Comment on Delivery robots are spreading across LA. Residents ‘both pity and hate them’
KoboldCoterie@pawb.social 1 day ago
The reasons related to them occupying sidewalks and whatnot are totally reasonable, but I really hate when something like this is opposed because it will take jobs from delivery drivers. That’s such a backwards way of thinking. “Humans need to work because working is how we make money and we need money to live” Sure, but like… what if we didn’t need money to live? What if the increased ‘free’ labor that things like this provide was just… shared equitably among everyone in the community? What if we had UBI so people didn’t need to work gig economy jobs that could be done by robots?
But no, that’s crazy talk.
What if the increased ‘free’ labor that things like this provide was just… shared equitably among everyone in the community? What if we had UBI so people didn’t need to work gig economy jobs that could be done by robots?
This happens just after the money begins to “trickle down.”
Maybe give people the UBI before the jobs go away and they become homeless? Just a thought.
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.
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 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.
als@lemmy.blahaj.zone 23 hours ago
Sure it’s a nice idea but in the current system, these robots don’t make life easier for poor people, they just make rich people richer. The luddites smashed looms not because they hated progress but because they needed employment to buy food to eat. Until we solve that, there will be new luddites with every new technology created to displace workers.
Flagstaff@programming.dev 20 hours ago
This is easily solved by heavily taxing the rich instead of banning innovation.
limerod@reddthat.com 4 hours ago
Is it really solved, if its not done in practice? The rich make sure its not done and the laws are made in way they can evade taxes.
KoboldCoterie@pawb.social 23 hours ago
I agree with you, I just hate that it rarely ever even makes it into the conversation. “We need to regulate this new technology until we pass this other legislation that we are actively working towards which I will now outline” would be far more productive than just “This is bad and we need to ban it.”