Good to see that Jeff Bezos, of Amazon, has the right attitude towards human labour. We wish to destroy jobs wherever and whenever we can.
Jeff Bezos believes people shouldn’t do jobs software can do’
Exactly the right attitude to have. For there’s no shortage of work to be done, not at all. Therefore we always want to economise on that scarce resource, labour, to get that work done, don’t we?
“He has a mindset that people shouldn’t do jobs that software and technology can do.”
So, imagine this. We desire to move 500 lbs of food from the field to the town where the people want to eat it. It’s about 10 miles from field to town. We have two available technologies. Ten people carrying 50 lbs each in rucksacks, or one bloke with a handcart carrying 500 lbs. The handcart is a technology of course. Which should we use, the technology economising on human labour or not?
One answer is that ten people want and desire jobs so we should use the rucksacks. But that is to be an idiot. The other is use the handcart and leave nine people doing sod all. Which is the correct solution.
Because of course they don’t go and do sod all, will they? Some will weed the field, or pick the spilt grain, so that we’ve more food to eat. Perhaps one will go off and play with and change the kiddies – we’ve happy and dry babbies which is a richness we humans enjoy. One might invent the horsecart so we can save even more people from jobs in the future. It’s even possible that some will just loaf. But leisure is also a wealth that humans enjoy, isn’t it?
Economising on the labour we’re using by employing technology makes us richer. By exactly the extra and different production by those no longer having to do the work now being done by the machine.
That is, when Jeff Bezos says that humans shouldn’t do things which can be done by technology and machines he’s not just right he’s describing the very process by which we all become richer.
We get richer not only through the freedom to innovate with technology but through the freedom to innovate to do given work differently, such as joining forces with foreigners who have more sunlight or a lower wage scale. And we fail to get richer when we pursue free and “fair” trade, fair being defined as protecting workers’ jobs (against innovative and more efficient ways of doing them). Trump, whose signature promise is to protect Americans’ jobs, hints that we are very close to a replacement for the Free Trade Agreement (which itself was 1000 pages longer than necessary to provide… Read more »