> You don't want to automate your job, I don't want to automate my job
? I have been automating my job since day 1, with shell scripts and Python and ansible and terraform and anything else that suits that work at hand. Granted, I'm a sysadmin so maybe it's different for others?
You want to automate your job internally to be able to get it done faster or focus on more interesting aspects, not externally such that you are replaceable by a tool, or a cheaper employee with a tool.
Here in the United States it’s awfully hard to get decent medical care if you don’t have either a full time job or have access to the entitlements system.
And lacking a full-time job doesn’t make you eligible for entitlements.
In the modern US we convert improved productivity into looser labor markets and invest enough into ubiquitous surveillance and militarized police that nothing comes of it.
I hope it’s better wherever you are, but here you don’t want your job automated unless you stay on the payroll, which by definition can’t be everyone.
> I hope it’s better wherever you are, but here you don’t want your job automated unless you stay on the payroll, which by definition can’t be everyone.
If the "fixed amount of work reduced by automation" assumption that is necessary to support "by definition can't be everyone" was true, >99% of humanity would per permanently unemployment by the past progress of technology.
The past is a guide to the future, but no guarantee of it.
Real wages, age of home ownership, age when folks decide to start a family, choose a metric that will stand up to any scrutiny and the advance of broad-based welfare has been in retreat for well over a decade.
Slightly more anecdotally but still very well documented is the proliferation of homeless folks, often families now, often recently employed now, living in ever-growing tent encampments in major urban areas.
When operations research PhDs have all real constraints removed social, regulatory, and legal and arbitrarily increasing compute and governmental influence (we just the other day tore down the Chevron Deference doctrine) things get real neo-feudal, real fast.
In an era of ever increasing and compounding change, appeals to past compromises between the donor class and the working person are just talking points. All I hear is “got mine”.
> you don’t want your job automated unless you stay on the payroll, which by definition can’t be everyone.
I have never in my life had a job where the reaction to employees being more productive was to have fewer employees rather than increasing output. Everyone absolutely can stay on payroll, we just get more stuff done on the same headcount and budget, and the company turns more profit for it.
2023 saw massive layoffs and hiring freezes. Seriously tenured veterans with proven track records sat out 6-12 months (burning their savings while anchored to the mortgages that were predicated on RSU grants tied to living in Redwood Shores or whatever) and got re-hired after being massively crammed down on equity issues from years ago. They’re called “boomerangs”.
In every single quarter since Q1 2023 the big shops have shattered EPS and driven 12 month forward PE to the level where NVIDIA is pretty much a proxy for how corrupt can be considered legal.
I like free markets, well-refereed. Competition is good.
This dystopian nightmare is nothing to do with capitalism and gives markets a bad name.
In a world where NVIDIA has net earnings north of 80% (the highest of any company in history not engaged in the slave trade) and their only credible competitor is helmed by the cousin of the CEO?
No. I do not in fact believe that payroll will track automation in a way that is humane.
Capitalism sounds awesome, I hope I live to see it.
By construction a market that doesn’t work well is suffering from a market failure: monopoly, duopoly, governmental capture, important people’s kids promoted beyond their abilities.
Capitalism has a bad name because we tolerate not only market failures but induced market failures: the first thing anyone seems to do after winning in a market is to try to construct barriers to further competition. No Soviet career party man, no apparatchik is such a fan of knowing the right people as the capitalist who won a hand of poker.
The tech business is addicted to this shit: a software venture isn’t truly considered a success until it’s a monopoly, entrepreneurs avoid markets with established players in them.
But this is because of the funding model. The people who fund software plays have convinced LPs that they can beat the market by a lot, and over the long run it’s not many people who can do that without cheating.
So everyone cheats and tries for market manipulation that is illegal on paper. We used to prosecute those people for securities fraud.
? I have been automating my job since day 1, with shell scripts and Python and ansible and terraform and anything else that suits that work at hand. Granted, I'm a sysadmin so maybe it's different for others?