> ...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.
> 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.
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?
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.
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.
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".
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.
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.
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.)
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 ...
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 on...
"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.
20 comments
[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 43.2 ms ] threadWhat, 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
https://www.amazon.com/Programmers-Managers-Routinization-Pr...
In social democracy, AI and automation are great news for workers.
Idealistic, granted, but where is our current path leading us?
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.
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.)
- 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 ...
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 on...
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.