How will the company stay in business without workers?

They'll have no choice...

They have plenty of choices, including:

- visa workers who have no bargaining power.

- younger people who are mobile

- moving offices to other places

There have been a few recent posts about struggling to find jobs... every time it turns out they are only applying to online listings for remote jobs, and have high standards. That's not a situation you're likely to stand out in.

I just don't see how global remote work as the norm is "pro worker" for anyone except those already well established in their career. Besides being more disposable, what happened to complaints about companies not providing job resources or training? Did we give up on that one?

The younger generation is much less willing to work under conditions they disagree with.

As if individuals don't have plenty of choices?

An understaffed company will last infinitely longer than an individual without a job.

That's a wild generalization

There's always someone who's willing to work regardless of WFH policy. What would probably happen is that companies are lowering their standards of hiring.

Ever hear of The New Deal?

It was necessary because many, many US citizens hit hard by The Great Depression figured out in that time how to live without depending on regular (or any) work.

Tent cities; hunting; scavenging; farming; begging; stealing; mutual aid networks; etc.

It wasn't the best life, but for many it was found to be preferable to the factories or the docks.

To even consider returning to living a life dependent on a wage, Uncle Sam needed to offer them a new deal.

We've since invented air conditioning (among other things), so I doubt this is a relevant point.

Air conditioning existed prior to The Great Depression.

So? The AC you’re referring to isn’t what is cooling my home right now, nor is it what will stop people from deciding to live in the woods.

But you knew that.

Depends on the timeline. Things are changing very rapidly. Automation seems to be coming at us at an exponential rate.

The expectation that it's going to be business as usual is just as short sighted and archaic with regard going into an office as it is with the idea of work in general.

Oh boy, I'm excited for the massive wealth creation of this exponential growth to trickle down to workers.

Certainly not an argument I'm making. But if you're making UBI at bare minimum you won't have to iron your polo shirt and khakis every morning.

You're right, sorry for the cynical tone. I do hope the level of automation we're aiming for will benefit everyone, not just a few individual owners and us lucky tech workers who have found ourselves in demand lately.

> I hope that by "trickle down to the workers" you aren't talking about technically illiterate workers who are not actively contributing to the automation effort.

I'm talking about every single human being who has been brought into this world through no fault of their own and deserves our empathy on that point alone.

> I've already seen huge gains in income and work-life balance by spending time automating my workflow.

Sure, most of us have used copilot or other AI tools and seen some benefit. But there's a point of no return where suddenly those tools are able to do the other things we think only we can.

What happens then?

So far automation helps rich people get richer, and that's about it

Is this not true of every watershed technological breakthrough?

It's a two-way street between employers and employees.