Amazon’s humanoid warehouse robots will eventually cost only $3 per hour to operate. That won’t calm workers’ fears of being replaced.::The robot’s human-like shape is bound to reignite workers’ fears of being replaced, but Amazon says they’re designed to “work collaboratively.”
Governments need to be proactive in getting taxes and strategies in place ready for corps that do this to offset the increases to recipients on welfare.
They won’t of course.
Designed to work collaboratively, sure, I can believe that. How many are you going to lay off tho?
In isolation the automation of roles is a great thing, but the way society is currently run your entire quality of existence is tied to your job, and retraining and getting a new job is harder than ever and costs a lot.
If society made it easier for people to retrain and get better jobs and slowly replaced all those bad jobs with an automated workforce it would be better for everyone.
Can’t see it happening though…
I think it’s still possible for EU to regulate this and protect workers here. Not in US though.
Maybe but I don’t know how they can realistically do anything worthwhile. As forcing companies to keep staff on and not automate isn’t a good outcome and isn’t fixing the societal issues that make this a problematic scenario.
If a robot/ai/machine can do a job safer, more efficiently, quicker than a person, it should 1000000% be automated by the given thing. This has been happening for hundreds of years in all industries.
Well, I guess EU would simply come up with a plan for the automation that will not leave people without any protection. No idea what it would look like but they could for example come up with some legal definition of AI worker, establish mandatory staffing levels (for example 50% of employees must be human until 2040), tax ‘salaries’ of AI workers and use this revenue to retrain the workforce. We would still end up with automated jobs but it would happen in an organize manner.
I mean, the workers can find another job to be useful to society.
Automation is a good thing.
Yeah, that has worked really well in the past. At least here in the US when people are pushed out of jobs to enrich capitalists we tend to find a way to criminalize them and warehouse them in prisons while their communities rot.
According to this podcast on collapse I once heard, not once in human history has a technological breakthrough made humans less productive.
not once in human history has a technological breakthrough made
humanssociety less productive
Let me fix that for you. Technology makes society more productive, over time. It does not necessarily make individual humans more productive or better off. A while back I read similar studies, which found the economic disruption of technology jumps like this can easily be two generations.
The other concern is location. Not everyone is perfectly mobile. If you have a major employer in a region make huge cutbacks, some people will find a better location but most will suffer, be unable to adapt
Let me throw out the coal industry in the US as an example. Over the decades, more automation has meant continued profits even in a declining industry. Society is more productive. The corps are more productive. However coal mining towns and their people most decidedly are not. Some people left. Some people were able to adapt. But all too many still know nothing but the illusion of good jobs that haven’t been there in decades and continue to disappear ever faster
Workers were always going to be replaced and automated pretending otherwise is disingenuous and caters to the absolute most inept among us.
People need to start bitching about taxing these organizations and supporting UBI.
More than UBI we need to empower democratic ownership through things like worker and community lead cooperatives. As well as better systems of education and training for a quickly changing world.
If the only reason people get UBI is to placated them then when we can be ignored or surpressed instead we will be.
