Comment on Bernie Sanders says that if AI makes us so productive, we should get a 4-day work week
WarlordSdocy@lemmy.zip 2 days agoThe problem comes when those technological innovations increase productivity which companies use solely to increase their bottom line. These innovations should be benefitting workers directly.
Outside of that a lot of your argument rests on the idea that there will always be new better jobs for humans to move into. However even the examples you gave aren’t great. How is someone doing manufacturing or transportation or extinguishing the street lights going to suddenly become a computer programmer? Especially considering how atleast in the US you’d have to pay to go to college to do that. And even then we’ve started to see in recent years a lot of these new “high demand” jobs getting saturated. As time goes on and companies use productivity gains to purely to benefit their profits they’re gonna lay off more people and new jobs from new technologies aren’t going to be able to keep up.
Gorilladrums@lemmy.world 1 day ago
My point isn’t based on an idea, it’s based on history. We’ve literally had the same thing happen before many, many times in the past.
Your arguments is based on the assumption that humans are static like sims characters. That they can only ever do one job, which isn’t true. You also know that it isn’t true, otherwise you wouldn’t appeal to extremes. There’s a lot in between being a truck driver and being a programmer that you’re intentionally skipping over. When people lose their jobs, they don’t automatically become eternally useless because they can’t do a highly specialized job that doesn’t utilize any of their skill sets, that’s not what history shows us. Instead, these people find other roles that use their skills.
In this case, truck drivers usually have skills like spatial awareness, logistics knowledge, mechanical aptitude, and time management. These skills are transferable, and other jobs do demand them. For example, they could work as safety inspectors or warehouse supervisors or logistics support or remote vehicle operators, field service support, and the list goes on and on. People adapt, that’s economies progress.
I don’t even understand what you’re argument is here. Should we just straight up freeze technological advancement and stop society from evolving because some people work outdated jobs? If things were left up to you, would you just not implement electric street lamps so lamplighters wouldn’t lose their jobs? You could make the some argument for people who work specialize for health insurance companies, so should we never have universal healthcare because these people might lose their jobs? It’s a ridiculous argument.