Quote:
Originally Posted by iggy_oi
Yes farmers are absolutely part of society. Do you know of any who only work 8 hours a day 5 days a week?
I don't see how the part of society made up of workers who are losing their jobs and consumers who are not seeing prices drop despite the labour cost savings from these efficiencies are benefiting, perhaps you could go into a little more detail to clarify. Cost cutting measures do not always equal higher efficiency, a self serve kiosk does not get the job done better or faster than a real person, because a real person is still needed to use that machine, and in a lot of cases it could be argued that not having a trained person using the machine actually reduces efficiency.
Most of your examples don't lead to less work for everyone, because they were introduced at a time when the new technology created more jobs than it eliminated. We are at a point where this is being less and less often the case. Trucks replacing horses reduced the number of people needed to drive carriages, but it also created the need for mechanics. The carriage builder jobs were replaced by vehicle assmbly line jobs and so on.
Now with self serve kiosks, we have jobs being eliminated to save on labour costs, rather than to increase efficiency at the productivity level. People will argue that it will create jobs because those machines require maintenance, which is true, however it will not create as many jobs as it eliminates, and as unemployment rises, the compensation for those new jobs will be given to the lowest bidder. So less people working, making less money, contributing less tax revenue and reducing consumerism. People will also argue these machines will need to be built, which is also true, but if you've seen an assembly line recently you'll have noticed machines building these machines is becoming the new norm.
If you really believe that people were handed a 40 hour work week because of efficiency, I don't know what to tell you other than you really need to do some research.
Workers continue to fight to this day to reduce other forms of labour cost reducing "efficiencies" such as the outsourcing of jobs. Why? Because increasing consumerism grows the economy, not labour cost reduction for employers that are already thriving. This past year workers at AT&T in the states fought to have their company bring back thousands of outsourced jobs because it became obvious that this cost cutting "efficiency" wasn't helping society or the economy, it was only helping AT&T's profits.
I'd say that disprooves your claim that without efficiency workers fighting for what makes sense won't get them(or others) anywhere.
To everyone who makes these claims that reducing costs for businesses and the rich will somehow benefit everyone, I suggest taking a step back for a minute and considering this: you are making the same arguments as Donald Trump. Think about that.
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You are missing the key point
Automation is always good. It's what allowed us to go from hunter gatherer to now and reduce the labour required for everything.
The distribution of the gain of efficiency needs to be determined and fought over and how the gain is distributed will determine whether society or a small portion thereof benefits.
Why were workers able to fight for shorter hours in coal mines? Because the value of what they produced was great enough that it was possible to pay two workers to do that work and it still be viable relative to whale oil or wood.
Can you show any evidence that more jobs were created than were lost through the development of any tech?
Being against automation is being a Luddite being concerned how the wealth gains from automation are distributed is very reasonable.