Ah, the carousel of "progress," a.k.a. planned obsolescence...[More]
It's all part of the plan.
We already have a significant portion of the population unemployable due to lack of marketable skills, with many also disqualified due to lack of requisite morality, making them a danger to have around.
So: What's the non-Luddite/non-coercive workaround? And will there be enough positions for the motivated and capable to strive for, particularly as things exponentially snowball?
We know the bill of goods the Opposite Day crowd is trying to sell. And if you want that credit transferred to your account, you've got to do something for us first...
A lot of somethings.
[Via Florida Guy]
Nowhere does this article address a basic problem: WHY is a robot cheaper than a human worker? Here are some reasons. You have to give a human worker a federally mandated minimum salary, even if his work is worth less than that. You have to give him a federally mandated health plan. You have to give him a federally mandated retirement plan. You have to spend a lot of the money that would otherwise be available to give him on the cost of government human resources reporting (color, ethnicity, and gender quotas, glass ceiling statistics, etc.).
ReplyDeleteAnd before you argue how much a worker needs to meet the cost of living for himself and/or his family, compute how much of that cost of living has been raised by the governent itself: licensing, taxes (income, sales, fuel, property), mandatory insurance (now including health), and so on.
If the government "protected" robots like it "protects" the human worker (which is enough to deny many of them any job at all), they'd be no bargain, either.
Speaking of the gig economy, take a lesson from the government taxi cartel. Government-sanctioned taxis were expensive, slow, and limited. Uber/Lyft changed all that by getting the government out of the way (at least before it found a way to worm back in, as it always does). Today, people would would never have considered calling for a taxi think nothing of calling for an Uber or Lyft. Get the government out the way, and you’ll be surprised how much the economy starts working FOR you.
So what if some steady job isn’t something that leads to a tenured career? I’m resigned to the fact that I’ll never be a princess, either.