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Comment by panarky | Hacker News Reader

That's how luddism works, you attack symbols that you can reach, when the root cause is unreachable or even unknown to you.

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Ludditism is a civilization ending disease. If we don't control it we will never get cures for major diseases, travel to the stars, etc.

I think we should automate more of deliveries.

But I think we should also make deliberate choices to keep humans and human meaning in many things, even if they are less "efficient" by some chosen metric.

Automation and mechanization is desirable to the point that it serves core human wishes and desires-- and through some kind of global/social metric, not that it serve individual humans at the expense of everyone else.

Its never immediately obvious. Computers put thousands of human calculators out of jobs. Now computers superpowered any and all physical modeling, molecule searches, etc. But, should we have decided eg astronomers or microscopists are required to have jobs, then we wouldn't have developed automated high quality optics, which themselves were required to commoditize computers. Almost all technologies somehow play a role directly or indirectly that existed before a new one for any new advance.

I think you're not really hearing my point. I'm not speaking about evaluating things just on the aspect of eliminating jobs.

I am saying that I would hate to automate away most joy or most things people find purposeful, even if it increases purpose or joy for some people.

We've already given up a lot of our social fabric recently with tech. I think it makes sense to be conscious and careful to not make it much worse.

It's my guess that delivery bots are a net add to well being.

But you are also not understanding my point. What automation or tech will end up useful and a "noble" use later on is never immediately obvious, it depends on a web of past developments which by themselves seem to have no connection.

I think I'm not speaking of the technology itself but the actual ways it's integrated into society. E.g. what is considered socially acceptable, what is given legal rights of passage on a sidewalk, or how we choose to build society/culture around technical implements.

And I agree it's not immediately obvious, but thinking a little more about second order effects before making a long term durable choice makes sense.

Tech's recent overall track record on impacts to quality of life is not great. And there's a lot of possible ways we can use advances that have different benefits and costs. Falling into them for the long term purely by accident isn't always avoidable, but it doesn't seem desirable.

i.e. it makes sense for society to make a conscious choice about how to trade off different interests for road users and sidewalk users, and to be willing to revise that choice based on experience rather than being stuck with inertia (while avoiding excessive churn and unpredictability).

True, but if the weavers get nothing they'll still burn your factory down.

But at least we get jobs!

You know what else will lead to us not getting your cures or space travel? Fully automating enough people such that there are no longer enough jobs in society to do for the majority. That would create a destitute underclass that can never get employed and earn anything to survive, and a tiny elite class that can truly live and afford a fully automated lifestyle, space travel, etc. We are well on track to making this happen within this century. The only way to avoid this is to share some of the value of removing people's jobs with the people it displaced. People doing delivery work are already at jobs of last resort, how do you think "sucks to suck" fares for them as an argument towards removing their livelihood?

Ludditism is not 'a disease', how dehumanizing. It's an expected response. If we did anything towards sharing the profits, it would not exist. If we answered the hard question of "how will a person survive if we permanently cut the number of all jobs in half?", it would not exist. Ludditism for the people being made irrelevant is stepping out of the oncoming train instead of proudly letting yourself be run over to take one for the team so maybe in a few decades' time some of the added value of new automation cancels out the job loss (how it was in the past - and that was when automated jobs still required loads of brand new workers).

How exactly do you propose to share the benefits? Do you think only "billionaires" should distribute their money? If you are middle class American you already are in the 1% or 0.1% worldwide. How much of your money are you distributing to African countries? People clamor for "distribution" until it comes to themselves.

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