why are people so against automation in factories if it makes things safer and produces more goods? is it just that people are losing jobs? but there are different jobs that open up.
In: Technology
The world is moving faster and faster but people can’t or refuse to adapt as fast. As lower end jobs are gone, you can’t expect the same amount of people to learn a higher end job like computer programming within a year or even five years. I lost my job due to outsourcing to India. I was lucky to find another career 12 months later.
You’re assuming the same number of jobs will be created as those lost and they will be of the same quality. Many people believe this is why, despite the massive increase in productivity over the last 50 years, wages have stagnated.
The new jobs tend to be poorly paid and have little security.
If you think about it it’s kind of silly that we have to work at all. Most of the necessities are produced without much effort, water and electricity supply is mostly automated, farming at large scales uses heavy machinery, so basic foods are also relatively easy to produce. The population size also isn’t increasing dramatically, so it would be possible to give everyone an apartment. And that is basically all you need to survive…
Shortsightedness. Human resources are the one limiting factor of everything. By freeing up human resources with automation, they can be invested in things that still require humans.
The problem is that this hurts the particular human in the short term, but benefits every other human in the long term.
Simple answer is that machines are much better at doing relatively simple work, so much better that they can outwork several people.
So even if only 10% of the manual labour jobs are mechanized the human workforce looses a lot more than 10% of it’s jobs. Also someone who’s only held low skilled mechanical jobs for most of their life it’s not easy to adapt and learn new skills to compete in that job market.
There are more jobs but not in the same sector. People struggle to adapt when the change is so sharp.
People really aren’t against it. It’s been happening for thousands of years and will continue to happen.
Capitalism doesn’t care if the work you would have been doing is now being done by a machine. If you’re automated out of a job, then you’re out on the street, you’re dying of starvation or exposure.
This is for the same reason that capitalism allows ANYONE to die on the street, whether or not their job got automated.
There are fewer jobs that open up that automation eliminates.
You only need a handful of technicians where you previously needed a couple dozen workers.
It’s largely based on the “lump of labor” fallacy, that if you get rid of a particular job that the same number of people will be unemployed, as opposed to having alternatives now/eventually become available.
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