• unfreeradical@lemmy.world
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      8 months ago

      The suggestion was that workers (“we”) should seek to automate processes that workers prefer not to perform.

      Your objection was that if such automation were possible to achieve and to implement, then they would have already done so.

      Processes of production, and the utilization and development of machinery implicated in production, is determined by business owners, not by workers.

      Business owners are bound by the profit motive, not by a motive to improve the experience of workers.

      Any activity or objective not supported by the profit motive is simply discarded, under our current systems.

      The meaningful suggestion is that workers (“we”) should seek to automate processes that workers prefer not to perform, even if business owners (“they”) have no motive for doing so.

      • helenslunch
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        8 months ago

        Buddy if you “we” could do that “we” never would have been employees in the first place.

        If you think automation is not profitable then you vastly underestimate the costs of running a business and hiring human employees.

        • unfreeradical@lemmy.world
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          8 months ago

          Buddy if you “we” could do that “we” never would have been employees in the first place.

          Workers already are the ones who design and build machines, but our capacities are constrained by business owners, who control the resources of society, including the enterprise that conducts research and manufacturing, and who direct the labor of workers for using the resources they control.

          If you think automation is not profitable then you vastly underestimate the costs of running a business and hiring human employees.

          You are attacking a straw man.

          Some automation is profitable, at any particular time, but some automation may improve the experience of workers without being profitable.

          Various relevant factors include the availability of technologies previously developed through public investment, the degree by which private enterprise is competitive versus monopolized, the structure of the labor pool especially in its degree of stratification, and the relative profitability of other investment opportunities, such as those more overtly framed around speculation, predation, extraction, or exploitation.

          • helenslunch
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            8 months ago

            Workers already are the ones who design and build machines

            Engineers design machines, not sewer cleaners.

            You are attacking a straw man.

            I don’t know what you meant by this if not to imply that it’s not profitable:

            Business owners are bound by the profit motive, not by a motive to improve the experience of workers.

            • unfreeradical@lemmy.world
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              8 months ago

              Engineers are workers.

              Sewer cleaners are workers.

              Neither are business owners, who make the decisions within enterprise, about how workers use enterprise.

              If business owners decide that engineers would design machines, that factory workers would then build, and that sewer cleaners would then utilize, then the events may occur. Otherwise, not, and the determining force is the profit motive, not the will of workers.

              The straw man you attacked was my alleged claim that no automation is ever profitable.

              In fact, at any particular time, some automation may be profitable, and some automation may not be profitable.

              • helenslunch
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                8 months ago

                Yes but sewer cleaners do not have the capacity to create automations…that’s why they clean sewers. That’s what we were discussing.

                • unfreeradical@lemmy.world
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                  8 months ago

                  We are discussing the reasons certain workers may be prevented from having better experiences through automation, even if development, manufacturing, and utilization of relevant automated systems are possible in principle, through the collective capacities of workers as a class.

                  You asserted the premise that the nonexistence of certain systems of automation is sufficient evidence for us to conclude the impossibility of their being caused to exist.

                  The premise is obviously false.

                  • helenslunch
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                    8 months ago

                    No, we are discussing why people choose to work cleaning sewers. Then someone suggested we could automate the jobs. Then I suggested if we could, we would have already (because profits). Then you suggested that only sewer workers could automate those kind of jobs because it wasn’t profitable for companies to do so.