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Comment by kreek | Hacker News Reader

In my previous job this hit home quite hard, one day many of the people who helped us build the system that automated their jobs were laid off.

Then once the system was fully streamlined we developers were laid off as well.

In addition some of the end product was used in aerospace so there's a good chance it could be used for 'bad' (depending on your perspective) things.

Now I work in video games, not curing cancer, but in my search I was looking for a company that at least did no harm.

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> Now I work in video games, not curing cancer, but in my search I was looking for a company that at least did no harm.

Ironically, one of the reasons I left EA was that I saw my CTO and half of the programmers around me assigned to the task of figuring out how to outsource more development. That didn't seem like a winning proposition to me.

I would say that outsourcing development jobs is at least a wash. Relatively wealthy people in developed countries may be (temporarily, let's be honest) out of work, but far less wealthy people living in less developed countries will have the opportunity to make what is, for them, a good wage.

Automation is harder to justify this sort of way. Outsourcing moves jobs around, automation is intended to eliminate them (yeah yeah, we need people to make and fix the robots, but let's be real, there is a net loss of jobs and we can only hope that cheaper products will trigger the creation of new, largely unrelated, jobs.)

> automation is intended to eliminate [jobs]

Automation has the potential to eliminate jobs, but also has the potential to allow much more work to be done by a single person, or allowing that person to do the same work with less effort.

Perhaps I'm overly simplifying your words, but I don't think automation is inherently "evil". Like all tools or techniques, they may be used toward good or bad ends.

One of the big problems with engineers is that they like solving problems, but sticking around to debate how those solutions will be used is "politics" and they say, "I hate that shit". Thus it's easy for the psychopaths who run this society to come in and use automation for bad (depriving others of participation, rather than distributing the benefits).

Well, I wouldn't say that automation is evil, and automation certainly can be used primarily to scale processes, but I think that if a process is already running at capacity (say, you are already producing more wheat than the world needs), then automation will tend to reduce prices (or at least costs) and reduce jobs. The end-game is total automation (hopefully with everybody enjoying the fruits of that past labor, Star Trek style.)

I think that automation in general is a worthwhile endeavor, but we need to be mindful of the downsides and modify our society as we implement more automation to ensure that we are not causing undue harm. I believe that various forms of social safety-nets will become essential as we march towards automation's logical conclusion.

So if we used to build a road by having a group of 50 guys with shovels, should we just ignore the invention of the bulldozer so these men don't lose their jobs.

95% of Americans used to work in agriculture. Should we still all be farmers today because if we adapt technology then some of the farmers would lose their job?

Yeah, a $5 an hour job is created in China, but a $20 an hour job is eliminated in America, and much of the difference is captured by some executive or shareholder in the U.S.

EA brings up a horrible (but true) thought. One of my colleagues was discussing the video game industry (which he left in disgust). People accept terrible terms to work in it, but in doing so, they make it worse for everyone. People who accept 60 cents on the dollar and mandatory 80-hour weeks and death-march projects to work in VG are making it worse for everyone else who wants to work in that industry and are, in a real way, being unethical.

I'm not anti-market, because I can't come up with anything better as a general economic problem-solving tool, but they do have the undesirable effect of often pitting have-nots against other have-nots, when it would be morally better for them to team up and maybe get a fighting chance against the haves. It's easy in New York (I lived there for 7 years) to hate "rich assholes" (and foreign speculators, and rent-control royalty) for the rent situation, but every time I paid that rent check, I was just as much a part of the problem.

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