this post was submitted on 15 Jan 2024
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I really wanna hear what the proposal is for removing "unqualified" jobs en masse without implementing universal basic income.
The low pay and bad conditions of "unqualified" jobs often gets excused because they, allegedly, are "stepping stones", a means of sustaining oneself while working towards more specialized careers.
If you destroy a significant amount of those positions, where does that leave those people? Are we so drunk on cyberpunk-esque lust of AI evolution that we are fine eliminating the means of entry to society for so many?
You're making a fundamentally bad assumption: that this is in any way "good faith".
The billionaires and giant corporations can make more money by employing less people. That's it.
It's limitless greed. They don't care about living wages or "stepping stones" or funding the country or how many people get thrown out onto the street. It sounds like I'm exaggerating, but it's the truth and we're all witnessing it. This is capitalism run amok: They can become even richer and nothing matters more than that.
We don't have to let corporations rule us. If voters weren't so fucking brainwashed we could make a system that works for everyone. I'm hoping at some point it will be too obvious for anytime not to notice that a system where give swathes of the population are just left to starve isn't something we can tolerate.
The solution is - instead of rejecting technology, which isn't going anywhere and will only progress and can't be stopped, because under capitalism it will lead to workers starving - we reject capitalism.
It's literally the only way that would actually prevent people from suffering (and significantly help the planet, too).
https://www.globallearning-cuba.com/blog-umlthe-view-from-the-southuml/marx-on-automated-industry
https://www.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/2015/mar/18/fully-automated-luxury-communism-robots-employment
The problem is that humans are really bad at caring for unproductive people. If you use wealth generated by natural resources as a proxy for wealth generated by robot labor, humans have a bad record of distributing the material wealth.
That's a current, not fundamental, observation.
On the family level, you see some supporting of other family members. However, it becomes a lot harder as you go beyond people's immediate kin.
Thank you for including those links. I especially liked this part of the conclusion:
If anyone is curious, it's a short read and a good overview.
This is happening not just in “unqualified” jobs. A good chunk of junior level professional positions are evaporating too. High functionality automation has taken a bite out of lots of IT jobs. I look at my own path in rising in IT and see it largely doesn't exist anymore.
I don't have any answers as far as what the end game of this looks like or what could or should be brought to bear to change course. I'm thinking there will be small pockets of seasoned IT professionals that are kept on to maintain system/processes until those age out and are replaced. This could take decades at the normal pace of giant corporations and government.
When it comes to IT, it's important to keep things in perspective, there's a limit on how much it can be impacted. It may be able to give you the foundations of that Python code you need, but it sure as hell won't be able to make sense of the fucking mess that your organization has made out of the venvs (I won't either, but sssshhhhhh). I think most if not all of IT specialties have that kind of situation.
If there's anything my time in IT has taught me, is that any solution or paradigm change that gets introduced doesn't really outpace the difficulties and challenges that are constantly emerging, and more often than not they create their own positions without completely eliminating the ones they are trying to streamline/replace. You introduce Ansible to automate and streamline the configuration of your storage systems, you think the people that were doing the deployment and config until now are now obsolete... Joke's on you, you now need both the Ansible dev as well as the guys that were already in charge of deployment and configuration, because inevitably something goes wrong periodically, something needs to be adapted to the particularities of the environment, or any other number of other things.
In the short term, yeah, maybe some entry positions might be affected under the direction of directives with lack of foresight, but I hope that, in the end, it won't end up being as severe as we expect, or at least that there will be an eventual course correction.
Do not despair at 100% is what I'm trying to say.
Only like, 70%.
If it's anything like Maggie's legacy in the UK. It just leads to generations of poverty and society degradation that even now don't look like they will be reversed. Like it's mad that life was better when people crawled in a hole to mine coal by hand.
But hey it least it was an excuse for a party when she died.