And I was going to comment the same thing about Drafters. They will never be gone, atleast not for a very long time. Drafting is designing, which will never be automated. They will just use different tools to do it. Just as a lot of the other jobs will.
Nope. The old job of drafter is totally non-existent. The people who call themselves drafters today are actually doing a much more sophisticated job then what the original comment was talking about. Drafting used to be the process of taking the design and making the requisite copies. As technology has advanced, and we've gone from blue prints to overlays and into the digital world, drafting took on more and more design related responsibilities and fewer reproduction related responsibilities.
In an architect's office in 1950 there are about 1/4 of the people as in an architect's office today. And relative to the amount of training needed to do the lowest job in the office, every one of those jobs was lost at the bottom.
Secretaries still exist? Really? At your job, where is the door to the secretary pool? That room with fifty people all sitting behind typewriters manually reproducing documents?
Every time you create a document digitally, at print-quality detail, and are then later able to change it, or even find the saved location, you are doing the following jobs that no longer exist:
Secretarial
Printing
File Clerk
Archivist
These words are being used and there may even be
a single person at your office that does this work, but the ratios are way different than they used to be.
Check a dozen emails before lunch? Your office has 1/10th a "mail room" staff that it used to. Most places don't even have a mail room anymore.
In 1970, the design firm I worked at had a strict rule, one secretary and draftsman per engineer. By 1985 it was one secretary and draftsman per 4 engineers. By the time I started there, it was one secretary per office and one draftsman per
region (15 states or so). And by the time I left the secretary had been replaced by a digital receptionist and the draftsman responsibilities were expected to be handled by the engineers.
All over the country, computers and robots are taking jobs that used to be held by people who 1. stayed in school, 2. worked hard, 3. followed through, 4. got the training, 5. went along.
I don't support the idea because it is a moral imperative that we come to an understanding of the value of a person outside of the work they do (though I think that is a thing). I support the idea because it's just a better solution to what we're already doing. Basic income makes more sense than welfare. Every argument against it is also an argument against welfare, because you're missing the point.
And the work disincentive goes away if you keep the benefit lower.
Think about it a different way. What if your job was replaced today at the exact same time something terrible happened. So you are starting at zero, no house, no savings, and no marketable skills.
Where is the virtue in being able to come back from that on your own? Setting aside the argument that it is possible to even do it, why should it be necessary? And wouldn't you be able to do it faster with a little help?
I think of every tool that I would reach for in order to start over completely. The first is the internet, well, need a PC/phone and a connection. Hmm...library! Need a way to get there. Could walk? Need clothes and shoes though. Can't walk naked and dirty into a public library. Would be nice to have something to write on/with. Also would be cool if had a decent meal beforehand so I could really start the job search.
I don't think it is rational to say that no help should be available. And I don't think it is rational to withhold help because some might abuse it. I think it is rational to say that there are such a thing as needs. And in today's world, to be efficient about serving needs, we need to acknowledge that there is just a lot that goes into the basic needs to be a functional human being.
"Why doesn't that homeless person just watch some youtube videos on how to not be homeless?" Food, shelter, clothing, access to basic education/skills. Don't be the person who can't acknowledge that working 80 hours a week with 20 hours of commuting thrown in for good measure just to barely die broke isn't a thing point to as success. It could be worse. We can do better though.
When I am in my most desperate need, none of you is going to understand what I need better than I do. Cash will help me more than anything else. It would be the most efficient way for you to help me. But because of your insistence that I won't do the right thing with it you're going to waste a vast amount of the cash earmarked to help me to make sure I'm "helped right."
Even if the job you do as a draftsman happens to be the exact job it was 20 years ago, and not just you getting paid way less to do a job that used to be much higher in prestige but has just been renamed draftsman to justify not paying you properly, that is irrelevant to the conversation.
Jobs require a lot more training/focus today than they used to. It is harder to maintain a robot that does a job than it is to do the job directly. Think of that as a fundamental law of thermodynamics. Entropy of effort. Even if a robot replaces a job but creates a new job on a 1:1 basis, you're still taking someone who used to have a job and rendering them unemployed (and likely unemployable) and creating a new job they aren't qualified for and giving it to someone else.
Just remember the day you smiled and said "that's not my problem" the first time a robot delivers a car that drives itself built by a factory that was built by a factory that builds factories, to drive you to the job you just lost because all your customers lost their jobs.
It isn't likely to be a world with no jobs. It might be a world where your employment is entirely up to you. Where employers are simply the owners of robots. After all, how many small business owners actually employ an accountant, vs. a software program?
If you start a furniture business in 20 years, are you going to hire some 18 year old with 10 liabilities on his hands to come cut wood, learn the trade, move up in your business until he saves up enough to start his own, or are you going to pay some 40 year old robot tech for 10 hours of work to set up the robot to cut the wood 24/7/365 with no back-talk, increasing your yield without adding the cost of employees? Who will buy your fucking furniture? The robots sit on the goddamn floor!
It is already much harder today to start a business than it should be, the barriers to entry get steep, and only access to certain things like technology / internet is doing anything to counter that. But you can't access the technology / internet if you are dragging your hands in the sand trying to find food and shelter.
