I dread automation and technology

Post Reply New Topic

Am I the only one who tends to dread automation and technology? I think I will dread the day when 70% of humans are unemployed, yet people seem to have a defeatist attitude saying there will be nothing they can do about it.

I wish we can go back to my parents and grandparents days of society. At least they will be well dead when this change occurs so they won't have to dread it here on Earth.

What's the point of dreaming about everything if literally "everything" becomes obsolete someday?

Back to the days when life expectancy was 60 years??? You never had it so good.

The more automation the better, for me!

Society is dead, there is no society. When and where did you grow up where the life expectancy of your parents and grandparents was only 60? It's such a garbage answer to as to why we're somehow better off now, even back when that was the average life expectancy whenever that was it still was mostly a product of people dying as a child, in childbirth, or an infection. Live past childhood and you'd live into your 70s, add antibiotics into the mix and here we are.

Automation can only be good if we as a society evolve and accept the fact that it will make unskilled human labor and even a lot of skilled labor obsolete leaving the majority of society with no means of supporting themselves. Either the have nots get taken care of or the haves will be strung up like Mussolini, the elites would prefer to just kill off this extra 70% of "useless eaters".

I dread people more. I think the best advice is, know your foe.

Or maybe I'm getting over-emotional about it, I personally consider myself very liberal, but I have certain lines I won't cross.

Not all of that extended life expectancy is worth living...

and then we'll create artificially intelligent robots who will turn against humans and kill everyone.
and people will get reincarnated as these robots and walk forever around a desolate wasteland of a planet ruined by humans.
Thats the true hell.

A smart society would adapt to automation giving humans more leisure time to pursue arts, hobbies, or recreation.

Let the robots toil away doing crappy jobs, perhaps supervised by human engineers or tradesmen for quality assurance.

So I guess the question is if we are such a society capable of making these changes. The strange thing is humans definitely like technology as a labor saving device, yet we're also seemingly wired to want to compete and be King of the Hill in society or business. I think these two sides of human nature are coming into conflict.

I used to be really upset about this, but I don't really care anymore. People have had the same ideas of "the downfall of humanity under new technology" ever since the wheel was invented.
Sure it makes a lot of human workforce obsolete, but it's also constantly improving the quality of life for pretty much everyone.
Once enough robots have taken over the workforce, there are two options for us humans. 1. The not completely unlikely scenario of everyone working way fewer hours for a lot bigger pay. Base-income is already being tried out in certain areas, and it seems to work very well. 2. The much more likely scenario of the richest getting even richer and the rest of us starve. Something that's also being tried out in many places. They've been going at it for some time, and it seems to be successful, as there's no sign of that system breaking anytime soon.

No matter what, I'll still be growing potatoes and raising chickens in the forest. I'll be just fine.
Until climate change screws me over of course.

Side note: that statement right there is enough to make me fall in love with you-- such a beautiful image, and much the same way I've tailored my own life.
-------------

As for the topic, technology will not kill society, but two high tech societies will eventually kill each other with their respective technology-- that's just following human nature, namely the desire for dominance over other humans. The sociopathic people at the top also won't slaughter the lower classes, they have to have them, if there aren't lower caste people then there's no one to lord over, which is their sole motivating drive, not progress (that's just a marketing term they use to justify said control). I foresee a future in which mechanization does virtually all tasks human labor does now but humans still spend 8 hours a day showing up to a job-- most likely a 'social' job that doesn't actually do much of anything, but it provides the control the sociopaths crave. That's because technology will replace human labor but it won't increase raw resources: those are finite. Since they are finite there needs to be a way to distribute them, and since humans no longer have any physical services to provide in that pursuit we'll just make s**t up and apply value to it. We've done it before: our entire economy is built on faith, faith in the system, faith in paper being more than paper (i.e. a dollar), faith that it will be there tomorrow, etc.

I think when this happens our supreme struggle will really be with our instincts. My biggest fear is that the unoccupied gap, if not tended to quite intelligently, will lead to some sort of very rigid fundamentalist religion catching vogue rapidly as that tends to be in keeping with how societies approach large bodies of needs that they can neither quite identify nor find an immediate solution to.

^^
that. I'm worried about a generation that grew up under the old paradigm not knowing how to handle the situation.
Like the other instances in history, where one story ended, and the new hadn't begun yet to taake hold of the imagination. I.e. - our generation will struggle. Our children's generation will think differently....

Is there any real way to prevent automation though?

If we tried to outlaw it, the plutocrats wouldn't allow this ... so that's out of the question.

I love it. The more automation and technology the more that people want creative people like me to do something with it.

like, invent the juicero? -