When I moved from California to Oregon I was floored that citizens were legally not allowed to pump their own gasoline into their car. Every station has attendants that pumped your gas for you by law. Apparently this law dates back all the way to 1951 and is rooted in "safety concerns" and job creation. But are those really the kinds of jobs we want to be keeping around?
Now that I live in Pennsylvania at the border of both New Jersey and New York I'm having flashbacks to my old Portland days. New Jersey is the only other state in the country that also doesn't allow you to pump your own gas. A few months back I drove into the state and pumped my own gas because the attendant wasn't around and I honestly didn't even remember what state I was in at the time (NJ is a pretty tiny state after all). The display was different than self service stations and I didn't realize what I had done until the attendant came out and commented how I must not be from around here, lol.
Self-checkout at the grocery store is another up-and-coming trend as well. Like everything else people complain that jobs are being made 'redundant' (a common term in the UK). Yeah well... that's EXACTLY the type of job we should be looking to eliminate in the first place right? Why does everyone think that every job should always exist forever. Isn't this Luddite thinking?
Technology creates abundance and automation.
You know the really nice thing about being able to pump your own gas? Stations are open 24/7. Yeah, if you run out of gas in Oregon at 3 AM it's pretty difficult to get more petrol. All the places that sell it are closed. Looks like Oregon is finally rolling back this law which is nice to hear, but of course there are those who oppose such things because it can be extremely difficult to find a job in Oregon depending on the market cycle.
Why doesn't anyone address the real problem?
The real problem with automation has nothing to do with a loss of jobs, but rather an increasingly centralized distribution of wealth. The company fires their employees and then replaces them with machines at a cheaper price. But those jobs were shit. We need better jobs, not crap ones that pay minimum wage and have zero opportunity to advance within a company. The corporate structure has been failing slowly over time for decades. A pension? What's that?
I hear there's another writers strike in Hollywood.
I'm going to chuckle to myself when AI starts writing the scripts. Striking doesn't work anymore. The ultra-wealthy can now outlast the plebs and undercut them. Automation can't be stopped.
AI has proven itself particularly good at lawyering. Declaring bankruptcy is comically expensive, as ironic as that may be. What happens when people can file legal paperwork for a couple hundred dollars in court fees instead of $5000 to a bankruptcy lawyer? I'll take 'disruption' for $300, Alex.
All value comes from automation.
When cavemen made tools to help them perform a certain task, that was a basic form of automation. Sure, the task didn't complete itself, so it wasn't fully automated, but people have been eliminating the drudgery and difficulty of work since the beginning of time. Work smart not hard. Without this society wouldn't have many any progress whatsoever. Why do so many people fight it?
It's quite obvious that technology isn't and has never been the problem. AI coming in and eliminating 50% of all the jobs is not a bad thing, it simply forces us to figure out how to better distribute wealth. Spoiler alert: UBI via CBDC is a piss-poor solution that results in pseudo-slavery, which is exactly why it's not going to work very well in the face of any other reasonable option.
People want to work.
Politically there are a lot of people out there that seem to think that the average person is lazy and those bums just need to "pick themselves up by the bootstraps". Yeah, that's not how the world works. The world economy grades on a curve, if everyone tried harder that just raises the bar for everyone else. That's how grading on a curve works. If everyone does A+ work it doesn't matter, someone's going to fail because the curve demands it. The debt-based system we are living in is a meat grinder that's going to get fed no matter how hard everyone is clamoring to get to the top of the blood-pyramid. There will always be someone on the bottom no matter what; that's a mathematical fact of life.
Crypto will not be taken seriously until it provides jobs.
If a single cryptocurrency created a job opportunity that paid even just $5 an hour it would be national news. Users from all around the globe would do that job if only for the novelty of it. Of course $5/h in certain places is actually a lot. A rising tide raises all ships.
Of course the whiplash to that development would almost certainly be crypto being accused of slave-labor by the powerful entities that are threatened by crypto. Make no mistake, they're just jealous they can't legally get away with paying their workers such low wages, at least in USA they can't. How many companies move overseas to avoid these exact regulations? Cough Nike Cough. Of course there are so many other examples but once you gain such infamy it never goes away. People don't forget.
Maybe you're thinking that I make more than $5/h writing this blog... and you'd be right, but also you're wrong, because I didn't just spend an hour writing this just so anyone could do it. I clawed and scraped on this network for literal years before the payouts of my posts had any significance whatsoever. That doesn't count.
It's extremely subjective and again... it grades on a curve. There are no guarantees. People want assurances. They like stability and dependability, which is why most of us are so willing to trade our time for money and allow the risk-takers to gamble their stack in regard to the business they've created. The rest of us are sidelined as the big players battle it out over a game of value-capture.
Conclusion
All wealth generated since the beginning of time is rooted in our ability to build upon the backs of giants and leverage the work that our ancestors have accomplished. The phrase "no need to reinvent the wheel" comes to mind. Without technology and other types of advancement, we'd of gotten nowhere as a species.
Unfortunately our inability to scale is holding us back. We are very good at creating tech and pushing forward, but we seem to be very bad at sharing and making sure no one gets left behind. Greed and ambition can help us push forward, but inevitably it's the double-edged sword that holds us back. How do we resolve such happenstances? Hopefully crypto has something to say about that, but that is yet to be seen on a practical level. Three steps forward, one step back. Always.
Return from All Wealth Comes from Automation to edicted's Web3 Blog
