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>while Ma was addressing Chinese who hope their jobs will get automated. Why do Chinese want their jobs to be automated?

yorwba 6y ago
For the same reason that a farmer wants a tractor and a seamstress wants a sewing machine. Controlling the machines that do the work is less exhausting and higher-status than doing the work yourself. Of course not all Chinese think like that, but an optimist view of future technology seems much more prevalent in Chinese-language media than in the English-speaking world. Maybe that's because China is still at a relatively low level of industrial automation and trying to catch up to advanced manufacturing economies like Japan or Germany with their "Made in China 2025" initiative. And the overall optimism doesn't mean there aren't also critical voices, worried that instead it will be the machines controlling the humans who do the work. E.g. Renwu recently published an article about delivery drivers struggling to meet the deadlines set by the system, which you can read translated into English by Jeffrey Ding here: https://chinai.substack.com/p/chinai-111-algorithms-and-food-delivery https://chinai.substack.com/p/chinai-111-algorithms-and-food...
arcticbull 6y ago
This is something that confuses me about Americans. Why on earth wouldn't everyone want their job automated? The only thing we should be discussing is how you fairly distribute the proceeds in a world where humans don't need to work.
- ls612 6y ago
  Because from a realpolitik/game theory perspective if your existence doesn’t contribute any sort of value to others/society there’s little incentive for others/society to keep you around. And that always ends in a very ugly way.
  - arcticbull 6y ago
    There is a built-in self-limiting mechanism for this. As development level increases (and coincidentally the number of workers required decreases) so does human fertility. Birth rate in the US is 1.77, well below the replacement rate of 2.1; Canada is 1.5, Finland is 1.49, Japan is 1.43. The workers are disappearing peacefully already.
- Traster 6y ago
  The reality of automation in America is that the value created by automation is captured exclusively by the large corporations that own the machines and their senior executives. So whilst the theory is you want automation, in reality it provides only risks to the person whose job you're automating.

yorwba 6y ago

For the same reason that a farmer wants a tractor and a seamstress wants a sewing machine. Controlling the machines that do the work is less exhausting and higher-status than doing the work yourself. Of course not all Chinese think like that, but an optimist view of future technology seems much more prevalent in Chinese-language media than in the English-speaking world. Maybe that's because China is still at a relatively low level of industrial automation and trying to catch up to advanced manufacturing economies like Japan or Germany with their "Made in China 2025" initiative. And the overall optimism doesn't mean there aren't also critical voices, worried that instead it will be the machines controlling the humans who do the work. E.g. Renwu recently published an article about delivery drivers struggling to meet the deadlines set by the system, which you can read translated into English by Jeffrey Ding here: https://chinai.substack.com/p/chinai-111-algorithms-and-food-delivery https://chinai.substack.com/p/chinai-111-algorithms-and-food...

arcticbull 6y ago

This is something that confuses me about Americans. Why on earth wouldn't everyone want their job automated? The only thing we should be discussing is how you fairly distribute the proceeds in a world where humans don't need to work.

ls612 6y ago
Because from a realpolitik/game theory perspective if your existence doesn’t contribute any sort of value to others/society there’s little incentive for others/society to keep you around. And that always ends in a very ugly way.
- arcticbull 6y ago
  There is a built-in self-limiting mechanism for this. As development level increases (and coincidentally the number of workers required decreases) so does human fertility. Birth rate in the US is 1.77, well below the replacement rate of 2.1; Canada is 1.5, Finland is 1.49, Japan is 1.43. The workers are disappearing peacefully already.
Traster 6y ago
The reality of automation in America is that the value created by automation is captured exclusively by the large corporations that own the machines and their senior executives. So whilst the theory is you want automation, in reality it provides only risks to the person whose job you're automating.