131–140 of 400 posts
It's a good thing actually given that the worker conditions are pretty terrible there. But it is only a good thing if the increased productivity translates into better wages, increased vacations and reduced work days and not helping Jeff getting a bigger yacht. And for that, it must be an active government policy.
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Jobs are a byproduct of capital owners needing labor to sell things and services with a profit margin, so they can buy the good stuff. I’d argue that once the capital owners possess the technology that brings the cost of labor near zero, they will have no need for an economy at all, not to mention other people - unless it’s something more akin to a zoo.
> they will have no need for an economy at all Who is going to buy all of their crap then?
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But, some already operate at their peak. Then, you automate that and they can only shift to unemployment. The conversation shouldn't be about replacing the most skilled workers. The conversation should be about what happens to the average worker. That has an average IQ level. That can't learn something to compete with the automation. These people have families. These people will suffer.
Has anyone claimed technological changes will impact every group and subgroup on a literally equal basis? Some will have better prospects and others will have worse. Since roughly half the population must have below median average prospects by definition.
No, but too much inequality is not sustainable. Since in a democracy everyone has an equal vote, there will be a force that balances things out over time one way or another.
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Maybe robots should pay taxes like humans since they are taking the jobs and the tax base that goes along with them.
That’s too hard to do. What is “a robot” and “a job?” Replacing workers is easy enough to calculate that with, but what if I start a brand new factory that only ever used robots? The solution is wealth tax and UBI. Get rid of regular income tax, then do a progressive wealth tax, which is enough to pay for a progressive UBI. This way, it’s no problem if you lay off all your workers to replace them with robots. In fact…
It's clear that technological development creates a shift in jobs, i.e some jobs are lost, but new ones are created as a result. Whether the total #jobs increases or decreases is debatable. The issue that I see addressed less often is that the new jobs require by definition, a higher skill set. (You wouldn't displace 100 manual labor workers with a machine that requires 105 workers to maintain). So by definition, the…
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Amazon's role in society is not to provide menial jobs to keep people busy though. If anything, the automation provides good, innovative jobs in robotics. Those are the sorts of jobs I think everyone should have. Leave fetching and carrying to robots, and educate people to be useful in more meaningful, fulfilling, and impactful ways. Suggesting that robots are bad because they take jobs from people doing horrible, bo…
>just says that you want people to carry on doing that work Or that we don't want them to starve. We are talking about the US where their isn't really an effective solution to help people without jobs.
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Wait a minute. Higher skill jobs? For at least a decade, the place jobs shifted to was Amazon. If you lost your job because Amazon put your company out of business, you could get a worse, more humiliating job working at an Amazon warehouse, or as an Amazon driver. It was not higher skill jobs the market shifted to, it was Nomadland jobs. Now that Amazon is switching to robots, where are those people Amazon is putting…
The fact that you can now warehouse with robots lowers the barrier of entry for warehousing, which creates new companies that will host competition against Amazon, offer contract labor for Amazon, and in both ways create jobs that are superior to the previously needed entry level pick and packer. The same laborer can now be promoted at a new company to a higher pay job that requires no greater skill set, simply becau…
It also assumes the moat to warehousing isn't huge, which seems kind of silly for such huge capital investments.
It's clear that technological development creates a shift in jobs, i.e some jobs are lost, but new ones are created as a result. Whether the total #jobs increases or decreases is debatable. The issue that I see addressed less often is that the new jobs require by definition, a higher skill set. (You wouldn't displace 100 manual labor workers with a machine that requires 105 workers to maintain). So by definition, the…
Eugenics
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But exactly as the person you replied to said, they increased the average intelligence needed to do the new jobs. That leaves so many marginal people unemployable. They could have maintained horses but working in cars is harder. I like this observation.
I'm not convinced that animal husbandry is less skilled than working in cars. Different skill, and as I've never done it I can't be certain, but horses are wet and messy biology with brains that are terrified of anything they've never seen before. Production line work I did do as a summer holiday job during my A-levels aged 17 or 18, it wasn't skilled work but also that was HVAC production line not cars.
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Some people do do that. Try stepping outside of your bubble.
The average hourly wage in the United States is $30, so 15 hours a week is $450 pre-tax. Live on that with a family.