Comment by ekianjo | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ekianjo | Hacker News Reader

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> Your history is just as flawed as your understanding of work, value and progress (in other words, you've been brainwashed). "Hard work" has always been a domain reserved exclusively for the slaves.

Haha, to wake up and see that is really entertaining. You're a guy who has made money in IT and you think everyone can live the same way as you. You don't realize you are living in a small bubble that does not apply to 99.9% of all other workers out there. You don't realize there is a whole working class below you who's working to make sure stuff gets cleaned, garbage gets collected, meals get cooked, tables are waited and so on ?

> The correct answer, of course, is: machines.

Amusing, again. There's just so much machines can do, and there are still many jobs where it's completely irrealistic to replace people by machines (mostly because the investment is not worth it). If you think otherwise, I'd recommend you go out and visit actual industries making stuff, not just IT related ones, and try to understand why most of them still employ people no matter how many machines they have.

Take a look at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0SuGRgdJA_c.

We will see an increase in automation for jobs that we didn't expect to be so. The speed of this transformation depends on our creative and technical ability.

If you think that work defines you, read up about the Puritans in America. They had an extreme motto that 100% of your waking life must be allocated to work. You could say they are the only religious that had a fear that someone around them was having a good time.

> If you think that work defines you [...]

I don't, and I've never implied that.

> We will see an increase in automation for jobs that we didn't expect to be so.

We've seen increases in automation for hundreds of years, yet there was never a depletion of jobs for people. There's more jobs now that there has ever been before (not talking about short time scale here). Industry automation has led to the creation of the expansion of the Services industry. And there will still be tons of professions where you can't automate stuff - at best you can improve people's work using computing aids, make them work more efficiently, but at some point of the supply chain you still need human action. For the services industry, there's also the bias that most people want to deal with other people and not with computers, so automation will face cultural limits as well in some areas. I'm not worried.

Surely you can see the endgame here. Amazon employs 1/3 as many people per dollar of revenue as Walmart does. Imagine a world where Walmart automates itself to a level comparable to Amazon. Lo! Watch as 1,452,000 jobs melt away!

And that's just one company. Sure, it's the biggest one. Sure, they're probably jobs nobody would do given better alternatives. All the same, those are now 1,452,000 fewer people employed in a world replacing human capital with physical capital.

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