4 ms·

Replacing people with machines isn’t, and has never been the problem. Telling generations of people who depend on the jobs they have to suck it up and move out

• overtone 8y ago
  > People don’t work a coal face because it’s fun, but because it’s what they know how to do, and it brings home the bacon. Far more than that, coal workers take pride in their work, it's part of their identity and it commands a certain degree of respect as being "hard labor". If it was just about "bringing home the bacon" they might as well take any other job. This is in contrast to working for Wal-Mart or McDonalds, there's no pride in it, it's not part of people's identity. People want to move on from these jobs, but there are less and less opportunities to move on to. > So if you want people to do more than spit on us as we pass, we should put effort into ensuring a safety net for them when the work we domtskes their livliehood away. A safety net is well and good, but if people lose their jobs and get stuck in the net, it destroys them. Again, it's about pride and identity.
  • bksenior 8y ago
    Eh. This seems fluffy. This seems more like the Industrial Revolution + Twitter. Just like all the studies that the world is technically better off in every modern metric of improvement (poverty, starvation, mobility..etc, but things feel shitty because you are forced to read about the one dude kidnapping and eating children one state over, I think it's probably just amplified fears (and ultimately seperation of teams) than it was during other large periods of change. It's also worth noting that people dont die, jobs just shift unexpectedly. Sure it can crush a generation (see the american midwest from 1960-2020), but most people move to where the work is geographically and intellectually or just die out.
    • NeedMoreTea 8y ago
      There was far more to it than that. Whole communities arose around the pit, steel works or ship yard. Hundreds or thousands of local families depended on it. Family, friends and everyone in the street was a part of it. When it goes a few shop or driving jobs may be possible but leaves the majority up shit creek with no paddle. > Sure it can crush a generation (see the american midwest from 1960-2020), but most people move to where the work is geographically and intellectually or just die out. That is possibly the most heartless thing I have read on this site. I imagine your perspective would change markedly if it were you that were stuck, unable to afford to move, in a dead town whose industry left, while you contemplate your time until you die out.
      • deevolution 8y ago
        I think this is exactly where VR will help people enormously. The game industry is already outpacing the sports industry in revenue - and in reach. Games provide people with agency, accomplishment, and a community that some people cannot get anywhere else - perhaps the very people you are describing. Its inevitable that people will be replaced by technology - no amount of government regulation is going to slow the massive tides of progress. VR is going to be a very, very important coping mechanism during this period of disruption. edit: some words
      • pas 8y ago
        You are right, so is OP, but I don't think OP's post is heartless. It's simply descriptivist (positivist) and not normative. It is what it is, there's no point in sugar coating it. And yes, of course our response to these facts are even more important. Do we just short steel mill stocks and Pittsburgh bonds or advocate for retraining, for subsidizing emerging industry establishments in the affected areas, etc. Some of the affected people feel it as elitism, socialism, etc. Usually because outsiders are blind to and ignorant of the local complexities, and also because good fashioned bias and denialism. It's easier to simply deny climate change and hate green liberals than accepting that coal is out. And that software has a much higher ROI due to the marginally aomost zero cost of adding new users/customers than hard labour jobs, etc.
  • hammock 8y ago
    Have you ever known a McDonald's worker, or a coal worker? I have known plenty of bottom-barrel blue collar workers who do it begrudgingly and some fast food employees who take pride in their work.
  • jackcosgrove 8y ago
    I think this debate underestimates the psychological value of contributing through work and the identity and belonging that come from that. And I don't even think obsolescence becoming common will help to normalize this state. People want to contribute, and it hurts when they aren't needed.
    • gotocake 8y ago
      I agree with this, but I also recognize that it’s not feasible for governments and industries to invent meaning in people's lives. Supporting people and providing them with more than a skin-of-their-teeth existence is and it’s something that isn’t historically addressed very well during transitional periods. If automation eventually dominates work, society will have to change, but that’s something we’ll have to work through as a society. The experience will be less horrific if people are not being dumped into poverty or awful makework jobs as well as having to reinvent the meaning of their collective existence!
  • nopinsight 8y ago
    I agree that pride and identity are important to people’s well being. What are some suggestions to help people gain those back, perhaps in a still viable industry? Until AGI is invented, there will always be jobs available [1] but some jobs are unnecessarily looked down upon despite being important to society and safer than mining. Since pride in one’s work tends to tie with the value that broader communities put on the work, would a broad-based ongoing PR campaign by well-resourced organizations (incl. local and federal governments) help with that? Perhaps we can put the DeBeers experience with creating a shared cross-generation myth of diamonds representing true love to good use. Elderly care, for example, would be hard to automate cost effectively over the next couple of decades and possibly longer. If society puts more value and gives more prestige to the job, more people would be willing to train to do it. (Obviously, the society should help people transition to their new roles as well for example by covering the costs of living and training for a substantial period.) [1] Lump of labor fallacy https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lump_of_labour_fallacy https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lump_of_labour_fallacy As concrete examples: - Has every piece of potentially useful land well-developed as a magnificent public or private space? - Has all public infrastructure needed been built and well-maintained to the best quality possible? - Does every person, adult and child, have access to world-class education/training they want or need, including private tutoring if they wish?
    • sedachv 8y ago
      > - Does every person, adult and child, have access to world-class education/training they want or need, including private tutoring if they wish? The well-resourced organizations seem to be backing broad-based ongoing PR and political campaigns to do exactly the opposite of providing people with a good education: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SZGVR1-4Gqs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SZGVR1-4Gqs
• bduerst 8y ago
  It's been a problem since the luddites in the 19th century, and as we move further into the 21st, human adaptability is going to become a stronger selling point. Nobody really cared as the blacksmith, farm hand, or the secretary lost jobs. Coal mining is a celebrated profession for some reason.
  • throwaway218649 8y ago
    > Nobody really cared as the blacksmith, farm hand, or the secretary lost jobs. I am not sure where you got that impression. The loss of blacksmith (and nailmaker, etc.) and farm hand jobs in 19th century England was a huge social issue (hundreds of thousands of people starved to death after being thrown out of work in England alone; over a million if you count the displacement that lead to the Irish famines), with regular government inquiries, newspaper coverage, and many, many books written about it. In particular, there was a very famous book, called Capital, written by Karl Marx, that, among other things, points out that popular anti-automation anxiety goes back much farther than the Luddite movement: > In the 17th century nearly all Europe experienced revolts of the work-people against the ribbon-loom, a machine for weaving ribbons and trimmings… Abbé Launcelloti, in a work that appeared in Venice in 1636, but which was written in 1579, says as follows: "Anthony Müller of Danzig saw about 50 years ago in that town, a very ingenious machine, which weaves 4 to 6 pieces at once. But the Mayor being apprehensive that this invention might throw a large number of workmen on the streets, caused the inventor to be secretly strangled or drowned." In Leyden, this machine was not used till 1629; there the riots of the ribbon-weavers at length compelled the Town Council to prohibit it… After making various decrees more or less prohibitive against this loom in 1632, 1639, etc., the States General of Holland at length permitted it to be used, under certain conditions, by the decree of the 15th December, 1661. It was also prohibited in Cologne in 1676, at the same time that its introduction into England was causing disturbances among the work-people. By an imperial Edict of 19th Feb., 1685, its use was forbidden throughout all Germany. In Hamburg it was burnt in public by order of the Senate. The Emperor Charles VI, on 9th Feb., 1719, renewed the edict of 1685, and not till 1765 was its use openly allowed in the Electorate of Saxony. This machine [the ribbon-loom], which shook Europe to its foundations, was in fact the precursor of the mule and power-loom, and of the industrial revolution of the 18th century… About 1630, a wind-sawmill, erected near London by a Dutchman, succumbed to the excesses of the populace. Even as late as the beginning of the 18th century, sawmills driven by water overcame the opposition of the people, supported as it was by Parliament, only with great difficulty. No sooner had Everet in 1758 erected the first wool-shearing machine that was driven by water-power, than it was set on fire by 100,000 people who had been thrown out of work. Fifty thousand workpeople, who had previously lived by carding wool, petitioned Parliament against Arkwright's scribbling mills and carding engines. The enormous destruction of machinery that occurred in the English manufacturing districts during the first 15 years of this century [19th], chiefly caused by the employment of the power-loom, and known as the Luddite movement, gave the anti-Jacobin governments of a Sidmouth, a Castlereagh, and the like, a pretext for the most reactionary and forcible measures. It took both time and experience before the workpeople learnt to distinguish between machinery and its employment by capital, and to direct their attacks, not against the material instruments of production, but against the mode in which they are used. [footnote: In old-fashioned manufactures the revolts of the workpeople against machinery, even to this day, occasionally assume a savage character, as in the case of the Sheffield file cutters in 1865]. From chapter 15 of volume I
• deevolution 8y ago
  Progress has always come with some consequences, unfortunately. I'm not saying that we can't do better, but we're only human afterall.