Re:What the Fourth Industrial Revolution Looks Like
by oliveira12345 on Tuesday April 14, 2015 @05:14PM
(#9377413)
Thanks for your explanation - there is a brighter future through your ideas.
What measures could/should be taken to minimize the social impact of this?
Would something along the lines of making special regulation so that the factory, in the verge of firing the workers, should pay a special compensation to contribute to the formation of those workers? A special tax on mecha-factory-robots ?
Re:What the Fourth Industrial Revolution Looks Like
by AnimalMuppet on Tuesday April 14, 2015 @05:39PM
(#9377548)
I think that responsible companies (there are a few) should do this, but probably it's going to take government. It could be done as part of the unemployment insurance, for example. It could also be done as part of the educational system.
But that requires competent government, so here's where I turn into a pessimist. What's actually likely to happen is that we lay off people and just drop them, and they become unemployable, not because of lack of talent, but because of lack of training.
Re:What the Fourth Industrial Revolution Looks Like
by danilocampos on Tuesday April 14, 2015 @04:48PM
(#9377237)
It's hardly an accident that one of the most successful capitalist systems in the history of the world has, since the automation of agriculture, shifted to storing millions of people (read: excess labor) in a vast, growing prison system.
Instead, you should think in terms of a society spending people. Take farming, for instance. We had about 35% of our people working on farms. Then mechanization came to agriculture, and now we have maybe 2% of our people working on farms. What will all the poor farmhands do? Starve? Well, it turns out that farmhands could do a lot more than just farm. But the mechanization of agriculture freed us from wasting an unnecessary 33% of our workers on farms. They went on to do a lot of useful stuff, from which society as a whole benefited.
Don't waste your workers in jobs that aren't necessary. It holds your society back.
Now, the problem comes when you expect that people "deserve" or "need" a job in a factory. That's false, too. They need/deserve a decent job. They may need training to get there. But if you think they need a factory job because they can never be competent to do anything more, I think you are selling people short...