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Delivery robots are spreading across LA. Residents ‘both pity and hate them’
(www.theguardian.com)
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this post was submitted on 25 May 2026
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Technology
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Please review the last 100 years of technological development and educate us all on when, exactly, improvements in productivity have resulted in a reduction of the working hours required for subsistence. Extra credit for when it also did not involve threats of bodily or existential harm to the ruling class.
Perhaps, just maybe, people are less concerned with perpetuating the wheels of the machine "at all costs" and more concerned with what happens between now and then. With who will get crushed before they're stopped, if they ever do, long after our own lifetimes end.
Perhaps it is not the entire world who is stupid while you're one of a select few intelligent enough to really know what's going on.
I'm fully in support of the idea of UBI by the way, I just don't see the hypothetical distant possibility as a reason to discount issues actively occurring in the existent present. Similar arguments are used to defend the acceleration of pollution in pursuit of an AI super intelligence that will supposedly "fix" all the issues we make during the pursuit of it. It's foolhardy, dangerous, and reckless to leave the problems being built today to be solved by a purely hypothetical future.
I'm not sure where you got the impression that that was at all what I was saying, but just to restate, the complaint was that the above points never even make it into the conversation when this comes up. The discourse is always 'Robots are taking away our jobs', and it completely misses the '...and that would be okay if we took steps to ensure everyone's prosperity' followup.
I'm not saying we should stop opposing this stuff because an alternative exists where it's okay, I'm saying that we should be actively talking about that alternative every time this comes up, because the vast majority of people [in the US] are not used to even hearing it.