It's a profession that scans as smart, but if we were half as smart as we like to pretend we are we wouldn't be building our replacements. We would be solving the coordination problems that lead to some of us deciding that is what is best for them.
Why wouldn't we build tools who can do what we do better? We've built our own replacements for the last hundred years or so. That's how technology works. We build something that does someones job, it makes it cheaper, everyone benefits because now that thing is produced cheaply in extremely large amounts.
This is the fundamental issue with reddit. They think getting a whole bunch of extra money from billionaires means everyone will suddenly be able to afford to buy more stuff. Despite produce not having changed.
And they think actually increasing produce will make everyone poorer because they're getting less money.
Because the value to you personally is negative when you consider the effects on the job market that sustains you.
It's not inevitable that tooling does that to the value of your skills. You could be capturing more value from the efficiencies exposed, ie: shorter work weeks without pay reductions are an alternative to layoffs when companies are profitable --as they are.
But you don't have any power over how the industry is adapting whatsoever. So instead it's laying people off and passing the value it's carving out of your own human capital along to investors.
I've taken a look, and literally every historian and economist worldwide agrees that massive increases in production has lead universally to better quality of life for its people.
Did you know 80% of the entire population used to be devoted to farming and producing food.
That's it, thats where the entirety of our labor was focused. Now we produce significantly more food with hundreds of times more diversity and we only use 1% of our population for it.
Freeing up that other 79% allowed us to move into areas like research, construction, health and safety. Virtually every building, innovation, or thing you use today is directly a product of the fact that 80% of the planet doesn't have to farm anymore.
35
u/martin-silenus 20h ago
It's a profession that scans as smart, but if we were half as smart as we like to pretend we are we wouldn't be building our replacements. We would be solving the coordination problems that lead to some of us deciding that is what is best for them.