Posted: May 26, 2019 1:21 pm
felltoearth wrote:There are multiple threads intertwined in the conversation so maybe I should break it down.
1. Jobs may be menial but it doesn’t mean they aren’t worth doing as a human being if you are getting paid to do so especially if they are a means to an end and not a means in and of themselves. I’ve worked at so many jobs and different kinds of jobs. I have found that experience formative and informative while at the time I may not have seen it. Could be a good topic for a thread.
2. Automation of menial tasks to “free up” humans for more worthy pursuits. There is so much value judgement loaded into this statement that I think it is where things started to go off the rails. Who decides what a worthy pursuit is? Why should you get paid by someone else for something you deem worthy of your time? Which leads to...
3. Post work society and Universal Basic Income. It’ll be a long time before we see any of this implemented as the powers that be love their wage slaves. UBI is a great ideal and I support it, but Capitalism needs a rework in its current form before anything moves towards that. I’m more pragmatic in that sense.
Its some kind of logical fallacy I am sure but I will call it .. you are imagining things. I said:
tuco wrote:@Macdoc Have you ever worked such job? Rhetorical. Automation frees people for menial and mundane tasks, literally.
Sure, there are questions like: what to do with the people who make living doing such tasks? where do they get income from? who is gonna pay for it? ... but conceptually, freeing oneself from such labor opens up many possibilities like using the brain for creativity, critical thinking or education and using energy for stuff like beekeeping or getting involved in communities or sharing own wisdom and experiences with others. Besides "mirror neurons" are far from being mechanized as far as I know.
It is the way to go. Automation allows humans to realize their potential. The only question is how we handle it.
"Possibilities" and "potential".
It's you who is assigning value-based judgments, not me. I never said "worthy", you did. Just like I have never said "superior" but Macdoc did.
And the same with "frees people from". It does not mean nor implies that what were people doing, before freed from, was "unworthy" or "inferior". Perhaps in your mind it does but that is why I am saying. It's not me but you who passes value-based judgments here.
I simply state, the obvious as usual :), that we humans have more potential, with regards to our intellectual capabilities, than to move boxes around 1/3 of day and we can realize such potential if we let robots do menial and mundane tasks for us because they can do it very well and efficiently. Unlike tasks involving empathy for example.
You don't have to agree. Perhaps humans moving boxes from one place to another is an efficient use of resources, humans have to eat and stuff, to you. There is no way for me to convince you otherwise. However, I think you are making things up for reasons I am not going to debate.