/lit/ - Literature

This is worth reading too. The phrase "countdown to automation" is a thing. Also Bezos doing Bezos things.

>The most disturbing revelation of the 21st century has been that we do not have all the time in the world, not least of all because the world may not have all that much time. We are working in the shadows of two doomsday clocks. The first counts down toward automation, the moment when the antagonism between capital and labor is permanently resolved in favor of the ownership class, whose tireless and uncomplaining automatons will eliminate the last vestiges of their dependence on anyone who might want food or medicine in exchange for their labor. In popular culture, automation dystopia only occurs when the robots don’t work the way they’re meant to, when they rise up and kill their masters. But for most of us, well-behaved robots are dystopia too, and wide paranoia about their violent, revolutionary potential says more, I think, about the anxieties that owners have toward the workforce they’re trying to replace.

>The second clock counts down toward environmental catastrophe. So long as capitalism remains the dominant economic system of the first world, it is inevitable. This is partly a structural matter — an economy predicated on endless growth cannot stop growing; the politics produced by such an economy can barely stick to half-measures they’re so scared of hampering GDP growth — but they are mundane, too. Climate change, even the kind where men boil in their own bodies, does not destroy the whole world. Not every patch of land goes underwater, even in the worst case. The world of 2050 may not be able to support seven billion human lives, but there will always be enough food and medicine and air conditioning for the narrow set who can afford it. By then, we may have robots that will be good at helping everyone find food, but I suspect we will have robots that are good at putting down food riots. Disease will take care of the rest.

https://theoutline.com/post/1767/the-end-will-be-delivered-by-amazon-drone