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If you only look at someone's skills at an instant in time, they are definitely not qualified for some things, but that's really obvious and not really fair. Ru

If you only look at someone's skills at an instant in time, they are definitely not qualified for some things, but that's really obvious and not really fair. Ruthless capitalistic businesses don't really give pop quizzes and fire people the instant they fail (that's only in interviews!). A lot of the writing around automation has suggested that there will be a single turning point, or a very short period, where all of this job loss happens (because all businesses will adopt it instantly for profit, right?), but that's not really the case even when you find a good automated solution to a problem. If not a single point in time, they say it will happen quickly enough that people can't re-skill quickly enough and will be jobless. So although fast food workers might fail at programming those things if you show up with a pop quiz, it's not really a good test. What we should do instead is offer them opportunities to be able to learn to do that over time (so long as they're interested in that kind of work) instead of trying to find a way to cull people who can't do it immediately.

tharkun__ 6y ago
I understand and agree. I tried to account for that with the "Of course there will be some overlap, because you will have had some really bright people doing some of those jobs that were also bored out of their mind but hey that's the job they could get in 1951... " Those are the people you can train up, to a certain point. Like you said, there might be people in that workforce that were just never given the opportunity but are actually pretty smart. But there's also the ones that just can't do anything above the level of what they were doing in that factory before, even if given the opportunity and training. There's a difference in training someone to perform X mundane manual task vs. Y mundane manual task vs. actually learning something completely new and different that requires 'thinking'. It's the same with "traditional" jobs, like say a shoe maker. Today, you mostly have a few cobblers left that know how to fix your typical "suit's" shoes if they bought proper ones (the Allen Edmonds and the like). When shoe production was automated, the actual job of shoemaker disappeared and the replacement jobs dumbed down significantly, so that "anyone" could do them. You still have some actual proper shoe makers left. The ones that in previous times would have be the master shoe makers that invented new ways of sewing or perfected previous techniques, invented new ways of combining pigments for awesome looking shoes etc.

tharkun__ 6y ago

I understand and agree. I tried to account for that with the "Of course there will be some overlap, because you will have had some really bright people doing some of those jobs that were also bored out of their mind but hey that's the job they could get in 1951... " Those are the people you can train up, to a certain point. Like you said, there might be people in that workforce that were just never given the opportunity but are actually pretty smart. But there's also the ones that just can't do anything above the level of what they were doing in that factory before, even if given the opportunity and training. There's a difference in training someone to perform X mundane manual task vs. Y mundane manual task vs. actually learning something completely new and different that requires 'thinking'. It's the same with "traditional" jobs, like say a shoe maker. Today, you mostly have a few cobblers left that know how to fix your typical "suit's" shoes if they bought proper ones (the Allen Edmonds and the like). When shoe production was automated, the actual job of shoemaker disappeared and the replacement jobs dumbed down significantly, so that "anyone" could do them. You still have some actual proper shoe makers left. The ones that in previous times would have be the master shoe makers that invented new ways of sewing or perfected previous techniques, invented new ways of combining pigments for awesome looking shoes etc.