[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.