Why corporations automate easy jobs instead of hard jobs?

submitted by trident765 from self.nonmorons

Technology should be focused on replacing jobs that humans are poorly suited for, but instead society focuses all its energy in getting technology to replace jobs that humans are well suited for, like taking your order at a fast food place, or tech support. Why?

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[–]chadwickofwv 2 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 0 fun3 insightful - 1 fun -  (1 child)

You practically answered your own question. We automate the easy jobs because they are easy to automate. The hard jobs are also hard to automate. If it was easy to automate them they would have been among the first jobs to be automated.

In fact, many of the hardest jobs already have been automated, they are just not jobs visible to someone who has never performed hard labor.

[–]trident765[S] 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

There are things that are difficult for a person to do but easy to automate. For example, it can be tiring to hold an object in front of you for long periods of time, but it is easy to automate this by placing the object in a table in front of you.

[–]fschmidt 2 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 0 fun3 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

It's basically just idolatry. People would rather work on what is cool (from an idolatrous point of view) than what is useful.

[–]wary_observer 3 insightful - 2 fun3 insightful - 1 fun4 insightful - 2 fun -  (0 children)

In trying to understand why a major change in the way of doing things is implemented in society, we should identify what sorts of things are necessarily impacted by it. We should look not only at the downstream effects - the impact on the subjects of the change - but at the upstream effects - the advantage gained by the agents of the change. The latter may be more revealing than the former, as it may give us clues as to whether and to what degree the change is made as a strategic move by its agents, as opposed to just an unfortunate byproduct of assumed abstract market or social forces.