If you look into what happened recently with Deloitte and the Australian gov't (among many examples) the end product was so filled with errors and ficticious references that it had to be reworked. It's like people using AI aren't selling you a solution, but the idea or confidence in a solution more so than we were before. It's a real extreme version of the value of a product is really a social agreement between the buyer and seller and not a monetary one. "I accept that this is what you say it is".
But any AI evangelist will say how massive performance boost they have with AI tools!
Yes, people can make plausible crap much faster now.
From my experience, since AI tools has been adopted (unofficially) by our developers, the amount of bugs increased dramatically. Feature delivery is much slower due to multiple rounds of testing after fixes.
> From my experience, since AI tools has been adopted (unofficially) by our developers, the amount of bugs increased dramatically. Feature delivery is much slower due to multiple rounds of testing after fixes.
With AI, to realize the productivity benefits, you just have to adopt a process that create new stories for all those tasks. Then you'll start to see massive improvements when you look at your close rates. Just think of those new bugs you can close now that you're using AI!
The answer to bad AI results from businesses won’t be, let’s forget about AI and instead hire back all those 6 figure programmers.
Instead it will be just as it is has been for years, let’s send this (in this case) AI generated data to Malaysia or Bangladesh and have them clean it up and then bill it as perfect AI solution.
These people in poorer nations have been cleaning data for ML and AI for years. It’s just adding another loop back in.
> the factory system allows certain people to out-compete the previous weavers with a shitty product that’s really cheap
This quote is thrown, off-handedly, to describe the product of a weaver.
Some of the highest quality and most valued apparel today is made of completely synthetic materials, through automation.
We can debate about the merits or necessity of that on its own, but I think the argument that automated outputs are inherently and universally worse on objective quality measures is a losing argument with readily available examples that counter it.
~25% of packages handled in france come from shein, which is shit tier fast fashion company
You're right about quality, machines _can_ produce better things, the quote is right about quantities, in practice they mostly produce inferior products in large quantities.
While Shein is enabled by machine weaving it took centuries to find this business model. The first person I heard about buying single use clothing was Michael Jackson allegedly in the 90s and it was seen as the height of eccentricity. Obviously many wealthy people since the 1960 have been rich enough to easily afford throw away clothing (after all they spend as much on meals or flights all the time). It just never occurred to anyone outside of ball gowns or wedding dresses.
In conclusions SHEIN is more of a social phenomenon piggybacking on a hack on the global postal system fee structure.
I want to agree with you and counter the other replies to your post so far.
Anyone that looks at the 'glorious past' of weavers has a very skewed view of how much of humanities time it took. Pre-industrial timelines and you're talking about massive amounts of effort for even a single piece of clothing. Deaths from exposure were a common thing due to lack of clothing.
Now the world is awash in clothing, so much we dump thousands of tons of it on other poor countries (yes, this is a problem in of itself). Even what we consider expensive fitted clothing is cheap.
After decades of refinement it may become a superior product, however the transition point normally occurs when the drop in quality is offset by a drop in price.
Generic clothes sizing can’t handle differing torso vs limb ratios etc so people still walk around in clothes that don’t really fit. Good enough and way cheaper wins.
Designer is yet another aspect alongside materials that matter so you end up with market fragmentation. Default sizing is a reasonable fit for much of the population and many people do pay the premium for custom sizing of high quality clothing.
> I think the argument that automated outputs are inherently and universally worse on objective quality measures
Just remove universally and the argument stands. The point here is to focus on the curve (it will depress the overall quality of products) not the outliers (I really like my Patagonia jacket).
I’m unconvinced: machine made fabrics go into my nicest shirts, at a price I can afford several.
How would quality be improved by making the fabric by hand? — how would I benefit from a less standard, less fine, more expensive weave of those textiles?
Machines enable cheaper goods; but the preference for buying them is down to individuals — eg, I think it’s great I can also get cheap, relatively disposable tshirts. According to you that “depresses the overall quality”; but I’m struggling to understand how the facts that a) I have better and cheaper dress shirts and b) I have cheap tshirts I don’t care about damaging when cleaning, sweating during exercise, etc together make my life worse.
Even if by some obscure metric the existence of the tshirts and my ownership of them “depresses” quality.
I don’t think it does stand. During the Industrial Revolution, automated production replaced craftsmen and often produced a better product.
Specifically, interchangeable parts were a product of industrial automation. Craftsmen were not able to build parts to the same level of precision as machines, so true interchangeability only came when the craftsmen were replaced.
As a percentage of all outputs, perhaps - But increasing to 20% high quality of 10000 vs 50% high quality of 500 would have meant an increase in absolute terms
Despite 76 comments, the article talking about it explicitly, there’s only a single mention of the word union here. If you think you can ride this wave to make your fortune, you’re probably wrong if AI ends up eating all jobs.
Collective action is the correct move here, for those who can actually see what is going on. The class war has been going on for awhile. If you are reading this, you aren’t going to cross the class thermocline to escape the societal consequences of it. (No offense intended there.)
I long ago accepted a career in B2B software meant my job was to put people out of work. And as it turns out, programmers always start by putting other programmers out of work.
Programmers and Managers by Kraft (1977) is my favourite book on the subject. It's unabashedly Marxist and from the very early days of the industry, which tickles me, since that is a different way of thinking than I usually do.
People should be compensated for the entire _transitive_ wealth created by their work proportional to the amount of time spent and their skill.
If a translator's work is used to train a model which replaces him, he should get a part of the income every time the model is used.
Same for programmers, artists and other people who created "content"[0] used to train AI models.
In fact, the designers of chips used to train the models should get a part of the income. And the people who built the data centers and the factories. And the miners who mines the raw materials.
Actually, when you look at it this way, you realize the big names[1] behind these behemoth AI companies did very little. Their amount of work put in is the same as of any other worker, maybe double, if their bragging about 80-hour weeks is to be believed. And their skill level? It's a bell curve. Even if they are 2 SD to the right, how much more productive are they than the average person (with the same amount of education and connections) put in their position. I am OK with the owner of such a company getting paid maybe 3-5x more than the average worker.
So are we to compensate the workers who make pipes and plumbers that install them each time we open the tap and water comes out? Or each time an air conditioner turns on to cool you off? Do we compensate the manufacturers of processors and fiber optic lines each time we write a message online instead of needing to give it to a courier to take to a scribe's home to copy?
Instead of making your entire life into a microtransaction-fest requiring dystopian tracking of everything, what if we just converted expected sequence of value to current dollars and made a lump sum payment? Of course different people will have different utility functions, so we could allow them to judge what is a fair trade.
> So are we to compensate the workers who make pipes and plumbers that install them each time we open the tap and water comes out?
This philosophy only really applies for things that we have to pay for on a subscription, or in a metered fashion.
So setting up a fund to ensure that people who laid the pipes, etc, get paid a portion of our collective water bills would follow, but doing the same with our air conditioning would not.
Ultimately, that sort of tracking is likely much more effort than it's worth, and what makes by far the most sense is a UBI, funded by appropriate taxes.
So do we exclude open LLMs like Deepseek or Llama then? If you do your own taxes on a computer, you don't owe anyone anything, but if you pay an accountant and they use a computer, they should revenue share with the entire chain of production from mining to manufacturing for the tools they use? Or if you pay an HVAC technician, they should revenue share from each job to miners and tool manufacturers, but that's not necessary if you DIY? Why is the idea of just owning a tool bad in the first place?
There still seems to be plenty of labor to be done to improve the world before we reach a point of unconditional UBI making sense. Why not have guaranteed work instead? Plenty of streets to clean or beautify, kids to tutor, buildings that need efficiency upgrades, etc.
There's plenty of resources to go around to make UBI (the "unconditional" is baked right in) make sense.
There's plenty of work that people want to do, that's otherwise unprofitable, that UBI would enable.
The barrier to UBI is not that we don't have enough to go around if not everyone is doing "productive work". It's that we're stuck on a model of human value that only considers productive work, and that we're stuck on a model of resource ownership that gives everything to the people at the top.
"Guaranteed jobs" is certainly better than what we have today, but it seems stupid to tell someone who's got an amazing artistic talent, "Nope, you don't get to do the thing you're great at that gives you fulfillment in life and brightens other people's lives with your work. You have to clean the streets."
We value productive work because there's always so much of it to do. We have programs to fund the arts already. If we want to expand those programs, we should just do that. At some point though we will have enough artists (especially since ML models can now generate soulless corporate art). Given that we're currently relying on an underpaid foreign underclass for basic needs like food, and every developed country has a policy of leaning on large amounts of immigration to fill in gaps in the workforce, it seems to me that we haven't demonstrated that we have enough to go around to then support people doing nothing.
> In social democracy, AI and automation are great news for workers.
Yeah, but fat lotta good that does me. I don't live in a social democracy, and there's about a zero percent change I will live in one before this shit hits the fan.
Personally I do believe these AI companies should be nationalized and the benefits of these technologies severely socialized. I think the hype is likely BS, but if you take it at face value, the goal will be terrible outcome for most of the population.
"Couldn’t we develop technology in a way that serves the human interest in having labor be a good part of life?"
You can go farm rice or wheat by hand - is that a good part of life?
You can ride a horse to go to work - is that a good part of life?
You can use an abacus to do your accounting - is that a good part of life?
We don't want to go back to these things because we simply grew up in a world where were no longer values those activities as 'work'. We valued other things like memorizing ailments and legal doctrine, like typing computer code out one character at a time.
I think this argument about technology removing the joy of work hides the fact that technology has no interest in your joy for your work. It only has interest in the economic value of that work. You can continue to do the same work for joy - the only difference is you can no longer derive economic value from it. Basically if you enjoy being a translator that's great but maybe you will only be able to somehow do it as a hobby. And of course that's deeply unsatisfying for us because humans want to feel needed and useful. But this 'useful work' requires two parties - not just the one doing the work but the one needing the work. By focusing on the needs of the producer, we miss the needs of the buyer who would rather buy the service from a machine. The loss of the producer is the gain of the buyer who can now spend less on the good and buy more of everything else.
Of course we still have classical musicians despite there being Spotify because there will be a niche for them. And so there will always be a niche certain people doing artisanal stuff. And you can always do whatever you want as a hobby. Technology and capitalism doesn't prevent that. It just serves the interests of the buyers as well as the interests of the producers.
The dumbest thing a smart person can do is work on AI for a company he doesn't own.
See, he gets a fixed amount of money[0] for his work and if AI is achieved, he becomes redundant, irrelevant, economically completely useless. The owners own the company and the product _and_ all subsequent income from the product.
So he has a fixed amount of money that must last him the rest of his life while the owners keep getting richer forever (their children inherit the company) from all subsequent wealth created by the thing he created.
---
And this completely ignored that A"I" is built on top of the work of people who have never been compensated in any way at all, often despite using licenses which explicitly forbid derivative works. The trick? Calling it "AI" and pretending it is not derivative work, despite being impossible to create without the training data.
[0]: You might say what if his compensation includes stock options? Well, have you seen a company where the workers own the majority? He gets a tiny part of this passive income while the owners still keep getting richer at a much faster rate. And money is not food/housing, it's only a medium of exchange. What you can actually buy with it depends on how much everyone has so if he is getting poorer relatively, he is getting poorer, period.
> The dumbest thing a smart person can do is work on AI for a company he doesn't own
Is this not all employment? I am also creating software that I will not own or reap the continued benefits from. When I was working for a coffee shop, I was helping establish that shop’s brand to which I did not own.
>is built on top of the work of people who have never been compensated in any way at all,
I mean, so is most of society. Or would you rather have to pay for the alphabet to learn it? When the argument against AI looks like a chapter out of 'The Right to Read' I take the anti-AI people as the losing side.
Is this just another case where people are poor at understanding complex systems (ie, large numbers of people interacting with large sets of incentives) and attribute a top-down elite conspiracy when they should really be studying game theory and market trends? I'm struggling to think of a a less controversial comparison, but for instance when people believe the literal conspiracy-theory version of great replacement vs. a combination of demographic facts, the capitalistic need for growth, and the general consequences of industrialization?
Yes, do not question the goodwill of these benevolent companies.
What seems unfair sounds just like a skill issue, "gitgud" am I right?
Don't want to be called a conspiracy theorist now, do we?
I am happy for you to be able to have these kind of perspectives.
Creating programs that lower fertility, discussing how that causes demographic issues, and then proposing replacement migration[0] rather than restructuring fertility incentives looks really bad. Especially when done by a small cabal of technocrats at insular meetings over the objections of most people.
That’s not more happenstance than the eradication of the four pests leading to famine, ie, technocrats often conspire and then catastrophically fail.
I think a lot of this stems directly from industrialization itself, even if there are specific policies which also go in this direction. The UN doesn't _really_ have the ability to set meaningful policy in countries across the world, however fertility drops off a cliff more or less universally as any country -- with any background, culture, etc. -- industrializes. To the extent that even countries which wish to oppose it are at best fighting an uphill battle.
I personally would have attributed that to the drift of the downstream effects:
- industrialization ultimately allows for women to meaningfully enter the workforce, which is a major pressure on fertility. This entering of the work force is quite delayed due to legal, cultural, and training issues.
- People probably don't just magically know when to have fewer kids, and I'm imagine the ramp-down happens over time.
- More specific things which suppress fertility might happen even later in the cycle. (as just one example: the accident of requiring car seats requiring the purchase of a much more expensive 3rd row vehicle, and so disincentivizing)
Is that along the lines of what you were thinking? I'm curious for what you think is causal here. (I'm not an expert, and am not trying to claim any expertise!)
> ...So now a lot of us that were in that position are getting drawn in and being like, no actually the impoverishment that has always been the underbelly of capitalism...
What, because we have this alternate system where the underbelly of society is happy, hale and having a really good time? The global south have been doing great under capitalism, the reason they are poor is they don't have a history of industrial success. The Chinese in particular are where they are right now because they embraced capitalism rather than throwing more bodies into the maw of communism and I think most of the world would prefer to follow their lead. Getting wealthier at that rate looks like a lot of fun.
Impoverished underbellys are in every system, they have nothing to do with capitalism. The problem is we treat low status people like garbage. Capitalism is just not a cause or consequence of human status hierarchies. But the lot of low status people is probably only going to improve with more AI because they of all people will benefit from cheap access to a system that makes high-intelligence decisions with more knowledge than can fit in a human mind.
I’m a fan of managed capitalism, which is the only capitalism we’ve ever known. I’m very nervous about what happens when unrestricted capital is allowed to consume all its guardrails and re-write all the rules to advantage itself. I imagine it leads to something extremely not-like the kind of capitalism that brought all those benefits you’re citing. I guess we might get to find out for ourselves!
Capitalism is a word invented by Louis Blanc for the bad thing "What I call 'capitalism' that is to say the appropriation of capital by some to the exclusion of others".
You don't actually call yourself a capitalist, because if you say that you actually say "I believe in a hard class system with a difficult to overcome divide between workers and capital owners and that the appropriation of capital by some to the exclusion of others is right". If you believe in a system that you feel is uncomfortably similar to Louis Blanc's bad thing, you say "This won't actually happen, this system is totally dynamic, with no permanent class division or any appropriation of capital by some to the exclusion of others" and you'd say things "I support free markets".
Capitalism is just a term for the concepts that predated Louis Blanc and were discussed by Adam Smith et al.
Your definition is nonsense: capitalism is a system in which the invested capital is also rewarded and not collectively owned. But it’s not a hard class system — as you’re given capital in reward for your labor. Capitalism is substantially more malleable as a class system than traditional feudalism (what came before in Europe) or modern communism (its main rival), which trades feudalistic class for status within the party.
That's more about ambition. So many examples of people who started with nothing and became very wealthy. Capitalism enables this, it does not prevent it.
Adam Smith was not in favour of capitalism, and in fact warned against it. He was in favour of the free market, which is not the same thing. A market is free when it's transparent and accessible for everybody. Extreme discrepancy in wealth and capital leads to powerful parties dominating and controlling the market. Smith recognized that and warned against it, recognizing the need for workers to organize, and to prevent cartels and monopolies.
Whether capitalism is distinguishable from traditional feudalism depends entirely on how you regulate it.
> it’s not a hard class system — as you’re given capital in reward for your labor
The latter doesn't justify the former. If you are rewarded for your work, but it would require you many lifetimes of labor to reach the next class, that's for all intents and purposes a hard class system.
The argument for class mobility based on initiative doesn't make it a soft class system.
> Capitalism is substantially more malleable as a class system than traditional feudalism (what came before in Europe) or modern communism (its main rival), which trades feudalistic class for status within the party.
Doesn't make it malleable, just comparatively more malleable.
The problem is with the later stages of capitalism where everything is big and rigid, but you still need growth for the system to work.
What we need is a different system that improves on capitalism, but has at its heart a welfare state, doesn't reduce each individual to an economic actor and have incentives set so that each actor (or machine which seeks connections) can converge to the mean, instead of each one trying to reach the top.
Capitalism is not a panacea and its history is steeped in blood.
The Dutch VOC, considered one of the first capitalist enterprises, carried out genocide in its pursuit to control spices in the Indies.
Capitalist interests in the US interfered in South American politics for decades, overthrowing democratically elected leaders and funding militias aligned with corporate interests. One of my closest friends is Guatemalan and most of his family was killed during the United Fruit Company conflict.
The Russians experienced one of the largest declines in quality of life in human history after the Soviet Union fell and the country became privatized.
History as a whole is full of unsavory things, but we have to decide between things that can happen — and many atrocities have been committed trying to build Utopia. For example, the massive casualties of the USSR. Or those killed in South America — eg, by the FARC.
If we look at a map of places where Socialist Democratic parties are active [0, 1] it actually looks like a map of people who generally have pretty terrible living conditions for the poorest in society. Mainly because it covers most of the known world so it'd reflect the normal living conditions for poor people. And is an ideology that is well integrated with capitalism, I happen to note.
It is pretty hard to say that the social democracy is free from a bloody history vs capitalism when people like the US Dems claim to be part of the social democrats. They're pretty blood-spattered. They're part of the governing system of the largest and most aggressive military in the world.
It's not just about the parties, but about the systems. Dutch social democratic parties haven't been in power in ages, but the foundation of our economy is social democratic, and right-wing parties don't dare to touch it. People like not having to worry about paid sick leave, maternity leave, unemployment, healthcare, disability, and a million other little things. That stuff is the fabric of our society.
All over northern Europe, you find high taxes, strong social safety nets, good healthcare, little violence, high levels of happiness and personal freedom, and high GDPs. This is the combination that works.
And the US was also on this path after WW2, but reverted course during the Reagan years, with all the consequences you see today.
And is the argument there that the Dutch no longer practice capitalism? They are one of the major names in the history of the limited-liability stock corporation, we've already had the VOC invoked in this thread. Pretty easy to see that representing the blood steeped face of capitalism. They still have stock exchanges in Amsterdam, so they haven't sworn off the shareholders.
Having a welfare state isn't capitalism but having one isn't the complete antithesis of capitalism. It is easy to see how a society could simultaneously support the VOC and a welfare state. Really easy, in fact - the VOC was mostly external and welfare is mostly internal, the systems don't need to interact at all.
It is impossible to hold the Dutch up as a group who have rid themselves of the blood-steeped history of capitalism when they are (1) a poster child of the blood-steeped history of capitalism (2) still supporting and encouraging capitalists. And (3) your comment could be interpreted as saying the social democrats don't actually hold power. At best that just establishes that capitalism isn't fundamentally steeped in blood since the Dutch have theoretically learned to behave responsibly over the centuries.
And to throw in a (4) have they apologised and made reparations for the VOC? It isn't obvious they've even repudiated the blood-soaked history of capitalism although maybe they have; I don't track Dutch politics.
I suppose the real question here is what exactly do you think "social democracy" is if not just standard democracy + welfare?
> And is the argument there that the Dutch no longer practice capitalism?
Who is saying that? Nobody.
> They are one of the major names in the history of the limited-liability stock corporation, we've already had the VOC invoked in this thread.
That's quite some time ago, though. That's not what we do today. What's your point with this?
> Having a welfare state isn't capitalism but having one isn't the complete antithesis of capitalism.
Exactly. It's about finding the right balance between the best parts of different ideas, while avoiding the worst parts.
> It is easy to see how a society could simultaneously support the VOC and a welfare state.
But it didn't. There was extreme poverty in the Dutch Republic during the days of the VOC. It was neither social, nor a democracy.
> At best that just establishes that capitalism isn't fundamentally steeped in blood since the Dutch have theoretically learned to behave responsibly over the centuries.
How does that undo the blood? It's that responsibility that's putting the brakes on the excesses of capitalism.
> I suppose the real question here is what exactly do you think "social democracy" is if not just standard democracy + welfare?
I'm really wondering what you think social democracy is, with a rant like that. It's certainly more than democracy + welfare, although those are definitely big parts of it. It's regulation, it's capitalism within responsible limits, it's cooperation and negotiation between unions and corporations. And it's government investment where it's necessary. That last part is something governments like to do less and less since neoliberalism, and they're also rolling back too much of the regulation.
It's undeniable that they've been weakening the social democratic system, but the core of it is still there. It's proven itself effective enough that all the toxic shit the right has been spewing about the left, even the right-wing parties don't truly dare to dismantle it.
>> > And is the argument there that the Dutch no longer practice capitalism?
> Who is saying that? Nobody.
Well a few comments ago you had that throwaway that the social democrats were less blood-steeped than the capitalists. Then you've held up, as social democrats, a group of capitalists with a long bloody history of capitalism and as far as I know never really did anything much to repudiate that history. And still practice capitalism today. You can still notionally buy shares from the same stock exchange that hosted the VOC [0].
And the follow up is me being a bit bemused. If the social democrats are the blood-steeped capitalists, how are they less blood steeped than the capitalists? Which capitalists are the blood-seeped ones if not the British, French and Dutch? I'd assumed you were talking about those 3 and the Americans until you held the Dutch up as a counterexample to bloodied capitalists.
I get it. You don't really know what social democracy is. So let me give you the briefest definition: social democracy tries to balance the best parts of socialism and capitalism, while trying to avoid the worst parts. Those worst parts include that blood-steeped history. Social democracy explicitly tries to avoid that, by regulating corporations and protecting people's rights. The corporations can still make profit, but not by any means; not by hurting people.
That is something that didn't happen during that blood steeped history. The VOC had no meaningful restrictions. They could wage war, kill people, enslave people. They could sentence their own employees to death. These are the kind of excesses you want to prevent.
Social democracy is something that was invented about a century and a half ago, although in the early days, the difference with socialism and anarchism wasn't very well-defined yet; those three terms were used fairly interchangeably much of the time. But at least it was explicit about democracy, and it grew to become the dominant form of socialism in capitalist democratic countries. And there it grew to be what it became over the course of the 20th century: a balance to capitalism, instead of an outright rejection of it.
It hasn't always been perfect; there have been slip ups and poor decisions, but it doesn't have the kind of blood-steeped history that capitalism and totalitarian communism have. It's been fairly effective at what it tries to do. More so than any other ideology, except maybe liberalism. But they go fairly well together.
And would you accept then that capitalism as an ideology is no longer implemented anywhere? Because there aren't many modern nations more capitalist than the Dutch. And those that arguably are are only marginally more capitalistic. Like, if you do a search for "capitalistic countries" you can find [0] people who consider them to be in the top 10.
Must admit I'm having trouble getting over the idea that the Dutch of all people are being held up as different than the capitalists. Good bad or otherwise this conversation is going to be a high point of the week. What's next? Socialist Switzerland?
No country has a pure implementation of any ideology. Ideologies are directions you want to take society, and economic systems are always a balance. But the US is quite a bit more blatantly capitalist, with its lack of holidays, lack of worker rights, and everything geared towards an even more extreme division of wealth.
Netherland, and northern Europe in general (I never meant to single out Netherland specifically; Scandinavia is probably ahead of us), is absolutely capitalist, but not nearly to the extreme that the US is, and has more labour protection, better social welfare, better regulations. Not to the extent that it should have; it's still falling way short, and Netherland in particular has been falling further short since the neoliberalist wave of the 1990s and the string of right-wing governments of the past 25 years. But it's not the worst of the world in this regard, and it still has a fairly effective balance that consistently puts it near the top of most freedom and happiness indexes with the rest of northern Europe.
It's by no means perfect, and there's a lot that needs to be improved, but compared to most other countries, this is clearly a pretty effective system.
Did you know the Netherlands, back in 2019, scored [0] the highest wealth inequality globally according to Wiki? Just saying. It does look like a bit of a fluke but I found that hilarious. Although the wiki article actually specifically cites them for having good statistics so there must be some confidence.
So earlier, when we're talking about blood-soaked capitalists, we're not talking about the Dutch with their history of blood soaked capitalism and their ongoing largely uninterrupted capitalist tradition. But we are talking about the people who don't take very many holidays and lack "workers rights" - where I note that the US has had their ability to negotiate with their corporate overlords eroded so far that they get a median income of maybe 10% higher than the Netherlands [1]? Most workers should really work on chipping away at their rights, it appears to improve their bargaining position! Maybe PPP can give the Dutch an edge, but we're talking about a pretty marginal difference to start talking about one obviously being the more blood-steeped.
I mean, look. We don't really have anything to talk about here but I am going to say I'm not sure you know a capitalist country when you see it. If we're talking about the blood-soaked ones, the Netherlands are capitalist heartland. Not quite as bad as the UK. But bad enough that I suppose I can see why they'd rather rebrand as something other than straight capitalists.
You should also include casualties of the coup in Indonesia, the Casualties of the Korean, Vietnamese, and secret war in Laos. Perhaps also the massacres performed by the Contras in Nicaragua,
I mean historically, with essentially every other incrrease in technology and GDP this has been true, at least broadly speaking.
The quality of life of the poorest in the world has been improving over time.
It is absolutely worth considering "would things really be different this time?" But it's also a mistake to think automatically that it WILL be different this time.
Past performance is not indicative of future results.
The problem is we have to think about the actions we are taking and what those results will be. Just saying "oh, all of history before now needed human labor, but don't worry we're replacing that and nothing is going to change" is a nonsensical statement. In previous times when massive technology changes occurred we typically see very large wars break out. This was terrible and all, but war was a regional thing with regional effects. During the 20th century war became a global thing with global consequences all the way up to biosphere altering weapons of mass destruction.
The threat of MAD set up a time of relative global peace coupled with fast transportation and an explosion in the human population has set up a very fragile state of humanity. Products must keep moving and energy must keep being produces or billions and billions of people will die because they need things from the other side of the world to show up.
It isn't enough to observe empirically how laissez-faire has increased living standards to the extent that it is permitted. It is also necessary to describe the impossibility of central planning due to the Economic Calculation Problem.
We must also observe that opponents to laissez-faire liberalizations are by definition proponents of illiberal central planning.
Yes, vaguely liberalized economies have had problems. It doesn't follow that the problems of these vaguely liberalized economies are exclusively the result of liberalization. HN will harp on cherry picked citations. A common theme will be judging events in the distant past by the standards of the present.
The alternative is not a utopia, it is a relatively less free and more centrally planned economy. The failure mode of these centralized systems is more catastrophic, results in less opportunity and less productivity.
AI is a technology to be used to improve the human condition. The laissez-faire system, to the extent that we allow it, is the decentralized way to allocate resources to serve humanity.
It's not laissez-faire that has increased living standards, it's the combination of the free market, union organizing, and resulting from that, regulation and the social safety net. Before that, there was still massive poverty. And many countries still experiencing poverty are lacking the latter half of that list.
Note that free market economics and laissez-faire economics are not the same thing. A free market requires a transparent market that's equally accessible to everyone, that's not dominated by cartels and monopolies, and that requires some regulation. Laissez-faire opposes that regulation and wants to give free reign to cartels and monopolies. Adam Smith explicitly warned against those, and pointed out the necessity of workers organizing to avoid being taken advantage of. And that, workers having negotiating power, that is what increased their living standards.
> We must also observe that opponents to laissez-faire liberalizations are by definition proponents of illiberal central planning.
This is bullshit. There's the entire free market economy in between those two extremes.
I don't think it is that extreme. The problem with the poster's assertion is that one individual's "free-market" as the poster defines it, is another's state capitalism.
If the above poster feels that there is a pragmatic need for regulation, fine. However the underlying principles of laissez-faire remain clearly defined. By appealing to a pragmatic need for regulation, the poster opens the door for centralized capture of the market. Long term this trend creates malign incentives.
Historically those who couldn't achieve monopoly conditions by appealing to consumers on the market, used the power of the state instead. So there's a mixed bag at best here. Others contend that the truly toxic monopolies are created exclusively by this process. You can take you pick, we're free to disagree here, but denying the hazards of the regulatory state would be unreasonable. Maybe that's an acceptable trade off and I think that's a fair discussion.
However, all of that is a far way off from an appeal to special circumstances, "because AI", "markets bad" and therefore neo-luddite doom. It isn't something we have observed with other tech innovations, nor is it grounded in axiomatic reasoning.
> denying the hazards of the regulatory state would be unreasonable.
The same goes for denying the hazards of unregulated corporations.
Completely unregulated corporations will, if given the chance, grow to become their own unaccountable states, which the first corporations, like the VOC, absolutely did.
You've chosen a poor example to illustrate your case.
The Dutch East India Company was a state granted monopoly. Obviously in this case, the regulations (state charter) empowered the abuses you feel so strongly about.
More generally, I'd caution against applying the present day norms around human rights to a distant historical case.
That monopoly doesn't mean all that much. Sure, they had no Dutch competitors east of Africa, but they had English, Spanish, Portuguese and local competitors. But due to their extreme wealth, they ended up controlling entire countries, a massive navy, and they minted their own currency.
Any corporation is inherently a grant by the state to act as a legal entity. If you truly oppose government regulation of corporations, you should oppose the existence of corporations themselves. And honestly, I think that would solve a lot of the problems with capitalism. But it would also cripple our ability to take on projects too big for a small group of people. The government grant and the concentration of wealth are the entire point of corporations.
Like always, people are missing the forest for the trees here. A swathe of commenters ardently defending the present status quo by nitpicking specifics in an interview and denying or distracting from their core premise by throwing out lines from Econ101 or something they read about Keynesian economics or game theory somewhere that one time. Heck, a few folks in here are really going down the rabbit hole and contorting themselves into knots desperately trying to avoid listening to what others have to say about something, and instead do everything in their power to dismiss the (non-)problem as one of lack of knowledge, than actual concern.
Let's ignore the nitty-gritty for a moment. Let's let Keynes rest for a day instead of putting words in his mouth. Let's all agree that everyone here on HN in the comments is not a billionaire, nor a Capitalist in the strictest definition of the term. We are - broadly - technologists, of different backgrounds and lived experiences that shape our perspectives. We're people, damnit, not key-value pairs in a dataset somewhere.
A large group of people have, for over half a century now, been increasingly concerned that the economic structure simply isn't working for them. In the wealthiest countries on the planet, the workforce has faced stagnant wages, rising asset values, increased precarity of employment, steeper necessity costs (and higher difficulties attaining them without assistance), and bigger boom-bust cycles. This is easily vetted through basic data analysis, and something even HN has let slip through time and again to the front page (we do love our FRED charts here on HN, myself included). These are problems that even the most ardent pro-Capital supporter agrees exist in some form.
Except instead of listening to the plight of their fellow man, so many people - here, on news media, in politics, in economic circles, in boardrooms, in VCs - immediately resort to "econosplaining", for lack of a better term. Rather than listen to the plight of the worker who cannot afford rent on minimum wage, these people will bluster about Keynesian theory and how regulation destroys markets and how, you know what, you are at fault for not owning enough assets to provide for your basic necessities or, better yet, finding a better paying job! How dare you be so poor, when there's so much ample opportunity out there if you just pulled yourself up by your bootstraps! It's not the market's fault that housing is so expensive, that's just basic supply and demand and there's nothing we can - or should - do about it. It's not Capital's fault you got laid off, it's just that cheaper labor existed abroad and we should work harder to import that labor here at that cost. It's not the fault of the market for functioning in this fashion, it's yours for refusing to play by its rules and not being a billionaire business founder with extensive assets.
Which always seems to ignore the plight of their fellow man in that they're asking for help, not seeking to blame - at least, not until fairly recently. The working class simply sought fairer working conditions and a paycheck that reflected the value they contribute to the revenue and profit of the organization. They want affordable housing, nutritious food, high quality education, functioning transport, and above all else, time to live their life as a human, not merely a cog in a greater machine.
In the context of the linked interview, what workers are saying is exactly what AI companies admit to doing: the last vestiges of the middle class are being attacked from above by AI in an effort to funnel as much money as possible into fewer and fewer hands, on purpose. Doctors, Developers, Technologists (hi!), Lawyers, Accountants, these are all the last of the middle class in Western societies, all careers that pay substantially above the median wage and provide the only remaining venue for asset-poor labor who must trade time for money a pathway into the comparatively modest comforts of homeownership and the odd vacation. AI companies don't hide this at all - it's their core advertising point that their LLMs (or whatever came before, and whatever comes next) will finally rid the business of all this expensive labor and allow business owners to hoard capital for themselves and their shareholders - a group that definitely excludes the working class in its entirety, as evidenced by how 93% of US securities are held by just the top 10% of Americans. When workers point this out in any capacity, we're bombarded by game theorists and economists and Keynesian-stans claiming that this is all somehow a good thing, because niche and specific (and often ideological) reasons, and that all of this will ultimately make life better for us despite all the suffering and misery it causes now. We're econosplained that the economy actually is doing great, and that life has never been better with all these streaming services and smartphones and apps and things, even though the plight of the worker was never bemoaning the existence of those things, rather that their necessities aren't affordable or attainable anymore, and that is a more pressing issue.
Workers continue to desperately scream that our lives are getting worse in the metrics that matter to us, yet are brow-beaten downward by pro-Capitalists and their loyalists with victim-blaming narratives and a constant gesticulation to the stock market as evidence that everything is fine and there's no need to worry. This is what I see time and time again in the comments sections, at rallies, at debates, on television, in media, and it shouldn't be any surprise that the narrative has gradually shifted over time from "I think workers need a helping hand with common sense interventions by the government" to "BURN DOWN THE CAPITALIST EMPIRES THAT ENSLAVE AND TORTURE US FOR PROFIT." If you didn't want populism, then you needed to listen to the people before it became populism. It's not that anti-Capitalists wanted to fabricate some great big boogeyman conspiracy theory about billionaires burning the planet and killing workers for profit, but more that after fifty years of reforms in their (Capital's) favor, well, there's kind of a lot of anecdata propping up that theory. Workers are told housing values are a matter of undersupply and overdemand, yet we can see with our own eyes the empty, dark apartments and condos in cities being leveraged for investment assets rather than housing. Workers are told AI will create more jobs, yet all we see are continued layoffs by highly profitable companies invested into AI - often of the most highly-paid workers in society. Workers are lectured that we must own assets in order to have comfort and security, at the simultaneous peak height of asset valuations and lows of wages and purchasing power.
That's the forest you're missing for the AI- or Capital-specific trees. Rather than trotting out the same tired (and often incorrectly attributed) talking points about industrial revolutions and asset markets and anti-regulation and bootstrapped-startups, please consider listening to what people are actually saying first: that this isn't working for us anymore, for a variety of reasons, and the advice parroted back to us over the past half-century hasn't actually improved the lives of the majority in a measurable way on core metrics (necessities).
Stop taking personal offense at the grievances of your fellow man and listen to them earnestly.
1) In the case of programmers, it couldn't happen to more appropriate people.
- At-will employment,
- Manpower/Kelly-ization of jobs and its culmination in the revival of piecework-by-app,
- infinite outsourcing, and
- infinite immigration, illegal and otherwise,
are all supported by programmers in general. This is because they are wealthy and because they are "libertarians" i.e. substitute learning about politics and power with yelling about how they should be left alone to do what they like when they like, and pretending that this is politics.
-----
2) There's an obsession with calling the products of new technologies mediocre when, exactly like the four processes above that caused wage destruction on the low end of the income scale, mediocre products have nothing to do with technology and everything to do with allowing people with capital to squeeze the last drop of profit out of every process they can get in the middle of.
You can have a shop full of people making mediocre products as quickly as they can. You can have a shop full of high-tech machines getting pieces to a point where they can be polished, joined and detailed by experts using high-tech tools. This is largely a matter of what people want at what cost - the level of decoration and permanence that you're going for may not be worth it to me as a customer.
It also has to do with the atomization of people and the disappearance of second-hand markets: relationships between people are where middlemen interpose themselves to extract value. They do this by making it difficult for people to interact, not easy. We have infinitely fast and distant communications, and worldwide cheap logistics, but somehow I can't sell used books without splitting the profit in half with a middleman.
But related, a major reason products are mediocre is because they are sold to you by the people who will sell you their replacements. There is little competition, because although the means of production are cheaper than ever, the lords simply took over the means of distribution through vertical integration (which was once taught as the primary indication of monopoly.) Somehow, the monopolies got larger when it became easier to do things independently, because to do things independently, you were forced to become a vendor to a monopolist distributor who was also selling their own lines. So with this monopolization comes forced obsolescence. There is absolutely no motivation for an Amazon who sells you everything to allow things to last for any period of time. There's no reason for them to allow those things to work well if they have a more expensive line of the same thing they can suggest you move to.
-----
3) None of any of this has anything to do with technology. It's a moral failure. It's a consequence of a complete absence of democracy. There is no restraint on anyone's behavior that voters can impose, and no system that they can dislodge. Government in the west has ceased to exist.
And this moral failure makes it obvious that any gains from AI (of which there will be many, if not as many as people think) will not be shared. You don't share yourself, you feel moral righteousness in not sharing; a sort of greed as heroism, and mistaken for efficiency. When you deign to share, you want to choose who you share with, and you want to be praised. We have more than enough now, and we still have homeless children. We scream about poor people shoplifting, and lament about why people committing multi-billion dollar frauds have to go to prison for a non-violent crime. The reason we believe that people in control of technology will use that control selfishly is because we defend their right to use it selfishly unless it disturbs our lifestyles in any way, which is when we suddenly become activists.
Technology is good. Automation is good. Productivity (denominated in effort, not in dollars) is good. Anything that can be made easier should be made easier. But the Luddites were still right. Not because they were breaking the frames that made weaving cheap and unskilled, but because they were breaking the lord's frames, a parasite whose job was to relax and live from their labor, and fire them when there was no value left to extract. This is not a technological problem. In a morally corrupted world, where the blessed prey on the cursed, any blessing is a curse.
Never trust a guy who pretends that owning things is a job; it is a title. People with titles can hire people to run the things they own; if they don't, it's because they are emotional holes who not only need everything you have, but need you to praise them as deserving of it.
The conversation really brings up some serious issues. AI is not merely a productivity enhancer—it is pure wage battle. What is happening is incredible—AI is being used to reduce the skill level of workers and hence their wages, all in the name of efficiency. The analogy to the Luddites is quite fitting. It is a pity that technology is only making work less expensive for the employers and not better for the workers.
> It is a pity that technology is only making work less expensive for the employers and not better for the workers.
This is true for any innovation. We don't haul ice from the arctic any more. We have refrigerators. It's a false dichotomy to imagine that workers and employers are the only people affected. Customers are also generally affected for the better, and far more people are customers than workers or employers.
A bit off topic, but we never really hauled most ice from the Arctic. The 19th century ice trade started in, and came mostly from, New England. In the later 19th century, Norway became a big player. But much of that ice came from lake Oppegård, which is below the Arctic circle.
But ultimately, customers must have an income, or they can't buy anything. I don't know if AI is a tipping point but if there aren't enough buyers, the economy falls apart.
Maybe everything becomes cheap/free but I don't think that is the likely outcome.
It is far, far too soon to imagine that AI will do everything. I could make myself an instant coffee for about $0.02 in the comfort of my own home, but instead I spend $6 to have a political illiterate with a massive beard make it for me.
> It's a false dichotomy to imagine that workers and employers are the only people affected. Customers are also generally affected for the better, and far more people are customers than workers or employers.
Uh, what now? I would say customers ~= workers + employers, especially if you count retired workers as workers. Outside of those groups, what do you have? The idle rich and welfare recipients? Not very big groups...
Also workers are by far the most numerous class of consumer, and lets not get deceived by the lazy capitalist oversimplification that a worker is not any worse off if you cut his income while making some of the goods he buys cheaper.
I think your categories are off. The workers in an individual company are not all the workers ever. You might work in a car factory and a new bit of automation makes your job safer or higher quality, and but also your team won't get to double in size. You make cars more efficiently, which means either your car company stays in business as it's still competitive, or the global customer base of car buyers gets a cheaper car than it would've if your team had doubled in size, or both.
> I think your categories are off. The workers in an individual company are not all the workers ever.
That's missing an important aspect: AI is not some technology marketed as affecting some relatively narrow slice of the economy, like a few car factories. It's being hyped as transformative of the whole thing. And that's what many people in power are hoping and pushing for (hello, AI use metrics).
> You might work in a car factory and a new bit of automation makes your job safer or higher quality, and but also your team won't get to double in size. You make cars more efficiently, which means either your car company stays in business as it's still competitive, or the global customer base of car buyers gets a cheaper car than it would've if your team had doubled in size, or both.
That's a fairy tale. If the technology allows you to make cars more efficiently, management cuts your team. Maybe some other consumer gets a cheaper car, but fat lot of good that does you, unemployed guy. Then repeat that across most if not all sectors all at once, and it's not a good story for consumers, broadly.
And then there's all kinds of other stuff going on, stuff that economics thinking (especially ECON 101 dogma) has a hard time with.
> That's missing an important aspect: AI is not some technology marketed as affecting some relatively narrow slice of the economy, like a few car factories. It's being hyped as transformative of the whole thing. And that's what many people in power are hoping and pushing for (hello, AI use metrics).
Marketing is only evidence of the fact that someone wants to sell something. How can you equate basic, fundamental economics with some marketing trend?
> That's a fairy tale. If the technology allows you to make cars more efficiently, management cuts your team.
It's definitely not a fairy tale. Evidence: all the millions of teams in the world that use some form of automation. You don't need a secretary for every manager now because Word and Outlook exist.
> It is a pity that technology is only making work less expensive for the employers and not better for the workers.
This is the core issue. Even if quality stays the same or is increased, a much higher percentage of the monetary income from the wealth created goes towards owners instead of workers.
Workers, who build wealth / perform positive-sum work, always were compensated worse than owners, who redistribute existing wealth / perform zero-sum work (if they do any work at all). And that was wrong but the differences were such that people were OK with them.
Now inequality is gonna reach such massive levels that the people will not be OK with it.
In fact, if actual AI is created, this will be the first time in history when the people automated out of jobs will be the most intelligent and most competent on the planet. And my hope is they won't sit idly and accept it.
> This is the core issue. Even if quality stays the same or is increased, a much higher percentage of the monetary income from the wealth created goes towards owners instead of workers.
It also goes to lowering prices or raising quality or raising wages elsewhere, as anywhere there's competition there's a constant tug of war on those axes.
> Workers, who build wealth / perform positive-sum work, always were compensated worse than owners, who redistribute existing wealth / perform zero-sum work (if they do any work at all).
Owners employ workers in a stable, agreed way. Owners might lose money or make money. Workers always make money. If you can't get the basics right, your conclusions will be way off.
We ignore that AI, doesn't really work, it has to be propagandically branded as being/doing things it isn't really doing, must be supervised by experts who actually know what is wrong (which is a paradox - who is learning in advance of the units and their correlations that end up making the mistakes visible?).
In a real sense, technology doesn't make work less expensive, it segragates experts from minions faster, necessitating an entire class of managers who know more than their supervisors. It reverses the food-chain ensuring a revolt of experts over their handlers.
Find it interesting that an entire field of coding is about to fall by the wayside based in irrational exuberance not panning out, and the adherents are relying on down-voting (status removal) rather than engaging with the problem at hand.
The whole concept of "enshittification" ignores that bureaucracy and mediocrity are sourced in primate laziness, which is output at the initial bottlenecks of symbols and metaphors. These are expediencies that engage our status drives.
Each stage of innovation embeds mediocrity and bureaucracy, even in institutions as early as settlements, religion and learning. Innovation is fleet-footed release from bureaucracy.
AI is simply an endgame stage of symbols. The overlord of bureaucratic mediocrity automated, which is the ultimate self-refuting software. It exists to destroy itself (or us) and begs for replacement in transformation. Run them as pretend communication, you create bureaucracy that has to be evaded, automate them in counting/binary, you massively embed mediocrity.
"something vaguely comparable happened in completely different settings and wasn't bad in the end, hence we should accept everything new as 100% positive and never question anything ever again"
Well it's not 'vaguely comparable'. The core point is that technology does not decrease demand for labor (i.e. jobs or wages) because new technology makes things possible that were not possible before. The direct result is that the breadth of human activity increases, and so does demand for labor. The textbook example of this is that 200 years ago, 96% of the population worked in agriculture and now only 4% of the population does. But that does NOT mean the balance are unemployed! More people are employed today globally than ever before in history.
It's a very common mistake to imagine the world has only a fixed number of jobs to go around. Anti immigration arguments and anti technology arguments both use this as the fulcrum of their argument but it's simply a faulty assumption.
Why are people pushed into more and more precarious and low paid jobs then? We have more technology than ever before yet it seems like job quality and stability peaked some time ago. Why is the retirement age growing? Why is the gape between wages and productivity increasing?
> The textbook example of this is that 300 years ago, 96% of the population worked in agriculture and now only 4% of the population does. But that does mean the balance are unemployed!
Oh no imagine the horrors of growing your own food and owning your own means of production, I'm shivering at the thought of it... Meanwhile we have millions of slaves driving Uber or delivering burgers, billions stuck in jobs with absolutely no meaning, billions working in industries actively harming the planet, &c.
"We have more technology than ever before yet it seems like job quality and stability peaked some time ago. Why is the retirement age growing? Why is the gape between wages and productivity increasing?"
- Your first statement is some sort of nostalgia or rose colored glasses. We have hard data on this. Globally speaking, but also in America specifically, people work fewer hours for higher inflation-adjusted pay than they did 20, 50, or 100 years ago. My grandfather was born in 1926, had the exact same educational attainment as me (although he attended a much more prestigious university), and I earn more and work less than he did. I have more vacation days. I have a higher savings rate.
- To your second question, the retirement age is increasing because our demographic pyramid around the world is inverting. This a function of birth rates being below replacement for too long. It's just math. Too many old people and not enough young people. But to my previous point, the ability to plan your family like this and have fewer kids is also a result of increased wealth and opportunity (to do things other than raise children).
- Lastly, the gap between wages and productivity is increasing because wages are only indirectly a result of productivity. They are directly a result of demand for labor against the supply available. Increased productivity allows companies to have the resources to bid more, (hence why some comparable role like middle management in a tech firm pays a lot more than middle management at a grocery retailer). But I don't view this as a problem. As long as the tide is generally rising, and it is as my first paragraph explained, no one is hurt by a gap increasing. It's not a zero sum game where a winner implies a loser. But also, increased productivity results in lower prices, which is equivalent to getting a raise. The classic example are things like electronics, movies, music, travel, and food which have gotten much cheaper than they used to be. In 1950, Americans spent an average of 21% of their incomes on food. In 2025, that number is 10%. That's the equivalent of raise in that one can pay for necessities and have more spending power left over. Interestingly, the areas people complain about are mostly housing, education, and healthcare. These are three sectors that have seen zero to negative productivity increases over the past few decades. Yes, the construction sector in America is less productive than it was in 1990 per man hour of labor, and higher education is a total wreck in terms of productivity. Places like Stanford now have more administrators than students.
One of the most interesting books I have read is Franz Innerhofers Schöne Tage which describes his experience on a farm in Austria in the second half of the 20th century. The experiences of farm hands and maids was absolutely horrifying and each one would take a soul less office job at Dunder Mifflin or an Uber Eats route without question. People were basically property even in society without slavery. The US 19th century is really a special case because the land was all recently stolen from the native Americans who mostly died of diseases. So those people that colonized the land had an unknown amount of freedom because that only existed for a short time in history and even they were lacking any access to medical services or real education. What’s not seeing half your children dying worth to you?
To your last question, zero, because no one has children anymore because of the present.
The past can be interesting, but is not a direct substation for actual discussion in the present. I mean in this one thread supposedly about the impact of capital itself now being able to create labour, instead of paying for labor, something that has never happened in history we have such depth on the topic at hand as:
'In the past everything perfectly just magically worked out so it will magically work out now and magic new jobs will appear because jobs appeared in the past'
'The past was horrific, you should be grateful for any current job and ignore you are getting poorer'
'The past was an special one off time in history, you can't expect that now'
'Medicine didn't exist in the past. Think about the children'
Zero depth of discussion but a shit load of handwaving away actual discussion.
In the past, workers complained that automation took away their jobs. The (roughly) same amount of wealth was created but the income went to fewer individuals (the owners).
This was a valid criticism but at least they could move onto other jobs.
AI, if successful, is different. Combined with robotics[0], it makes all jobs obsolete. Regardless if the amount of wealth created will be less, the same, or greater than before, the income will only go towards the owners and everyone else will become a beggar. That is the endgame.
If you believe the endgame is different, please game it out in your head and share what you think. Don't just reject this idea without thinking about it.
[0]: And even without robotics, true AI (AGI) would obliterate such a huge percentage of jobs it would create a shock and massive unemployment.
Just as they do during every economic downturn, when the wealthy have all their needs satisfied and have no reason for people anymore. But soon the wealthy become bored just sitting there doing nothing with no people around them. So they end up dreaming up new work for people to do to fill the void.
"It's not what you know, it's who you know." People already aren't hired for their rote task abilities, they are hired because the wealthy want warm bodies around them (see also RTO mandates). It's their social outlet. A large number of jobs exist simply because the wealthy are willing to pay for "friends".
Even if AI does end up doing all the real work, the wealthy will still want to hire humans to be "managers", just like they already are doing in the growing absence of real work. According to Statistics Canada, the management sector has grown by 36% over the past two decades. Which is funny from a purely productivity perspective as management is most amendable to automation. The sector should be shrinking. But it isn't about any kind of actual work, it's about gathering together to build social connections so that the wealthy have their social needs satisfied.
The biggest threat to people is if AI figures out how to become the owner. Then it will be apt to rationally operate on what needs to be done, not the emotional experience of being around humans. But so long as humans retain that position...
> AI, if successful, is different. Combined with robotics[0], it makes all jobs obsolete.
I'm still skeptical that AI will be able to take our jobs anytime soon, but when it does, we really need to make sure that we have a different economic system; one that doesn't demand that people work in jobs that don't exist anymore. At the very least, we need to tax those companies enough to provide a Basic Income, so we can actually allow those companies to go through with it. But even then, capitalism might be a problem, because as the sole owners of all production capital, they will continue to gather more capital and power, without the people on BI having any say over it anymore. Eventually, AI will have to be used to support people instead of corporations, and I don't think that's possible in a highly capitalist economy. Get rid of the Friedman Doctrine at the very least.
I guess we’re back to good ol’ slavery here. Wasn’t it Platonic ideal where everyone would own at least two slaves? Except that we’re all going to be slaves and richer slaves will have their own slaves, all the way down.
And child labor! Don’t forget about child labor. Childhood is cancelled! Gotta learn how to slave right from the infancy.
I get what you are saying. But I am not sure that is happening.
It has totally leveled up the people I am working with. They have a fairly decent expert they can bug all the time. The types of questions my jr people are bringing me now are no longer 'xyz doesnt compile right' to 'if I am using this pattern the crap doesnt come from the right place'.
My mentoring has turned from basic trouble shooting to fairly higher level how to design things. How to really break something and tear it apart and put it back together. How to find that one inscrutable bug that is doing something weird.
I agree with you but many programmers really enjoyed the fiddling with the lines of code and solving the puzzles more than actually building the thing and are not liking the changes. I saw it as a means to an end (which I enjoyed getting good at!) and I am loving the change.
And still several years into this generative AI phenomenon and no-one has lost their job to a bot yet. We should concentrate on the labour struggle we are currently engaged in, and not make up fantasy issues.
> Printing money caused inflation caused interest rate hikes that forced companies to operate with a skeleton crew of slave labor.
Feudalism is the end goal. These people are clearly perturbed by the lack of power they have relative to wealth. They’ve been explicitly writing about this for a while now. Now they’re building castles, rapidly expanding their power and influence in politics, and working on a way to gut the middle class.
