Technology

Thanks for the insight!

This has never been how automation has worked. Automation all the way back to the first factories displacing handmade goods has used automation to increase total output, not to reduce time spent for the same output, and then allowing everyone to work less. It actually increased the workday for most of those jobs, because the automation so drastically reduced the per-item price that it drove down wages in turn.

Amazon wants employees who won't unionize, who don't take breaks, and who cost far less, and since they can't outsource a local distribution warehouse, they'll use robots instead of exploited foreign workers.

I mean let's be honest from the minute 0 Amazon has wanted to automate all the warehouse... Like the people were meant as transitory thing or for the parts were there wasn't any alternative at all.

This is exactly the problem.

We have a puritanical idea burned into our society that you have to suffer to live, that you have to work your fingers to the bone to deserve even the most basic necessities of life, and can’t imagine a non-capitalist society where we just provide everything people need to live and not force people to do bullshit busywork just to prove they “deserve” the basics of life.

For ages, we've been talking about automation, and how it can free us from the drudgery of menial, dangerous, and repetitive work, freeing us to have more time to live our lives enjoyably and pursue our desires instead or having to spend a third of our lives working. But the problem is that people think that if you don't work, then you don't deserve to live, or be happy, or have any kind of enjoyment in your life at all. It's completely at odds with the kind of society we've actually built.

We have so many empty homes in the US that we could give every single homeless person in the country a home, for free, and still have loads left over. But instead we'd rather let them die on the streets because they haven't "proved" they deserve a life.

We produce so much food that we could just give every single person in this country all the food they'd need to survive, and still not have shortages. But we'd rather throw away 50% of the food we produce because it's kinda not pretty, or it sits on store shelves until expiration date, and gets chucked in the garbage.

We have Conservatives that talk about how all life is sacred, and we must protect it at all cost, going to far as to value the life of a fetus over the life of a parent. But once that child is born? Fuck them. Can't afford healthcare? Can't afford housing? Well then the parent shouldn't have gotten pregnant. Oh, we have ways to take care of that beforehand? Sorry, no, cant have that either. Let's make birth control, family planning, healthcare, housing, education, etc. impossible to access. And now that you have an impoverished family? Better get tugging on those bootstraps, because helping you would be unethical and antithetical to our Rugged Individualist ideal.

So many people in this country are absolutely terrified of the idea that someone else, somewhere, might possibly get something they "don't deserve" and will go out of their way to make people suffer because of it.

So say Amazon replaces all of their warehouse workers with robots. Those are objectively horrifying jobs that we have years of evidence to prove. People suffer and die in those warehouses. So getting people out of them is a good thing. But what then? You've "freed" them, but to do what? Maybe they live in an area where that Amazon job was the best paying one, and moving or finding other work or going to school, etc. just simply aren't options.

The robots aren't the problem. Our society is the problem. And it's completely and utterly broken. Until captialism is destroyed, there won't be a meaningful solution to this.

I’d really love to see some better propositions for quantifying value that’s better than straight up corporate profit. I’m with you a 100%, just looking for the path to get there.

Only if we continue to be dumbasses

We need to take universal basic income more seriously as a future policy

There are many people who can only do grunt work.

You mean essential work? Building the homes people live in, cooking the meals people eat, delivering people the stuff they're otherwise incapable of getting for themselves?

Not sure why anyone who's not part of the ruling class who profits from its devaluation would want to refer to it as being done by 'grunts'?

You shouldn't even need to explain this, but thanks for doing it. That shit you replied to was a Ben Shapiro level of disingenuous bullshit argument.

Agreed, so let's celebrate the progress and find alternative ways for people to provide for their families rather than act like robots are taking the desirable jobs.

The idea that Amazon will not replace every job they can regardless of unionization status is preposterous.

If they can automate the job, they already have every incentive to do so. This is not going to crack the whip.

Workers should unionize, period. The company is coming for them either way.

The Paris Metro example is fine as they create new lines and upgrade existing ones.

The idea with the union is that any organization will have a difficult time slowly replacing workers with robots other than waiting for people to retire. It will either have to fire all or major portions of the unionized workplace to put in scabs or robots, or not at all.

I mean either you get good jobs or it accelerates total automation which can be used as grounds for organizing socialism in the total unemployment