Whereas the intention of building an oppressive system such as the one described above is, what, selfishness? Laziness? Programmers, because of the high-demand nature of our role, do not tend to be subject to the usual financial pressures that other communities are. I'm not sure what would motivate someone to build such a system as opposed to walking and finding a better job offer.
Not really.
If you work for Raytheon, you are supporting a company that sells arms to the following countries: https://www.raytheon.com/ourcompany/global
Northrop Grumman have a list of their worldwide presence here: https://www.northropgrumman.com/AboutUs/OurGlobalPresence/Pa...
If you work for a defense contractor, you are not 'protecting your society' - that's not even the intent. The intent is to make money by selling tools designed to kill other human beings.
Say you have a call center run as a co-op. You’ve got workers and HR people. Both the workers and HR people are shareholders. If you can eliminate the HR people, then the workers can each have a larger proportionate share for the same work. Automating HR eliminates the HR people.
This is my point.
Eventually someone will come in and say the system in the OP was necessary for the company to stay afloat, pay its employees or retain value for its retired shareholders.
That you think one is justified and the other is not has very little to do with their relative harm, which is by no means a solved problem or a given. It has to do with your view of it, and those views will differ between different people.
It creates jobs. A lot of people don't have the self-control to keep from taking longer and longer breaks, either costing the company money or getting fired. Some jobs pay more to hire people that do have this self-control, but there are only so many of those people. This creates a business model that works when supplied only with the lazier employees who are left.
Another system like this is the timeclock. It's a tyrant and getting out of bed on time every morning is the hardest thing I've ever had to do, but there's just no way to run a factory without it.
Drug trials have benefit to society.
I would argue that creating a system to fire people in an automated fashion when they take too many bathroom breaks like this is morally worse than both of those systems you mentioned.
However using that as an example, there are people who work as vermin exterminators, or people who work in labs that have to euthanise lab mice. They probably don't enjoy it, but when there's a need for something you'll find someone to do it.
> However using that as an example, there are people who work as vermin exterminators, or people who work in labs that have to euthanise lab mice. They probably don't enjoy it, but when there's a need for something you'll find someone to do it.
Yes, but that does not serve as a reason why I should be the one to do it (instead of them), that only postulates that there are other people out there to do it, which is an irrelevant point.
