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Automation may seem unintuitive economically but the alternative is much worse. Food workers tend to be minimum wage workers. Minimum wage really stands for mi

by hbt 11y ago

Automation may seem unintuitive economically but the alternative is much worse. Food workers tend to be minimum wage workers. Minimum wage really stands for minimum living wage which is different from place to place and somewhat artificial (e.g rent). If minimum wage workers could be paid less, the "owners of capital" would (because they don't generate that much value) Example: if you order a 9$ burger and it costs 5$ to "manufacture" a burger (food processing, shipping, preparation etc.) and 4$ to have a minimum wage workers assemble it; by eliminating the minimum wage worker, eventually the price of the burger will go down. But who will buy burgers? Automation/technology is about turning goods into commodities. Eliminating scarcity. So, yeah, I would work for the guy killing minimum wage jobs because without him, 10-15 years from now, you'd be paying 25$ a burger and most of it will go to the minimum wage worker making 15$/hr doing a job a machine could do. I won't bother to argue how mind numbing those jobs are.

beatpanda 11y ago
I'm not arguing that people should be flipping burgers, or even that we should be "creating jobs", or whatever. I agree with you, some of the things people have to do to earn their right to exist in this society are inhumane and it would be great if they were automated away, and everyone benefited. The problem is that nobody's really interested in what happens to the low-skilled worker once their job gets automated away. Take a walk through the Tenderloin in San Francisco some time and ask homeless people what they used to do before they became homeless, and see how the "benefits" of automation have worked out in practice. The pariah class, represented in my mind by the number of chronically homeless people, the prison population, or people who work in the informal economy because they can't get work due to either of those conditions, has grown since the 70s, I believe in large part because of automation. And relative poverty in the U.S. is getting worse, not better. I don't disagree with the potential benefits of automation. I just wonder whether we're really paying attention to who's receiving those benefits.

by hbt 11y ago

beatpanda 11y ago

I'm not arguing that people should be flipping burgers, or even that we should be "creating jobs", or whatever. I agree with you, some of the things people have to do to earn their right to exist in this society are inhumane and it would be great if they were automated away, and everyone benefited. The problem is that nobody's really interested in what happens to the low-skilled worker once their job gets automated away. Take a walk through the Tenderloin in San Francisco some time and ask homeless people what they used to do before they became homeless, and see how the "benefits" of automation have worked out in practice. The pariah class, represented in my mind by the number of chronically homeless people, the prison population, or people who work in the informal economy because they can't get work due to either of those conditions, has grown since the 70s, I believe in large part because of automation. And relative poverty in the U.S. is getting worse, not better. I don't disagree with the potential benefits of automation. I just wonder whether we're really paying attention to who's receiving those benefits.