
There's an Automation Crisis Underway, It's Just Mostly Invisible - hhs
https://gizmodo.com/the-trickle-down-disaster-of-automation-1838974516
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mdorazio
Here's the key takeaway: "automation increases the likelihood that workers
will be driven away from their previous jobs at the companies—whether they’re
fired, or moved to less rewarding tasks, or quit—and causes a long-term loss
of wages for the employee."

This is similar to my own thoughts on automation - it doesn't have to directly
destroy a single job to lead to huge adverse impacts on our modern economics
systems. Automation just has to be available and capitalism will take care of
the rest over time.

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dragonwriter
> This is similar to my own thoughts on automation - it doesn't have to
> directly destroy a single job to lead to huge adverse impacts on our modern
> economics systems. Automation just has to be available and capitalism will
> take care of the rest over time.

I'd argue automation doesn't lead to adverse impacts, capitalism does.
Automation leads to greater output from the same labor input, which is good.
Capitalism that is not mitigated in these effects leads to the more than 100%
of the net benefit of those gains going to capital owners or those on
combination with workers skilled in automation-related fields, while a net
detriment is received by workers whose prior function, or a substitute for
that function, was automated. But that's true of _every_ change under
capitalism that shifts demand from one kind of labor to another (but is felt
most broadly detrimentally when the labor benefitting is of a type where skill
is more concentrated.)

The problem isn't automation, it is distributional infelicities in capitalism
which must be mitigated by reducing (but not erasing) the concentrated
benefits so as to allow broadly-shared benefits instead of broad harms.

