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Re:A Slow-Motion Trainwreck Facing the Meal-Kit Industry by eropple on Tuesday June 27, 2017 @05:35PM (#14649695)
Have you considered the knock-on effects of minimizing human interaction with regard to actually creating an empathic community? That the people who you would like to avoid interacting with (sorry, "don't care" about avoiding, while you implicitly cheer it on) are a part of the local community around you--generally of a lower social class, which emphatically does not make them less important but does make them less visible and thus less considered to you when voting or suggesting policy?

That empathy that develops through knowing and understanding the people around you is what makes society actually work. The idea that "efficient = better" is one of the most profoundly dehumanizing pictures I have ever seen painted of the future and you do nothing to shake that. Monstrosities like the one you posit are what we should be working to avoid because it makes all of us mere grist for the mill.

Re:A Slow-Motion Trainwreck Facing the Meal-Kit Industry by opportune on Tuesday June 27, 2017 @05:59PM (#14649911)
What do you suggest to do to prevent things from moving this way? Do you think that it will never take off because people are uncomfortable with the idea, or that this is simply not technologically going to happen? I of course would respect anybody's right to vote with their wallets. Just as there are premium goods such as Rolls Royce that are hand-crafted versions of products that are normally mass-produced, I'm sure there will be premium services in the future to replace automated ones, such as food preparation.

The other solution is what is, in my opinion, a sort of neo-Luddite reaciton to automation where we either ban hugely efficient economies-of-scale infrastructures as a make-work program, or a regulation requiring sufficient numbers of humans in the loop.

I think you are really over-interpreting the way I see this. Replacing jobs with more efficient services is pretty unequivocally better in my opinion. If it weren't better, people would keep using the less efficient services that give them some form of empathic pleasure. In particular, I find the allegations of classism a little baseless. I have no problems interacting with those of a lower class, and if they do indeed lose their jobs due to mass automation, I definitely think the government will need to implement programs to retrain them or to provide for their needs a la basic income. But it doesn't make sense to pay someone to do a job that could be done better, especially ones like in food service, just so we can pat ourselves and say that "they at least have a job."

Re:A Slow-Motion Trainwreck Facing the Meal-Kit Industry by eropple on Tuesday June 27, 2017 @06:30PM (#14650136)
Sorry, dude, you're not getting me. I'm not talking about the jobs. I'm talking about the profound dehumanizing isolation that the future you posit implies.

It's not about jobs. It's about people. It's about not encouraging the shrinking of individuals into tiny-little-boxes where they don't have to interact with people unlike them. Epistemic and social-stratifying closures are pernicious and dangerous to society in ways "inefficiency" never, not once in human history, has been.