Amazon's Vulcan Robots Now Stow Items Faster Than Humans

Luddites were asking that question long before socialism was a thing. However we now have more people than ever working, and standard of living is higher. I'm not worried.

During the transition to industrialization it’s conceivable that many people became worse off because they could not find a place in the new economy. Even if society is eventually better off, the our generation or the next may have to sacrifice our way of life.

We do for sure need to get people to realize their jobs are obsolete and train them on something more useful. Old people (often anyone over 25) are far too resistant to change.

I mean there is an argument that the robber-barons during the Gilded Age were a net negative, in that they exerted way too much control and a lot of people needlessly suffered in the process.

Generally, though, I'm against the arguments of "automation is bad cuz less jobs". I think that might be true in the very short term, but we're never going to have a case where "all possible work is done", because that's a completely malformed premise. There's pretty much an infinite amount of potential work to do.

> I think that might be true in the very short term...

The short term matters. It's zero comfort to a factory worker who has lost his job if there will be another, better job for him in a year or two. He still needs to eat between now and then, and he can't buy food with pie in the sky promises of future employment.

We could start by dismantling the oppressive systems that force labor.

Not a question of luddites. Example, coal in the US became heavily automated - the workers did not all just find new jobs. Industry shifts don't mean the old workers become the new workers. People do get left behind, and potentially en masse.

AFAIK it would be more fitting to say it is of little comfort to a factory worker who lost their job, that there are now 1.5 more jobs, better jobs, now available to other people.

The reason for AFAIK, my understanding is it is more common for people to be left behind than to transition entirely to a new industry. (That is my memory of seeing some data around that, not saying I'm correct, but that I find it just as plausible to speculate that industrial transitions don't always transition with the same workers.) Perhaps we should talk farming? That is the biggest example pethaps. Some 80% plus of all populations used to do agriculture. The Grapes of Wraith were all about this very topic.

For better or worse, my parents always instilled in me that no job is guaranteed forever, and that's why you need to keep up with as much new technology as you can. My dad's uncle was a victim of automation in his 40's, and I think he was always annoyed that instead of learning something new he would sit and complain all day that there's no jobs for him.

In hindsight, I think they were completely right and I feel kind of lucky that they drilled that in so much, because even into my mid 30's I don't have a ton of trouble or resistance to picking up new things. Sometimes I don't love the way new tech is going [1], but I still try my best to keep up with what's in demand in the industry (generally looking at job boards and looking at their keywords and making sure I have at least a cursory understanding of the stuff they're talking about). I will admit I don't completely love that AI is being used instead of junior engineers in some cases, largely because a lot of AI code is shit or flatout wrong in non-obvious ways, but I still have tried my best to utilize it and learn from it because it's clearly the way that things are going. [2]

I've been hired and lost/quit more desk jobs than anyone I know, and I attribute my ability to find work quickly to this characteristic.

[1] e.g. treating memory like it's infinite, disregarding CPU performance as a means of "getting more shit done", making configurations (arguably) needlessly complicated like Kubernetes, etc.

[2] For example, my latest project has been building an HLS and Icecast "infinite radio station" which picks a random song from my collection, feeds a prompt to OpenAI for DJ chatter in between songs,

That's true as well. Also, the timeframe for those new jobs probably won't be just 1-2 years. But I was trying to use the most favorable scenario for tombert's argument to show that, even in that case, it still isn't enough.

I mean, as someone who has been laid off a bunch of times (more than most people I think), I do sympathize with them. It sucks to have your income source cut off, it sucks to lose health insurance (or have to pay full freight with COBRA), it’s demoralizing to have to grovel at the feet of a bunch of potential employers for months at a time, it’s depressing to wake up to dozens of rejection emails, and it’s scary to not see an end in sight.

I wouldn’t necessarily be opposed to forcing companies to pay some amount per month to people whose jobs were automated away for N years, and/or providing job training for a new career.

Eh, this isn't a great theory especially for the poor.

As a higher income individual I conversely seem to have a lot of time to study and am not given a constant stream of work I must complete every moment. I also have the benefit of working from home and being able to spend a lot on training and upskilling.

When you are poorer you typically don't get this. The vast majority of your income is spent at the end of the week. Your job gives you zero time to explore and learn more. You likely commute and and may have a second job to make ends meet.

Just saying 'learn to code' here doesn't address the systematic issues.

I mean the great depression is a good example too. Stuff can fall apart much faster than you can retrain and that economies can find new work.

"anyone over 25". Right.