5 ms·

Surprised to find so many modern Luddites in comments. History lessons says that new professions will appear.

lm28469 7y ago
But that's the whole point though. We're creating bs jobs to replace the bs jobs we automated. What's our goal as a society ? Shouldn't we think about working less, better spreading wealth, figuring out a plan so people don't have to work multiple jobs to barely survive ? Right now almost everywhere in the world we're heading for longer work week and increased retirement age. So much for "automation will deliver us from work" we've heard over and over again for the last 60 years.
- EugeneOZ 7y ago
  > better spreading wealth I grew up in a country where communism has won - I know for sure that it's an utopia. I really hate communists, socialists and other imbeciles who believe that people/business should give their money to lazy people just to make everybody "equal". No, people are not equal - somebody is smarter, somebody works more, somebody is a great artist, somebody is just a lazy alcoholic. So no, we should not think about "spreading" wealth, we should think how to train people for new skills/professions, required by the market.
  - lm28469 7y ago
    > I grew up in a country where communism has won - I know for sure that it's an utopia. I don't think communism is the answer either. > I really hate communists, socialists and other imbeciles who believe that people/business should give their money to lazy people just to make everybody "equal". That's a very individualistic point of view, I used to hold a similar one a few years ago but traveling made me change my mind. Look at the US for example, people are dying of diabetes, in 2019, because they can't afford insulin. That's in the #1 country in the world according to "the market". It might be lazy people, it might also be disabled people, people born in the wrong place / at the wrong time, people who didn't get the opportunity to develop, &c. The question isn't even "why are these people failing?", but "how do we handle them humanely?". It's life, shit happens, your parents die prematurely, you get sick, your company declares bankruptcy and you get fire out of nowhere. The day you'll have kids or, hopefully not, a car accident, a cancer or other high impact disease, you'll be happy that all these "imbeciles" paid a bit of your hundred thousand dollar bills you'll owe to the hospital / schools. > just to make everybody "equal". No, people are not equal Sure they're not, nothing is. It's not about making people equal, it's about not letting people go down too far. You can shift the blame on people all you want ("somebody is just a lazy alcoholic"), but in the end we're products of our environment. Individuals shape society, society shapes individuals. There are people having full time jobs who won't be able to live when they retire without public pensions, what do you tell to these people ? "Too bad you were too lazy, go die somewhere else" ? When I'm talking about spreading wealth I'm not talking about the average worker giving even more of his money, I'm talking about the top 10%, the people who game the system going through every loophole available to avoid paying tax. > we should think how to train people for new skills/professions, required by the market. We're already doing that, and in a perfect world yeah, it might work. But I don't see that happening, we'll always have people less capable than others, people who chose or get pushed on different paths. Also, idk where you live but (moderate) socialism brought us weekends (yeah before workers started to unionize in europe we were workin 10 hours a day 7/7), vacation days, sick days, health insurance, social security, work insurances, maternity/paternity leave, unemployment benefits, <40hrs work week, &c. so it's not all bad. I care much more about what I and my close community requires than what "the market" requires. By the way, isn't "the market" supposed to serve the people and not the other way around ?
    - EugeneOZ 7y ago
      Next time drink some water before rage-speech. I have 2 kids and I never asked for help from the society to raise them. "The day you'll have kids" - lol, ridiculous that you think you are much older and "wiser". And I answered about old people who can't work anymore in another comment, you were too lazy to read before blaming. There's a huge difference between people who can't work and people who are too lazy to work. Society should not encourage laziness. If only skill person learned is how to pack items into a box - should learn more. And one more time: all communists are imbeciles, without exceptions.
- noonespecial 7y ago
  As long as we keep setting the cost of housing to "everything you've got" and the cost of health care to "everything you're gonna have", it won't matter how much new productivity we create.
- mschuster91 7y ago
  > Shouldn't we think about working less, better spreading wealth, figuring out a plan so people don't have to work multiple jobs to barely survive ? We should but that would put a decent dent in corporate profits. Germany actually followed this for a long time - since the aftermath of WW2 up until the collapse of the UdSSR we had the "Soziale Marktwirtschaft" which is basically what you described. Then after communism fell, neoliberalism took over.
Kadin 7y ago
History also suggests that having a significant number of unemployed people who suddenly can't afford basic necessities because their jobs / way of life suddenly disappeared, is destabilizing as hell. Very few people are actually suggesting that automation is bad, per se; the concern many people have is that the rate of change needs to be managed such that significant numbers of people aren't left behind. People can only retrain so fast, and some people will never be able to effectively retrain. Automation that suddenly puts them out of work needs to account for what they're supposed to do, and hopefully it's something better than "sit at home and drink themselves to death / overdose on opiates / engage in crime". I'd rather intentionally put the brakes on automation, even though it's a hit to efficiency (and depresses the value of labor -- automation makes human labor more valuable over time), if the alternative you get with unlimited automation is a massive disenfranchisement of working people and consequent destabilization of society. Better to keep some technologically-unnecessary jobs around than to live in a society constantly teetering on the brink of a violent populist uprising. All the efficiency gains of that automation are going to pale in comparison to the damage and loss that will happen during one night of rioting by the now-unemployed proletariat.
- EugeneOZ 7y ago
  > one night of rioting by the now-unemployed proletariat Lol, and this is response to "Luddites". Good luck with riots :)
- max76 7y ago
  > Better to keep some technologically-unnecessary jobs around than to live in a society constantly teetering on the brink of a violent populist uprising. Is there any evidence that the United States is "teetering on the bring of a violent populist uprising."? Your entire comment is hyperbolic.
nepeckman 7y ago
And all those middle age workers will, what? Just be retrained? Who's paying for that? What happens when the retraining fails (as it so often does) because you can't magically turn a truck driver into a software engineer? I don't think any of the comments here are anti-progress. But we do need a social and political plan to handle the automation of a large number of low skill jobs. Failure to plan for this future will result in large numbers of displaced and disaffected people.
- EugeneOZ 7y ago
  > And all those middle age workers will, what? They will be fired, yes. This cruel world, where people should care about competitiveness of their skills. It starts right after the school.
  - theflyinghorse 7y ago
    > It starts right after the school. I'd argue that the competition start before the child is even born in the modern world. Wealth of one's family, their connections play a major role in the success of the child (admission scandals come to mind)
    - EugeneOZ 7y ago
      I wrote about skills competition, not competition between persons. In our cruel world it's absolutely possible to get new skills, and you don't even need huge money to get skills you could sell later. > Wealth of one's family, their connections play a major role in the success of the child And it's perfectly fine. Somebody's parents were working hard or smart and created some legacy - it is absolutely, 100% fine that their offsprings have some advantage - it was the goal of their parents' life.
  - nepeckman 7y ago
    Let's set empathy aside for a moment (which you seem to lack). This just isn't a practical approach. What do you think those people will do after being fired? Kindly die so you don't have to deal with them anymore? No, they will riot. And when that fails, they will turn to theft and crime in order to feed themselves and their family. We will pay one way or another for these economic hardships, in property damage, increased crime, increased prison costs, and overall worse standard of living throughout the developed world.
0xffff2 7y ago
As every mutual fund prospectus will tell you, past performance does not guarantee future results.
jrockway 7y ago
I think we've reached "peak profession". The reality is that there will be fewer and fewer types of jobs going forward, and that you probably can't merely retrain a coal miner to be a software engineer. This doesn't mean we should stop automation. It does mean that we need to figure out a real solution to give these people a secure future. Companies are already innovating on how to not need employees. As a society, we need to innovate on how to give these people that aren't need to pack Amazon boxes a productive and fulfilling life. (My answer is basic income, paid for by the government. It seems that other people's answer, though, is that Amazon should have to pay for not needing employees. I don't foresee that working out. You can't put the security of the collective in the hands of a profit-seeking entity.)

But that's the whole point though. We're creating bs jobs to replace the bs jobs we automated. What's our goal as a society ? Shouldn't we think about working less, better spreading wealth, figuring out a plan so people don't have to work multiple jobs to barely survive ? Right now almost everywhere in the world we're heading for longer work week and increased retirement age. So much for "automation will deliver us from work" we've heard over and over again for the last 60 years.

EugeneOZ 7y ago
> better spreading wealth I grew up in a country where communism has won - I know for sure that it's an utopia. I really hate communists, socialists and other imbeciles who believe that people/business should give their money to lazy people just to make everybody "equal". No, people are not equal - somebody is smarter, somebody works more, somebody is a great artist, somebody is just a lazy alcoholic. So no, we should not think about "spreading" wealth, we should think how to train people for new skills/professions, required by the market.
- lm28469 7y ago
  > I grew up in a country where communism has won - I know for sure that it's an utopia. I don't think communism is the answer either. > I really hate communists, socialists and other imbeciles who believe that people/business should give their money to lazy people just to make everybody "equal". That's a very individualistic point of view, I used to hold a similar one a few years ago but traveling made me change my mind. Look at the US for example, people are dying of diabetes, in 2019, because they can't afford insulin. That's in the #1 country in the world according to "the market". It might be lazy people, it might also be disabled people, people born in the wrong place / at the wrong time, people who didn't get the opportunity to develop, &c. The question isn't even "why are these people failing?", but "how do we handle them humanely?". It's life, shit happens, your parents die prematurely, you get sick, your company declares bankruptcy and you get fire out of nowhere. The day you'll have kids or, hopefully not, a car accident, a cancer or other high impact disease, you'll be happy that all these "imbeciles" paid a bit of your hundred thousand dollar bills you'll owe to the hospital / schools. > just to make everybody "equal". No, people are not equal Sure they're not, nothing is. It's not about making people equal, it's about not letting people go down too far. You can shift the blame on people all you want ("somebody is just a lazy alcoholic"), but in the end we're products of our environment. Individuals shape society, society shapes individuals. There are people having full time jobs who won't be able to live when they retire without public pensions, what do you tell to these people ? "Too bad you were too lazy, go die somewhere else" ? When I'm talking about spreading wealth I'm not talking about the average worker giving even more of his money, I'm talking about the top 10%, the people who game the system going through every loophole available to avoid paying tax. > we should think how to train people for new skills/professions, required by the market. We're already doing that, and in a perfect world yeah, it might work. But I don't see that happening, we'll always have people less capable than others, people who chose or get pushed on different paths. Also, idk where you live but (moderate) socialism brought us weekends (yeah before workers started to unionize in europe we were workin 10 hours a day 7/7), vacation days, sick days, health insurance, social security, work insurances, maternity/paternity leave, unemployment benefits, <40hrs work week, &c. so it's not all bad. I care much more about what I and my close community requires than what "the market" requires. By the way, isn't "the market" supposed to serve the people and not the other way around ?
  - EugeneOZ 7y ago
    Next time drink some water before rage-speech. I have 2 kids and I never asked for help from the society to raise them. "The day you'll have kids" - lol, ridiculous that you think you are much older and "wiser". And I answered about old people who can't work anymore in another comment, you were too lazy to read before blaming. There's a huge difference between people who can't work and people who are too lazy to work. Society should not encourage laziness. If only skill person learned is how to pack items into a box - should learn more. And one more time: all communists are imbeciles, without exceptions.
noonespecial 7y ago
As long as we keep setting the cost of housing to "everything you've got" and the cost of health care to "everything you're gonna have", it won't matter how much new productivity we create.
mschuster91 7y ago
> Shouldn't we think about working less, better spreading wealth, figuring out a plan so people don't have to work multiple jobs to barely survive ? We should but that would put a decent dent in corporate profits. Germany actually followed this for a long time - since the aftermath of WW2 up until the collapse of the UdSSR we had the "Soziale Marktwirtschaft" which is basically what you described. Then after communism fell, neoliberalism took over.

Kadin 7y ago

History also suggests that having a significant number of unemployed people who suddenly can't afford basic necessities because their jobs / way of life suddenly disappeared, is destabilizing as hell. Very few people are actually suggesting that automation is bad, per se; the concern many people have is that the rate of change needs to be managed such that significant numbers of people aren't left behind. People can only retrain so fast, and some people will never be able to effectively retrain. Automation that suddenly puts them out of work needs to account for what they're supposed to do, and hopefully it's something better than "sit at home and drink themselves to death / overdose on opiates / engage in crime". I'd rather intentionally put the brakes on automation, even though it's a hit to efficiency (and depresses the value of labor -- automation makes human labor more valuable over time), if the alternative you get with unlimited automation is a massive disenfranchisement of working people and consequent destabilization of society. Better to keep some technologically-unnecessary jobs around than to live in a society constantly teetering on the brink of a violent populist uprising. All the efficiency gains of that automation are going to pale in comparison to the damage and loss that will happen during one night of rioting by the now-unemployed proletariat.

EugeneOZ 7y ago
> one night of rioting by the now-unemployed proletariat Lol, and this is response to "Luddites". Good luck with riots :)
max76 7y ago
> Better to keep some technologically-unnecessary jobs around than to live in a society constantly teetering on the brink of a violent populist uprising. Is there any evidence that the United States is "teetering on the bring of a violent populist uprising."? Your entire comment is hyperbolic.

nepeckman 7y ago

And all those middle age workers will, what? Just be retrained? Who's paying for that? What happens when the retraining fails (as it so often does) because you can't magically turn a truck driver into a software engineer? I don't think any of the comments here are anti-progress. But we do need a social and political plan to handle the automation of a large number of low skill jobs. Failure to plan for this future will result in large numbers of displaced and disaffected people.

EugeneOZ 7y ago
> And all those middle age workers will, what? They will be fired, yes. This cruel world, where people should care about competitiveness of their skills. It starts right after the school.
- theflyinghorse 7y ago
  > It starts right after the school. I'd argue that the competition start before the child is even born in the modern world. Wealth of one's family, their connections play a major role in the success of the child (admission scandals come to mind)
  - EugeneOZ 7y ago
    I wrote about skills competition, not competition between persons. In our cruel world it's absolutely possible to get new skills, and you don't even need huge money to get skills you could sell later. > Wealth of one's family, their connections play a major role in the success of the child And it's perfectly fine. Somebody's parents were working hard or smart and created some legacy - it is absolutely, 100% fine that their offsprings have some advantage - it was the goal of their parents' life.
- nepeckman 7y ago
  Let's set empathy aside for a moment (which you seem to lack). This just isn't a practical approach. What do you think those people will do after being fired? Kindly die so you don't have to deal with them anymore? No, they will riot. And when that fails, they will turn to theft and crime in order to feed themselves and their family. We will pay one way or another for these economic hardships, in property damage, increased crime, increased prison costs, and overall worse standard of living throughout the developed world.

0xffff2 7y ago

As every mutual fund prospectus will tell you, past performance does not guarantee future results.

jrockway 7y ago

I think we've reached "peak profession". The reality is that there will be fewer and fewer types of jobs going forward, and that you probably can't merely retrain a coal miner to be a software engineer. This doesn't mean we should stop automation. It does mean that we need to figure out a real solution to give these people a secure future. Companies are already innovating on how to not need employees. As a society, we need to innovate on how to give these people that aren't need to pack Amazon boxes a productive and fulfilling life. (My answer is basic income, paid for by the government. It seems that other people's answer, though, is that Amazon should have to pay for not needing employees. I don't foresee that working out. You can't put the security of the collective in the hands of a profit-seeking entity.)