31–40 of 96 posts
I definitely wouldn't put all my fears, hopes, and dreams in to a vote for a politician who promises to bring my job back. What I WOULD do is move to a place with the lowest possible cost of living and become a bartender or something equally undemanding.
Bartending is more demanding than you would think.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I was thinking more along the lines of "Turn to a life of crime." But your solution also has merit.
Suicide and crime have merit? I fail to see the ethical upside of any of those besides short-term gains.
Edit: From an ethical perspective it can be argued that a person who is "good" but does not help less fortunate "bad" people is not in a morally superior position (however you want to interpret that to make the sentence work).
Become a Robot service engineer...oh wait that's what I already am! Sorted. Edit: I am not an actual robot service engineer except in so far as all devs service automated systems.
That'll be the second job to be taken over by robots.
It's a bit unrelated, but I think that maybe instead of just introducing basic income to suppress social tensions caused by bots taking jobs it would be better to spend the money to create new research jobs at large scale. There are plenty underexplored directions in science and research in lots of them can't be automated anytime soon.
If there were much more PhD positions that paid solid stipend (and colleges were accessible to everyone and paid solid stipends too) and there were a lot of open research positions, people losing their jobs because of automation would go to these programs and then do research which eventually might make the world a better place to live.
Just replying to someone who is going to say that not everyone is able to meaningfully participate in research, I think it is not true. Yes, different people might have different productivity and abilities, but science needs not only researchers generating new ideas, but also laboratory assistants and experimental scientists mostly just doing meticulous measurements.
However it's simpler to just throw money at people and tell them that they don't need to work rather than scale the educational and research systems to the extent that would allow them to engage a large part of the population into them.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not really, this is the position middle america finds itself in. Different population groups retrain at different speeds.
We must have different ideas about what 'the Big Rip' is. The one I'm familiar with is a cosmology one, where because of the speed of the increase of expansion of the universe everything literally gets torn apart. Applied to the work situation it means a future roughly related to the plot of 'Accelerando', and once we hit that kind of rate-of-change all bets are off in the most literal sense. https://en.wikipedia.org…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I was thinking more along the lines of "Turn to a life of crime." But your solution also has merit.
Suicide and crime have merit? I fail to see the ethical upside of any of those besides short-term gains.