
Ask HN: Is it morally right to automate jobs people want? - siruncledrew
I understand automation provides a lot of pros and cons. Some &#x27;pros&#x27; include: it can reduce repetitive tasks, cut down on workplace injury, and offer greater efficiency a majority of the time. It&#x27;s no surprise more companies are looking towards automation.<p>However, I believe there is a mismatch in terms of benefit to society and benefit to the corporations. Aside from initial capital and maintenance costs, automation provides businesses a way to profit without having to deal with the costs of paying and managing people. Assuming the role of the business is individualistic, the incentive is to pull in as much profit as possible, and work towards reducing costs. My takeaway from this is that self-interest also creates a lack of employee-interest.<p>For example, with low-skill, low-reward jobs such as cashier, most people may not care if they get automated (as we sort of have today with self-checkout&#x2F;kiosks) since they were not very desirable jobs to begin with. Yet, what is to stop a business from automating other more &quot;desirable&quot; jobs that employees may actually want and enjoy doing, such as software developer, strategist, manager, etc. - the higher paying jobs that people train for and aspire for to put their productivity to good use. If it saves the business (or executives at the top) money by axing those jobs, my guess is that they will do it, regardless if it hurts their employees (or impacts greater society).<p>So with this in mind, where is the moral limit for automation?<p>Should we protect employees from having their jobs taken away for a more profitable alternative?<p>(I&#x27;m not counting on things like UBI in this instance because, sticking with the presumption of corporate self-interest, I&#x27;m not assuming that more profit = more paid in taxes for society, if taxes are another undesirable &quot;cost&quot; that businesses would want to reduce).
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Karishma1234
Consider this: A blood test today costs $100 in USA. A complicated blood test
costs $250.

If we could invent a serious AI algorithm that can replace lab technician and
drop this cost to $10 and $25 respectively. (Note that every single item in
USA such as Cars, phones and bread is damn too cheap compared to mere 30 years
ago).The lower cost of blood tests would save thousands of lives each year.

A small efficiency in making bread will save lives and put food on table of
more people and improve sustainability of our planet.

It is not about jobs but efficiency. Making things more and more efficient is
a moral imperative. It is something we need to do for the future generations.

Secondly, a cashier losing job is not as big a deal as people make it out to
be because these people will do something else. Large availability of cheap
labor can invent new industries as long as government does no criminalise
being poor or skill less. Minimum wage jobs for example make it a crime to
have no skill.

In future I imagine human beings with driving skills sitting a automated car
simulators and teaching the cars to drive or clicking on images and video
feeds to teach computers to get better while receiving am minimum wage.

Losing job is also something that makes a society ant-fragile and robust.
Without laying off inefficient arms of the company you will haev a fragile
North Korea/ Venezuella like economy.

~~~
arwineap
Can you expand on this?

> Minimum wage jobs for example make it a crime to have no skill.

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Karishma1234
Imagine a 19 year old back teenager from a bad neighbourhood. He can't walk to
a local McDonalds and offer to work for free or for $1 and hour and the McD
manager will always find plenty to experienced people at $10 /hr. Government
has made it a crime to employ anyone whose skills is worth below minimum wage.

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adrianmonk
I think it helps to also look at this from the other angle: if a buyer wants
or needs a product, and it can be made more affordable to them through
automation, is it morally right to _not_ automate it?

Suppose someone loves being a farmer, but you could make food available
cheaper by automating it. People need food. Should they have to pay more to
eat in order to allow the farmer to do what they love?

If all other things are equal, it's good for the farmer to be able to do the
kind of work that they enjoy. But all other things are not equal, so it's
necessary to weigh that benefit against the cost.

(Having said that, one thing about automation is that it requires investment,
which means part of the returns tend to go to investors. So not all of the
savings are passed on to the end user. But hopefully some of them are.)

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lurker_primo
I believe that if the job can be automated, it will be. That is the way
humanity is progressing since the beginning. If you want a current example,
you can look at farming practices. It is highly automated and industrialized
in developed countries. It is common to see 1 person managing a 500 acre farm
with machines. In developing countries, farming is still a very labor
intensive process. It isn't economically viable to bring machines to farms yet
and the labor rates are sufficiently low. Over the decades, I have seen more
and more machines coming to the farms as the availability of labor has
decreased and the wages have increased.

> software developer, strategist, manager, etc.

These jobs cannot be automated easily now, but in future, we may have a good
enough AI that can do these jobs. Consider the jobs that existed in 19th and
20th century. Many of them don't exist nowadays at all. For ex., Horses were a
major component of transportation. There were a lot of people involved to
support this industry. If we stopped the progress of automotive industry on
moral grounds that these people would lose their jobs, wouldn't we be cheating
our future?

We cannot legislate job protection because then somebody else will come along,
automate it, and offer the service at a lower price. What we can do is
legislate for fair working conditions, wages etc, and a stable social net that
will support people who can't/won't work for any reason. This brings us to the
topic of UBI and others.

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sp527
It's arguably "right" at a macro, species POV and ruthless at a micro POV.

Logically speaking, if we refused to progressively improve how we perform
tasks, we'd be cave men.

Improvement (and automation is of course a part of this) happens naturally by
virtue of competitive market dynamics. In this environment, it's arguably
morally irresponsible for a company to _not_ rely on automation, because it's
facing a trade-off between laying off some fraction of its labor pool now or
going out of business altogether later. Therefore, the correct decision is
always to improve towards greater competitive efficiency, not just for the
benefit of shareholders but less obviously also for employees, in the
aggregate. Competitive efficiency is also good for society.

Governments are supposed to protect people from this problem, in my opinion. I
think the behavior of the US government (and most others I imagine), in
allocating the vast majority of taxpayer dollars to military spending and
skyrocketing medical costs due to poor regulation, instead of education,
infrastructure, social safety, and retraining, is what's truly morally
irresponsible. There's a whole rabbit hole of thinking down that way as well
(e.g. corporate lobbying is obviously a huge part of the problem and thus in
some ways we come full circle).

Oh and wrt UBI and the looming AI/robotics crisis, yea we're screwed.

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rayascott
You'll never get rid of self-interested people. They are just wired that way,
regardless of the state of the world.

Things will be just fine. See the Industrial Revolution:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Industrial_Revolu...](https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Industrial_Revolution&mobileaction=toggle_view_desktop)

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jraph
Automating tasks is freeing humanity of some amount of necessary labor to
achieve (assuming any task is useful).

This means, in a society were things are correctly organized, more average
free time for humans, more things we can achieve. Which is desirable, if we
are not achieving self destruction or the destruction of our neighborhood. But
I'm optimistic, I'm sure we will be able to figure this out at some point that
I hope is not too distant in the future.

This is my feeling.

Also, if people like to do something that can be automated, they will still be
able to do that. Just not as a job maybe... Or maybe not. Some people still
paint pictures that are pretty close to actual photos. And, in my opinion, in
a well organized society, people have enough free time to do what they like to
do.

Not automating things we can automate is maintaining useless work for humans.
We should just be sure about what can be automated, which is not so easy. If
you replace a cashier by a machine, you may free this person from risking
serious injuries in some cases, and from a task that can be dull and
repetitive. You also remove some human interactions that people may appreciate
(and maybe even rely on) and that a machine cannot provide. I've already gone
out of a shop happier just because I had a nice or funny exchange with the
cashier, or even a smile. At the end of the day, this kind of things is
useful.

I believe we will always need human interactions, some jobs might not be
automatable for this reason.

So cashiers might be better replaced by machines in many places for a lot of
good reasons, but human interactions have to be maintained somewhere. This may
not have to be part of a job however.

And i agree that sometimes, you just want to buy your stuff and go out without
having to expose yourself to any human interaction.

~~~
cimmanom
"In a society where things are correctly organized...."

That's the heart of the problem.

~~~
jraph
I completely agree with you.

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OscarCunningham
Automate the job and then send the money you're saving to an efficient
charity.

EDIT: This isn't quite a serious suggestion. My point is to imagine it as the
default setting. If you were going to give some money to buy anti-malaria
nets, should you instead give that money to subsidise someone's wages in the
US?

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chatmasta
It's not the _job_ that people want. If it were, they would do it for free.

People have needs [0], money allows transacting for those needs, and a job is
a vehicle to deliver money. If people could have their needs met without a
job, would they still "want" the job that was automated away from them?

What's morally wrong is a society that forces its most vulnerable people to
work jobs that can be done by machines, leaving those people no time to
improve their skills or standing in the world, trapping them in a permanently
disadvantaged social stratum.

[0]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maslow%27s_hierarchy_of_needs](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maslow%27s_hierarchy_of_needs)

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amorphid
My immediate thoughts are:

\- we shouldn't save jobs that can't be saved

\- we should protect everyone

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rajacombinator
The goal of automation is to reduce the costs of goods and services, with the
cost savings getting passed on to consumers of those goods and services.
Whether we need more goods and services is a better question.

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Raed667
Anecdotal example, when I was an intern at a small company my boss asked me to
do this more or less basic script that would take an excel and do a bunch of
stuff with its data.

It was not difficult, basically a few hours to get an MVP running, he was VERY
happy.

A few days later, one of the girls working there explained to me that she was
very scared for her job as she thinks the boss would like to automate it.

Needless to say I didn't go through with it.

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mabynogy
Yes it's immoral but we aren't reponsible for that because we have no power
over it and even the people in charge don't have much.

The real question is: what are the forces and the rules we obey?

