<story><title>Robots have been about to take all the jobs for 100 years</title><url>https://newsletter.pessimistsarchive.org/p/robots-have-been-about-to-take-all</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>betaby</author><text>Western ideology is mostly about taxing the salaries. While xUSSR was mostly about redistribution of the goods. But then again xUSSR &amp;quot;did&amp;#x27;t work&amp;quot; and capitalism &amp;quot;worked&amp;quot;. How it even possible to reap anything from the automation if tax base is people&amp;#x27;s salaries and VAT?</text></item><item><author>lp4vn</author><text>The scariest thing of all is how the average citizen is in a certain sense not reaping the benefits of automation.&lt;p&gt;You would think that automating your job would make you free to work less. No, of course not, you end up either unemployed or working at least as much as you used to or more.&lt;p&gt;A lot of the comments here on this thread are already pessimistic in relation to the automation because people low key know that in the last decades almost all societal changes have come to the detriment of general population.</text></item><item><author>irrational</author><text>Number 1 is my big concern. I have a son that is on the autism spectrum. He graduated from high school with a modified diploma when he was 20 and they decided to just send him along. He has managed to get a job doing baggage at the airport, which is pretty the limit of his abilities. What if all similar jobs were automated?</text></item><item><author>Hermitian909</author><text>Probably worth calling out the two of the biggest observable negative effects of automation that &lt;i&gt;have&lt;/i&gt; occurred over time:&lt;p&gt;1. We&amp;#x27;ve decimated the bottom end of the skills market in developed countries. Something often touted in the psychometrics literature is that the number of jobs for folks with IQ under 85 are quite rare in the US where once they were common. That&amp;#x27;s ~15% of the population who are close to un-employable.&lt;p&gt;2. People who spend years or decades on a skillset see it devalued and their income drops. It is often difficult to get a &amp;quot;second shot&amp;quot; at a new career in your 40s and can be deeply disruptive to you and your family&amp;#x27;s lives. Growing up I watched this happen to the parents of several friends who&amp;#x27;d made careers in things like printing that were obsoleted by digital revolution. None of those people achieved the monetary success they might have in an un-disrupted industry.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>peterbell_nyc</author><text>Presumably the model for sufficiently wealthy countries would be to effectively tax the corporations either based in those countries or that wanted to sell to people in those countries. You then redistribute a subset of that as UBI or some other form of payment for either the subset affected by unemployability or to everyone.</text></comment>
<story><title>Robots have been about to take all the jobs for 100 years</title><url>https://newsletter.pessimistsarchive.org/p/robots-have-been-about-to-take-all</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>betaby</author><text>Western ideology is mostly about taxing the salaries. While xUSSR was mostly about redistribution of the goods. But then again xUSSR &amp;quot;did&amp;#x27;t work&amp;quot; and capitalism &amp;quot;worked&amp;quot;. How it even possible to reap anything from the automation if tax base is people&amp;#x27;s salaries and VAT?</text></item><item><author>lp4vn</author><text>The scariest thing of all is how the average citizen is in a certain sense not reaping the benefits of automation.&lt;p&gt;You would think that automating your job would make you free to work less. No, of course not, you end up either unemployed or working at least as much as you used to or more.&lt;p&gt;A lot of the comments here on this thread are already pessimistic in relation to the automation because people low key know that in the last decades almost all societal changes have come to the detriment of general population.</text></item><item><author>irrational</author><text>Number 1 is my big concern. I have a son that is on the autism spectrum. He graduated from high school with a modified diploma when he was 20 and they decided to just send him along. He has managed to get a job doing baggage at the airport, which is pretty the limit of his abilities. What if all similar jobs were automated?</text></item><item><author>Hermitian909</author><text>Probably worth calling out the two of the biggest observable negative effects of automation that &lt;i&gt;have&lt;/i&gt; occurred over time:&lt;p&gt;1. We&amp;#x27;ve decimated the bottom end of the skills market in developed countries. Something often touted in the psychometrics literature is that the number of jobs for folks with IQ under 85 are quite rare in the US where once they were common. That&amp;#x27;s ~15% of the population who are close to un-employable.&lt;p&gt;2. People who spend years or decades on a skillset see it devalued and their income drops. It is often difficult to get a &amp;quot;second shot&amp;quot; at a new career in your 40s and can be deeply disruptive to you and your family&amp;#x27;s lives. Growing up I watched this happen to the parents of several friends who&amp;#x27;d made careers in things like printing that were obsoleted by digital revolution. None of those people achieved the monetary success they might have in an un-disrupted industry.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>bradDonniger</author><text>USSR style communism was really an authoritarian dictatorship.&lt;p&gt;In capitalist west, capitalism was also about distribution of goods but literally being nice about it. Working together.&lt;p&gt;The language is meaningless gibberish. The tone and emotional spin, roleplay are what’s important.&lt;p&gt;In the US we’re enabling iron fisted oligarchs like the USSR once had. Those who refuse to share without extreme deference and idolatry, not because they’re that important to the well being of billions (they’re not) but because they’re important to the political actors that insulate them from taxation.</text></comment>