I don't think this is true.

I once spent some time at an Amish community, and I saw their elderly and sick all living relatively productive lives. They were cooking, cleaning, watching children, and performing other small tasks that made everyone's life a bit nicer. The only reason these "menial" jobs were available to them was the deliberate inefficiency of the Amish lifestyle.

These things aren't unavailable in greater society. You simply have a choice. I'm not sure you have as much choice in Amish society, and I think the lack of choice is cruel.

If my elbow is broken, I can't cook efficiently. If it doesn't work correctly, same. If walking to the toilet saps my energy, I shouldn't be expected to do the same.

I should also now mention that elderly doesn't mean you are sick. Loads of folks are busy throughout old age. "sick" doesn't always mean you can't do anything, either, and I'm pretty sure the Amish communities take care of folks that can't.

They are unavailable in the sense that rent/utilities/transportation is expensive whether you want it or not, and minimum wage part time jobs won't pay rent.

It's high cost of living that urban singles areas have and rural multi-generational homes don't.

The key thing there is not "no automation" but co-living in the same community; the main barrier to having your retired parents look after the children while you go to work is the need of most people to move across the country to look for jobs.

But those are linked attributes. Automation encourages/requires centralization and industrial scaling, and efficient allocation of labor demands that said labor be liquid in regards to physical location, making jobs less situated. The workforce must become more mobile, flocking to the latest job locus, and therefore more settled people are left behind.

Alternatively, automation might act as a platform for small local businesses (think people who sell via Shopify or Amazon). Indeed, I believe Americans have got less mobile in recent years, not more, though I'm not so sure that is a good thing.

Unlikely, since automation has a positive return to scale. The surest evidence of this is the profitability of Amazon itself.

> people who sell via Shopify or Amazon

If you're selling by mail countrywide, you're not a "local" business any more even if you remain a small business.

Yes it is local in the context of this discussion (working near your previous home). Of course you are competing with people in other localities who might outcompete you due to better local economic business conditions

I think the Amish optimize not for minimum spoon use but for maximum spoon availability.

Predictable spoon consumption?

The anti-automation argument isn't that automation is bad, and grueling labor is good. The argument is that being forced to change careers can be - depending at which age it happens for a person - anything from taking away significant amounts of wealth to complete impossibility. When you change careers, you usually start at the bottom of the ladder. Past a certain point, such switch is not recoverable, and best you can hope is that your children will start a good career early and won't be themselves forced to switch careers later on.

If automation didn't involve pushing people into deep poverty, it wouldn't have as much opposition.

The lean FIRE people show that the bad part of losing a high income career is the hugely wasteful lifestyle that preceded it, not the career or it's loss.

Automatic sending wealth to capital instead of labor is another issue, perhaps better viewed as capital ownership being centralized as the actual problem.

Achieving FIRE is relatively rare and privileged situation. Many families have non-negotiable expenses, particularly around healthcare. Even for those who don't, going lean will be a huge shock and a downgrade in quality of life. It's only reasonable such people will object. Much like I myself could survive on 20% of my income, but I wouldn't be happy about it being forced on me.

> Automatic sending wealth to capital instead of labor is another issue, perhaps better viewed as capital ownership being centralized as the actual problem.

That's the underlying issue. Not the fault of automation per se, but of the thing that drives it. It serves to highlight my point: anti-automation arguments aren't really about automation itself.

The arguments of those against automation are that it eliminates jobs and consolidates wealth to the owners of the automation facilities, completely eliminating the contribution of laid off workers who go on to work menial jobs else where.

How this "spoons" analogy a good argument against that?

That's not an argument against automation, it's an argument against capitalism.

It's both. But it's definitely an argument I've heard used against increasing automation multiple times including in historical contexts, so I'm unsure why you are saying it is not.

Indeed it is. And if you look at it, most of the arguments against tech in general - including all the hand-wringing about AI, privacy and evil tech bros - they're all arguments against capitalism. But it would be boring to repeat the same thing that's been repeated for the past 100+ years, so people instead confuse symptoms with cause.

If capitalism is defined as "everything people do that has has negative externalities" that's tautological and useless.

It's not that. All these things have a common root cause in the form of businesses accumulating capital and making decisions to abuse people. The public discourse is distracted by focusing on minutia - AI does this, robots do that - instead of noticing the common thread: business people decide to use this technology to hurt people.

We don't always get to pick independently. Capitalism is largely a force of nature. Even Communist societies end up becoming state-owned capitalist.

That's pretty broad strokes, and I am not sure it works everywhere. One of the other effects of society is to reduce -- and it has been fairly constant -- access to pain medication. At first you could nip over to the apothecary for laudanum or whatever. Then you needed a prescription from a physician. Next, one of the effects on society is insurance, so you must also navigate that to get your prescription. And finally the government comes in and decides on a ham-fisted "crackdown" on pill mills, nevermind people who actually need the stuff, so society has put another obstacle between you and relief, so there are quotas, hooray.

The other area where this falls down is standardization, and I think this is exactly a group of people to understand it. Twenty years ago programming was very much the Wild Wild West, but now, seemingly, everyone talks this Agile talk and now we "must" all program like one another, which includes odious morning standups and the being "on call" mentality of DevOps, plus even bog standard shops pretending that they have some kind of Silicon Valley burn rate and velocity to maintain. And if you cannot hack that, tough, find another industry. That's society and that's a transition that has been fairly rough if you are put in a position to count your spoons.

Assuming the benefits of automation are somewhat equitably distributed. But if someone has a decent job which then gets displaced by automation and their next best option is a more demanding job, then automation has increased their daily spoon demand.

I don't believe this especially. We've replaced a large amount of our work with a huge amount of bureaucracy. There's so much of it that it feels like I'm being overwhelmed by just it some days.

What exactly do you mean? You mean if you want to do something extraordinary, bureaucracy keeps you in check? I think "normal days" are pretty automatic in terms of bureaucracy?