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.
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.
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.
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?
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”
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).
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).