If we’re lucky, the great flattening will end up like the industrial revolution, where almost everybody a three or four generations later will be very glad that it happened, and also very glad they didn’t live through it.
Sadly, my guess is also that we’ll be seen as those minor lords who had it good under the old system and whined terribly how they were going to be reduced to the same level as the peasants by these awful machines.
(That’s if we’re lucky. If we’re unlucky, the robots programmed to optimize will realize the system operates much more smoothly if we’re not present at all.)
I certainly can’t vouch for the accuracy of all those claims; but The Deliverator doesn’t really work as a concept unless the pizza claim is true; so I’m inclined to look charitably upon it.
I don’t think the horror of joblessness is entirely a matter of externally imposed stigma. Almost all of us want to be contributing member of society. We want to be valued by providing value to others. The desperation of joblessness is (at least in my observation) self-imposed (and often leads to depression and a host of other psychological ills).
I will say, as a strong supporter of minimum wage, this is the strongest argument (in my opinion) against it. A minimum wage of $10 means that anyone unable to produce $10/hr of value will be permanently unemployed. Even with the most generous safety net, the psychological hit of not having being capable of any renumerated work is heavy indeed. It can be very hard not to feel like a burden on society or those supporting you. (And of course, it’s pretty hard to get to the point of being able to produce more value if you’re can’t get a job in the first place.)
(Just to be clear, despite this, I support a fairly healthy minimum wage for lots of other reasons. But I am aware that minimum wage makes life a lot worse for some (while making life better for many others.))
Health insurance is expensive. A discount on health insurance would be enough money that offering it up ONLY if you agree to wear what is essentially a tracking device would qualify as coercion.
If I were doing a psychological study where I gave people $500 dollars to let me scrape their fitbit accounts, it wouldn’t pass the ethics review board, because there’d be people participating who weren’t properly consenting, but desperately needed the cash anyway, and I’d be taking advantage of people’s financial issues.
