Now they can replace them without paying unemployment and pay the new workers a lower wage. This is what they wanted to happen. Mega corporations are a problem we need to solve as a society.
Quality programmers are a finite resource. Amazon chewed through the entire unskilled labor market with their warehouses and then struggled to find employees to meet their labor needs. If they try the same stunt with skilled labor they’re in for a very rude awakening. They’ll be able to find people, but only for well above market rates. They’re highly likely to find in the long run it would have been much cheaper to hang onto the people they already had.
The whole problem with companies like Amazon is that hardly anyone in charge of them seems to care about long term sustainability. They all just invest enough effort to squeeze out some short term profits, earn their bonuses and then leave for another company to do it all again. Nobody is interested in sustainability because there is no incentive to. They’re playing hot potato with the collapse of the company.
Now expand that to the entire planetary economy. Unsustainable short term gains is the entire industrial revolution.
We’re only 300 years in and most life and ecosystems on Earth have been destroyed and homogenized to service humanity. We’re essentially a parasite. It’s not surprising that the most successful corporations are the most successful parasites. It’s just parasites, doing parasitic things, because they’re parasites… from the top down.
We kicked “this quarter” thinking into high gear when Nixon permanently increased inflation.
There has been efficiency gains throughout. Capitalism is amazing for that, far better than other systems.
The problem is too many people. If standard of living is to increase then the resource requirement is due to massive unsustainable population growth.
That and the fact the public hate externalities and don’t want them used at all never mind aggressively.
The problem is too many people. If standard of living is to increase then the resource requirement is due to massive unsustainable population growth.
They’re both important. And crucially, people in developed countries use a lot more resources than those in undeveloped countries. Just look at the resource utilization of our richest people. We have billionaires operating private rocket companies! If somehow, say due to really really good automation, orbital rockets could be made cheap enough for the average person to afford, we would have average middle class people regularly launching rockets into space and taking private trips to the Moon. Just staggering levels of resource use. If we could build and maintain homes very cheaply due to advanced robotics, the average person would live in a private skyscraper if they could afford it. Imagine the average suburban lot, except with a tower built on it 100 stories tall. If it was cheap enough to build and maintain that sort of thing, that absolutely would become the norm.
The only billionaire I know of that is launching rockets is Elon Musk.
That’s just evidence that capitalism is efficient. Because SpaceX has revolutionised space travel making the only reusable rocket doing something all the government agencies said was impossible. NASAs new unbuilt rocket is using tech from the 1970 that they are going to throe away into the ocean on every launch.
The rest you say is meaningless. How you expect this robotic skyscrapers to be built? Some MIT masters project or some capitalist experiment?
