Grace Augustine talks about her interviews with people who’ve chosen to leave their jobs over climate change concerns on The Conversation Weekly podcast.
Tools will wear out too and need replacement. Boots, gloves and many articles of clothing will wear out.
If you replace a machine that does the job of 100 people and replace it with 100 people, those people will need to commute to work, they will need to eat, and this will put carbon in the air and/or use electricity. Thermodynamics is a bitch, the energy needed by a group of people to lift something will not be any different from the amount of energy needed for a robot to lift something. Growing food to get that energy and then the person shitting out the waste requiring water treatment plants to process it may not be the most energy efficient way to move heavy objects.
And I’ve worked on machines that can do calculations to optimize where materials are cut to minimize wastage. A human with a tape measure and a calculator won’t be able to achieve this level of material usage optimization. Automation can actually reduce material waste.
A lot of the problems you mention would still be problems even if we went full Butlerian Jihad and eliminated all robots. Bad management? Yeah it’s not going to go away when a manger has more employees to manage. Wasteful use of plastic in shipping things? A person can wrap stuff with plastic just as a machine does.
If you don’t like automation that’s fine. But there’s no environmental reasons for being against automation. In fact we need to produce a lot of wind turbines and solar panels as fast as possible. Like a huge number of them. The workforce isn’t big enough to produce them all.
Tools will wear out too and need replacement. Boots, gloves and many articles of clothing will wear out.
If you replace a machine that does the job of 100 people and replace it with 100 people, those people will need to commute to work, they will need to eat, and this will put carbon in the air and/or use electricity. Thermodynamics is a bitch, the energy needed by a group of people to lift something will not be any different from the amount of energy needed for a robot to lift something. Growing food to get that energy and then the person shitting out the waste requiring water treatment plants to process it may not be the most energy efficient way to move heavy objects.
And I’ve worked on machines that can do calculations to optimize where materials are cut to minimize wastage. A human with a tape measure and a calculator won’t be able to achieve this level of material usage optimization. Automation can actually reduce material waste.
A lot of the problems you mention would still be problems even if we went full Butlerian Jihad and eliminated all robots. Bad management? Yeah it’s not going to go away when a manger has more employees to manage. Wasteful use of plastic in shipping things? A person can wrap stuff with plastic just as a machine does.
If you don’t like automation that’s fine. But there’s no environmental reasons for being against automation. In fact we need to produce a lot of wind turbines and solar panels as fast as possible. Like a huge number of them. The workforce isn’t big enough to produce them all.