Who does the dirty jobs?

On June 7th 2019 Daniel Finkelstein wrote this in The Times:

"A Jeremy Corbyn supporter makes the case for ‘fully automated luxury communism’. Daniel Finkelstein tries to take it seriously

What is socialism? I don’t mean what is it against, or what is its objective. I mean what is it? How does it work? Let me give an example. Under socialism, who works in the human resources department of the organisation that makes the ink that is used on Twix wrappers? Why do they? How much do they get paid? Who decides that? Do we still make Twix? Why?

"In more than a century there have been millions of socialists and millions of words written about socialism, but none of them has provided a convincing answer to any of those questions. All we have are dozens of practical attempts to introduce socialism, each one a disaster. And each one disowned once it has collapsed. The problem isn’t that socialism doesn’t work, you see, so much as that we have never really tried it."

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What is capitalism's answer to this question which is, to be precise: who will do those necessary jobs that people won't do voluntarily, without compulsion.

Capitalism's answer is the existence of a class of individuals who lack the means to provide a living for themselves - and who thereby need to work as directed by their employer.

Not everyone can live off benefits as some mythmakers seem to believe.

Obviously Daniel Finkelstein does not propose himself to do that HR job - he enjoys his work.

But the Twix-ink-HR thing is still just a tedious job, something currently done by a protoplasmic robot of medium cognitive skills known as a white-collar worker.

The brutal answer is that socialism has nothing to do with this issue. It's capitalism that will eventually succeed in displacing that unreliable, idiosyncratic, over-emotional human in favour of an automated, infinitely-replicable system with the physical/cognitive skills to emulate - or more likely improve upon - that HR guy's performance.

Mr Finkelstein should read his own newspaper (The Times June 10th 2019):

"Tengai robot is just the job as an unbiased recruiter

The world’s first recruitment robot is said to have many of humanity’s qualities but few of our faults.

Tengai, built in Sweden, has the social skills needed to put job candidates at ease, apologising if it interrupts, asking them to take their time, and gently asking questions again if an answer is vague or beside the point.

Yet it will not discriminate because of their gender, ethnicity, religion, background or appearance. Nor will it do what many human recruiters do, subconsciously favouring a golf-playing applicant if they themselves love golf.

“It was very important for us to have a recruitment process that was free from prejudice,” said Karl Öhlander director of Upplands-Bro council, northeast of Stockholm, which last week became the first organisation to use Tengai to help to fill a post, in IT. “We all have lots of prejudices but the robot stops these from getting in the way.”

Mr Finkelstein's own job will probably hold out for a few decades further, although his usual tendentious style of reasoning seems amenable to automation.