More Perfect Union released a video on automated truck drivers (which are now on the roads in Texas.)

They argue:

1. The "driver shortage" framing is industry spin on the fact that employers are deliberately underpaying workers to increase churn and keep the average pay grade low.
2. Automation will lead to further degradation of the trucking career that has allowed many men to earn a decent wage and quality of life. The consequences of this will be dire.

Is automation necessarily anti-labour? Is it possible to automate jobs while protecting the people who do them?

My supermarket installed 12 self-checkouts several years ago. In the pen, there's now one worker who harriedly flits between the stations, swiping their lanyard to authorize alcohol purchases. Repetitive and thankless. Pretty bad, as far as jobs go.¹

I assume most of people doing this job don't love it, but that doing it is still one of the better options available to them. Maybe they don't have any skills, or the skills from a previous career aren't valued anymore. Maybe they like the flexibility of part-time work.²

All I know is that I wouldn't want that job, and that I'm grateful for the privileges of my life that mean it's not yet been an option I've had to consider - privileges that I wish were extended to everyone.

It's all well and good for me to say that I can imagine a world where everyone is so taken-care-of that we'd find it unconscionable to require labour that alienates³, but steering our shambling society towards such a utopia is really hard to do. How can we identify and agree on why we have "bad jobs", align everyone's interests to the collective cause of reducing suffering, and correctly triage the opportunities we have?⁴

Maybe the answer is to read more Marx, but I don't think it's possible to get the Good Automation that reduces toil, without also fundamentally lowering the value of the equivalent human labour and therefore the power of those workers' strikes.

i.e. the truckers are right to be concerned.

But I want jobs to be automated. I want humans to do things other than scan barcodes and drive along the interstate for the majority of their lives. If we still have warehouses filled with humans in 15 years⁵, I think that's because we've shambled wrong, even if it's because we've fought tooth and nail for labour.

Maybe there's a more middle-ground Scandanavian model. Companies that automate must invest some additional amount in continual retraining such that automation remains complimentary rather than rivalrous. I'm not actually sure if that approach will be able to keep up with the rate at which human skill is outcompeted.

In any case, I think it's going to be really hard to form a coherent story and set of policies to sell automation. Workers are proud of their worth, and are going to be skeptical that any self-sacrifice will contribute to a greater good, because the collectivist spirit is so dead in the West. Conversely, corporations will argue against paying redistributive taxes, because it's the profit incentive that drives the transition to full automation.

Yet, ultimately, I think automation will win. It's going to be hard for labour to globally impede technological progress, whereas tech companies will be able to easily relocate and improve, until they're so cost-effective that even the most labour-sympathetic regions will be unable to resist interfacing with the automated economy.

Whether or not that irreparably tears the social contract, idk. Hope not.