[Riverheart]

I'm unclear how people got the impression that I'm okay with people's lives getting upended by automation. As I elaborated on elsewhere, my post was to say there was a difference in what is being automated, highly skilled labor with high time/money/education costs vs something you shouldn't require a degree to learn to do.

[fipar]

As you elaborated elsewhere:

> Honestly this whole "adapt" thing is a load of nonsense parroted by people who aren't immediately under threat and have nothing to fear. Who is going to adapt at 30/40/50 years old? How about people who just graduated art school? Go right back into college? Please.

I agree completely, I just don't think a degree being involved has anything to do with it. I assume most people work the best job they could land, so someone doing menial work and losing it due to automation is in about as much pain as someone facing the same situation on a very specialized role. If anything, the person with more education has a much better chance at getting another (perhaps lower paying) job.

I interpreted your first reply as conveying the message that it's not so bad if low skilled labor is automated, and it's a bigger problem if it's high skilled labor that is replaced. My apologies if I misunderstood you.

[Riverheart]

I understand why I might have come across that way but it wasn't my intention. I could have phrased it better. I agree that losing a job, particularly to automation is painful all around. My take is that low skilled labor getting automated is problematic because people need work and frankly I don't think everyone can/should go to college to make a living and I feel much automation is about margins. We need a strong middle class of homeowners and consumers and enough jobs that people can reasonably achieve it.

But automation has been coming for low skilled work for ages and the wisdom was that high skilled work was supposed to be safe(r). I think it is extraordinarily problematic if high skilled workers are forced to start competing for a diminishing pool of low skill jobs. Moving into another high skilled job would be best but without free/subsidized education puts undue burden on people and who is to say what work is safe 10yrs into the future now? Once high skilled work starts getting automated it means there is no protection and therefore no stability. How can we grow the middle class in such an environment?

This also means automation of low skilled work will accelerate. Order kiosks will be replaced by a specialized ChatGPT customer service version. Acts and sounds like a real person. Maybe it's got a floating head avatar while an automated process in the back assembles the food. One store manager and a guy who inspects the equipment across town.

Today it's the artists but tomorrow it could be IT workers. Companies are pyramids and the room at the top is finite. A healthy economy is not a pyramid.

[fipar]

I understand what you meant better now, and I agree with your position. In particular:

> Today it's the artists but tomorrow it could be IT workers. Companies are pyramids and the room at the top is finite. A healthy economy is not a pyramid.

This is why I said perhaps some meaningful social change may come out of this. If we assume automation will continue to replace jobs higher up the pyramid, at some point it seems the extremes in the range of possible outcomes is "more people competing for a diminishing pool of low skill jobs" on one side, and "we figured out a post-capitalistic (0) society in which how useful you are to the economy (this is basically your skills vs the demand for them) determines things like if you get the house with the nice view or not, but not whether you get access to good health care, can live in a place without the fear of getting evicted or of getting robbed/murdered when you go out, etc.

I know it's utopic but I rather be utopic than dystopic, I guess.

A great path towards a better (IMHO) arrangement would be to have very good unemployment benefits, including education/training for jobs that are in demand when you get downsized/automated away.

(0) I use post-capitalistic for lack of a better term, and to make it obvious I don't mean communism. I certainly don't mean that and see societies organized that way closer to dystopia than utopia. My point is, as you say, I believe a pyramid is not a good way to organize an economy (or a society for that matter).

Edit: formatting