Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by MSFT_Edging 84 days ago
> How is livelihood being "ripped away"?

Who does it benefit to automate away well paid industries? For every well paid industry mostly automated away, you remove one more path for financial mobility.

One less path available means more people doomed to the service economy serfdom. You can be incredibly intelligent, creative, personable, and driven, but bad luck can still doom you to the role of a serf.

It's incredibly naive to assume the pattern of the short history of industrialization will continue. More jobs may have been created in the past, but where are those plans for the future? Why is it imperative we accept the plans of people making money hand over fist, while also forced to endure the hardships of adapting?

Jeff Bezos won't have difficulties adapting, but the average citizen will lose their healthcare and get beaten by a cop for protesting their own social murder.

Pure automation and efficiency can't be the one true path if we want to maintain our current economic system. Capitalism needs waste and inefficiency. It has little room for charity when the shareholders are the end beneficiary.

1 comments

It benefits humanity as a whole to have all industries, across the board, automated away. Right now that's primarily happening in service economy, which essentially means either there are increasingly fewer "serfs", or they're moving up the ladder. This is just accelerating the process and pushing from the top.

In the end eventually everyone will be at the same industry earning potential level (or whatever it's called), and then there will literally be no more "potential for earning" because there would be 0 economic value to human labor (but there will always be aesthetic value). And by then the greatest collective decision the majority of mankind will have to make in its existence would already have been made: do away with this highly flawed and unsustainable economic system, or be wholly at the mercy and whims of those unreasonably trying to keep it in place. It's up to us whether the inevitably fully automated future is a dystopia, or utopia. There is no viable middle ground.

https://marshallbrain.com/manna