this post was submitted on 25 Sep 2023
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This is a bad, regressive argument.
We need to legislate the benefit of automation for society.
Trying to bury the technology never works if it is indeed an improvement. Technology is benign, people twist it for malice.
This is the same argument as still using oil based street lamps, just to maintain a the lamplighting jobs that don't need to be done anymore.
It's a Bizaare hill to die on to fight to maintain jobs a robot can do faster and better, rather than fighting to make society the beneficiary of such advances through taxation. Either way, you have to fight the billionaires and will probably lose, so why not fight for a better outcome than maintaining shitty, menial jobs?
This isn't automation though. The self checkout tech is the same tech that a cashier uses. It's not automated. A human still does the work, they just don't get paid for it.
I mean, technically the self-checkout package has automation in it, a scale and cameras to "automate" the process of ensuring what was scanned was what was bagged, a process by which the station determines when employee intervention is necessary, etc. Automation tech is in there, things a person used to do are being done by technology, but again it wasn't created to improve the way it was done before, merely to make the owner more money.
The registers with cashiers also have scales and cameras and systems that are built in to determine when a CSM is required for things like overrides. The tech is not appreciably different. It's not automation.
Our self checkouts completely abandoned the stupid scales except when needed for fruit and such. Enforcing the packing with scales makes for a fucking horrible experience.
I haven't seen any cameras though.
Personally I like that they are more space efficient and time efficient.
Here it is also common to carry around a hand scanner in the store and just pay by docking the scanner without having to pack up anything. It's way quicker.
Seriously, fuck the scales. The grocery store near me recently shut theirs off. I found the manager and thanked him. That thing annoyed the piss out of me.
I don’t have that here but I do have a regional grocery chain that allows you to use your phone as the scanner as you shop, then you just go to a terminal at the end of your trip and scan a QR code to finalize. I love it.
Past advancements in medicine has destroyed a lot of jobs... in funeral business. Some jobs should be let go of, if it makes everyone's lives easier ultimately
I disagree with your analogy. The death rate has held steady at 100% for quite some time now. The only difference is how wrinkly the corpses are.
Their business is certainly less frequent, though, surely
Who out there not dying?
Lamp lighters, cotton pickers, wooden teeth makers, wool socks knitters, muck rakers, medical leech farmers... the list of jobs and entire industries destroyed in the name of "progress" goes on and on. We're going to be totally out of jobs any day now!
I always go with buggy whip manufacturers and ice delivery people.
Well, we are trying to find even more banal jobs to fill in the blanks. Who out there thought influencer would be a job some day?
With UBI, people would be more inclined to pursue their own interests. They would have more time to set up that little shop selling handcrafted items. There would be more variation and competition. Even more niche products could be created and sold, because there is no fear they will ever go bankrupt.
I remembered Mr Omar from Everybody Hates Chris trying to get the mayor that wouldn't care for safety elected so his funeral business gets more, well, dead people.
Tragic!
I would love a "robotax" where automation is encouraged, but with the caveat that it is also heavily taxed. Not so much that it's cheaper to have employees, but enough so that the people who's jobs have been replaced can still get an income. Be it through major subsidies or the ultimate subsidy: universal basic income
Your instinct to use a systemic solution is good. My concern would be the tax gives corporations the wrong incentive (Some percentage of jobs could be automated but would still be cheaper to hire people). As another approach I like worker cooperatives because if they automate some task the financial benefit goes to the employees. The problem is there aren't enough large scale worker co-ops, so I'd like to see them get tax advantages, preference on government contracts, grants, etc to drive their development.
I think the idea is the tax applies only to any money saved through automation. So if an employee costs $2500/mo and automation costs $500/mo, the company saves $2000/mo. Lets say the tax is 75%, the government takes $1500/mo from the company, but the company is still saving an extra $500/mo from automating, so they are still incentivized to do so.
Then that money from the tax could be used to pay for things like job retraining courses for people displaced by automation, or even maybe UBI.
Tbf, shouldn't we be doing both? Legislation is slow and in the meantime, people need to be paid. Honestly, to me, this doesn't feel that dissimilar to the argument around tipping. Yes, we absolutely SHOULD be paying waitstaff a living wage so tipping isn't needed but in the meantime, you should still tip your server.
Tbf the owners will get 100% of what they want because this country was bought decades ago. I was talking decent world. This will be inflicted on us, and used purely to further satiate the greed of the owners whether we protest for it not to be used and/or to be taxed.
I was just saying it would be stupid to put half our effort into both when one has a much better today outcome in a decent country. But in practical terms? The people are brainwashed, the owners hold all the cards, and this will be used to fuck us all, because the people gave up their voice in the 80s in exchange for the lie that giving the owners everything would benefit everyone. Now we're trapped in this workcamp of a country until collapse, likely long after everyone alive today is dead, because anyone who lives here paying attention knows the peasants are too chickenshit and/or brainwashed to revolt.