> For hundreds of thousands of years, pre-historic man became very skilled at cutting rocks in order to make stone age tools....When metal working developed, all of the hundreds of thousands of years of skill in making stone tools was meaningless

Relevant Mitchell & Webb Look sketch: https://youtu.be/nyu4u3VZYaQ

Also that's all well and good, but people won't necessarily take their skills being obsoleted lightly, just shrug their shoulders and disappear into the sunset. It could get to the point (especially if predictions about A.I. replacing a large swatch of jobs turns out to be true) that the people will get violent if unemployment gets too high. Just look at riots in Greece (when youth unemployment was 50%)[1] or France[2] for just a couple of examples.

Granted, that's not going to happen with this particular layoff, especially with the unemployment rate at a low 3.5%, but if it gets back into the double digits, it starts becoming more likely.

This is probably the real reason we gave out stimulus and PPP loans at the beginning of the Covid pandemic - to stop people from being so jobless, broke, that they take it out on the government. Not out of empathy.

[1]: https://www.cnbc.com/2014/11/26/protests-in-greece-expected-...

[2]: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/11/business/france-economy-m...

> I don't care one iota about craftsmen who can no longer conduct their craft in the way they want because a better technology came around.

You'll care when they actively subvert the rollout of the new technology. If the technology truly benefits society more than it hurts the craftsman then you can share some of the gains with them so they too can benefit.

You are honestly arguing that if I create a better widget factory, I need to pay everyone else who owns the means of producing widgets in inferior ways some of my money?

Directly? Maybe not. But no man is an island, and no one's factory is a continent either. Your widget factory wasn't created by you ex nihilo, it's built on the labor and skills of people in your community, it is possible for it to exist and be profitable thanks to the larger society being what it is and generating wealth it does. It's in your interest to care that the society supporting you thrives, and if your factory is threatening to damage it, then even if you're 100% selfish, you owe it to yourself and your children to help mitigate it somehow.

No this article was about layoffs. The employee-employer relationship is very different the one between competing companies. If you have created a better widget factory and need 90% less staff, I do think you have some responsibility to those employees that are no longer needed.

The changes were over hundreds if not thousands of years. Everyone had time to adapt. Here the people are just discarded. I'm not saying we should keep inefficient work. The society hopefuly adapts and creates a safety net for upcoming changes. I'm pissimist, so I think more pain is coming and no way are we going to be allowed to have a repeat of 1917 in Russia. Just more rejects, outcasts and general misery.

This is actually a great description of a fascinating topic to ponder further.

Someone will make 1000 shoes, all the same, poor quality, nowhere near the fit but they are 1000 shoes while it use to be 5.

Someone will make 1000 inferior loafs of bread. Someone will make 1000 mcdonalds quality hamburgers. Someone will build many crappy houses and stack them until they touch the sky. A box will play audio recordings to thousands while we use to sing and play instruments ourselves. A box will show pictures in stead of us reading books and giving speeches. Someone will also [kinda] have 1000 babies in stead of 5.

But we price everything at a point where profit is maxed for what people can afford and we buy 1000 things in stead of just the 5 we needed. If there is any room in the budget we will make housing more expensive.

A coworker of mine always has pain in uhhh all parts of his body, everything is sore and worn out.

One a year he goes back to his country of birth, by plane, by train, then by bus, then by taxi then he climbs the mountain. There is the tiny village where he was born. He drinks the spring water, sits in the sun under unpolluted air, eats real vegetables grown on real soil, eats meat from animals who had a good life, eggs from chickens roaming around, milk from happy cows, he takes in the view, talks with relatives. And then, gradually the pains go one by one, the headache clears up, the joins soften, the muscles work again, his head moves back above his shoulders, his eyes work again, he can walk tirelessly.

I'm not trying to make a point, it is just something to think about.