#11

It’s a reasonable (if well worn) point.

1 Like
#12

And it will be our duty to build and maintain those robots.

4 Likes
#13

:’( there are robots who can build and maintain robots. It’ll be our job to design the robots.

#14

And maintain the robots that maintain

#15

I don’t think when they started they were robot jobs

2 Likes
#17

yeah

it’s very ‘makeuthink’ & very white privilege isn’t

I went to a series of conferences last week and one of them basically convinced me that in 3-5 years time Amazon will own everything. Kids will be going to Amazon schools & sick people will be treated in Amazon hospitals & everything will be run by robots and AI

and when I asked the obvious question about jobs & incomes & employment - whether we should tax robots, universal basic income etc all these techdudes were like ‘Buh? People will be freed to do cool stuff instead’

I literally asked “You say that Amazon central depot is unmanned & run by 45,000 robots that work 24/7. No sick leave, no holiday pay, no income tax or insurance contribution… that’s the equivalent productivity of maybe 200,000 people. What are those 200,000 people going to do?”

he was
“No, no they won’t take 45,000 jobs. Those people will just do other things”

:neutral_face:

3 Likes
#18

Luxury communist revolution :+1:

#19

I’m afraid that Wall-E is a near future documentary

#20

The way I see it we’re going to literally run out of jobs pretty soon so either our governments will have to stump up a liveable citizen’s wage or we’ll end up burning everything to the ground in hunger anyhow, looking forward to it.

1 Like
#21

this video is a bit out of date now - they’ve added 20,000 new robots since then & most of their ‘fulfillment centres’ have been ‘upgraded’ to unmanned

#22

Government policy is running way, way, way, way, way, way, way behind tech innovation

in fact, the continued drive down of corporate tax is precisely what incentivises automation as a replacement for costly flesh-based workers

#23

Yeah I agree and I realise that tech companies actively circumvent laws but when the people actually run out of jobs they’ll turn to their governments to sort it out and as long as they have the monopoly on legitimate violence they’ll always have the whip hand. And if they choose the corporations instead it’ll just all implode, corporations need consumers.

#24

image

Think this cartoon has been somewhat doctored by some wag, can’t find the original

#25

It’s very worrying and difficult to see how it’ll play out, but something like that seems inevitable. Could Amazon do a better job of running the country than our government? It probably could.

Heard a liveable citizen’s wage suggested by various people, which is both simultaneously appealing and terrifying. I am a lazy and jaded fucker, so I’d happily accept my daily food tokens and a shot of lithium to the brain from the World State, so I could sit around in my pants all day.

#26

But what if those corporations are ‘too big to fail’ ?? (And they will be if they’re running schools & healthcare & data logistics etc etc)

Bail outs - that is public future money to prop up corporate infrastructure - & austerity are already practically integral to capitalism.
The whole system is a whisker away from being permanently sealed in Bezos/Musk/Gates favour

#27

I’m old enough to have been in school in the Seventies and we were being told that technology would mean that we would all be working at home, and that everything would be automated. Even at the time we were asking the teacher who would pay us to stay at home.

I think we were all promised hover cars about the same time.

#28

I don’t really buy the whole what will we do for jobs when robots do everything? People have worried about that since forever (in terms of machinery replacing people), but humans will always dream up new ways to sell shit to each other and the more wealthy will employ the less wealthy to service them in some way. But, yeah, privatising essential public services and the potential fall out when it goes tits up (which I guess it inevitably will), that’s worth worrying about.

#29

pretty banal hot take.

1 Like
#30

And they don’t do it very well, either.

Ocado will rule the world.

#31

This is a bit similar to the ‘wars have always existed’ shrug you sometimes hear

Sure, but in 1845 the best you could do was bayonette people while on horseback or fire cannonballs into their town hall. 100 years later war was so industrialised that you could flatten entire cities with a single bomb and gas/incinerate 12 million people who you deemed as no longer useful labour/subhuman scum.

A lot of people working in tech are working on their specialty - whether that be VR/AR, robotics, AI, IoT/smart environments or biotech. The mega corporations like Amazon are buying up all this tech and fitting it together and at some point pretty soon all these technologies will coalesce…

I’m not 100% a doomsayer, there’s loads of massive potential for vastly improving society and indeed freeing ourselves from many unwanted/unnecessary burdens

But speaking to these innovators I was just alarmed at how much of them view their work life as ‘dreaming, experimenting, making’ & then selling on to the highest bidder with a total blank-faced response when asked any questions of ethics, morals or consequences.

Actually, that’s not totally true. There were about 5-10% of speakers who were firmly in favour of their innovations being open source but even then only about half of those viewed open source as a way to give marginalized groups access to self-determination as opposed to having an unpaid army of beta testers refine their product