[ncmncm]

The difference is whether you are automating a "profit center" or a "cost center". Automate a profit center, and you free up people to do more profitable stuff. Automate a cost center, and they can lay everybody off and cut costs.

The whole notion of "cost-" and "profit centers" is a terrible construction of modern management theory. But it is how almost all businesses work nowadays. Never work in a cost center department (unless you can use it for grift the way HR directors do).

The notion of cost centers is why most web sites are crap. For most businesses the web site is a cost center, and everybody working on it is piling on superfluous tech to pad their résumé with, and to make themselves more essential.

[imtringued]

It is simply an internal implementation of rent seeking.

You can burn fossil fuels and cause damage through pollution and be applauded for being highly profitable.

Meanwhile people building sustainable energy or at least reducing the damage caused by pollution will be considered a drag and harshly criticized.

Ultimately the problem lies in the fact that we have built entire societies around the idea of exploiting externalities. You can't build a healthy society around such a thing and yet we keep doing and loving it.

[jacquesm]

This is spot on. The final conclusion is that we are in a cul-de-sac though, any kind of exit seems to be across capital expenditure barriers that are too high to surmount and if you succeed there will always be a competitor to your plan that does things the old way and that looks short term to be cheaper.

I think the big problem is that we do not show the full price at the outset, the 'sticker price' is usually only a fraction of the total cost and the payer of the sticker price has no idea of what the total cost eventually will be. If we could only make them aware of that it would already be a step in the right direction, and the remainder might be fixable by taxation.