hey you! you want an illustration of exactly why capitalism is the wrong economic system for handling automation? here it is:

automated phone system payment menus.

years ago, in a forgotten era, if you needed to make a payment to a company over the phone, you would call their line, be routed to an actual human being with a name who gets paid minimum wage or close to it, and make your payment with their help.

but then, computer systems progressed to the point where that process could be automated: a user could simply hear a prerecorded message, enter the necessary credit card information, confirm the payment and be done.

of course, not everyone is able or willing to use automated systems, so those underpaid employees are still there; they just handle *a portion* of the callers, rather than *all* of them.

now, when a corporation makes the decision to switch to a partially automated payment system, they're reducing the amount of labor that is necessary for this particular function.

what does that mean for their employees?

people have to work to live, right? so when a company needs less labor, that means that the existing employees need to perform less labor to make the same money, right? so their job gets easier, right?

of course not. the company simply lays off excess employees, who must now find some other job. even though less labor is required to the company as a whole, employees do not benefit from this increase in efficiency.

furthermore, since now the company has fewer employees handling those calls, it's incentivized to make it difficult for people using their system to reach those employees, to keep the demand low and staffing lean.

many companies now accomplish this by adding an additional charge to any payments made with the help of a human - so they're charging *additional money* for something that used to be the only way of doing it.

thus the consumers end up losing, just like the employees.

if automation is detrimental to the consumer of this service and to the producer, why does it exist?

well, because it is beneficial to those who reap the financial benefit of the automation, of course!

that would be the shareholders.

these decisions are made for the interest of, on behalf of, if not always *by*... investors. people with capital.

people whose income derives from owning property, not performing labor.

people who are rich because a piece of paper says they are rich.

if it pisses you off that you now have to pay extra money just for the privilege of having a human being help you pay a company money, the fault lies with capitalism.

if it pisses you off that you may lose your job to a machine through no fault of your own, the fault lies with capitalism.

if you want a system where more automation of labor means laborers' lives are made easier, GET RID OF CAPITALISM.