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Comment by BobbyJo | Hacker News Reader

If even 50% of those workers perform other jobs, society as a whole will be wealthier, while having the same number of people.

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I agree, if we can get them into other jobs. So many other times we've seen workers who flat-out refused to participate in retraining because politicians talked them out of it. I'm specifically thinking of coal miners who believed the lie that their jobs were coming back, and based on that turned away free education offers that would have given them modern-world skills.

Gonna be honest: if someone told me my tech job had been replaced with all its benefits (wfh! office stipend!) and now I have to retrain as a plumber, including back to the shitty apprenticeship system for low pay and low benefits (starting from the bottom again) I would also get really damn upset and resist that. There will be a lot of tooth gnashing on my end even if you pay for my apprenticeship and initial training, I'm still significantly worse off for the literal rest of my whole life.

For sure, but I wonder what you (or anyone) is going to do about it.

Eventually, you simply have to go to work for a roof over your head, food and healthcare.

It doesn't really matter if you like it or not. If you current job ceases to exist you will get another job, or you will die.

Yes, I'm just pointing out the retraining isn't actually the real alternative people think it is. It's directly lowering the quality of life and destroying the economic future of an entire industry's worth of people and all their families/dependents. This is important to deal with as it is, not with some bs "well we offered them retraining!" as if that means anything.

But not as much as not retraining. Given the choice between a ship and a lifeboat, I’d take the ship. Choosing between a lifeboat and treading water, scoot over and hand me an oar.

I'm arguing that retraining isn't really the lifeboat people are saying it is.

Just be upfront: removing jobs is drowning people. That's it. Don't comfort yourself with "retraining" programs like they mean anything. They don't. Acting like you're giving them an oar is just insulting them on top of taking their livelihoods, so I understand the anger.

> It's directly lowering the quality of life

I would argue that any long-haul trucker or coal miner will have a much higher quality of life when those jobs go away and they re-train for something where they don't have to be away from their families doing dangerous things.

> Eventually, you simply have to go to work for a roof over your head, food and healthcare

No, you don't. Plenty of retired people don't go to work and yet they have all of those things.

> No, you don't. Plenty of retired people don't go to work and yet they have all of those things

of course, retirement is an option.

But we're talking about people that need to re-train, so I'm assuming here we're talking about people who are not yet ready to retire

If somebody can't or won't re-train, don't you think maybe they're ready to retire?

They might want to, but obviously they can't if they don't have enough saved

I don't regard that as obvious. A social safety net COULD catch them when they fall out of the workforce. We don't seem to have such a safety net in America, but that's a consequence of politics, not of economics or technology. Confronting those politics admittedly is a tall order, but consider the alternative: retarding innovation, wasting human potential, and maintaining make-work jobs because politics is hard? Is that really the hill you wanna die on?

> but consider the alternative

You make it sound like there are only two choices:

1. Confronting the politics of building a social saftey net in America.

2. Retarding innovation, wasting human potential, etc. etc.

Yet there is a perfectly good third solution that has worked countless times in history when technology has made certain jobs redundant, and will without a doubt continue to work long into the future.

3. Re-skill and get a different job.

You made it sound like there's only one choice when you wrote above:

> Eventually, you simply have to go to work for a roof over your head, food and healthcare.

I'm glad we finally agree that there are at least three choices, that building a safety net is one of them, and that going to work so that you have a roof, food, and healthcare isn't the only one.

I get why it sucks, but every day someone resists retraining from a dying or dead occupation is a day they’re not getting experience in a new job. In the case of the coal miners, those jobs were gone. No amount of bargaining would bring them back. The mines aren’t going to re-open. The affected people didn’t get to choose between retraining or keeping their current jobs. They had to choose between learning new marketable skills in a classroom or scrabbling through whatever remaining local jobs they could find.

We’re not there with truck driving yet, but to me it seems inevitable. I wouldn’t consider it as a brand new career worth starting today if my intent were to retire from it.

I'm only arguing that it makes complete sense why people are resisting if someone is telling them otherwise. I would also cling to my livelihood if my alternative was losing my home, my healthcare, my stability. And I'd further be insulted by people offering me retraining programs that don't actually train me to a lateral career. I'm trying to practice some empathy, man.

I'm empathetic. My family background is solidly working class. My dad worked in a funeral home. My mom retired from a railroad. My brother-in-law drives long-haul trucks for a living. My ancestors were farmers, miners, settlers, and little horse teamsters. I love these people and want good things for them.

But there's "is" vs "ought". It ought to be the case that these hard-working people can earn a decent living doing the jobs they spent many years in. It is the case that a lot of those jobs are disappearing as the natural result of technological and societal changes. My grandpa couldn't have delivered ice in downtown St. Louis with a horse and cart today if he wanted to. That job no longer exists. In the case of coal mining, most people don't want those jobs to exist anymore: each ton of coal pulled out of the ground is nearly 3 tons of CO2 gas into the air (purely from the burning process, not counting the effort to mine it).

I don't have the answers here. I don't know what we should be doing. I sure don't want my BIL to lose his career. But what is the kind, empathetic thing to do? We've gone from zero to having self-driving cars zipping around San Francisco in a few short years. What will they be like in 10 years? 20? I don't know when it'll happen, but it seems absolutely inevitable that at some point in the near future, autonomous vehicles will be better drivers than we are. After that, do we build a little passenger cabin onto automated vehicles so that we can pay "drivers" to pretend to operate them? Even if we did, how long can we keep that going? I don't know. I just can't see a path where that's the new state of affairs forever.

Sometimes love means having hard, uncomfortable conversations. I think that's where we're at today with jobs like mining, and where we'll be soon with other careers.

Would it go down easier if you were offered a home, healthcare, and stability in lieu of re-training?

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