Amazon's Vulcan Robots Now Stow Items Faster Than Humans

Henry Ford famously wanted his workers to be able to afford his cars. When Bezos replaces everyone with robots, who will be left to buy his junk?

Plenty of people who don’t work for Amazon already buy stuff from there. I guess I mostly see the jobs as exchanging labour for something that society values and so by automating, there is more labour available to do things society values and so society gets more of what it values. And if you think working for Amazon is bad for people then you should be happy if automation is decreasing the number of people suffering that bad thing (though automation won’t always decrease this, eg see rise in number of bank tellers/branches in the US). But that isn’t really the way that lots of people talk about jobs and so if what you want is for people to have somewhere local where they can exchange their time for money to spend on goods and services then I guess automation and efficiency don’t really matter because the point of the job is to ensure the worker has money coming in rather than to ensure that something useful comes out of it. That latter point of view is pretty popular and I think I’m describing it pretty terribly – I’m sure there is a much more reasonable argument for it.

The ultimate endgame is either a significant reduction in global population, or UBI. You can’t just keep automating every non-knowledge job away and just hope people find something else to do.

All those jobs in Detroit that went away were replaced by…? As best I can tell they were replaced by poverty and crime.

> You can’t just keep automating every non-knowledge job away and just hope people find something else to do.

[citation needed]

We've been at it for more than a century now and it seems to be working pretty well for nearly everyone!

Our goal is not to preserve jobs. Our goal is to be more productive for fewer resources.

Jobs in Detroit went away - but so did the people, who found new jobs in other cities. There has been no lasting unemployment from automation, ever.

Human beings are good for more than pulling levers and carrying heavy objects and we do each other a disservice by pretending otherwise.

> Jobs in Detroit went away - but so did the people, who found new jobs in other cities. There has been no lasting unemployment from automation, ever.

Do you have some citations? There’s absolutely no indication they “found new jobs in other cities” but there is plenty of proof they just never found another well paying job and moved into welfare or became homeless.