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Ya I agree in theory but disagree in practice. I moved furniture for 2.5 years and delivered appliances for 6 months for a warehouse from about 2001-2003 while
by zackmorris 8y ago
Ya I agree in theory but disagree in practice. I moved furniture for 2.5 years and delivered appliances for 6 months for a warehouse from about 2001-2003 while I was trying to get my shareware business going. This meant sometimes loading and unloading full 53 foot semi trailers of furniture and boxes (typically 2 or 3 households worth) with just 2 or 3 people, up to 2 or 3 times a day if we were working in the warehouse itself and had a few stragglers who could help.
For a while there I came up with roughly one invention per day that would radically reduce the amount of labor we performed or protect us from the sun and elements. For example, in big cities they use lifts to windows and chutes on stairs to get boxes up and down tall buildings. But they don't use anything in smaller cities except elbow grease usually.
Anyway, whenever I brought up a new idea, it was soundly rejected by pretty much everyone. The standard answer being "that would put us out of a job!"
There is massive resistance to any kind of innovation in the shipping industry. My gut feeling is that it won't change at all until it's too late, and then the whole thing will come crashing down when it's replaced by self-driving forklifts and drones. It's one of the few industries that still (under)employs millions of people, and I think that we should keep that in mind before we work so hard to automate it into oblivion.
But automation is inevitable and will come within 10 years or so, so if we really want to help society, we should be focussing on education and vo-tech training in order to find meaningful work for everyone who's going to be misplaced. I know in my heart that that won't be enough though, which is why I'm a huge proponent of universal basic income.
- fineline 8y agoI did removals for a couple of years as a young man too. I disagree with your conclusion. There are so many different physical characteristics between each day's jobs - parking setups, strange paths through gardens, different types of building layouts and contents, different types of unusual belongings, the behavior of customers in one of the most stressful activities in most people's lives (possibly combined with other stressful circumstances such as divorce, bereavement or repossession), the need to pack and handle both very fragile items and very heavy and bulky items... People who reckon you're going to build a robot that can handle this huge diversity of demands at a cost that can beat low paid manual workers are being very techno-utopian. Same with cleaning hotel rooms, doing roadworks, building up and knocking down special events etc. Not to mention the immense amount of work in reconfiguring physical infrastructure if we ever get remotely serious about climate change. If anyone was making a betting market on achieving automation of those kinds of jobs within a specific timeframe I'd be an eager counter party. Now if you're a radiographer, legal assistant, project manager, sports reporter, then yeah the times are a changin'...