Comment on Amazon staff walk out in Black Friday strike

• Adalast@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  It is wholly negative, and I develop automation and AI stuff for a living. The issue is that as automation accelerates, population growth will still be exponential as it has always been. That means fewer and fewer workers needed while the population continues to explode. Without obscenely massive reforms to society and law, we are careening towards a social and economic collapse the likes of which we have contemplated. Stop for a second and think what just Amazon fully automatic packing centers would mean. A few million people are working in those facilities. What happens when they are all fired because Amazon automates their jobs? There are moved to automate fast food production as well. Burger flipping robots already exist. Cashiers are being replaced with apps and kiosks in every McDonald’s. Those jobs make up the bottom rung in the economic chain.

  In the US, 60% of the population already lives below the realistic poverty line (not the legal one, because that one is a joke). What happen a when you unemployed > 2% of the entire population in less than a year? That isn’t the working-age adult population, that is all of us. At the same time, cut social safety nets, remove consumer protections, and deregulate rent.

  I am not trying to be a doomsayer, I am just realistically looking at the whole of the trajectories of our society. Unfortunately, those trajectories carry us over a rather dystopian cliff. Tell me you honestly believe that a realistic and functional UBI will ever happen, even when there are 5 employees to every job, so 80% of us are finctionally incapable of obtaining gainful employment?

  source

  • velvetThunder@lemmy.zip ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    It sounded as if you were against automation only at Amazon. But now you cleared things up.

    In an ideal society the burger flippers could get the education to be Burgerflipperrobot engineers and so on, while everybody has to work less. But we already see that only a few profit from that progress.

    source