[pessimizer]

Often when you automate a job done manually, the only productive work for that person to do is to contribute to the profit margin by getting laid off.

I've written a lot of MS Office macros that replaced people - immediately they became the person who ran the macro while other things were looked for that they could do, then a month later they were gone. The entirety of a lot of people's $30k/yr jobs is taking digital data from one source and entering it into a different program. $30k/yr is a lot of money.

I've seen it so often that it actually soured me to the work.

edit: This is exactly the kind of thing that I would work on. It could clearly be reduced to a .csv, template image, and a few Imagemagick calls.

[derefr]

> $30k/yr is a lot of money.

Another way to think of automation is that you're making it $30k/yr cheaper to run a business. The more automated the world becomes, the cheaper it becomes to start (useful, profitable) businesses--and so the more likely people are to start them.

Or, to put it another way: to whatever degree social mobility is enabled in a culture (and to whatever degree people realize "start a business" is an option to escape unemployment), automation converts a culture's proletariat wage-earners into bourgeois capital-holders. This process is lossy--it also outputs non-adaptive workers on welfare--but if the exchange is recognized at a cultural/governmental level, it can be optimized through education and incentive programs to produce more entrepreneurs and fewer non-productive workers.

[coldtea]

>Another way to think of automation is that you're making it $30k/yr cheaper to run a business. The more automated the world becomes, the cheaper it becomes to start (useful, profitable) businesses--and so the more likely people are to start them.

And the less employed people would be out there to buy your stuff.

Sorry, but automation either ultimately leads to something like communism or similar, or to a severy damaged market economy.

The only reason neither has happened thus far is because we haven't achieved nearly total automation, actually not even for 10-20% of the jobs. And still, what there has been have led to a shrinking middle class compared to decades past.

>it can be optimized through education and incentive programs to produce more entrepreneurs and fewer non-productive workers.

The only reason entrepreneurs are "productive" is because there are workers (either productive or non-productive) that have salaries to buy their stuff and services.