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Comment by protocolture | Hacker News Reader

>If I am eating a delicious meal but the people preparing it had a miserable time, or it was prepared entirely by robots controlled by nefarious people using the profits to harm society, I don’t want it.

So much infrastructure is built by people having a less than good time.

An Engineer might get the jollies designing a bridge, but the workers who work on it dont.

The goal is to give lots of people happiness from not having to drive 100km out of their way.

If we solve a lot of problems for a lot of people and all it costs is the happiness of a few software engineers, well I am not convinced they were happy to begin with. Fund it.

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> An Engineer might get the jollies designing a bridge, but the workers who work on it dont.

My father was a laborer and he was incredibly proud of every project he worked on to build the city he loved.

He was exceptionally proud the day I drove to my first day of work at Microsoft, along a road he helped pave.

We should all aim to build things we can take pride in.

Same here. My father was a bricklayer. Backbreaking work. On weekends he drove us to the houses he had worked on. We didn't appreciate it as young children, but he was definitely very proud of what he built.

And why should the workers who work on the bridge be denied happiness and satisfaction from their work? Building and creating physical stuff is incredibly rewarding in concept for so many people - especially in a culture that values/glorifies physical and manual labor like parts of the US. I mean bob the builder is a popular kids show and "all boys are fascinated by big trucks and construction projects" is both an incredibly common stereotype and to a significant extent just a true statement.

They shouldnt, but their happiness should also not prevent the bridge.

> So much infrastructure is built by people having a less than good time.

If the "work only as means to an end" line of thinking continues, us programmers will be there in no time.

Many people get immense satisfaction by looking at a physical object they helped create and saying - “I helped build that”.

> An Engineer might get the jollies designing a bridge, but the workers who work on it dont.

What is this viewpoint based on?

The majority of blue collar workers I know get plenty of pleasure from their work and would absolutely hate sitting on a computer 8 hours per day.

> An Engineer might get the jollies designing a bridge, but the workers who work on it don't.

I think work becoming more abstract and not seeing anything concrete like a bridge or a road or a building after the work is complete is the source of a lot of mental illness, melancholy, and even suicidal ideation in modern society.

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