this post was submitted on 04 Apr 2025
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Great for people getting fired or finding that now the jobs they used to have that were middle class are now lower class pay or obsolete. They will be so delighted at the progress despite their salaries and employment benefits and opportunities falling.
And it's so nice that AI is most concentrated in the hands of billionaires who are oh so generous with improving living standards of the commoners. Wonderful.
This shouldn't come as a surprise. Everyone who's suprised by that is either not educated how economy works or how societal progress works. There are always winners and losers but society makes net-positive progress as a whole.
I have no empathy for people losing their jobs. Even if I lose my job, I accept it. It's just life. Humanity is a really big machine of many gears. Some gears replace others to make the machine run more efficient.
This is just a sad excuse I'm hearing all the time. The moment society gets intense and chang is about to happen, a purpetrator needs to be found. But most people don't realize that the people at the top change all the time when the economy changes. They die aswell. It's a dynamic system. And there is no one purpetrator in a dynamic system. The only purpetrator is progress. And progress is like entropy. It always find its way and you cannot stop it. Those who attempt to stop it instead of adapting to it will be crushed.
This is collateral damage of societal progress. This is a phenomenon as old as humanity. You can't fight it. And it has brought us to where we are now. From cavemen to space explorers.
Which are separate things from people's ability to financially support themselves.
People can have smartphones and tech the past didn't have, but be increasingly worse off financially and unable to afford housing.
And you aren't a space explorer.
I'm not arguing about whether innovation is cool. It is.
I however strongly disagree with your claim that people being replaced is good. That assumes society is being guided with altruism as a cornerstone of motivation to create some Star Trek future to free up people to pursue their interests, but that's a fantasy. Innovation is simply innovation. It's not about whether people's lives will be improved. It doesn't care.
World can be the most technologically advanced its ever been with space travel for the masses and still be a totalitarian dystopia. People could be poorer than ever and become corpo slaves, but it would fit under the defition of societal progress because of innovation.
You really have no idea what life was like just two or three generations ago. At least you now have toilet paper, water, can shower, and don't need to starve to death when the pig in your backyard dies of some illness. Life was FUCKING HARD man. Affording a house is your problem? Really?
The smoke detector, the microwave and birth control pills were invented around the time when we landed on the moon.
People being economically displaced from innovation increasing productivity is good provided it happens at a reasonable pace and there is a sufficient social safety net to get those people back on their feet. Unfortunately those safety nets dont exist everywhere and have been under attack (in the west) for the past 40 years.
Yep that's my point. That they just assumed that it must be the case when that hasn't been the outcome with innovation not coinciding with improved affordable living. Instead it's just been further class divide despite advancements.
Innovation is its own separate thing from human outcomes, and advancement of improved human lives needs its own care and guidance. Its not going to improve just because science and tech is improving. Otherwise humans are no different than any other disposable resource from the view of the powers that be, and will be discarded and abused without care.