One thought that keeps me awake at night is that my past automation work has cost others their jobs. I understand that that's "how the world works", but it still deeply affects me that people have lost their livelihoods because of my actions.
I understand this guilt but it doesn't belong to you. We're rapidly entering a post-scarcity economy and most of the western world are employed in service industries anyways. I think the lack of more societal guarantees to survival is a critical issue especially in the US, it'd be nice to see UBI or alternatives explored more and rolled out so that losing one of these tedium jobs isn't devastating on the former employee.
Yeah, probably. My career started in a job that could have easily been automated, but never was (intentionally). So in a lot of ways, I feel indebted to it and the idea of entry level tech jobs, because it allowed me to build a career without a degree. From that experience, it feels kind of sad that certain automation can displace potential careers.
It's possible that your automation saved jobs by enabling your former employer / client to remain solvent. Sometimes the choice is not "30 jobs without automation or 10 jobs with automation," but rather "10 jobs with automation or 0 jobs without automation."
That makes no sense. If people were doing jobs that could literally be replaced by automation, they were not great jobs and either soul destroying or they would have gone away anyway.
Progress enables productivity which is a net win for everyone, your work has contributed to productivity a LOT more than the work of the people who needed to move on. Without technology we’d almost all be in poverty.
You're making a hell of a lot of assumptions there.
In the end you're probably right for a population of people. I'm not talking about that, though - I'm talking about very specific people with families to feed.
