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@hansw@mastodon.social right, but the cause of that is a too many people are underskilled and thus so many people compete for those jobs that the pay goes to shit due to supply-demand.
The solution still remains that people need more skills so there are fewer unskilled workers and as the unskilled worker pool shrinks the supply demand curve demands they be paid more, a living wage.
So the solution is the same if you have too many low-skill workers the solution is to have less
@freemo @hansw@mastodon.social
I actually don't think either of these solutions will work.
Minimum wage is a 90-year-old, depression-era solution looking for a 21st-century problem. It won't help the truck drivers, bus drivers, Uber drivers, UPS drivers, etc. who will soon be out of a job due to self-driving tech. It won't help construction workers, cooks, soldiers, barbers etc. whose jobs will be lost to robotics. It hasn't helped the retail clerks, educators, factory workers, journalist etc. who have already lost their jobs due to current technological disruptions.
The "let's retrain everybody" idea won't work either because there simply won't be enough jobs for everyone. Even many creative and highly skilled tasks will be automated by AI, such as medial diagnostics, music composition, art, acting, etc.
Also, I think the idea of punishing people with substandard assistance is inappropriate and assumes that people are only motivated to work because of the pay they get. If you had enough money to meet your basic needs without working would you just sit at home eating bon-bons and watching TV all day? Of course not. People are generally miserable when they are out of work not because they're not getting paid, but because they miss working -- being productive, solving problems, collaborating, etc.
The technological disruptions that our future will soon bring us are going to require radically different thinking and solutions, even about our most fundamental notions about work, play, economics and just generally how we live our lives.
I dont agree with the whole "technology is automating things and therefore the world is facing a crisis and we need a solution".. to me this is bore more out the tendency for humans to see the time they live in as special and extraordinary and that the technology of their time is like nothing before it that will change things in ways too scary too imagine... something that every generation has thought for thousands of years.
The truth is "automation" has always been around and has always been quite significant replacing jobs in huge swatchs generation after generation and what we are seeing now is literally no different or exceptional, it just feels that way because what is new is scary and strange. and its hard to see it as equivocal to the technologies of the past.
As an example lets go back to one of the earlier examples of automation, though we never think of it as such, plumbing.. before plumbing thousands/hundreds of years ago there were huge armies of people whose whole job it was to either dig hole after hole for latrines or to shovel human shit into a cart and haul it away in the case of open-air toilets. This was very common around castles where open air toilets were the norm. Then one day plumbing cam around (different times in different places) and now all these people out of jobs.
We can say the same for farms as new hoes and plows and gas motors were created, the loom which replaced hand sowing, they even had complete automated looms. Hell the entire industrial revolution was little more than massive automation .
In all of the countless cases throughout history of automation, all of which were as significant as the ones we see in the present, it didnt cause an unemployment crisis in fact it caused a boom in economies where new more skilled people were the norm and every still had a job (though not always the same jobs) generation after generation... this is no different
@hansw@mastodon.social
