We have a puritanical idea burned into our society that you have to suffer to live, that you have to work your fingers to the bone to deserve even the most basic necessities of life, and can’t imagine a non-capitalist society where we just provide everything people need to live and not force people to do bullshit busywork just to prove they “deserve” the basics of life.
For ages, we’ve been talking about automation, and how it can free us from the drudgery of menial, dangerous, and repetitive work, freeing us to have more time to live our lives enjoyably and pursue our desires instead or having to spend a third of our lives working. But the problem is that people think that if you don’t work, then you don’t deserve to live, or be happy, or have any kind of enjoyment in your life at all. It’s completely at odds with the kind of society we’ve actually built.
We have so many empty homes in the US that we could give every single homeless person in the country a home, for free, and still have loads left over. But instead we’d rather let them die on the streets because they haven’t “proved” they deserve a life.
We produce so much food that we could just give every single person in this country all the food they’d need to survive, and still not have shortages. But we’d rather throw away 50% of the food we produce because it’s kinda not pretty, or it sits on store shelves until expiration date, and gets chucked in the garbage.
We have Conservatives that talk about how all life is sacred, and we must protect it at all cost, going to far as to value the life of a fetus over the life of a parent. But once that child is born? Fuck them. Can’t afford healthcare? Can’t afford housing? Well then the parent shouldn’t have gotten pregnant. Oh, we have ways to take care of that beforehand? Sorry, no, cant have that either. Let’s make birth control, family planning, healthcare, housing, education, etc. impossible to access. And now that you have an impoverished family? Better get tugging on those bootstraps, because helping you would be unethical and antithetical to our Rugged Individualist ideal.
So many people in this country are absolutely terrified of the idea that someone else, somewhere, might possibly get something they “don’t deserve” and will go out of their way to make people suffer because of it.
So say Amazon replaces all of their warehouse workers with robots. Those are objectively horrifying jobs that we have years of evidence to prove. People suffer and die in those warehouses. So getting people out of them is a good thing. But what then? You’ve “freed” them, but to do what? Maybe they live in an area where that Amazon job was the best paying one, and moving or finding other work or going to school, etc. just simply aren’t options.
The robots aren’t the problem. Our society is the problem. And it’s completely and utterly broken. Until captialism is destroyed, there won’t be a meaningful solution to this.