George Rebane
RR reader and longtime friend sent me a current piece on the theme of machines replacing humans in the workplace (here). The article focuses on the current labor crunch reported under the ‘I quit’ spate of news articles. Hard to tell how many jobs are actually going unfilled, but the number is somewhere north of 6M. Workers are not applying for a couple of reasons – they don’t have the skillsets required and they’re already getting enough government payouts to support their lifestyles.
As you might guess, those greedy capitalists with open job slots are not just sitting on their thumbs. They are doing everything possible to reduce the cost of expensive, undependable, recalcitrant, and quirky labor and substitute machines wherever possible. The more workers, on or off the job, resist, the faster the development and acquisition of replacement robots.
But I and most observers of this process believe that the road to robotics will not be traveled quietly with just the judicious substitution of universal basic income (UBI). One of the core attributes of Man is his irrepressible demand to be relevant in his environment, no matter the size of his UBI check. This will give rise to a spate of modern age luddite riots demanding that robots be excluded from a catalog of jobs to be reserved for humans. These uprisings will be promoted and championed by leftwing politicians within a whole new category of vote-buying policies.
RR is a repository of many commentaries that deal with this most human problem of pre-Singularity systemic unemployment. A sampling of these from just the last ten years are available here, here, here, here, here, and here.
rebanesruminations.com 
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