this post was submitted on 10 Jan 2024
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Maybe the robot is getting vandalized because a person used to be paid to do that job.
So now we’re justifying Luddism?
I can get it when the outcome is clearly worse for the consumer, but cleaning robots work pretty well. We should all strive to replace as much of that work as possible, no one wants to be a garbage collector. The issue isn’t robots, it’s the lack of UBI.
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.
How do you know? Have you taken a survey of garbage collectors?
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.
Clearly you do not understand how technology works in economics. There's a term called "induced demand", meaning the reduced cost of some thing passes some threshold where it becomes a viable option for new customers - creating new demand.
People who did not understand this thought computers would eliminate paperwork, when in reality more things got paperwork attached to them, when handshakes worked before.
In our janitor example, it's not worth paying humans to pick up trash across arbitrarily large swathes of nothing in my example. Nobody is going to pay your friend to hike The Appalachian trail and pick up every last bit of rubbish hikers left behind. The reality is that you'd just find things better maintained if robots could do that. There are companies trying to do this for less nebulous things like bridge maintenance, which just do not get maintained because of the crazy cost of sending engineers to inspect every inch of them to find out what even needs fixing.
What? They literally pay people to clean national parks.
https://www.nps.gov/articles/000/nps-careers-maintenance.htm
There is no reason to build a robot to do that except to save money paying humans. The same with bridge maintenance. You even admitted it yourself about the bridge maintenance. This is about saving money at the expense of people's jobs. And you're okay with that.
You know what we can do to pay for humans to do bridge maintenance without any issues? Raise taxes on rich people. No robots needed. But I'm guessing raising taxes on the rich is a big step too far for you.
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.
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.
So because it's not their dream career it's okay to replace their job with a robot? That's what you're saying?
When has that ever happened when someone's job was replaced with a machine? That's a fantasy. What happens is they go home, spend months looking for a job, get kicked out of their home because they can't afford rent, starve and then take whatever they can for much lower pay because they're desperate and homeless. You must know this.
And that’s why I said the issue is the lack of UBI. Progress is moving forward whether we like it or not, Luddism can only slow it down and make us waste resources.
Instead of going against it we should spend that effort into building a society where you don’t need to work to live (or, at least not full-time).
Exactly, people are resentful just because they are becoming worthless in the increasingly modern society.
So you think teens spray painted the hell out of new York's subways because they put someone out of work 80 years before that?
I think the teens spray painting subways has more to do with marginalizing an entire class of people and a failure of public services, which were largely gutted at the bequest of a few billionaires who wanted to watch their number go up. Any dollar spent that doesn't come back to them is a dollar they see as one they've lost. And the number must go ever up.
Kid's vandalism has been studied and that's mostly wrong: propensity to vandalize is most strongly tied to parent-child relationships.
Sure maybe billionaires taking all the resources makes parents less likely to be there for their kids, but the gap between parents who are there and deadbeats who let the wolves do the babysitting is not someone else's fault.
Upbringing cannot be thrown away just so you can blame billionaires for why nice things aren't the norm
When did we get from a cleaning robot getting vandalized to teens spray painting subways?
I've got this big bag of random arguments. Whenever I'm cornered on one I pull another one out.
Vandalism in general, and that can be generally further into people ruining nice things, these are examples
Two different examples about two completely different situations.
And graffiti is almost as old as writing. There is graffiti on the Great Pyramid painted by workers.