Automation – Good or Evil?

Automation good or bad, a good question. We know automation is here and more is coming. Be it good or bad could depend on which areas automation is and will be affecting and with the individuals be they workers or profit takers.

The big expansion that appears to be coming is with transportation on roads and may be rail. To some extent this is already within aviation with autopilot, but more could be on the horizon as could be with oceanic transportation.

With roads this will lead to driverless cars, which if you follow this through could be the end of taxi drivers, but also expansion into trade transport so could affect lorry and van drivers. Then there will be public transport covering buses and trams and this would extend onto rail travel with driverless trains. How will the rail unions deal with that?

But automation could extend into other industries such as care to some extent and maybe even some aspects of nursing.

Should all or even some come to pass this will have a drastic effect on the various employment areas and more than likely effect greater proportions of the employed and self employed sectors.

Yes, all the affected persons could be retrained but retrained into what areas and will there be sufficient opportunities within any of the other areas and it will limit a person’s choice. But the firstly it will have to be the respected workers who need to be the priority areas, for the profit takers will always benefit to varying degrees. Who could say why bother with the profit takers, but we discount them completely who will provide the required investments.

Done correctly this should improve everyone’s quality of life, but would the quality be acceptable to everyone, especially then their choice of the aspects of life may not have been considered.

There is then the ages of the employment market to consider, will all be ready for change, could it be that some age ranges be more open to change then others.

Will the monetary reward (wages/salaries) be sufficient to maintain life.
Should this be the opening or the opportunity to bring in the universal guaranteed income, so that all persons will receive an income irrespective on what employments they are engaged in.
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But this assumes all have the capacity to undertake a working position.

Where will sickness be in all this and also those who because of various disabilities will never be able to engage in engage in any forms of employment.

Here I am not relating to persons who should be able to work, but decide not to do. There are within the population some who wish to work but because of their disability this can never be a realisation. Yes, people can be trained some techniques to mitigate some disabilities. But there are some disabilities where this will never be a realisation because they will lack the capacity through no fault of their own.

So on paper automation can look good for us all, but in reality this will not be so for us all.

Any outcome or outcomes need to take all the various situations into account and not just discount various sectors of the community.

For some life is and will be not easy, but they still have a right to a life.

Opher's World

Automation – Good or Evil?

It seems to me that every innovation that comes along heralds in a new age of possibility and a new age of problems.

Just like the start of the industrial revolution, which spawned the Luddites of yore, these developments threaten existing jobs and ways of life. They are usually seen as a bad thing but gradually we adjust to them. The old ways never survive. Once the new age comes in the old is shunted out.

We saw this with the new machines of the industrial age that threw people out of work and ripped apart communities that had existed for centuries. No longer were masses of labour required to farm the land; machines could do the work more efficiently. The workers poured into the cities and ended up slaves to machines in the factories. Trains, trams, cars, diesel engine ships and planes replaced the…

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Jimmy Dore on the MIT Professor Showing Trump Wrong about Sarin Gas Attack in Syria

Just who is telling the truth, is it propaganda on both sides.

In any conflict it is not just the innocent that suffer, but also the truth.

The innocents should be the prime consideration on all sides of any conflict, not the last, as is shown and proven many times.

Beastrabban\'s Weblog

As well as appearing on Counterpunch’s website, Theodore A. Postol also appeared on RT, and his analysis of the Sarin gas attack in Syria was also covered by Jimmy Dore. Postol is the emeritus professor of Science, Technology and National Security at MIT. He concluded that, contrary to what the American government and Syrian rebels were saying, the poison gas that killed the people of Khan Shaykhun was not dropped as a bomb from a plane, but was released from an improved ground-based weapon, about 12 cm long. Trump and the American media have claimed that the attack was the responsibility of Assad, and launched an attack by Tomohawk missiles on the air force base, from which the attack was supposedly launched, in reprisal.

In this video, Dore savagely critiques the statements of Trump, Sean Spicer and other members of the White House. He makes the point that the American…

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Friedrich Engels: Principles of Communism

Beastrabban\'s Weblog

Looking through one of the secondhand bookshops in Cheltenham last wee, I found a copy of Friedrich Engels’ Principles of Communism, published by Pluto Press. It was written in 1847, and is a very short introduction to Marx and Engels’ ideas of what constituted Communism. It’s 20 pages in length, and is written in the form of a catechism, Engels presenting their ideas as answers to the following questions: What is Communism? What is the proletariat? Proletarians, then, have not always existed? How did the proletariat originate? Under what conditions does this sale of the labour of the proletarians to the bourgeoisie take place? What working classes were there before the industrial revolution? In what way do proletarians differ from slaves? In what way do proletarians differ from serfs? In what way do proletarians differ from handicraftsmen? In what way do proletarians differ from manufacturing workers? What were the…

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Vox Political: Bank of England Economist Says High Executive Pay Damages Economy

Beastrabban\'s Weblog

Mike over at Vox Political has posted a piece about the remarks by Andy Haldane, the Chief Economist at the Bank of England, that Britain’s economy is being damaged by exorbitantly high executive pay. An article in the Independent notes that the average pay of FTSE 100 bosses is now 150 times that of the average UK worker. The Indie then went on to say

This large and growing remuneration gap, Mr Haldane said, “drive[s] a wedge between management and employees…that in turn erodes social capital. A company, like a country, whose physical and social capital is being eroded is one whose wealth-creation capacity is being impaired.”

Social capital refers to trust and relationships in a society and Mr Haldane argued this matters “every bit as much to wealth and well-being” as financial capital such as stocks and shares and other such assets.

It also reported that there have been…

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The Young Turks: US Senator Blames Heroin Addiction on Disability Benefits

Beastrabban\'s Weblog

Okay, this is another video from The Young Turks across the Pond. I’m reblogging it here, because the attitude of the Republican senator, who made this stupid speech is exactly the same as the Conservatives over here. It’s so similar that I wonder how long it’ll be before Ian Duncan Smith, Katie Hopkins, Louise Mensch or some other Tory rentagob makes precisely the same argument in parliament, or in the pages of the Sun or the Mail.

The Republican senator, Tom Cotton, gave a speech to the right-wing Heritage Foundation arguing that disability benefits should be abolished because they act as a disincentive for the disabled to get jobs. He stated that disability benefits encourage increasing numbers of people to stop working to go on them. Eventually there comes a point, according to Cotton, where the sheer number of people on disability benefits drives companies away from an area…

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