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In response to automation replacing jobs I often say "Get a career that is high-skill that cant be automated"...
What people thing I mean:
* Mathematician
* Programmer
* Electrical Engineer
What I mean:
* Everything above
* Magician
* Actor
* YouTuber
* Etc.
@freemo An old problem with organizing a society... naively, one would expect productivity gains to translate into more leisure time for everyone. Yet, that never materializes and people are pushed to either be productive or at least look like it.
Oh, but the productivity gains DO translate into more leisure time for everyone.
It's just that people go on to trade that leisure for wanting more stuff.
It's easy to work for the standard of living of a century ago. It's just that now we want air conditioning and YouTube in addition to food.
If that's your point then why bring up leisure?
Anyway, that's a gross over-generalization with echos of the old Luddite attitudes that we so rightly criticize.
Not only will so many made redundant by productivity gains continue to earn money doing other things, but often those things will have been made possible by the productivity gains themselves.
And the gains in productivity will even unlock more opportunities for leisure, that you were so concerned about.
There will always be folks in difficult situations that society needs to address, but productivity gains also makes that easier as well.
Bring on the productivity gains. Let's not cling to the past out of fear of advancemet.
Again, if I had a winner takes all mentality, Why would I go out of my way to say one of the benefits of increased productivity is that it lets us better help those in need?
If you really want to frame it as winners vs losers, I'm explicitly talking about the loser taking, though I wouldn't frame it that way *because I don't have the mentality you're asking about :)*
So, growing up I always heard them referred to as I described above, backwards people clinging to the past over fears of the future.
You'd refer to someone as a Luddite because they refused to change to newer things, like a person refusing to get a smartphone even though they'd like it better because they were just used to an old flip phone.
That's the use of the idiom that I've so commonly heard.
@volkris @freemo But... are we talking about idioms or about human relations?
I would decline to talk about idioms, since i am not a linguist - i would be out of my depth, and it would be highly academic.
The base of this was, at least for me, about equity. It does seem to be missing from our current societys in many countries, and that was what i was trying to say.
So, with your often professed love for new things that advance us, do you think equity is there? All good, we just need to embrace the new?
We were using an idiom to talk about human relations :)
But one that was particularly relevant considering the historical developments that it referenced.
But no, not everything new is good. There are plenty of new things that fail. You had narrowed in on advancements that increased productivity and had implications for leisure, which I'd say focuses on the new things that work, not the ones that don't.
After all, a failed program--a bad new thing--is likely to harm productivity and intrude into leisure, unlike the ones you seemed to have in mind.
@volkris @freemo Hmm, if you insist, i will invoke wikipedia...
"They protested against manufacturers who used machines in "a fraudulent and deceitful manner" to replace the skilled labour of workers and drive down wages by producing inferior goods."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luddite
So, it seems there is another dimension except "working"? It did work out for textile manufacurers, but not so much for the workers.
Leaving us where we started: i do claim that prodictivity gains are not equally distributed.
While i know freemo for a bit and am convinced that his snark is mainly aimed at getting more precise statements, you do not have this kind of standing. You sidestep, you invoke new things as helpful, you completely ignore my appeals at equity. You have a choice here: take this discussion seriously or do not.
Wow, you really threw some bombs with that criticism there. I don't know where that came from.
Anyway, it seems to me that you're changing your claims faster than I can address them. It's not that I'm sidestepping, rather I'm having trouble following your points.
At one point it was leisure, another it was equity, or equality, or winners and losers, or the workers being displaced, or workers in general... I think you're all over the place here, and it's hard to follow.
So, when you claim productivity gains are not equally distributed I say YES I COMPLETELY AGREE. Of course they aren't. Why would they be? Different people want different things and value different things differently.
Just as additional production and accessibility of iPhones will favor iPhone users and not Android users... but why would that metric matter?
But this is a brand new front, as far as I can remember in this thread.
Fortunately, we're in agreement there so I guess it's resolved.
As for the inequality problem, why would I go out of my way to state that society needs to address it if I want it to exist?
We ABSOLUTELY need to address peoples' needs, and that's exactly why we need to embrace increases in productivity, as that gives us more resources to do exactly that.
@admitsWrongIfProven
Honest question: Wait, you haven't heard Luddite having a negative connotation?
I thought that was the overwhelmingly common understanding of the term, backwards people clinging to the past out of irrational fear.
I wonder if you'd mind giving a sense of where you grew up because it's genuinely important to know what idioms are used where when trying to converse.
@freemo