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Do you honestly believe this isn't going to be a problem?

• stale2002 8y ago
  People have predicted that it would be a problem every year for the last hundred years. And those people were all proven false. How many times do the same predictions have to be proven false before we don't take them seriously anymore? People won't do that though. We will continue to hear the same predictions for another hundred years, and every time the people making will say "but this time it's different!"
  • antoinette_ 8y ago
    No, they weren't proven false, it's just that the effects of automation aren't felt evenly across the whole population at once. If you aren't in the groups it was affecting, you likely didn't see it beyond a newspaper article here and there, and maybe it didn't really register. There are entire towns filled with people who are suffering from poverty and all its knock-on effects because they were single-industry towns and that industry went through automation that eliminated those jobs en masse. Everyone always says that these people are just suffering from a skills shortage and need to retrain into a different career and move to where the jobs are. But which careers should they choose to retrain into? Retraining represents several years of time investment and at least tens of thousands of dollars in money investment, money which they don't even have in the bank, so choosing wrong will often be the last nail in the coffin. When I was entering school I was told that going into CS was too risky because everyone was offshoring these days. Instead the most recommended "safe" jobs were: lawyer, pharmacist, welder. Of those three choices, only one was still in demand by the time the entering cohort had graduated. The other two had such a glut of entering workers that many new grads were being advised to retrain again. When industry demand is changing faster than people can reasonably retrain and pay off their student loans, "skills shortage" is just another way to say "let them eat cake", and the pace of automation is absolutely contributing to this issue.
  • pbhjpbhj 8y ago
    You're right, energy resources are limitless so there's no possibility a system based on ever growing consumption could possibly fail. /s
    • stale2002 8y ago
      The laws of physics are of course true. But we will run into "infinite growth" issues in a couple thousand years. Not in a couple decades. The burden of proof is on you, if you want to argue that the limits of growth are right around the corner. I have been hearing people yell the the same arguement that you are making about infinite growth for years. And yet every year they get proven wrong. So talk to me in a thousand years, when we actually start to hit those limits.
  • int_19h 8y ago
    The reason why we continue to hear the same predictions is because the predictions from the other side (that everything will be alright this time) are never concrete. It's always something like, "oh, there will be new industries you couldn't possibly imagine before, and jobs will be there". Excuse me if I don't find that argument convincing. Saying that it happened before is not really convincing either, unless we understand the underlying mechanism and can predict that it will continue to operate the same - and I haven't even seen any convincing theories yet. Relying on past observations alone without understanding what's behind them is not always such a good idea; you might be crossing the river by walking on ice because it never cracked before - and then one day it does, because it's springtime. If the risks are high, I'd rather be more sure than "it never happened before". And we're talking about a potential economic disruption so massive that it'd likely erupt into violence, so the risks are high.