re: #257 Belafon

The people cheering don’t seem to grasp that most of their jobs are going to be impacted by the same automation. And while I’m actually in favor of automating a bunch of the monotonous tasks (which humans are lousy at dealing with), our version of capitalism is not set up for a lot of out of work people.

Too many wingnuts who cheer the oncoming automation fall into one of two groups: Those who are already retired and so don’t feel they have anything to worry about and those who think their jobs are “impossible” to automate. The former doesn’t consider that the jobs lost will mean more of a drag on the economy while the industries hurt by the reduced demand will affect their stock portfolios. And the latter is either too young or too dumb to have paid attention to the mountain of jobs once considered “too complicated” or “too vital” to be done by a machine rendered obsolete by increasingly sophisticated automation.

To give an anecdotal example, my hotel is presently joining a major chain, and we’re privately marveling at a lot of the things that the chain hotels take for granted that we’re so used to doing ourselves. We’re to immediately shunt all reservations calls to a central reservations center, and will actually get fined if we don’t. Likewise all refunds have to go through accounting, when previously managers or even front desk clerks could do it themselves directly. But the big thing that spun our heads was the new RFID room locks which can be opened with smartphones using the hotel chain’s proprietary app service. I remarked to the lady training us on the new property management system that before long, they won’t need more than an automated kiosk in the lobby. To which she assured me that there’s just too much stuff that happens at a front desk that a human needs to do. I’m trying to put a list together of those tasks and most are so mundane that I can easily see their being automated in my lifetime.