6 ms·
There’ll be a bunch of people here saying that capitalism is vicious and people should earn more. But actually what will happen is that they will get automated
by ITB 3y ago
There’ll be a bunch of people here saying that capitalism is vicious and people should earn more. But actually what will happen is that they will get automated and then have no job. When automation is the alternative, collective bargaining is not a great option.
- HPsquared 3y agoNext step: ban automation.
- toomuchtodo 3y agoWell, not necessarily, you simply tax it at a highly progressive rate and distribute the tax revenue as social services. Automation isn't the problem, its control and use to create systems of extraction from the disadvantaged is.
- HPsquared 3y agoAn automatic McDonalds is a not a system of extraction.
- Xelynega 3y agoIt quite literally is. A non-automated McDonalds extracts money from a certain population(the target market of the McDonald's) and funnels it to the owner, but the owner has to employ people(typically from the same area/market) to give some of that money back to. Without those jobs, money is being extracted from the target market without any being given back.
- pessimizer 3y agoNever tax automation. The failure to distribute resources humanely or fairly is a failure of sympathy, conscience, and justice. Automation should make us all richer. Not having to work customer service is a blessing. Tax everybody at the rate that allows us to provide for those who are put out of work by automation, and let those who automate reap the rewards of that. It's not technology's fault that we require people to do bullshit jobs in return for bullshit pay. It's that our secular religion of protestant capitalism is severely flawed. One day, all production will be automated, and 99% of the population will still be digging holes and filling them all day in return for their rations.
- toomuchtodo 3y agoWe sort of agree? I suggest taxing automation heavily and distributing the resulting gains broadly because the marginal costs are so low, versus human labor, which should be scarce and highly valued. You have to tax differently because different productivity mechanisms have different societal value (not economic, importantly). There is a short story or proposal I recall consuming a long time ago about different types of money, one for things with no or low marginal cost, and one for things produced by humans. The former money would be printed and distributed somewhat freely, the latter not. Similar idea. If someone recalls a link to this idea, please comment!
- Jochim 3y agoTaxing automation could incentivise having people work jobs that could be automated. We already have a lot of pointless jobs in the charade that we continue with.
- Tade0 3y agoAutomation isn't keeping up with the decrease in fertility rates. There's considerably less young people entering the workforce in the west now than there were 40 years ago.
- ben_w 3y agoAutomation isn't the same in each sector, but even if it was, it's unlikely to be linear going forward. Likewise, fertility rates may be going down, but we also have people working on all kinds of things in that area, including but not limited to artificial wombs.
- duxup 3y agoWouldn't that just mean automation is inevitable anyway? The scenario isn't "If you ask for more I'll automate you." It is that they'll automate them anyway when it is convenient for them to do so.
- ta1243 3y agoAutomation is great. I do it all the time. Sure I could spend my life manually configuring switch ports, copying and pasting information into 50 pointless repositories, but that would be tedious, so I automate it. Same in a shop. It's far better for a machine to stack a shelf than for a person to do it, it leaves the person free to do something more useful with their life.
- malcolmgreaves 3y ago> it leaves the person free to do something more useful with their life. And in this hypothetical, you'd be in favor of paying that person now, right? Surely the machine doesn't need the money in exchange for the value of its labor.
- ta1243 3y agoThus it lowers the cost of providing service thus lowers the price to the customer.
- malcolmgreaves 3y agoSo, I think what you're implying is that lower costs are good for everyone, right?
- ta1243 3y agoYup. Lower costs are a reflection of less human effort going into getting the same result. That's a great move. In an ideal world all work would be done by automation, and everyone else would be free to do what they wanted for fun.
- green_man_lives 3y ago> But actually what will happen is that they will get automated and then have no job. I find this to be a lazy argument because the conclusion is that you should never try to improve your situation ever. Also the easy counter to this is to establish a welfare state by taxing profits across the board (not that this could successfully be done in the US). The counter to that argument is that capital will flee overseas. The counter to that argument is to do what China did and remind the tech oligarchs who is really in charge. The counter to that argument is that it's bad to do that because property rights are sacred. At the end of the day though, we should really want for all citizens to have as high of a living standard as possible. I think their humanity is a better argument than any alternatives that economists can come up with.
- mytailorisrich 3y agoGig workers, especially food delivery, do a very low productivity job that consumers don't want to pay a lot for. So, really, it cannot be well-paid. It's either crap pay or the job disappears. This is a classic balancing act between jobs and workers protection/level of minimum wage.
- Xelynega 3y agoIt sounds more like a"job that nobody wants to do" and a "service nobody wants to pay for" that Uber et. all are exploiting labour laws to profit from by providing it in an unsustainable way that governments are afraid to regulate because of the money being made. This is classic late stage capitalism more than it is some "balancing act" imo.
- green_man_lives 3y agoI can agree with this take. I think if the job can't exist after reasonable regulation is enacted, then it shouldn't exist.
- skyyler 3y ago>Gig workers, especially food delivery, do a very low productivity job that consumers don't want to pay a lot for If you compare the prices on doordash or similar apps to the prices inside the restaurant, you'll find that what you said just isn't true. It seems some people are comfortable paying more for the delivery than the food itself.
- n4r9 3y agoThe fact that automation leaves people without a means of support only supports the claim that capitalism is vicious...