won't a heavily automated economy greatly increase the ratio of skilled to unskilled labor?

It doesn't matter how you feel about something that happens, but you can always recognize why and how it happened

The unskilled/skilled labor argument is also dumb, you then flood people into school, ok, that's EXACTLY LIKE THE MINIMUM WAGE PROBLEM!

i mean, you can put people in school

Sure I'd be pissed if I got my job automated, but that doesn't change the fact that the economy is going to react and people will find work elsewhere

doesn't necessarily mean they have the capacity to actually learn the skills that are needed

and i mean with the demographic trends in america we're certainly trending toward a stupider society

also you have to consider the availability of skill/trade knowledge now compared to the intra-industrial period

But it still floods the labor market!

What do you think will happen to about 80% of the population in a society where all the goods and services are automated?

both due to immigration and dysgenic factors

Literacy rates alone have skyrocketed, but the availability of knowledge now is completely incomparable to the 1900s

What does it matter if we’re all guys on the factory line vs we’re all guys who kinda get how the factory line robot works. If it becomes a mainline skill because now all the unskilled are now supposedly skilled. Where is the value outside the company reducing costs?

Our tools have always been evolving and getting more efficient, and our economy always grows and adapts to those changes

@TheBadfish AKA inflation in the value of education

Everything has a value tied to it, including your abilities.

The value is in the baseline of intelligence of the population. Yes the value of education is inflated but is that a bad thing? Is it really a bad thing that people can get hyper-educated (at least when compared to 100 years ago) with relative ease?

So all your saying is it’s ok if the worker is able to do less and earn less because now he is somewhat smarter at doing it? Oh great.

It's not like there's a ceiling to what the human race's collective knowledge can encompass, there are still countless mysteries and problems to be solved

No and that's a wildly unfair mischaracterization of my argument

@ubermensch There isn't any value. The point of all automation is basically to reduce the need of employees. If the factory floor is operated entirely by robots, then you don't need the same amount of maintenance guys to keep the robots working as you would've needed factory workers in the past.

I think the example of the farmer is a useful one to this proble. One farmer with one tractor and combine harvester can plow the same area of crop fields that required hundreds of farmhands in the past.

There was a time, flipping burgers could see you survive on your own and even save up for college, now- you'll be lucky to survive with 3 roommates.

If you allow corporatized automation (which is in fact designed to do that) then yes, but what I'm saying is that if you're just going to say "automation bad, kill automation" then you're going to get zoomed past by the corporations _who want to abuse you_ and they will control it.

Just like luddites and amish got zipped past a

There was a time when a single burger flipping bread winner could support an entire family and household. But then feminism happened 😉

Yeah, feminism really fucked a lot of things also

That's kind of a myth though, you could have supported a family for that wage but you'd have massively struggled unless you lived in a place that already had extremely low cost of living

People act like there wasn't a giant poor working class before feminism

Ya, but my example isn't a myth

family, sure...

people had far less stuff in the past too

less valuable stuff anyway

Well, today you can barely function without computer/internet/cellphone.

stuff is pretty overrated

That's also a huge factor, the level of consumerism that constitutes an "average" life is massively increased

Cause of free trade but also because companies use slave labor in China.

@TheBadfish I'm not saying that automation is bad. At worst it's morally neutral.

What i'm saying is that corporations already control the development of automation, to serve the ends of the shareholders. They will eventually leave all the labourers behind.

One could propose various ways to curtail this development. Not necessarily by banning or destroying automation altogether.

Yes I understand that, and it's exactly what I'm saying too. We're talking past each other.

But my other point is that we as the laborers and workers need to take more control over the automation shift

Well ya, a gun is neutral until it is used for a mass shooting, like a lot of things.

Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a human mind.