this post was submitted on 10 Jan 2024
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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.