Unemployment is not a disease | Hacker News Reader

Unemployment is not a disease

deepleafproductions.com

17 pointsmaxwell5 comments

Slight tangent. Greater automation and the necessities of life driving toward a zero cost -- vs -- the ever bigger dreams of humanity, employing greater labor / more minds. I wonder if anyone has tried to quantify the two fantasies against one another.

I think they're interrelated. Look at how the European colonization of the Americas coincided with the Renaissance. They only happened because of a few key technologies reaching a certain point of evolutionary maturity. You needed the square rig, pintle-and-gudgeon rudder, compass, star charts, oil paint, double entry accounting... (See http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1hukkfbevWM)

We still have more problems to resolve (such as the finite nature of terrestrial resources) before all undesirable but necessary tasks are automated, and we can spend our lives entirely on art/science.

The gains in productivity that you get from automation should be pumped into fields where pain points still exist, such as medical research.

With the infrastructure that's been built, we have wonderful tools that we can use to learn how to extend human life. Just as we once moved from agriculture to manufacturing we should move again now to massive efforts to advance and practice medicine. In addition to being immoral, socialism (the article proposes several guaranteed-income programs) is not a practical system for getting the results needed to meet the challenges we face.

As I learn about cancer biology, I often wish that even more people would jump in and try to figure things out. The field is full of incredibly tough problems, and they are of paramount importance to virtually everyone: you're going to get cancer if you live long enough.

You might think it's fantastic that millions of average folks should go and get educations in the sciences, and perhaps it is. But socialism simply would pull people in the exact opposite direction. (See some statistics on Saudi Arabia if you want to see what free money does to a people.)

Is starvation a disease?

"unemployment is not a disease, but the natural, healthy functioning of an advanced technological society."

This is almost true. Everybody who wants to work should be able to do so, have the right to do so. It's not needed for society as a whole that everybody has to work (to survive) like today.

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