Post

i think a core beef that i have with a lot of this "automation is bad" sentiment lately is that there is no inherent moral good in laboring the story of humanity is one of invention, where we improve our conditions by building things that help us do more things more easily

sort of along my recent repost, the issue at hand has been the same since the dawn of capitalism: when automation increases productivity, who gets to capture the value of that productivity increase? the beef is not with the productivity. it's with the value capture

I think also negative externalities as well not being compensated for by those who are capturing that value e.g. xAI and Gas Turbines being turned on in black neighborhoods. I think it's good to be mad at that and the people making those decisions.

Degradation of quality matters, too. I see a lot of parallels to what happened with textiles. Yeah we got more "productive", but we went from a world where pieces of clothing routinely lasted an entire lifetime to fast fashion and disposable clothing that you're lucky to have last a year