the "automation" angle has been almost entirely bullshit in the modern age.
jobs being lost to technological advancements at a large scale hasn't happened in a very long time. there is a constant trickle of jobs being slowly lost to tech, but it's rather small and it's generally offset by new job openings created from new opportunities that come with the same new technology.
very few jobs are actually being automated away. it's a cover story, an excuse, a scapegoat. the overwhelming majority of lost jobs are lost either to outsourcing or to immigrant labor. that is the real issue here, it has been this way for our entire lifetimes, and it will remain so for the foreseeable future.
I agree, even with AI in the mix. I just did not want to completely discount the other guy's sentiment when we more or less agreed with each other. Most of the automation that could be easily implemented was implemented quite a long time ago, and while there have been some small developments here and there, I think a lot of it is overstated. We have been "five years" from self driving semi trucks for twenty years at this point, for example.
The vast majority of it is due to outsourcing and immigration, as you pointed out. I also think we need to not discount other people's experiences, considering that we need a more unified voice as Americans opposing our replacement. White Replacement is the same whether it's by bot or """man""".
Fun little story, if you want:
A big weld shop I have done third party work for installed half a dozen robot welders, and they have been happy as shit about it from what I heard from the "huge" reduction in man hours. They have four articulating arms, can put small parts on the beam, can weld out of position, can weld three sides of a beam without turning the piece with a crane, and does it faster than a human. Neat! The problem is, each unit is half a million dollars, they can't do anything else, a very expensive technician still has to come out twice a month to calibrate them, all weld wire and parts are proprietary and can only be purchased from the vendor, the wire takes way longer to replace because it has effectively four moving weld whips, and it can't weld the out of spec beams that are made all the time.
Also: no custom work, it can only do fill beams and box columns, it needs two full time men in the form of a crane operator and a beam length checker, and they have a
paid subscription service for hours ran on the machine. They have to pay a
ransom for their half a million dollar "automated" welders to work!!!! Part of why the technician comes out is to "calibrate" more hours into the welding machine so that it will work, otherwise it just locks itself out and they are fucked. Unfortunately, I wasn't able to find a cost on the subscription fee, but that had me cackling when I found out.
But hey, they "reduced man hours", so who gives a fuck that they are millions in the hole now and don't even own the machines? They were able to fuck six American men out of a welding job and replace them with two Mexicans, and hey, isn't that what really matters? It will take them decades to break even off of those machines, I guarantee it.
This is why I fundamentally do not believe that automation is going to replace all jobs. The greedy, short-sighted desire to replace humanity at every turn is the same greedy, short-sighted desire to rip off your
mark customer that all the rest of these corpo creatures have, and the same greedy, short-sighted desire to replace your competent native workers with every slack-jawed simpleton that you could rustle up from Calcutta. They can not help but eat each other.
