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- A Reminder About Jobs and Profit
A Reminder About Jobs and Profit
It’s important to remember something about jobs: every industry is trying as hard as it can to automate human workers out of existence in order to maximize profit. And they’re finding some success. We should only expect that success to continue, and to accelerate.
Remember what the priority is: profit. Not jobs. Not America. If technology makes it so that 75% of Walmart’s workers can be replaced by computers, then that’s precisely what will happen.
Expect it.
You should actually be surprised if you see us gain jobs, not if we lose them. Given our constant advances in what computers can do in place of humans, and our ravenous obsession with profit, losing jobs is now the norm and will remain so until we do one of two things:
Put human livelihood and happiness over capitalism and profit, or
We stop developing technology to replace humans in the workforce.
Like I said, expect it.
[ Feb 26, 2019 — This is interesting to read now that there is so much talk about AI replacing jobs, people like Andrew Yang being out there, etc. At this point these truths are nearly self-evident for most who pay attention, but the problem remains the same. The question is whether we can make changes fast enough to absorb what’s coming, or if there will be inevitable large-scale conflict. ]
[ Feb 17, 2013 ]