Relevant Mitchell & Webb Look sketch: https://youtu.be/nyu4u3VZYaQ

Also that's all well and good, but people won't necessarily take their skills being obsoleted lightly, just shrug their shoulders and disappear into the sunset. It could get to the point (especially if predictions about A.I. replacing a large swatch of jobs turns out to be true) that the people will get violent if unemployment gets too high. Just look at riots in Greece (when youth unemployment was 50%)[1] or France[2] for just a couple of examples.

Granted, that's not going to happen with this particular layoff, especially with the unemployment rate at a low 3.5%, but if it gets back into the double digits, it starts becoming more likely.

This is probably the real reason we gave out stimulus and PPP loans at the beginning of the Covid pandemic - to stop people from being so jobless, broke, that they take it out on the government. Not out of empathy.

[1]: https://www.cnbc.com/2014/11/26/protests-in-greece-expected-...

[2]: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/11/business/france-economy-m...

Someone will make 1000 shoes, all the same, poor quality, nowhere near the fit but they are 1000 shoes while it use to be 5.

Someone will make 1000 inferior loafs of bread. Someone will make 1000 mcdonalds quality hamburgers. Someone will build many crappy houses and stack them until they touch the sky. A box will play audio recordings to thousands while we use to sing and play instruments ourselves. A box will show pictures in stead of us reading books and giving speeches. Someone will also [kinda] have 1000 babies in stead of 5.

But we price everything at a point where profit is maxed for what people can afford and we buy 1000 things in stead of just the 5 we needed. If there is any room in the budget we will make housing more expensive.

A coworker of mine always has pain in uhhh all parts of his body, everything is sore and worn out.

One a year he goes back to his country of birth, by plane, by train, then by bus, then by taxi then he climbs the mountain. There is the tiny village where he was born. He drinks the spring water, sits in the sun under unpolluted air, eats real vegetables grown on real soil, eats meat from animals who had a good life, eggs from chickens roaming around, milk from happy cows, he takes in the view, talks with relatives. And then, gradually the pains go one by one, the headache clears up, the joins soften, the muscles work again, his head moves back above his shoulders, his eyes work again, he can walk tirelessly.

I'm not trying to make a point, it is just something to think about.

You'll care when they actively subvert the rollout of the new technology. If the technology truly benefits society more than it hurts the craftsman then you can share some of the gains with them so they too can benefit.

We really should aim for both. That the society as a whole is better off when it receives the benefits of creative destruction, it also has a moral obligation to make sure the "destruction" part is only shifting labor and expertise allocation - destroying ephemeral constructs like companies and brands, not actual lives.

It is a moral issue first and foremost, but we can't be burying our heads in the sand here and pretending we didn't know - the issue carries with it a real threat of those whose lives get destroyed rising up to tear down the civilization that crushed it. It's in everyone's self-interest to be on the side of the Luddites.