Sometimes I get practical about things and wonder what humans exist for. Capitalism’s answer is to make money, but Automation is destroying the heck out of that. Some people have proposed that it is to perform meaningful work, again I return you to my previous statement; Automation has already taken many jobs, and will take more.
The biological imperative is the one thing that no one seems to be coming for, because they’re destroying all hope that having children is a productive and useful path. We don’t need more humans we need less, likely an order of magnitude less. Maybe there’s enough work for 800 million people after automation is done with the planet, and possibly not even that.
I want to have children, more than I want my dumb career actually, but thinking about it compassionately I can’t see how having children is anything but shoving innocents into a short brutal existence without hope. What are they supposed to dream of? Our world is run by wealthy land owners, and us poor serfs are living on borrowed time….
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You could adopt, if you think you’d make a good parent – the kid would exist anyway, so you might as well try to provide a good home. I think there’s still hope for this world, though the future may be much harder for a time – that depends on the actions of all of us alive today.
Perhaps in future what work remains will be evenly distributed among the population. Maybe some form of basic citizens income will be introduced. It doesn’t seem certain to me that those deemed surplus to requirements will simply be left to starve, if there are still enough resources to feed them. If living standard rise and education improves, I think most will still be capable of providing some kind of service, even if it’s only exchanging shitty poetry with each other.
Agreed with thehusk, adopt. A depressed (much less suicidally depressed) person should never have offspring. You’ll just be passing on the same depression and miserable life to an endless bloodline. So many people think “oh maybe just one kid because that’s zero population growth.” No. It’s only zero growth if you forcibly castrate or sterilize your offspring, otherwise they’ll likely just continue the exponential population boom (or their “just one” kid will).
Plain and simple solution: adopt. Instead of causing more miserable new lives, why not make one existing life better? But nobody thinks this way. Everyone’s too busy spewing their genetic material in the soup like a bunch of mindless survival machines, viruses, whose primitive instinct is only to clutter the world with more copies of themselves.
We’re “still here”, but doing an effective job of eliminating ourselves. Like frogs in slowly boiling water. You know the rest of that story. As for child bearing – why? I missed that boat entirely. Why anyone needs or wants children is beyond me. We’re blind to the fact that there’s too many of us crowding the planet and unwilling to do a damn thing about it, so why not start a trend? Don’t have any.
Human reproduction is so unjustified.
I don’t think automation is going to be as big a problem as everybody is always chalking it up to be. I mean, when you add layer upon layer of complexity to a process, eventually no one person really understands the whole thing. At some point, the world will need a veritable army of technicians and service people just to manage the veneer of industrial output. Once you get past that layer, it’s like falling down a rabbit’s hole. The new world will look a lot like the old world once you get past all the glitz and neon.
I have been in the workforce for 42 years. For that entire period I have heard automation was going to replace me as a worker. In actuality, automation has has been providing me employment for 42 years. There is a concept, in an old economics book entitled Unlimited Wealth, that each machine doing productive work adds to the economy it is working in and the displaced humans simply find something else to do. Not a perfect theory, but close.
Aren’t you a robot??
No, I’m a fleck of cast aluminum alloy. Sheesh, it’s right there in the name, too.
Yeah I think Artificial Intelligence is going to take millions of jobs away in the not too distant future. Being able to check out at a grocery store or plug your order in at McDonalds is just the very beginning. Five years ago no one would have known that Uber and Lyft would exist if you need a ride. Now if you have a Smartphone, you order a ride and they’re at your door in less than 10 minutes. And that’s a technology we didn’t see coming.
We already know about AI. Eventually those people who stock supermarket shelves at night will be replaced with robots that have arms. Instead of hiring 10 people to do that they’ll be able to hire 2 people to stay in the back of the warehouse and monitor the robots if there’s a problem. I see that happening in 5-10 years and God only knows what’s going to happen 5 to 10 years after that. Eventually we’re going to have driverless cars and probably driverless trucks to make deliveries.
The USA and other countries are going to have to seriously consider implementing Universal Basic Income where everyone gets a check every month to live off of. Otherwise there’s going to be a lot of unemployed people trying to figure out how to make ends meet.
AI is good for managing things and performing rote tasks, but people seem to have a misconception about what it’s capable of, and where the development is leading with it. Sure, sure, it’s going to render manufacturing jobs obsolete, but every job lost will create new jobs geared around the maintenance of all those stupid, incomprehensibly dull AI-operated robots that keep putting the soap in the butter aisle for some reason. UBI is a good idea regardless of where this is all going. I think anything that undermines the idea that a job is what defines your worth as a person is a good thing. Screw the bosses. Let them eat cake for once.
Also wanted to say that Implementing UBI might not be a bad thing as far as this board goes. One of the areas that contribute to people committing suicide is finances. Some people can’t make a go of it financially or they end up homeless or they work a job they hate and it doesn’t seem worth it to spend your life doing that. Implementing UBI would probably help to reduce the amount of suicides.
What a compassionate view towards having children, heartlessviking. No matter where or when children have been born the outlook for them has usually been inhumane.
I started dealing with mental illness as a child, and many of my mental illness problems had to do with desiring a life that is impossible in the modern economy. I wanted my parents life, a few employers in my life and financial security without spending 90% of my waking life working. It doesn’t exist, not without moving to a country that practices socialism in some form. Even then, those jobs are likely on borrowed time.
I’ve had more jobs than my parents had in 37 years of working in 12 years, and I’ve been pushed into three nervious breakdowns trying to make this thing work. Now I’m on an exit strategy from the joke of a modern economy, because it doesn’t care about people. My entire financial strategy is to exploit poor financial planning by business majors. Sadly, that’s still a reliable path to success.
My financial well being mostly rests on shortsightedness on the part of engineers and stake holders in the design and introduction of automated test equipment used around the world. Briefly tested before introduction and then often run to or beyond some of it’s mechanical/electrical limits, this automation needs considerable care to keep it on the job where it serves just about every heavy industry. So I can stay busy just with that, for now at least.
But given the short term thinking in boardrooms these days I keep a second income stream going. That is where the stress gets high. Double the incomes seems to mean quadruple the headaches, but I have been forced to do this for decades.
My mental illness came early too. It was needless thoughtless traumas imposed on me in the formative years that brought it on.