who cares? that’s not this year’s problem let alone this quarter. this year, profits go up
It’s illegal to look at next year
Anticapitalist badthink. Prepare the mechanical hound.
The robots won’t have all the jobs. And the demand for human labor will increase.
There will always be some jobs humans can’t do. It’s not that there’s something magical about humans and the human mind. It’s just that there are certain jobs that are so complex and involve such human emotional intelligence and human interaction, that any machine that could do this instead of a person would have to be a person themselves. I might trust Commander Data to be my kid’s elementary school teacher. But that’s also because I would consider Commander Data to be a person. But there would also be little reason to mass produce Commanders Data to be elementary school teachers, as that would amount to little more than slavery. A mind is a mind, regardless of the substrate. Forcing a mind to work for you is a moral abomination, regardless of whether that mind is flesh or silicon.
As automation has increased over the generations, the demand for human labor has increased. The fields whose services have increased in price high above inflation are non-coincidentally those with the highest amount of unavoidable human labor. Think medicine, higher education, and home construction. Automation generates vast wealth. People who profit from highly automated industries then have more money to spend on things. There’s more money in the economy to support the labor-intensive industries. But automation can’t meaningfully decrease the cost of producing them. So the wealth generated in low-labor intensity industries goes towards bidding up the cost of the goods and services produced in high-labor intensive industries.
Or another way to look at it. Automation is deflationary. Whenever the production of a good or service becomes highly automated, the cost that good or service tends to go down. There’s a reason the idea of a walk-in-closet would have been considered absurd to your ancestors. When people spend less money on the automated goods, they have more money to spend on the labor-intensive goods.
Or, a third perspective. A reasonable assumption is that future automation will look like past automation. Yes, automation can be disruptive on an individual level. If you’re 55 and your entire career specialty is automated away, you’re going to be really hurting at a personal level. You just don’t have time to retrain for a new career field, and medically you may be unable to. But as a whole, people move into fields that have high need for workers. We have a higher labor force participation rate than we did 200 years ago, despite only a single-digit percentage of people needing to work in agriculture now. Wave after wave of automation has failed to result in the predicted mass employment and immiseration of the populace. And every time we’re told that “this time is different,” it turns out to be no different than the previous times. The people telling you that this round of automation will be completely different from all the others are the same people profiting from the current AI bubble.
The automation that AI is promising (but not necessarily delivering) is fundamentally different than the automation that came before.
Remember; the luddites were right but their industry was small enough that the displaced labour could be absorbed by other industries.
Not only is AI affecting almost every artistic and white-collar industry, but the cap-ex barrier to entry is way lower than for any other automation effort in the past. No need to buy expensive machines, or create whole new production lines just to test it out. Computers used to take up an entire room to do the work of a handful of people. If you can increase productivity but there is no associated increase in demand, then what you get is layoffs.
The amount of workers that this has the potential to displace far outstrips the industry/economy/society’s ability to replace with “new careers” (that we’ve yet to see materialize). And I challenge your assertion that automation has resulted in increased demand for human labour, do we significantly less unemployment on average? Over the last 70 years (in the USA for ex) unemployment has been trending up.
What we have seen is a total gutting of employee bargaining power.
Why do you assume these all need to be new careers? Why do you assume that we can’t expand existing careers? It’s happened in the past, it can happen again. Agriculture went from employing the majority of the populace to 2%. We found jobs for everyone.
There are many professions that have immense latent demand that people simply cannot afford. Really any industry that involves a lot of human labor. People want more education than they can afford. People want more healthcare than they can afford. People want more childcare, private tutoring, home cleaning, personal trainers, life coaches, financial advisors, and on and on. Think of the retinue of assistants and employees the wealthy employ. Now imagine the number of people who can afford those services drastically expanding. We don’t even need to necessarily invent new careers. There’s plenty of latent demand already. Those masses of displaced agricultural workers? Most of them found jobs in fields that already existed.
Over the last 70 years (in the USA for ex) unemployment has been trending up.
This is false. I’ll ignore the employment rate and focus on labor force participation rate, as unemployment doesn’t count people who are long-term unemployed and have given up working. Labor force participation is a better metric here.
Labor force participation has gone up and down, corresponding with changes in demographics. Despite generations of technological change and automation, we’ve always found ways to employ the excess labor. Human labor is always the ultimate bottleneck. There’s probably enough latent demand for human labor to employ many multiples of our current population.
Agriculture went from employing the majority of the populace to 2%. We found jobs for everyone.
Sure, over the course of like 200 years. Can you not see how that is fundamentally different?
There are many professions that have immense latent demand that people simply cannot afford
“Afford” is doing a lot of work in your sentence. How do you think people are going to be able to afford more? Workers aren’t going to be making more money, and the workers who enter these professions are going to be making a lot less money.
Labor force participation is a better metric here
No, it really isn’t.
Labour force participation rate is “how many working age people want a job” even if they’re unemployed.
Unemployment rate tells you “how much of the labour force can get a job” which is what we actually care about. Can you get a job if you want one. More people need jobs (as you have shown) but fewer percentage of those people are able to get jobs (as I’ve shown).\
No-one will have to be worried about budgets once SkyNet takes over.
I’ll be like the oil tanker level measuring fella in Waterworld when the MIRVs rend the sky over my city. Oh, thank god.
A cancer doesn’t plan
The owners of other robots.
We kinda have two choices:
Some flavour of socialism where people get what they need for free
Or
Turbo-rio-de-janiro style inequality where we all live in slums
Now the 2nd one is what the ultra rich want and they have a lot of power, so it’s kinda on the rest of us to make the first happen instead
Didn’t the French have an option three?
It’s an uphill battle, but it’s better to start early than late.
Unlike before, the rich now have private armies, lobbying groups, and mass surveillance networks while we peasants own nothing. Plus, the pot is slowly boiled.
The rich have always had private armies and spy networks. The technology may have changed, but same old same old.
I disagree. My opinion is that the technology did change. It just became more efficient at doing its job (killing people, surveillance, and mass propaganda).
The internet was supposed to be a gateway of information, but now it’s the largest propaganda network. Free speech is censored by closed source algorithms and the entire internet infrastructure is controlled and owned by the 1%.
We are more isolated compared to before, class solidarity is almost nonexistent, and its easier to identify people now vs before due to being interconnected real time.
I can go more on and on but the tldr is that technology has made it easier and faster to crush dissent
The french fucked up cause they didn’t have option 1 as the follow-up to option 3.
Data centres notoriously don’t have heads, but I love the enthusiasm
If Louis so-and-so hadn’t had a head my ancestors would have blown him to bits, that’s also an option for datacenters, just look at Iran !
Data centers are made by companies and companies have board of directors who have heads. CEOs have heads.
They do have power supply, though.
The sad part of a revolution is that it means civil war. You can’t have a revolution without infighting or counter revolution. It always amounts to civil war.
The other sad part is that once the French king and queen were taken care of, it was time for the revolution OGs to get their heads chopped off. Desmoulins, Danton, D’Eglantine, Philippe Égalité… infighting and a little reign of terror just made the revolution turn on itself.
Be careful what you wish for.
“maybe the clothes are made of paper. The food is just nutrient paste…”
Or something like that from the Expanse. Sure, your needs are met, but living life on basic assistance seems like a nightmare.
Another fiction to look at could be Star Trek. Pretty much everything materialistic is free. You study and work not to afford your materialistic needs and wants, but for the joy of doing it.
And people do build careers and business, for the joy and the achievement of it.
… just to contrast your idea of badic income meaning barely surviving.
Option 3 : WW3 and kill off all the poors
This might inconvenience some of the rich, though.
The economy is already morphing to serve the needs of the upper levels of worth. Look at the trend with airlines shrinking economy sections and expanding first class and business class. Pretty much all consumer offerings are moving to the luxury tier.
Vegas is a good example. Increasingly caters to the top 1%.
I have a suspicion they are focusing on short-term goals, because that is what those people usually do. For example, it’s probably hard to explain who should watch all the ads and buy all the advertised products when Facebook replaces their content and interactions with bot slop. They didn’t think this through. This isn’t some kind of visionary 4D chess. But it does not matter to them. When wasting 80 billion on a VR project that was doomed to fail from the beginning does not matter, nothing does.
I purposely “watch” ads because I think it’s funny that me doing it causes company’s to think they work and therefore spend more money, I cannot think of a single thing I bought because of an ad, sure some things I have learned about because of ads but if I bought the product it is because I researched the product and it fit with my expectations, most of the time I buy competitive products because my assessment process asigns negative points for ads that annoy me.
What you’re describing is exactly how most ads work. It’s to inundate you with a brand so you want to search it up and likely purchase it. You never bought directly from an ad, but an ad sure as fuck worked on you.
I’m a former digital marketer. Many ads are meant for brand reach. They’re basically there to ear (mind?) worm you so you’re thinking about the brand. Digital ads can be cheap in niche markets when bidding isn’t forcing up prices due to competition for market share.
If buy “worked” you mean “caused me to not buy a product” then you are correct. I have no memory of ever buying a product because of an ad. In fact the ads I see are almost all for products I have no interest in. I get ads for fast food and I haven’t been to any restaurant in 10 years or so. I get ads for feminine hygiene products and I am male. I get ads in Spanish that I’m certain are for great products but I will never know because I don’t speak Spanish. I have even got an ad from a company that makes sand traps for off shore oil rigs.
To me ads feel like a person is trying to scam me it is the same feeling I get from door to door sales people and agresive sales people in general. The more I see an ad the less likely I am to hold positive feelings for the product.
I understand that I am nerodivergent and therefore my response to ads is atypical, but it is still my response.
“This year, give her english muffins.”
Whatever you say, Mr. Billboard.
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For example, it’s probably hard to explain who should watch all the ads and buy all the advertised products when Facebook replaces their content and interactions with bot slop.
Sam Altman owns a company that provides ‘human verification’
Yeah, the “elite” aren’t actually smart enough to figure that out. Elite is kind of an oxymoron.
No one asked you to use that word to describe them, why are you perpetuating it?
They’re not elite, they’re just rich fuckers who attained massive riches by exploiting the workers’ need for survival.
That’s why they need to horde that much money.
Nobody gets rich or stays rich by hoarding money. That’s not what being wealthy means.
Please explain. You mean they invest and are actually very smart and earned their wealth by working hard?
Rich people don’t hoard cash. They have assets that are valuable. A billionaire doesn’t have a billion dollars on their bank account. Hell, they probably don’t even have a million in there. All that wealth is tied to investments that either increases in value or for the very least holds it.
Making money is incredibly easy if you have a lot of money to begin with. Going from zero to million is hard. Going from million to a hundred million, not so much.
It’s hoarding none the less. I assume the previous commenter didn’t mean literally cash, neither did I. So yes you’re right.
Is Elon hoarding money because he owns multiple succesfull companies?
I don’t think so. Hoarding means sitting on a pile of something that you don’t use/need.
Exactly!!
They’re more like sadistic self interested fucks than elites.
Thats not very “shareholder value” of you. /s
We will be the stuff
Stuff is people! 😮
That’s why it’s called “human capital.”
It’s literally right there in the term.
Either we all die, or our owners will give us a few bucks to make a living (UBI style), but not enough to do more. We’re fucked anyway.
It’s okay. Elon said we’d all be rich thanks to UBI once the robots have taken over all the jobs. And Elon wouldn’t lie.
/s
With MechaHitler controlled robots, you will compete with all of the other sharecroppers to pay your robot rental fess with your mechahitler minion’s work’s revenue. If you get rich from this scheme, Musk will increase supply of robots so that more competition to your income stops you from being rich.
Concerning!
