Re:Many people in finance, sales and management feel their j...
by pcthrowaway on Wednesday August 02, 2023 @10:00PM
(#36980453)
> Every single worker at, say, a McDonald's is doing a job that could be automated with some capital investment.
I think you underestimate how difficult something like this would be.
I mean, I agree that as long as you have someone/something supplying the food gloop packets to the store, taking out the waste, and fixing the machines, pretty much everything in a McDonalds could be automated as a closed system.
But we're talking about billions to trillions of dollars of investment.
Just maintaining the frosty machines is outrageously expensive.
Then you get into the world of white collar work, where the "let's optimize society to minimize toil" solution, by and large, is to just eliminate the job wholesale. Accounting exists because the tax codes are too complicated, so streamline them and their jobs could be done by some API calls and Excel formulas. The entire finance sector is superfluous if money isn't the driving motivator in society. Entire militaries can be replaced by a "If we are attacked, we glass everyone we have even minor beef with" MAD systems. Trash pickups can be automated by tube systems. Food production is already largely automated outside of the produce aisle, so maybe we just cut back on foods that we can't harvest mechanically.
Frankly, the biggest sector that couldn't be fundamentally altered by a such a societal shift using just yesterday's tech is construction.