> In reality automation seems to be a source of widespread immiseration beneficial to only a few.
Are you serious?
The printing press alone has benefitted humanity as a whole immensly over the last centuries.
And there were piles and piles more of automation necessary for us to be able have this discussion right now - on a global scale and at virtually no cost to either of us.
This talk about technology taking jobs from people is utter nonsense. This has happened before - the Industrialization. People are freed from unnecessary chores like harvesting or standing at the cashier, for example. Soon enough new types of jobs were in high demand - mathematicians, engineers, professors. This enabled further development in other professions - more doctors, teachers, historians, etc.
Same thing will happen now. Just look at the education landscape. Data science is taught EVERYWHERE.
Industrilization made humanity able to focus on exact sciences. The advancement in exact sciences will enable us to focus on social studies, philosophy, history, ecology, medicine, law, system design.
One big issue that people tend to miss when comparing current situation to the previous years is the fact that machines are making more machines. See, when combine harvester or loom was invented people were needed to build these machines, so it was fairly easy to move them from doing one manual job to another. Right now however, that one machine can be build by another machine.
When I recently helped build a machine to automate some test processes at a local company it took us about 120 hours in total to do it. The machine will replace three people. All of the components that were used were either computers, software or electronics. This is not something that any of these employees will be ever able to do, as they are simply a very low skilled, uneducated workers, from impoverished neighborhood. The next machine that we may be building for this company will take us even less time, as we have everything already designed, and tested. We just need to put few components together and verify that it works. It will maybe take us 16 hours to do it.
When it takes you less than a week of work to replace three people, there is no way that the jobs for these employees can be created fast enough.
It's not only about intellectual jobs; it's also about more powerful abstractions.
With the same resources spent on the same amount of workers for example, a company will produce more than in the past.
It's not necessarily true that in such conditions, the company would choose to keep the productivity constant employing less workers.
You seem to be discussing net human effects and cherry picking a particularly positive example. I'm discussing the immediate effects of automation on the lives of the workers formerly employed in the automated jobs.
Are you serious?
The printing press alone has benefitted humanity as a whole immensly over the last centuries.
And there were piles and piles more of automation necessary for us to be able have this discussion right now - on a global scale and at virtually no cost to either of us.