People resist the automation of labour by machines because they believe that this will rarefy jobs – that the job market will become scarce, and that there will be fewer sources of income. This will in turn mean that there will be more have-nots than ever before, because there’s not enough work to go around as is. They think that the powers that be are saying “we have decreed that you need money to live, but we’re not going to provide you with any way of getting that money”. But what people don’t realize is that automating labour enables us to phase out the use of and the need for money. Not having any way to earn money isn’t a problem if you don’t need money to exchange for what you need to live, and if you can instead freely take what you need to live. The point of money is to make people work: you can ONLY survive by exchanging money for the things you need to live, and you can ONLY acquire money BY working. Survival depends on working, so we work, and this is the only way we’ll work. The reason for this is that the idea of working full-time at soul-crushing drudgery is inherently unappealing. There is no incentive to do such work as this – the work is not inherently rewarding, and we have to be dragged kicking and screaming to do it. A false incentive not inherent or intrinsic to the work must be created – the incentive that says “you get to survive if you do it”. We don’t want all our time dominated by tedious, monotonous, homogeneous labour, and we don’t want all our energy to be spent on it either.

Variety is the spice of life and is vital for a person to be happy. But, the labour is necessary, so it must be done. Because humans are the only capable source of labour we have, and because the work must be done, we have no choice but to force humans to do the work by making their life depend on it. It’s work or starve. However, if we can rely on a different and equally (if not more) capable labour source that will do the work without complaint, we will. What this would mean is that we would no longer have to bully people into doing the work by making their lives depend on it. In short, we can take away the institution that forces people to work, because people not working would not be a problem anymore. It is not as though nothing would get done if we liberated people from labour, because machines would now be handling it all. There would be no more need for money, and we could have unconditional access to life’s necessities.

If you create infrastructure that freely, unconditionally provides everyone with what they need to live, you must have some way to deal with the resulting sharp decrease in employment. You would no longer have people over the barrel – they wouldn’t no longer have to work shit jobs to live, and so wouldn’t. So, you’d have to automate all the labour left unattended by socially protected people. Likewise if you first automated all the awful labour, you would leave the jobs market virtually empty, and there would barely be any way for anyone to make any money, and they wouldn’t be able to purchase what they needed to live. So, in this case, you would have to create infrastructure that provided people with necessities freely.

The automation of labour is only a "threat" or a "risk" if we think myopically about it. We are so imaginatively locked into the logic of capitalism that we fail to see this as a step towards a real utopia. If we respond to the automation of labour CORRECTLY, the world will become a much better place.

Robots or machines may save time for sure but we have to maintain an equal balance so our society too maintain the balance.

Constant A.I. updates/upgrades is the key for better robotics which will eventually kill a lot of jobs.

This is what most first and emerging market world countries are aiming for anyway.

You get what asked for.

And then just like that a short circuit will make machinery....
https://youtu.be/QVKXkaNKL9...

We should become robot mechanics.

Good talking point.

There's at least one story about this every month and the end point is the same. At the end of the day the discussion is as much aboutwanting control and wanting freedom. It's using technology to strike the balance.