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.
