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Comment by jryhdtjtdhy | Hacker News Reader

Because then those engineers will no longer be out of a job, but some other people with a smaller skillset will be! And all will be good, because we finally had a push towards real automation!

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I'm sympathetic to this argument because people can't retrain for a different job instantly, and there's mostly no safety net that allows people to take the time to retrain and still be able to provide for themselves and family while they do it.

But in the grand scheme of things, low-skill jobs should be automated to the greatest degree possible, freeing up people to work on more worthwhile things. And as automation gets better and better, even medium-skill and eventually high-skill jobs should also be automated.

In my version of utopia, people won't even have to work if they don't want to, but, due the to abundance afforded by all this automation, will still be able to live a very comfortable life. I suspect humanity will destroy itself before we get there, though.

(Of course, that utopia will be fragile if enough people don't know how to maintain the automation.)

The notion of retraining implies a waiting pool of unfilled jobs. The only industries in the US that are chronically understaffed and desperate for talent are construction and unskilled agricultural labor, neither of which (separately or together) are prepared to absorb the roughly 22 million individuals who work in the service industry in the US. You want automation, you then also have to choose between luxury space communism or open air refugee camps and massive civil unrest.

Well on the bright side we’d have to be incredibly stupid to pick the latter, right?

It says quite a bit about the world we find ourselves in that I can't tell if this is a masterwork of sarcasm or if you're being earnest.

I don’t even know if I was being sarcastic, hahaha. I mean I was playing with the fact that obviously the latter is a terrible pick, but I’m really worried that we won’t so much pick it as default into it.

The OP is running a distinctive coffee shop. Interacting with human staff is a feature. If I literally just want to drink a coffee then coffee vending machines already exist.

Sure, and people should certainly be allowed to run businesses like that. But a barista job shouldn't be one that someone has to take in order to make ends meet.

You should read Mana if you haven't already.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Manna-Two-Visions-Humanitys-Future-...

Thankfully, life is not a zero-sum game (I mean it is, but we are just converting energy into complexity).

Some of these engineers will open other types of businesses and employ these people. Or maybe these people will go back to trades, because you know, these are much needed skills.

Based on your logic, we should still be using horses.

What isn't a zero sum game? Someone really needs to go take a look at a graph of household buying power charted against GDP for the last 60 years. Anyway, your ability to concoct pie-in-the-sky hypotheticals in the face of real-world consequences notwithstanding, historically folks that are pushed out of their industry (with outliers) have a tendency to slide into poverty and then stay there.

This, but unironically

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