laid off due to replacement.

That seems like a transitory problem already solved by government programs such as extended unemployment and adult training programs.

The problem is still more people's willingness to cede the status of their current jobs to take up new ones. That's still the hardest part.

I'd argue that your point is only true if the amount of money the government gives out per month per person vastly increases.

Yup. Political problems irrelevant to the tech. Also a lot more attainable/manageable than an expansive permanent UBI.

That is a quite pervasive thought in the tech industry nowadays: we break everything, let the politics/society/aliens fix it. What would you say if the politics/society/aliens decide to block said tech, stopping the problem at the source? It's not a given, that techbros can do anything with impunity.

It doesn't have to be. But often the executives or investors who stand to profit the most from innovation also have strong public facing influence over the narrative. Employees cost a ton, so it's self serving both to promote the product to like minded people, and to hype the product itself.

That's what it does.

"Replacement" is only a problem for people who are dependent on someone else being dependent on them.

> "Replacement" is only a problem for people who are dependent on someone else being dependent on them.

Not so. Replacement is a huge problem for people who have people who depend on them to furnish the cost of living.

Also it can be quite dangerous in a game setting where some costs of losing the game include homelessness or death.

In fact, it might be desirable to some political figures to drive up enlistment numbers by putting more people in such precarious situations.

But what do I know, I read a book and an AI can do that for you now... so... don't think too much about it.

>Also it can be quite dangerous in a game setting where some costs of losing the game include homelessness or death.

It could allow for natural selection to start taking place again to select for desirable traits.

A meteor could select for the whole Earth to be gone, but I don't think I'm going to start praising disaster.

We've been optimizing for the wrong metrics? Infinite growth was fine when the map had "here be dragons", led to absurdum you get the profit driven, neurotic company architecture that optimizes for the goals of optimizing, every single person can be playing the right cards but the end goal is to move value from A to B with A(A-value) being not considered, when A(-value) are people with lives, we either pickup and move, but A_n(-value) is already there. Aka. no more dragons.\

edit for clarity

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