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by mitochondrion
3437 days ago
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For the most part, automation doesn't create wealth. Sometimes it dramatically improves the functionality of an operation, but mostly it just lets private enterprise replace humans with capital. Thus, it enormously increases the wealth of the owners of that capital, and moderately increases the wealth of the managers of that capital, but overall wealth is not increased, only distributed differently. Also, to the extent that Trump was elected because of economic factors rather than social factors, a cultural reaction against the rampant libertinism of late-stage liberalism, it was because their jobs were not automated but exported overseas. If their jobs hadn't been exported en masse, they would have been largely protected from automation for the last 30 years and until 10 to 20 years from now when things really get serious. |
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When we have the technology to meet the population's needs without its involvement in production, we have something much better than wealth: we have our lives back, our time and energy, our freedom from wage slavery.
We have government for the distribution problem.
The most viscerally disturbing thing I've ever seen a human do, is wish that others be forced to expend useless, unnecessary effort to "earn" what we could just hand out.
I understand the argument about stealing person A's labor output and giving it to person B, but no individual has a legitimate moral claim on the output of a fully automated process.