Automation and the supposed end of Manual labor
“…we need to create a world where people are equally valuable; we need to create a world where people cannot be forced into any terrible bargains. We need to aim for a world where no one makes choices that are hard and heartbreaking. This is a structural problem. It’s a societal problem.”
Actually, “we” don’t need to do any of those things, which are in fact quite impossible. People are not now and never will be “equally valuable” (unless the words equally and valuable are interpreted so broadly as to be meaningless).
Further, there will always be terrible bargains and choices that are hard and heartbreaking. Even if all of this supposedly wondrous upcoming technology allows us to Immanentize the latest Eschaton and bring about a post human era of perfect abundance, this writer’s affected demands could never be realized without essentially denying humanity completely (transforming it into something very different; inequality, difficult choices, and all of the rest of it are simply part of what it means to have individual humans, and not something else, like, say, an insect colony, or the Borg).
Further, there will always be terrible bargains and choices that are hard and heartbreaking. Even if all of this supposedly wondrous upcoming technology allows us to Immanentize the latest Eschaton and bring about a post human era of perfect abundance, this writer’s affected demands could never be realized without essentially denying humanity completely (transforming it into something very different; inequality, difficult choices, and all of the rest of it are simply part of what it means to have individual humans, and not something else, like, say, an insect colony, or the Borg).
(Now, the bulk of the Singularitarian crowd would prefer something like absorption into the Borg to continued existence as free, separate humans, but they are neither representative nor, in my view, sane.)
Planet Ulrich 
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