| He's literally talking about eliminating jobs from the Tesla factory in Fremont. And then he takes a further step and discusses in eliminating all manual labor. I think it's reasonable to consider the chance a fully mobile non-human humanoid will actually disrupt labor more so than the invention of a shopping cart. I'm talking about marginalized people who are under educated and have very good reason to believe that they are not a part of the broader society, black and brown people. This is a real group of people. Take away their labor opportunity and they're not going to suddenly become managers. Maybe someone will train them so that they become robot repair technicians or something else which hasn't been a likely to be automated. Who is thinking about this for them? They're certainly not thinking about it because they don't think they belong in this society, already, based on how they are actively marginalized, based on evidence. So it's left up to us as technologists to think about the societal impact of the technology that we're working on. Edit: furthermore, I have worked in a grocery store and it was not great. I had to go out of my way to engage with people, to get some of that juicy worthwhile socialization, because the job was to move stuff around. Move new blocks of cheese into the freezing cold open refrigerators. Move purchased groceries from the cash register to people's cars. Move carts from the parking lot back into the store. Not great labor. So having a personal shopper job would be awesome by comparison. |
Literally no invention, not this robot by Tesla certainly, would ever have even 5% of the impact the tracks and other farm tools had.