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Fears of employee displacement as Amazon brings robots into warehouses
(www.theguardian.com)
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this post was submitted on 19 Oct 2023
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Technology
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Having robots to do grunt work and that somehow being bad for our society is just the dumbest timeline. Fucking cunts
The dumbest timeline is indeed the one we have -- living in times of nearly boundless plenty yet letting people starve and go homeless.
Amazon's not doing this to enrich and improve society. They're doing it to enrich and improve themselves. Fighting to keep bad jobs is what we do when the entire economic system has entirely given up on serving the needs of the public rather than private wealth.
It's not that we should force Amazon to not use robots to replace jobs. It's that we should force Amazon to contribute at least as much value to their communities as they extract, through any means possible. Unfortunately, in this idiot society, we think "being an employer" is the only reasonable way a company can contribute to its community.
This is exactly the problem.
We have a puritanical idea burned into our society that you have to suffer to live, that you have to work your fingers to the bone to deserve even the most basic necessities of life, and can’t imagine a non-capitalist society where we just provide everything people need to live and not force people to do bullshit busywork just to prove they “deserve” the basics of life.
For ages, we've been talking about automation, and how it can free us from the drudgery of menial, dangerous, and repetitive work, freeing us to have more time to live our lives enjoyably and pursue our desires instead or having to spend a third of our lives working. But the problem is that people think that if you don't work, then you don't deserve to live, or be happy, or have any kind of enjoyment in your life at all. It's completely at odds with the kind of society we've actually built.
We have so many empty homes in the US that we could give every single homeless person in the country a home, for free, and still have loads left over. But instead we'd rather let them die on the streets because they haven't "proved" they deserve a life.
We produce so much food that we could just give every single person in this country all the food they'd need to survive, and still not have shortages. But we'd rather throw away 50% of the food we produce because it's kinda not pretty, or it sits on store shelves until expiration date, and gets chucked in the garbage.
We have Conservatives that talk about how all life is sacred, and we must protect it at all cost, going to far as to value the life of a fetus over the life of a parent. But once that child is born? Fuck them. Can't afford healthcare? Can't afford housing? Well then the parent shouldn't have gotten pregnant. Oh, we have ways to take care of that beforehand? Sorry, no, cant have that either. Let's make birth control, family planning, healthcare, housing, education, etc. impossible to access. And now that you have an impoverished family? Better get tugging on those bootstraps, because helping you would be unethical and antithetical to our Rugged Individualist ideal.
So many people in this country are absolutely terrified of the idea that someone else, somewhere, might possibly get something they "don't deserve" and will go out of their way to make people suffer because of it.
So say Amazon replaces all of their warehouse workers with robots. Those are objectively horrifying jobs that we have years of evidence to prove. People suffer and die in those warehouses. So getting people out of them is a good thing. But what then? You've "freed" them, but to do what? Maybe they live in an area where that Amazon job was the best paying one, and moving or finding other work or going to school, etc. just simply aren't options.
The robots aren't the problem. Our society is the problem. And it's completely and utterly broken. Until captialism is destroyed, there won't be a meaningful solution to this.
I’d really love to see some better propositions for quantifying value that’s better than straight up corporate profit. I’m with you a 100%, just looking for the path to get there.
Imo it's not so much that corporate profit is the problem, it's how corporate profit is allowed to happen. Make stock buybacks illegal again, revert tax law to a point where dividends are a better way to profit than endlessly increasing share price, and force all businesses to be some form of business cooperative.
It's not a perfect answer, I don't think a perfect one actually exists, but it plugs most of the biggest holes we have right now
There are many people who can only do grunt work. If they don’t have a means to make money, society will unravel.
Only if we continue to be dumbasses
We need to take universal basic income more seriously as a future policy
In my experience there are two groups of people who don't take UBI seriously.
If you’ve been paying attention to society over the last 5-10-15-50 years you’ll see precisely that this concept will never be implemented. It would take catastrophe and the destruction of current society.
I share your pessimism tbh
You mean essential work? Building the homes people live in, cooking the meals people eat, delivering people the stuff they're otherwise incapable of getting for themselves?
Not sure why anyone who's not part of the ruling class who profits from its devaluation would want to refer to it as being done by 'grunts'?
I agree that we shouldn’t devalue it, and that was my initial word choice. That wasn’t the intent behind the choice, but I get it. I’m not sure “essential” is a good descriptor either. It is essential, but that’s not the defining quality we’re after.
My comment was a reply to another user, quoting the exact same verbiage as them to offer them a counter point.
Instead, you’ve deliberately skewed my entire comment and attached your own deranged rambling about “the elite class” to demonize me. We’re on the same side but you’re too lost to understand that.
If you had a bad day today, take it out on a pillow instead of harassing other people. Get yourself some help.
Quoting you is demonizing you? You're the only person here who's called anyone a name.
Language is important. "Grunt work" is a phrase used to devalue jobs in order to justify low wages, regardless of how important those jobs are and what skills they actually require. If you want to use the phrase, don't expect to be immune from criticism. You weren't using it ironically or something, you were just straight calling it that.
And you're the one who asserted that "some people" can only do those jobs. Which people are that, exactly? Have a group in mind? Or was that just another careless use of language?
There is no such thing as 'unskilled' labor. That concept is part-and-parcel to that undervaluation of labor. Line cooks, construction workers, professional drivers, etc, all have skills that doing similar activities non-professionally does not impart. They all require training and experience.
The attitude that certain jobs are something "anyone can pick up and do just as well" as someone experienced in that work is just hubris.