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The fact that making work more efficient can be a problem highlights some fundamental flaws in our society.

protonbob 4y ago
I agree. But I also think that meaningful work that provides value to your community and to yourself is something that provides some of the greatest satisfaction available to man. If you remove that ability by either automating someone's job or reducing it to a kitschy "artisan" label which implies that their work is now inefficient and flawed compared to the efficient automated way, you are taking away something important about the human experience that cannot be replaced by leisure activities.
- xapata 4y ago
  > ... greatest satisfaction available to man. What about women? Yeah, yeah, I know it's uncouth to worry about gendered language. On to the real topic ... > reducing [a job] to a kitschy "artisan" label Automation doesn't (only) reduce jobs, it (also) allows people to get meta. They are now free to think about how the job gets done, rather than constrained by time to only do the job the way they did it yesterday. Or, they can do other jobs that they prefer. I used to live in an apartment without a washing machine, and where the closest laundromat was a 20-minute walk away. I got used to a bucket-and-plunger method for washing my clothes. It was enjoyable in that "I am the salt of the earth" way. When I found a used sink-attachable tiny washing machine on Craigslist, I had a smile on my face the rest of the day.
phoe-krk 4y ago
I think it revolves around just one fundamental question that's become obvious since the start of the industrial revolution: why have workers if you can get work done without them? You can answer this question rather quickly; very often, the benefits of being able to produce something en masse outweigh the initial drop in quality due to adopting an automation process that is not yet mature but evolves over time, and that's been proven many times in the past two centuries. It's just the speed and the scale that have been following logistic distribution. We're still before the midway point as a global society, but we can certainly see the big speedup as more and more work becomes automated. If people's work can be automated away as a whole and people somehow become poorer rather than richer, then the benefits of automation are sucked away from them. And here comes the flaws you mention - or the flaw, I think, singular. They happen exactly in this one point.
- chrismorgan 4y ago
  Sometimes it’s just an initial drop in quality, other times it’s permanent. My favourite example is book binding: hot-melt glue has completely supplanted cold glue in mass production, despite being drastically inferior, because it’s (just barely) good enough, and it’s so much faster/easier/cheaper for production. Many aspects of computer setting of works for printing also show a significant regression in potential quality (prose, musical engraving, &c.), though the right software and proper human tweaking can balance that out—but people seldom actually do as much tweaking as would be done automatically by the experts of old. And as for text presentation on screen… well, that’s just lousy compared to what an expert setter would do. But it does adapt to different media with no or minimal effort required, doing in one second what used to take days, and that’s a rather big deal.
- toomanydoubts 4y ago
  Something I sometimes think about, is how really can capitalists benefit from that? If you can automate your company away, and fire all employees, and if every company is doing that, then workers have no jobs or ways to make money. So the customers for most of the companies start disappearing. It's the ultimate accumulation of capital, to a point that the wheels of economy grind to a halt.
  - dougabug 4y ago
    That’s exactly what happened to the Magratheans in “Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy”: “Unfortunately, the venture was so successful that Magrathea soon became the richest planet of all time and the rest of the Galaxy was reduced to abject poverty. The Magratheans went into hibernation, awaiting an economic recovery that could afford their services once more.“
  - vidarh 4y ago
    This is exactly Marx' thesis. He took capitalists on their word with respect to believing that competition will drive margins towards zero over time, and that as a consequence cutting labour is inherently a pre-requisite for surviving competition, and that as a result that capitalism will eventually, once it runs out of new markets to expand into, start experiencing crises of simultaneous overproduction and under-employment. If he was right, it can be "patched" and made to work with a sufficient level of redistribution to avoid such crises, or left to fail catastrophically without.
swatcoder 4y ago
Well, it highlights that there's some disagreement between people who see maximizing production as inevitably positive, and other people who are unconvinced. It sounds like you might be so squarely in one of those camps, that you see it as a fundamental flaw that people may disagree with you. To me, that sounds even worse!
vkou 4y ago
We could work those flaws out after we figure out what people getting put out of work are going to eat. Or do.
barrkel 4y ago
Rapid change is a real problem and not a flaw of society. People cannot change careers quickly without loss of human capital. There is no flaw in society that you can fix to prevent this. It doesn't mean that we shouldn't make things more efficient, but economies exist to serve people, not the other way around. That sometimes means bailing some people out, sometimes it means phasing something in, and sometimes it means changing the definition of value. For example, painting used to be how you'd get a portrait. But photos did that much better. Painting shifted: it became much more abstract, and because photos were cheap and easy, they didn't have the same cachet as a portrait. Not many people hang big photo portraits on their walls they way they might have done with paintings. I suspect authenticity, or some other thing which the machine cannot replicate, may be valued more in future.

I agree. But I also think that meaningful work that provides value to your community and to yourself is something that provides some of the greatest satisfaction available to man. If you remove that ability by either automating someone's job or reducing it to a kitschy "artisan" label which implies that their work is now inefficient and flawed compared to the efficient automated way, you are taking away something important about the human experience that cannot be replaced by leisure activities.

xapata 4y ago
> ... greatest satisfaction available to man. What about women? Yeah, yeah, I know it's uncouth to worry about gendered language. On to the real topic ... > reducing [a job] to a kitschy "artisan" label Automation doesn't (only) reduce jobs, it (also) allows people to get meta. They are now free to think about how the job gets done, rather than constrained by time to only do the job the way they did it yesterday. Or, they can do other jobs that they prefer. I used to live in an apartment without a washing machine, and where the closest laundromat was a 20-minute walk away. I got used to a bucket-and-plunger method for washing my clothes. It was enjoyable in that "I am the salt of the earth" way. When I found a used sink-attachable tiny washing machine on Craigslist, I had a smile on my face the rest of the day.

phoe-krk 4y ago

I think it revolves around just one fundamental question that's become obvious since the start of the industrial revolution: why have workers if you can get work done without them? You can answer this question rather quickly; very often, the benefits of being able to produce something en masse outweigh the initial drop in quality due to adopting an automation process that is not yet mature but evolves over time, and that's been proven many times in the past two centuries. It's just the speed and the scale that have been following logistic distribution. We're still before the midway point as a global society, but we can certainly see the big speedup as more and more work becomes automated. If people's work can be automated away as a whole and people somehow become poorer rather than richer, then the benefits of automation are sucked away from them. And here comes the flaws you mention - or the flaw, I think, singular. They happen exactly in this one point.

chrismorgan 4y ago
Sometimes it’s just an initial drop in quality, other times it’s permanent. My favourite example is book binding: hot-melt glue has completely supplanted cold glue in mass production, despite being drastically inferior, because it’s (just barely) good enough, and it’s so much faster/easier/cheaper for production. Many aspects of computer setting of works for printing also show a significant regression in potential quality (prose, musical engraving, &c.), though the right software and proper human tweaking can balance that out—but people seldom actually do as much tweaking as would be done automatically by the experts of old. And as for text presentation on screen… well, that’s just lousy compared to what an expert setter would do. But it does adapt to different media with no or minimal effort required, doing in one second what used to take days, and that’s a rather big deal.
toomanydoubts 4y ago
Something I sometimes think about, is how really can capitalists benefit from that? If you can automate your company away, and fire all employees, and if every company is doing that, then workers have no jobs or ways to make money. So the customers for most of the companies start disappearing. It's the ultimate accumulation of capital, to a point that the wheels of economy grind to a halt.
- dougabug 4y ago
  That’s exactly what happened to the Magratheans in “Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy”: “Unfortunately, the venture was so successful that Magrathea soon became the richest planet of all time and the rest of the Galaxy was reduced to abject poverty. The Magratheans went into hibernation, awaiting an economic recovery that could afford their services once more.“
- vidarh 4y ago
  This is exactly Marx' thesis. He took capitalists on their word with respect to believing that competition will drive margins towards zero over time, and that as a consequence cutting labour is inherently a pre-requisite for surviving competition, and that as a result that capitalism will eventually, once it runs out of new markets to expand into, start experiencing crises of simultaneous overproduction and under-employment. If he was right, it can be "patched" and made to work with a sufficient level of redistribution to avoid such crises, or left to fail catastrophically without.

swatcoder 4y ago

Well, it highlights that there's some disagreement between people who see maximizing production as inevitably positive, and other people who are unconvinced. It sounds like you might be so squarely in one of those camps, that you see it as a fundamental flaw that people may disagree with you. To me, that sounds even worse!

vkou 4y ago

We could work those flaws out after we figure out what people getting put out of work are going to eat. Or do.

barrkel 4y ago

Rapid change is a real problem and not a flaw of society. People cannot change careers quickly without loss of human capital. There is no flaw in society that you can fix to prevent this. It doesn't mean that we shouldn't make things more efficient, but economies exist to serve people, not the other way around. That sometimes means bailing some people out, sometimes it means phasing something in, and sometimes it means changing the definition of value. For example, painting used to be how you'd get a portrait. But photos did that much better. Painting shifted: it became much more abstract, and because photos were cheap and easy, they didn't have the same cachet as a portrait. Not many people hang big photo portraits on their walls they way they might have done with paintings. I suspect authenticity, or some other thing which the machine cannot replicate, may be valued more in future.