Human beings can fly. This is an incredible achievement. For millennia, those who came before us could only dream of such a thing. Now we can do it, and somehow, it totally sucks.
Imagine going back to any other period in time and trying to explain this. Assuming they don't burn you for being a witch, imagine trying to explain to someone that not only can people in the future fly, but that it actually totally sucks and basically everybody hates doing it. The latter part seems even less plausible than the former.
Now do the same for our other technologies. Explain trucks, excavators, robots, or even AI chatbots. We make these giant machines capable of building Stonehenge before lunch, or of moving quantities of goods hitherto unimaginable faster than the fastest animals, but the working conditions of those who operate these giant technological wonders are actually terrible. It's as if we purposefully curse the people with which we bestow these god-like powers.
Not only do we curse those who use technology, but it seems there is always a new one, and it is coming for our jobs, and we are terrified of it. Today, it is AI. Last decade, it was robots. Just like that, joyful technological wonders are transformed into changes to which we must "adapt," the ubiquitously-used word for how we should deal with new technology. Adapting isn't something you do to thrive; it's something you do to survive.
This is the pathetic vision of technology we have today in our society. We did the hard part — we can literally fly — but we do it joylessly. The internet is full of miserable articles like this one from Forbes, titled "13 Practical Ways To Help Employees Adapt To New Technology."
Blend incentives with guidance.
Offer a stipend for technology adoption. Bookend it with some guidance so it is easier to manage across the enterprise—for example, here are the two tools for X, the three for Y, and so on. This ensures there’s some consistency in the process.
This new, hypothetical technology is assumed to suck so much that Forbes recommends giving employees more money if they learn to use it. This is from the same publication that writes things like How To Pay Your Employees Less. If capitalists are willing to pay their employees more money just to get them to use a completely-hypothetical technology, then it must really, truly suck.
Capitalists like to style themselves as visionaries, yet the vision they put forth for technology is so disheartening, so bleak, and so inhuman that each new technological advance is now presumed to come paired with human suffering. We have taught machines to write language and draw pictures, but all we can do is worry about how it will take our jobs.
This dismal attitude is in no way inherent to technology. It is the opposite. Technology is fun and cool. Robots and AI chatbots, the last two things that came for our jobs, are actually awesome. Children understand this, until capitalism beats it out of them.
Capitalism's proponents often argue that capitalism is just human nature. Humans are naturally greedy and selfish, these people who apparently have never experienced friendship or family say. Those who have experienced love and kindness have rebutted this in countless ways. To that corpus, I add this argument: Anything that takes the joy out of flying cannot be just human nature.
I'd like to thank Cousin Egg, whose love of robots made me realize how much of capitalism's dejected technological worldview I had internalized. Cousin Egg is 5 years old.