Unemployment caused by automation?

D

David O'Somachain

Of course Automation created unemployment in a number of sectors because 'old school' boys were unwilling to learn new tricks.

Take for example Lighthouse employees world-wide, everyday living in the weather to the extrems. Maybe fine for a hermit but ruined life for any normal person.

One such person is Mr Geoff Gordon who worked on his lighthouse in Norway. Upon the automation of the lighthouse he learnt new tricks including the internet. Gordon now runs a $2.4million internet
based company.

Now, before you say well he must be young to learn how to use the Internet - he was 57 - and when he left the lighthouse his newly acquired mistress taught him how to use the net!?"@*
 
M

Matthew da Silva

Jim,
I agree with you and Ted Kaczinski, together, that the future of automation is not going to work to mitigate as a direct goal and aim, the disparities between rich and poor. But, who would want such 'equalization'? But, no evident truth lies anywhere in his assertions, which amount to a rather sterile approximation of equality where everyone has an equal 'chance' to get what is 'rightfully' theirs. Please read Vladimir Nabokov's 'Bend Sinister' for a more realistic approximation of the type of Kafkaesque
monstrosity that would ensue should people like Ted K. ever (again) get to run things.

>The "next revolution" is not industrial automation, but the fast
> increasing dependence of humans on "synthetic intelligence".

There is a degree of difference between dignity and arrogance. We cannot get around the fact that free-marketism and industrialization (which he is
against) are two agendas that have consistently outperformed any others in the entire history of our tiny planet (except, perhaps, the solid
performances of the other two great urban success stories -- crows and cockroaches).

The Unabomber was a criminal who managed to evade the authorities for so long because the depth of his personal despair enabled him to live in
abominal conditions that many, in 'third-world' countries, simply take for granted. But they have no choice. Many of them would quickly endure what Ted K. takes to be indignities, if given the slightest chance to live in a single-room shack in Montana.
 
J

Johan Bengtsson

Another story:

Two people were standing next to a place where they built a new building of some kind, an excavator was digging, one said:
- Look at that excavator, it is replacing twelve men with shovels. If it had not been for the excavator eleven more men could have had a job.
The other one replied:
- If it had not been for the shovels about 2000 men with teaspoons could have done the job...


I think these stories say a lot....
The human race have a long time back tried to make an easier living.
When "we" first started to put out seed in the ground and harvest the thing that grown out of it it was simply because it was easier than always go hunting the food and in that way be more sure that the food always would be there when we got hungry, ok it was a while back...


/Johan Bengtsson

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