[mrrrgn]

Progress implies moving toward a goal. What goal are we moving toward? Our society and economy aren't optimized for scenarios involving large scale unemployment. What use is automation if it only leads to mass human suffering?

[draugadrotten]

> Progress implies moving toward a goal. What goal are we moving toward?

The goal seems to be making the rich even richer.

You are right in that the goal is key, because much time and effort will be spent towards the goal. When Kennedy said we should go to the moon, we did. Our leaders today have other goals, and they too will reach their goals. Choose wisely.

[atemerev]

Quite right. Almost everyone is quite rich in terms of available goods and services per median income, compared to 100 years ago. Even by 50 years old standards, I am super-rich, having the ability to travel though Europe many times per year, flexible working schedule, and having, say, an on-demand driver available on call by the push of the button on my portable phone... this is insanely rich even by original Wall Street movie standards! And I am not a Wall Street trader, I am just a self-educated software engineer, coming from relatively poor family. My wife is a mathematician, also enjoying similar privileges.

So yes, I am looking forward to get even more richer in time. Like most of people. And this is way easier than it ever was before.

[atemerev]

Luddites were saying the same around 200 years ago, but it turned out better than expected. Lots of new jobs were created, replacing manual labor.

[ska]

Not for the Luddites. This is one of the most consistently misunderstood and misused historical lessons I run into in tech circles. The true lesson of the Luddites isn't that "things will turn out better than you thought", it is that "there will be casualties".

The Luddites were basically correct - they were trading "good jobs" for fundamental unemployment. Demographically speaking the families involved did not on average recover from the damage for a few generations.

So while from a global perspective the overall change may be positive over time, you can't discount people out of hand for saying "wait a minute, we're going to get screwed hard here". They may well be right. It may still be the right thing to do.

What the policy implications of such are or should be is a separable issue.

Another potentially deep issue: the industrial revolution creating a bunch of new jobs and job categories does not demonstrate that the same will be true of a putative automation revolution that we are entering....

[marknutter]

Technological advancements displace jobs at a relatively slow pace. It doesn't happen overnight. And as those jobs get replaced, the demand for the remaining people who can do those jobs goes up because not all companies can afford to automate initially. The "casualties" you mention are more likely the future workers for a particular profession, but they're unlikely to care much having, y'know, not been born yet.

[ska]

No, that is not at all what happened with the Luddites.

Which is the point, really. This is exactly the sort of assertion that is often made ... and often the Luddites are trotted out as an example. But they are a better counterexample to what you assert than an example.

[a_humean]

To counter the unfair Luddite bashing:

The problem the Luddites had is that they were skilled labour facing the possibility of destitution with no welfare state to provide time and money for retraining into new occupations. They could see that there was no future for their occupation, but they were arguing for better terms with their employers so that their short-medium term future wasn't so bleak (e.g. their family being sent to the [workhouse](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Workhouse), and likely a drawn out and dehumanising death).

We have a welfare state now in all developed countries (by varying degrees), so the problems that the Luddites faced have been greatly mitigated from those past extremes. However, all welfare states assume that any state of unemployment is merely temporary, and provides on that basis.

The past is not a wholly reliable indicator for the future, and present indications are that with increasing automation there won't be enough good (interpret as you will) new jobs. Further, many of the new good jobs will be out of reach for a significant portion of our populations without the luck of latent ability and/or the luck being born into the right (well-off) family with access to high quality education and social connections.

The institutions that solved the Luddite problem can't solve a problem of truly long-term/permanent unemployment or very irregular employment.

[atemerev]

But why there is a conception that somebody should be entitled to a stable job for life?

I started my career as a journalist/editor when paper magazines were still a thing. Soon, the publishing house I was working in went out of business, so I have to learn the new trade: software development. Which also may become obsolete soon, at least for simpler tasks, so I'll be ready to learn something new.

Capitalism works because it needs rich enough customers on mass scale, the middle class. If there will be not enough jobs for the middle class to exist, there will be no capitalism anymore.

[Futurebot]

Just because it was true then, does not mean it will be true now. The Luddite Fallacy Fallacy; Gwern does a good job explaining it and supplying copious links on the subject: https://www.gwern.net/Mistakes#neo-luddism

[paulryanrogers]

Ecological sustainability would be nice. Though it seems our current means of automating are more often at the expense of our environment.

[tomjen3]

Please look out the nearest window that overlooks a street. Then compare with the next couple of minutes of this video (https://youtu.be/uYmbyOrM4gs?t=543). Compare the amount of human suffering. The difference is 116 years of the automation you so hate.

Unfortunately I can't show you what life was like before the industrial revolution, because we don't have images or movies from that time, suffice to say that life then "was short, brutish and hard". Child mortality was rampant, according to Adam Smith it was not unusual that a woman who had had 10 children didn't see any of them grew up to be adults.

There is no goal, but progress is moving as far away from that condition as humanely possible, as fast as possible. This is best achieved with capitalism.

If you want full scale employment just create another world war, so that we can draft everybody and piss all our wealth away.

[a_humean]

I'm afraid you have completely misunderstood him/her. I'm pretty certain that he believes the industrial revolution eventually brought about amazing social change and genuine life improvements for everyone that made life much much less 'short, brutish, and hard'.

The point wasn't that automation is bad (it clearly is not), but that if we continue to automate without a plan for how we deal with mass unemployment, then automation will lead to mass human suffering of a different kind.

[exit]

for the vast majority employment is mass human suffering