81–90 of 96 posts
Aside from that, go back to work on my voice recognition software for gaming.
Or become a hobo under a bridge, drinking from a glass jar and reminiscing about the good old days before those damn machines took over.
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Given his statement I'm assuming his family fled a particular implementation of communism at some point in the past. I struggle with responses to statements like OP has made for a number of reasons. I find it questionable that authoritarianism is a required component of a communist society. That said it has clearly been a component of all implementations of "communism" at the national level. I'm air quoting that beca…
Communism requires a planned economy which requires authoritarianism. Post scarcity != communism, if we go by the motief of this thread then the federation is not communist it also doesn't have a planned economy.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Given his statement I'm assuming his family fled a particular implementation of communism at some point in the past. I struggle with responses to statements like OP has made for a number of reasons. I find it questionable that authoritarianism is a required component of a communist society. That said it has clearly been a component of all implementations of "communism" at the national level. I'm air quoting that beca…
Communism requires a planned economy which requires authoritarianism. Post scarcity != communism, if we go by the motief of this thread then the federation is not communist it also doesn't have a planned economy.
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.
The hallmark of civilization is specialization. Instead of everyone having to hunt and farm their own food, build their own shelter from resources they mined/harvested/gathered themselves, only own whatever property they can by force stop other people from taking, and so on, we specialize.
The price for specialization is the loss of self-reliance. To get people to give up that self-reliance and specialize, it has to be implicit in the social contract that if they pick a useful specialty that society needs, they will be able to make a living for essentially the rest of their life. That's important because it can be very hard to change specialties, especially for someone who is older and has a family to support.
In the past when automation took jobs it usually took long enough and there was enough warning that specialists faced a slow decline in their specialty. New people could stop entering that specialty, but there would still be enough work to keep the existing practitioners going for the most part.
For instance, it took a long time for passenger aircraft to seriously take a bite out of demand for passenger rail service. That at least gave people considering careers related to passenger rail a good shot at recognizing when that would no longer be a safe lifetime career and choose something else.
Now we seem to be automating things faster. We can go from "automation is something your grandkids might have to worry about" in a given job to "there is a decade left on this job" in just a few years. People who played by the implicit social contract's rules, and picked specialties that were in demand and that no one seriously thought would be automated for several decades at the earliest are going to get screwed.
I think one could make a plausible argument that society has breached the social contract in such cases, and owes those people compensation in the form of one or more of (1) training them for some other comparable (by income and difficulty) work, (2) early retirement with some kind of pension to let them keep their standard of living until they reach normal retirement age, (3) throttling the rate that these jobs can be replaced by automation so instead of people being fired to make room for the bots the bots only replace workers who are retiring or leaving normally.
If society is not going to uphold the social contract, or compensate for its breach, then perhaps one can make the case that it is not unethical for the aggrieved former worker to also breach the social contract and turn to crime to support himself and his family, depending on the type of crime.
I think I'd do like Charlie Brown did and set up a "Psychological Help - $5" booth.
Other than, attempt to retrain and look for another job? Without quite knowing the scope or seriousness of question, it's tricky. I'm in IT, started as a sysadmin in PeopleSoft/ERP world, currently a hands-on team-lead. A lot of stuff we do can, should, and will be automated. Which will remove my hands-on portion and reduce my team-lead portion. I've been lucky/careful to retrain both up (relative direction) and late…
> attempt to retrain and look for another job? The question is whether there will be a Big Rip type of event, where jobs are being automated faster than most people can retrain.
For the section of the US between the Hudson river and the SF bay this has been the case for ~20 years. What most 30 year old laid off workers MAY do is very different from what they CAN do. Saying "ohh, just learn to code" isn't helpful to someone worried about making rent this month let alone paying their internet bill.