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Comment by amiga_500 | Hacker News Reader

I'm quite surprised by this because it was my understanding that companies were doing us a favor by employing most people. That they were forestalling replacing us with robots by paying us near subsistence wages.

I'm very confused. On the one hand I have all the things I've been reading in the papers about workers being superfluous.

But yet on the other hand when I just look at the evidence, it seems like companies really, really need workers.

I wonder what will happen when this is over...

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Consumer spending is kind of the foundation of the economy, and as of today in the US it's about to go into freefall. Especially services.

This fall is pricing in the inevitable waves of bankruptcies in the service industry.

Why don't the fed just print money, a program could order stuff on amazon and they could deliver it to a land fill (obviously the landfill would have to be automated by robots).

for services they could just automate making bookings with a deposit and not show up. or a little zoomba vacuum thing could show up.

wouldn't be inflationary as cash is being destroyed like mad as we are all replaced by robots, so that won't be a problem.

Okay lets see if anybody else has a suggestion

Nope, because hacker news wants to believe that capitalists are adding more value than they take out.

Jobs that were economically beneficial to replace with machines or outsource were replaced with machines or outsourced. People with jobs now have them because they are needed now, even if not in ten years. How is that hard to understand?

I do understand that. I think workers are needed and should be paid well to reflect that, instead of the constant undermining of the psychology of wage negotiation by the apparent imminent replacement by robots.

Companies need consumers more than they need workers.

I have that sorted: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22597679

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