[mikkupikku]

> My ideal would be a world in which boring, heavy, dangerous, etc work is replaced by machines. Giving humans time and opportunity to pursue creative, fun, stimulating or intellectually challenging tasks.

I can't quite square people seriously believing such things, it seems like it must be wishful thinking crossed with denial. We have more than 200 years of technology taking away the hard and dangerous jobs and it hasn't been playing out that way at all, so why should the latest kind of automation have a dramatically different effect on society?

A hydraulic excavator can do the work of dozens of men with shovels, dozens of times faster too, but that hasn't lead to easy lives of luxury for the sort of men that would have been breaking their backs with shovels. They all had to get other manual labor jobs, because they weren't the capital that got to own and profit from the new machines. The best we can hope for is that when all the women manually spinning thread get replaced by factories, that at least some of them will get to have new factory jobs and the rest will at least be offset by society at large benefiting from clothing so cheap that even the poorest people can own more than one outfit.

[zeroonetwothree]

This is pretty wrong. We went from 90% of the population working in agriculture in ~1800 to (now) 80% working in services. Most services jobs are much nicer (and require far less manual labor) than those in agriculture.

[insane_dreamer]

> Most services jobs are much nicer (and require far less manual labor) than those in agriculture.

We tell ourselves that because none of us have ever done agriculture. But I'm not so sure that it's true. Yes, far less manual labor. But manual labor isn't a bad thing.

Technology has made our lives _easier_, no question about it. It could also make our lives _better_, but I'm not sure that it is anymore (I feel like the curve has flattened, except for the few who are reaping nearly all the benefits of increased technological "progress").

[mikkupikku]

Farming sucks, therefore common laborers will profit and live luxurious when technology takes their jobs is a hell of a stretch. And even saying those displaced farm workers who had to migrate to crowded and dirty cities just to continue to survive personally benefited is a stretch too. As a whole we're better off now, but trying to pretend that you're doing somebody a favor by eliminating their job seems like peak techie cope.