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Comment by onion2k | Hacker News Reader

I don't like the thought of contributing to a system that costs people (cashiers) their jobs.

People in boring, low paid jobs shouldn't be there. There are far better things people can be doing than working a till. The idea that we're doing people a favour by 'enabling' them to have a job when that job is tedious menial work a tiny compute can do is nonsense. We need to automate those jobs away to free people to do more interesting, fulfilling things.

We also need to do things to work out how to enable those people to do more interesting work, like figuring out how to pay people if the free market fails, but that's a separate issue.

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>We also need to do things to work out how to enable those people to do more interesting work, like figuring out how to pay people if the free market fails, but that's a separate issue.

Seeing as the free market has deeply failed many, MANY people (and stands to fail even more in the near future), I would hesitate to put more people out of work before addressing this "separate issue." Lots of people can have their lives ruined before those in power decide it's time to think about how to ameliorate the damage done.

That's correct. But this is why you should shape your purchase habits in different ways than choosing lack of automation.

For instance, choose to shop at a coop grocer, where the workers are paid a livable wage and usually also become member-owners with voting rights and a share in the profits. (There are also consumer advantages to consumer coops, obviously.) In this case, it'd be to the workers' advantage to automate things which make sense to automate as they share in the higher profits and possibly a higher wage as well.

Personally, I don't use self-checkout usually because cashiers are almost always much faster when you have a lot of stuff. But generally, I'm much in favor of automation.

In the history of economics and politics, that has never happened. Tumult creates unacceptable carnage, and the solutions fall out of the carnage. Furthermore, we don't always correctly predict the form that carnage will take, so it's not even as if we know what acceptable solutions might be until things are already in freefall.

So although it's a nice sentiment, I'm not so sure it's realistic.

When textiles automated in England, the carnage included a generation of weavers starving to death.

Consumerism and technology have coincidentally grown to provide a few more generations of employment. But now that's ending.

And sure its not happened in history, because we've never been exactly here before. But we're here now! And there's no sign that solutions will fall out of the sky to fix things. I for one don't want to wait for starvation or revolution.

then don't wait for it - ontario NDP adopted basic income as a platform point, basic income tests are happening in a number of countries. Advocate for it or something else that is attempting to solve that problem.

At the very least, we can push back against the notion that this upheaval is "for the best" simply because it's the outcome of the market. It's Panglossianism at its worst. Sometimes things that benefit capital are bad for the world and for the rest of society. Wealth doesn't trickle down except by political will. That political will can only organize when we, the very fortunate few who have better resources and education than most working class people, begin to give a shit about something other than what is technologically possible or efficient.

Just think of all the people that were displaced when the horseless carriage came about. Society will adapt. It may be painful for those directly affected, especially in the short term, but that won’t stop progress.

Once a basic income or solid safety net has been established, we can consider whether it makes sense to take actions in order to not obsolete low paid jobs.

Heck its not all about low paid jobs. That's just another domino. Folks who used to be office managers, technical writers, factory line managers find themselves automated out of a job. They turn to lower-paid jobs.

To compound it all, now the lower-paid jobs are going too. Leaving a 'bow wave' of steadily-lower-wage folks completely out of options.

Not a separate issue to the person losing their job!

These have to be solved together, or big trouble will be coming.

> or big trouble will be coming

The implication here is that the trouble isn't already on it's way. Those jobs are operating on borrowed time at this point and I think they'll be gone sooner than most people think. This is a problem that we should have started addressing several years ago at least.

There are some people who are really only capable of doing these "boring, low paid jobs". Not everyone is capable of being an information worker or a hard physical laborer.

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