Why I learned to "make things"

Re:Why I learned to "make things" by kyllo on Monday December 17, 2012 @04:08PM (#4934369)

Yes. There are so many companies with wasted productivity in repetitive business process waiting for someone to automate them or "DRY them out." One of the worst examples I saw was a woman whose entire job, as far as I could tell, consisted of downloading a list of system-generated pickup numbers every day and e-mailing it to people. This person was probably being paid between $40-50k per year to do a job that could be completely automated by a few lines of scripting code.

Not that I think automation should be used to lay people off. But if the job she was doing were automated, they could have her on the phone talking to customers and helping out the overworked customer service staff with the call queue instead, with no net expense to the company.

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Re:Why I learned to "make things" by Wingman4l7 on Monday December 17, 2012 @05:24PM (#4934796)

Why shouldn't automation be used to lay people off? Eliminating busywork jobs is a big deal -- how are we going to get to a post-scarcity society otherwise?

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Re:Why I learned to "make things" by polshaw on Monday December 17, 2012 @10:10PM (#4935838)

Unless/until there were a revolution, increased automation leads to increased inequality rather than a 'post-scarcity society', though.

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Re:Why I learned to "make things" by Wingman4l7 on Monday December 17, 2012 @10:16PM (#4935863)

Should we restart the buggy whip assembly lines to "re-create" all those jobs? What about all the jobs lost to car assembly robots, which probably pushed down the cost to make said cars?

Increased automation doesn't have to mean increased inequality -- ideally, it would lead to a gradual reduction in average work hours. Working hours for people in first-world western nations are evidence of this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Working_time#Gradual_decrease_i...

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Re:Why I learned to "make things" by arjunnarayan on Tuesday December 18, 2012 @10:19AM (#4937831)

I think the lesson of the 21st century is that people don't want reduced work hours. They'll just work as hard as they can for even more utilons/status points/dollars.

I mean, it's not like Paul Graham ever had to work another day after he sold Viaweb. Nevertheless, you see him still working. (And he's not an outlier.)

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Re:Why I learned to "make things" by Wingman4l7 on Tuesday December 18, 2012 @05:16PM (#4939906)

That's not necessarily true. There was a study making the rounds ~2 years ago done by two Princeton researchers, indicating that once you hit ~$75,000+ a year in income, your emotional well-being doesn't significantly improve past that amount.

It follows that if you could make $75,000+ working 20 hours a week, you'd be quite happy. I know I certainly would =) (Yes, I'm sure there have been studies done on the correlation of life satisfaction and keeping busy; that's what hobbies are for! I'm sure there are plenty of happy, busy retired people.)

http://wws.princeton.edu/news/Income_Happiness/ (press release) http://www.pnas.org/cgi/doi/10.1073/pnas.1011492107 (actual study)

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