A Center City Philadelphia woman was arrested after allegedly refusing to move out of the path of a delivery robot, a confrontation that was captured on video and has since drawn attention online.
  • mefisdo_dot_info@lemmy.ca
    81·
    3 days ago

    Those inventions directly and immediately created new kinds of jobs and that was clear to everyone. Plumbing made plumbers, electricity made electricians, computers made programmers. Robots take jobs and add very few new jobs. Which people dislike, because for millenia the social contract has been that everybody has to “earn” their survival. That contract, while always disingenuous due to existence of various kinds of aristocracies and elites, has been more or less in balance due to the need for labor. This is what’s breaking now. And the two possible outcomes are either only the elites survive, or none of the elites survive.

    • BorgDrone@feddit.nl
      82·
      2 days ago

      They don’t “take jobs”, they save work.

      Jobs are a means to an end, not a goal in itself. Jobs are not a good thing, they are a necessary evil. Things need to be done and someone needs to do them. Once we run out of stuff that needs doing, we don’t make up new work just to keep people busy. Do you think our hunter/gatherer ancestors sent out people to gather berries when they already had more than enough just so everyone could have a ‘job’? Of course not.

      Our goal should be to eleminate all jobs, or at least as many as possible. Every job that is eliminated means more free time for humans to do things that actually matter.

      You are confusing needing a job with needing an income. People need incomes, they don’t need jobs. You can hand people the income without creating meaningless work for them.

      It’s like those stupid fundraisers where someone does a meaningless task in order to raise money. “I’m walking from the east coast to the west coast of the US to raise money for cancer research”. Why are people requiring you do something this pointless before donating? You gain nothing by requiring this. It makes no sense.

      • mefisdo_dot_info@lemmy.ca
        3·
        2 days ago

        You may be surprised but I agree with you. The millenia old social contract to have to “earn” your livelihood is a bad one. We should not need to have jobs. With more automation this could be possible. However, it won’t work if oligarchs own all of it. Also won’t work with 8 billion+ people on Earth. The idea of UBI would in practice mean living in barracks and eating slop, if it’s up to the oligarchs to dole out. So, yes, down with jobs. But I also understand why people don’t want to starve waiting for the automation utopia to come.

      • eneff@discuss.tchncs.de
        4·
        2 days ago

        sure but in a capitalistic economy, what’s gonna happen to people that still need an income but there is no work left anyone would be willing to pay someone else an income for?