this post was submitted on 30 Apr 2026
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A Boring Dystopia
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Yes this is obviously slavery.
What kind of work are they expecting people to do though?
Most menial tasks are performed by machines now.
Well since ICE rounded up all those "illegals" they will replace them with the homeless. Of course a large majority of homeless are mentally ill. Doubt they can accurately replace migrant workers.
But this shit needs to be torn down and anyone who votes yes on this bill removed from society.
Those undocumented migrants weren't screwing lids on tubes of toothpaste though. A lot of farm work uses specialised gear and skilled teams zoom along rows planting or picking.
It would cost more and take more time and produce a less desirable outcome to force slaves to do it.
Machines cost expensive forms of energy and need to be fixed and maintained. Humans cost almost nothing to keep alive and are in large supply. When humans "break" you just replace them with new ones. Slavery is very efficient for capital production.
I feel like we are moving towards a sci-fi story where AI enslaves humanity. But instead their is an elite class of trillionares and politicians above the AI.
AI does the thinking for free. Unpaid slaves do the physical work that machines can't do or costs too much to do. All that equals 100% profit and control.
there are a bunch of scifis like htis. dredd, mad max maybe, 4400 is a interesting one, the elite/affluent live in thier pristine cities while outside of it is basically a madmax, ghetto the people tried to change this by abducting people in the past to the future and give superpowers and then send them back, but the rich elite found out and started to infilitrate in the past by sending one of thier owns into the past to stop it, by possessing people through nanotech (transferring conscieness to the possessed person_.
Can you give me some examples of that physical work?
Im sure there are things, but most things I think of can be done very efficiently by a machine with a skilled operator for less than it would cost to force unpaid labourers to do.
Sure, I work with printers and suppliers a lot. A vast majority of what they do requires "temp workers" usually low paid people or even disabled adults with down syndrome to do a part of the process that would be much more costly to retool a machine to do or too expensive to build something that does it. Like folding and filling perfume boxes of various sizes, shapes.
Also the same kind of labor was used to pack over a million bags of various items because making a machine grab or move a changing inventory is just too expensive and having a machine that does one thing than never do it again is wasteful.
Really it's a balance between what costs more people or designing and/or resetting a machine for the job. A lot of times bringing in a group of low-paid people for a few months is much much less than a machine. People have more flexible parts.
Farming and sewing. Both involve manual laborers that's unpleasant and not yet able to be automated. There's also some assembly work that amounts to loading and unloading things in machines or inspecting things that come out of machines. Then you've also got a lot of building of more complicated machines like cars.
There's more I'm sure, but that's a lot of the stuff I can think of as an industrial engineer.
Oh also unpleasant service labor like call center work and content moderation. And don't discount pointless labor. Or labor that could be automated, but it's cheaper to pay prisoners to do it since the state subsidizes their care.