[kennywinker]

The promise of automation has always been that you'll get a better job with less menial labour if your job is automated. But I don't believe that's been the case, overall. It seems to me that automation causes people to be displaced from jobs where their skills are valued, to jobs where their skills are seen as replaceable. In a capitalist system, without something like UBI, that's a huge problem because once you're at the bottom it's easy to fall out of the system entirely. So, you frame it as a choice between hard work and easy work - but I think ultimately it's closer to a choice between hard work and poverty or death.

There is no mechanism in our capitalist system for allowing people to be automated out of a job while still living a good life.

[wahnfrieden]

Yes, workers don’t benefit from automation under capitalism. Productivity increases far outpace wages earned which have even moved in opposite directions