Re:100% Unemployment: on keeping busy when the robots take over
by treelovinhippie on Tuesday February 17, 2015 @06:55PM
(#9066059)
It's definitely a scary proposal for management to accept. The company I pitched this to was a 15 year-old web dev / digital agency with ~15 employees and <$2m in revenues. So a pretty tiny and poorly performing company. Management liked the idea because almost all of their revenues were going into wages.
But there must be a particular type of company, at a particular scale, with a particular ethos out there that would be up for giving an automation initiative a shot.
If it worked, it would make for an impressive news story which could spark others to follow suit.
Imagine an economy where everyone's job was to automate their job...
At a company I worked for, after they realized that things couldn't go on anymore without massive automation, their first approach was to introduce it into the infrastructure lifecycle and require all new infrastructure to be heavily automated. That allowed the legacy stuff to die slowly without much disturbance.
Another different idea entirely would be spin off a subsidiary with those ideals and slowly migrate the work there. Perhaps too much work, but if the situation is desperate enough..