this post was submitted on 10 Jan 2024
1739 points (97.4% liked)
Political Memes
5489 readers
3659 users here now
Welcome to politcal memes!
These are our rules:
Be civil
Jokes are okay, but don’t intentionally harass or disturb any member of our community. Sexism, racism and bigotry are not allowed. Good faith argumentation only. No posts discouraging people to vote or shaming people for voting.
No misinformation
Don’t post any intentional misinformation. When asked by mods, provide sources for any claims you make.
Posts should be memes
Random pictures do not qualify as memes. Relevance to politics is required.
No bots, spam or self-promotion
Follow instance rules, ask for your bot to be allowed on this community.
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
So now we’re justifying Luddism?
I can get it when the outcome is clearly worse for the consumer, but cleaning robots work pretty well. We should all strive to replace as much of that work as possible, no one wants to be a garbage collector. The issue isn’t robots, it’s the lack of UBI.
As we should if you know anything about luddism. It wasn't anti-technology, it was anti-technology taking people's jobs. Like a cleaning robot taking away a person's job.
How do you know? Have you taken a survey of garbage collectors?
I have a friend who is a janitor and is very satisfied in his job. You would have his job taken away by a robot not because a robot would do it better, but because you have decided he doesn't want to work at that job.
As always, “technology taking people’s jobs” is the natural outcome of progress. As long as the non-human “worker” is doing the job as well as the human one, that’s what we should all strive for. Keeping jobs around just “to feed people” is basically a sort of crooked UBI that isn’t universal, forces people to do useless stuff, and hinders progress.
Did he say “When I grow up, I want to be a janitor!” as a kid? Did he get out of high school with “janitor” being his dream career? Or did he just happen to find a job they were hiring for which “isn’t that bad”?
Because if it’s the first one good for him, but I think he’s in the extreme minority. Every janitor I met was at most “okay” with their job, and if you told them “hey, we just got a robot that can do your job as well as you, you can go home and do whatever while earning the same pay” they’d do it in a heartbeat.
So because it's not their dream career it's okay to replace their job with a robot? That's what you're saying?
When has that ever happened when someone's job was replaced with a machine? That's a fantasy. What happens is they go home, spend months looking for a job, get kicked out of their home because they can't afford rent, starve and then take whatever they can for much lower pay because they're desperate and homeless. You must know this.
And that’s why I said the issue is the lack of UBI. Progress is moving forward whether we like it or not, Luddism can only slow it down and make us waste resources.
Instead of going against it we should spend that effort into building a society where you don’t need to work to live (or, at least not full-time).
Clearly you do not understand how technology works in economics. There's a term called "induced demand", meaning the reduced cost of some thing passes some threshold where it becomes a viable option for new customers - creating new demand.
People who did not understand this thought computers would eliminate paperwork, when in reality more things got paperwork attached to them, when handshakes worked before.
In our janitor example, it's not worth paying humans to pick up trash across arbitrarily large swathes of nothing in my example. Nobody is going to pay your friend to hike The Appalachian trail and pick up every last bit of rubbish hikers left behind. The reality is that you'd just find things better maintained if robots could do that. There are companies trying to do this for less nebulous things like bridge maintenance, which just do not get maintained because of the crazy cost of sending engineers to inspect every inch of them to find out what even needs fixing.
What? They literally pay people to clean national parks.
https://www.nps.gov/articles/000/nps-careers-maintenance.htm
There is no reason to build a robot to do that except to save money paying humans. The same with bridge maintenance. You even admitted it yourself about the bridge maintenance. This is about saving money at the expense of people's jobs. And you're okay with that.
You know what we can do to pay for humans to do bridge maintenance without any issues? Raise taxes on rich people. No robots needed. But I'm guessing raising taxes on the rich is a big step too far for you.