Political Memes

As we should if you know anything about luddism. It wasn’t anti-technology, it was anti-technology taking people’s jobs. Like a cleaning robot taking away a person’s job.

As always, “technology taking people’s jobs” is the natural outcome of progress. As long as the non-human “worker” is doing the job as well as the human one, that’s what we should all strive for. Keeping jobs around just “to feed people” is basically a sort of crooked UBI that isn’t universal, forces people to do useless stuff, and hinders progress.

I have a friend who is a janitor and is very satisfied in his job. You would have his job taken away by a robot not because a robot would do it better, but because you have decided he doesn’t want to work at that job.

Did he say “When I grow up, I want to be a janitor!” as a kid? Did he get out of high school with “janitor” being his dream career? Or did he just happen to find a job they were hiring for which “isn’t that bad”?

Because if it’s the first one good for him, but I think he’s in the extreme minority. Every janitor I met was at most “okay” with their job, and if you told them “hey, we just got a robot that can do your job as well as you, you can go home and do whatever while earning the same pay” they’d do it in a heartbeat.