Technology is going too far

When the self check out stations first came out I said the same thing to a friend. They could have four employees checking out customers. He responded with this, you have people building the machines and maintaining them also. So yes on losing some jobs but gaining other jobs. And like Zen said you can’t stop progress. Whether it be a boon to society or a bane.

You aren't wrong. Human flaws are why jobs as sofware Developers/Testers and anything in cybersecurity are pretty stable. You have to always be learning or you become obsolete, but if you stay up on things there will always be a job for you.

As far as replacing jobs, manually operated elevators were before my time but it is still illegal to pump your own gas in NJ as far as I know. Unions of elevator workers kept them going even when push buttons were added, but they finally disappeared. NJ has a job market for people to pump your gas for you, whether you want "full service" or not. I remember having to teach a friend in college how to pump her own gas because she came from NJ.

But while most of us may agree that those jobs don't need to exist, there are present ones that we may argue are important. Think of all the people working in a grocery store for their pick-up and delivery services:



Well, for now they still need people to stock the slots the robots pull from, clear malfunctions, and maintain the robots but robot maintenance isn't an entry level summer job. You need more advanced knowledge to fill some of the roles replacing others.

But delivery drivers are safe, right?

selfdrivingdelivery.dominos.com/en

We have talked about autonomous vehicles before, but Domino's is actually testing some for pizza delivery. Pair these with the robot grocery store and you have a very convenient world for us all to live in. That is, as long as the systems keep working and we can find jobs that can't be automated.

There is one big job sector I've seen continue to grow despite efforts to automate it. Customer service/tech support/call centers in general. So as not to go on forever, I'll limit to Customer service for now.

Nobody wants to talk to a robot or leave a voice message when they are upset. So, we are increasingly an impatient, "I want it and I want it now" society that drops any sense of courtesy when a customer service problem comes up, yet more and more of us are finding that the most or only available job. The irony of people HATING their work because people are awful to them when they, themselves, are awful when they the need to call customer service.

This is especially big right now with the home delivery services available (Amazon, Walmart, Meijer, Kroger, UberEats, DoorDash, etc.) that enable a work-from-home lifestyle during the pandemic. Check Indeed or any other job listing site and see the flood of customer support agent listings.

Or we could evolve past technology.  To not be able to imagine it is an eyerollingly limited and narrow outlook on "science fiction".  After all, who and what we are now is nothing more than light that was compressed and morphed at the beginning of everything.  Now that compressed light is self aware and questioning it's own origins.  Why is it not at least possible that this light, who is now questioning it's own existence from inside of a casing made of matter, can't someday become self-aware light in a non-corporeal form similar to that from which it was originally formed? 

But more importantly, how much of ourselves can we replace with technology before we cease to be ourselves?  How much hardware replacement does it take to not be human anymore? 

Well, here is a basic case that makes the argument we will have to extend what we define as "being human". I can have an app on my phone vibrate to alert me if a client's server goes down. Likewise, I can feel this distinct vibration pattern in my watch. This communicates information to me about the status of a web-facing server in such an naturally tactile way it is functionally indistinguishable from me noticing a raindrop on my skin.

Now, to be honest, I have been out of the MSP IT game for a while and I don't miss being that plugged in, but yes we have technologies to extend out awareness from this simple example to the vastly more complex.

To cite a Zen koan: "The five tones make a man deaf, the five colors make a man blind."

I was a child in the last days of the gas station attendant. I remember them. I grew up when self service started to really get big in the 1980s. I am getting old too. 😿

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I would have to respectfully disagree with your statement on 80s cartoons. That’s when they really started to emphasize educational and public messages in them. The sixties and seventies were the best cartoons. Gratuitous violence, stupid situations, adult humor for latter when you grew up AND no messages. Now music, I’m a child of the 60s & 70s and the music was great but just damn, the 80s did have some awesome music. Oh, and talking about the nuclear threat, it’s was still around in the 80s but did you ever get under your desk (yes like those old black and white films) for a nuclear bomb drill because everyone knows those old time school desks could protect you from nuclear bombs and radiation. I actually did that as a child in Los Angeles.

" When you can balance a tack hammer on your head, you will head off your foes with a balanced attack."

Sphinx

Howler, you just named all the greats. Watched all those. Never heard of Star Blazers. The only 80s cartoon I watched sometimes was Thunder Cats. Hated He-Man.

IMHO, all it takes is a Bluetooth headset and a cellular device to concentrate on, so that they waddle along in public, talking to thin air and bumping into people.