5 ms·

yadayada, you're all robots, artificial humans, walking calculators. tell me what those low income workers will do when you take away their jobs?

Osiris 6y ago
What happened to gas lighters when street lights were replaced with electric lights?
- iancmceachern 6y ago
  Or midnight soil rakers
- notJim 6y ago
  Well, what did happen to them? The implication of your statement was that they were obviously totally fine, but is that a given? It's possible they were miserable and then died. Switching careers is not always easy and smooth.
  - orestarod 6y ago
    I believe cost cuts to maximize profit consistently cause an enormous number of people to lose their jobs, yet no one addresses that.
    - zaroth 6y ago
      I mean this is absolutely true in the sense that 99.9% of the hours that humans used to spend doing things across history have already been automated away. The amount of time we used to spend making a single yard of cloth, or creating 10 pounds of flour is almost unfathomable today. The prevailing economic theory was that we would automate away so much work that leisure time would prevail. Instead our massive increases in output have just driven greater consumption. But the difference made by housecleaning robots isn’t the straw the breaks the camels back. It would take a massive breakthrough in AI to eliminate the majority of knowledge workers at the scale that agriculture and textiles have already been transformed.
  - brownbat 6y ago
    I'm all for transition assistance and a safety net to mitigate the harms, but halting human ingenuity seems like it would put far greater numbers of people at risk of misery and untimely deaths. Lamplighters are especially useful to consider here. How many lives has electricity saved? How many ICUs can operate continual machines because of it? How many people at risk of heat stroke can run AC in summer because of it? How many transplants and temperature controlled medicines got delivered because of it? What about its role in food safety? What about timely communications of life saving information, like those lost at sea asking for help, or severe weather alerts advising others to shelter? That's just the beginning, it seems incalculable really. That lamplighter should have had a society willing to catch them during the transition. But imagine if it solved this problem by holding that one person's job sacred at the cost of millions of other lives instead. It's absolutely good and relevant to worry about individual cases, but it seems like society is better off if we allow jobs to adjust to the actual current needs of humanity, rather than holding them fixed. Then we just also try to do our best to take care of as many of those who fall through the cracks as we can.
    - notJim 6y ago
      Wait, so you're suggesting we should think more about what happens to them, rather than ridiculing the question?
  - fragmede 6y ago
    Survivor's bias says even for the ones for whom it wasn't smooth and died a horribly gristly death that we wouldn't hear from them.

Osiris 6y ago

What happened to gas lighters when street lights were replaced with electric lights?

iancmceachern 6y ago
Or midnight soil rakers
notJim 6y ago
Well, what did happen to them? The implication of your statement was that they were obviously totally fine, but is that a given? It's possible they were miserable and then died. Switching careers is not always easy and smooth.
- orestarod 6y ago
  I believe cost cuts to maximize profit consistently cause an enormous number of people to lose their jobs, yet no one addresses that.
  - zaroth 6y ago
    I mean this is absolutely true in the sense that 99.9% of the hours that humans used to spend doing things across history have already been automated away. The amount of time we used to spend making a single yard of cloth, or creating 10 pounds of flour is almost unfathomable today. The prevailing economic theory was that we would automate away so much work that leisure time would prevail. Instead our massive increases in output have just driven greater consumption. But the difference made by housecleaning robots isn’t the straw the breaks the camels back. It would take a massive breakthrough in AI to eliminate the majority of knowledge workers at the scale that agriculture and textiles have already been transformed.
- brownbat 6y ago
  I'm all for transition assistance and a safety net to mitigate the harms, but halting human ingenuity seems like it would put far greater numbers of people at risk of misery and untimely deaths. Lamplighters are especially useful to consider here. How many lives has electricity saved? How many ICUs can operate continual machines because of it? How many people at risk of heat stroke can run AC in summer because of it? How many transplants and temperature controlled medicines got delivered because of it? What about its role in food safety? What about timely communications of life saving information, like those lost at sea asking for help, or severe weather alerts advising others to shelter? That's just the beginning, it seems incalculable really. That lamplighter should have had a society willing to catch them during the transition. But imagine if it solved this problem by holding that one person's job sacred at the cost of millions of other lives instead. It's absolutely good and relevant to worry about individual cases, but it seems like society is better off if we allow jobs to adjust to the actual current needs of humanity, rather than holding them fixed. Then we just also try to do our best to take care of as many of those who fall through the cracks as we can.
  - notJim 6y ago
    Wait, so you're suggesting we should think more about what happens to them, rather than ridiculing the question?
- fragmede 6y ago
  Survivor's bias says even for the ones for whom it wasn't smooth and died a horribly gristly death that we wouldn't hear from them.