imagine wrecking your life working to advance a thing for which the ultimate end goal is to replace you entirely
imagine wrecking your life working to advance a thing for which the ultimate end goal is to replace you entirely
That isn’t new with AI. Non-AI Automation has been the goal (and achievement) of business for decades.
Automation is great , everything should be automated as much as possible.
IF everyone benefits from it in the form of higher wages/less working hours due to the higher productivity.
IF everyone benefits from it in the form of higher wages/less working hours due to the higher productivity.
I know this is a common philosophical statement, but I haven’t yet seen a great implementation of it in reality. I’m interested if your approach is viable.
Scenario:
Lets say we have a 25 year old worker named Jim. Jim was hired and his job for 1 year was to log into a system, look up specific values, and populate these values into fields in an Excel spreadsheet. At the beginning of the second year, a small Bash script (computer code) was written by an engineer and set to run on a repeating daily schedule that did all of the lookups and sheet population that was Jim’s entire job. The entirely of Jim’s job has been replaced by automation.
Result:
Jim no longer has any work to do for the organization. There aren’t any other open positions at the company for Jim (or if there are Jim is not even remotely qualified to do those other jobs).
- So how would you apply your philosophy to this situation?
- Do you believe the organization should continue to employ Jim even without any work for him?
- Should he be let go, but still paid? If so, how much, and for how long?
In my opinion, go the Mondragón route. Bring democracy into the enterprise and allow those who work to control how they work. That way those who are being “automated” away can have a voice in what to do next.
Also, your vision of human capacity is very limiting. Why can’t Jim learn new skills? Everyone does it, literally all the time. Even construction workers have domain knowledge on how to pour cement that they learnt from others.
If there is truly no capacity in that enterprise a social safety net might be the only viable option.
In my opinion, go the Mondragón route. Bring democracy into the enterprise and allow those who work to control how they work. That way those who are being “automated” away can have a voice in what to do next.
Isn’t that what we already have today? Jim no longer has a job at this employer. Jim can choose where he works next.
Also, your vision of human capacity is very limiting. Why can’t Jim learn new skills? Everyone does it, literally all the time. Even construction workers have domain knowledge on how to pour cement that they learnt from others.
As shown in the example, Jim is not capable of learning the skills (in any reasonable amount of time) to take on another open position at that company. So are you suggesting that Jim go back to school? Who are you suggesting, in your vision, is pay for Jim’s living and school expenses until he is ready to work a position with a higher skillset?
If you look into what the “Mondragón route” is, you’ll understand the differences to the current system.
To sum it up, Mondragón is a federation of worker owned/controlled enterprises/cooperatives. Due to this innovative ownership model democracy is intertwined in all decisions in the companies. Therefore, Jim (workers) gets a real say on how automation is leveraged.
About the possible career change. Mondragón handles it quite gracefully in my opinion. They have internal recruitment that attempts to relocate “obsolete” workers to other parts of the federation, as to avoid severing work relations entirely. They also invested early on in internal capacity to teach themselves through their technical schools. This way the profit of the automation is paying for the education of the workers it replaced.
Jim no longer has a job at this employer. Jim can choose where he works next.
He has to beg employers for a job, the employers get to choose where he works next.
