Re:How to get rich without being lucky (2019)
by JoeAltmaier on Sunday May 23, 2021 @11:39AM
(#27255767)
Labor is commonly understood to be those that use physical presence e.g. on an assembly line, moving a tool, carrying, sorting etc. Not professionals. Professionals are still employed but growing slower?
I don't dismiss workers' rights; but when there are fewer and fewer workers needed in society, workers' rights become less and less the focus.
Automation means most non-professionals will stop being employed. Except in make-work personal services. No road-building gangs; no fields of farm workers; no rows of checkout clerks or bank tellers. All going away. One person in 100 is needed to keep the electronics factory going. Workers will have no place. Even in China; most of your 3B will be out of a job. Not in the far future, but probably in your lifetime.
Folks love to point out every shit job somebody is resorting to as 'employed' and put the god of employment above any other measure. Putting pumping gas on a par with owning your own business, counting them both equally as 'employment'. The old Protestant work ethic writ large - the point of human existence is to be employed, at all cost.
Back in the '50s we read stories of the day robots would take the burden of labor from our shoulders so we could live better lives. Now that it's happening we read of nothing but panic and desperate moves to toward 'full employment'.
If Socialism will find a way to keep the high-tech machinery of society going with technical folks in charge and making the decisions, well I'll be flabbergasted. Because putting former shoe-makers in charge of a silicon plant seems doomed. Just look at existing experiments in Socialism to see the disasters - Venezuela springs to mind.
It'll be something like Capitalism or Socialism but adapted to the new reality, that keeps the machinery running. Not old 1800's papers about a bygone age.
I don't dismiss workers' rights; but when there are fewer and fewer workers needed in society, workers' rights become less and less the focus.
Automation means most non-professionals will stop being employed. Except in make-work personal services. No road-building gangs; no fields of farm workers; no rows of checkout clerks or bank tellers. All going away. One person in 100 is needed to keep the electronics factory going. Workers will have no place. Even in China; most of your 3B will be out of a job. Not in the far future, but probably in your lifetime.
Folks love to point out every shit job somebody is resorting to as 'employed' and put the god of employment above any other measure. Putting pumping gas on a par with owning your own business, counting them both equally as 'employment'. The old Protestant work ethic writ large - the point of human existence is to be employed, at all cost.
Back in the '50s we read stories of the day robots would take the burden of labor from our shoulders so we could live better lives. Now that it's happening we read of nothing but panic and desperate moves to toward 'full employment'.
If Socialism will find a way to keep the high-tech machinery of society going with technical folks in charge and making the decisions, well I'll be flabbergasted. Because putting former shoe-makers in charge of a silicon plant seems doomed. Just look at existing experiments in Socialism to see the disasters - Venezuela springs to mind.
It'll be something like Capitalism or Socialism but adapted to the new reality, that keeps the machinery running. Not old 1800's papers about a bygone age.