Comment on How in the hell
unfreeradical@lemmy.world 11 months agoThe suggestions was that workers (“we”) should seek to automate processes that workers prefer not to perform.
You objected that if such automation were possible to achieve and to implement, then they would have already done so.
Processes of production, and the utilization and development of machinery implicated in production, is determined by business owners, not by workers.
Business owners are bound by the profit motive, not by a motive to improve the experience of workers.
Any activity or objective not supported by the profit motive is simply discarded, under our current systems.
The meaningful suggestion is that workers (“we”) should seek to automate processes that workers prefer not to perform, even if business owners (“they”) have no motive for doing so.
helenslunch@feddit.nl 11 months ago
Buddy if you “we” could do that “we” never would have been employees in the first place.
If you think automation is not profitable then you vastly underestimate the costs of running a business and hiring human employees.
unfreeradical@lemmy.world 11 months ago
Workers already build and design machines, but our capacities are constrained by business owners, who control the resources of society, including the enterprise that conducts research and manufacturing, and who direct the labor of workers for using the resources they control.
You are attacking a straw man.
Some automation is profitable, at any particular time, but some automation may improve the experience of workers without being profitable.
Various relevant factors include the availability of technologies previously developed through public investment, the degree by which private enterprise is competitive versus monopolized, the structure of the labor pool especially in its degree of stratification, and the relative profitability of other investment opportunities, such as those more overtly framed around speculation, predation, extraction, or exploitation.
helenslunch@feddit.nl 11 months ago
Engineers design machines, not sewer cleaners.
I don’t know what you meant by this if not to imply that it’s not profitable:
unfreeradical@lemmy.world 11 months ago
Engineers are workers.
Sewer cleaners are workers.
Neither are business owners, who make the decisions within enterprise, about how workers use enterprise.
If business owners decide that engineers may design machines, that factory workers may then build, and that sewer cleaners may then utilize, then the events may occur. Otherwise, not, and the determining force is the profit motive, not the will or workers.
At any particular time, some automation may be profitable, and some automation may not be profitable.
The straw man you attacked was my alleged claim that no automation is ever profitable.