The reality is that each time a business buys an efficiency-and-productivity-improving device, they were able to afford that device by exploiting the labor of their workers.
They will use the device they paid for to lay off some of their workers to reduce overhead costs. These workers essentially worked to have their jobs taken away as a reward.
In the 1970’s, people were worried about a future where people had too much leisure time. In the cartoon The Jetsons George Jetson worked a grueling two hours a week at The Button which he was tasked to press once in a while. People assumed the fruits of automation would go to everyone.
Not so, business owners use the fruits of your labor to put you out of a job to be replaced with a machine.
When they buy an AI to replace you, they did it with the labor you provided your employer. This honestly should not be allowed, legally the benefits of such devices should be experienced by all, not just the boss.
That’s why it exacerbates social tensions, because we all know the score: The ownership class will take and take and take and take and never give an inch unless you break out the gui— oh wait.
Hate to say this but what a big blob of BS because the ownership class find out pretty early that if no one else is making money to buy the shits they make, they can’t make more money. (We will skip the pre 1900 slavery scenario, as they can just force you to work and just keep you alive is enough as slaves are “production equipment” like cows/horses. )
People generate value if they do or make something other people want, currency invented to cover that value gap so supply, demand, skill and rarity, efficiency and many different quality of your work/product/service decides how many $ you get when people want your service. At least, that’s how it all should be in equal footing. But since money == power when the scale goes up, since ancient time successful merchants holds a lot influence in politics and cause unbalance in wealth distribution. They can only push it so far until they get hunting down and stuff taken, but usually by other influential political/business figures that does the raids.
Having said the above, a lot of small and medium scale business owners values their employees a lot, especially those that truly have the skill set that compliments their business. And, do I need to remind you to do a bit of study of history, the invention of machines, tele-communication and then the boom of computers(especially general purpose ones), yet global population keeps going up and up instead of all starved to death cause the jobs these past things replaced?
And, just to do a quick review of how much people hates the automated phone support menu system transition from traditional to modern voice recognition ones. Or how many internet goer hates the auto generated useless pages plague our search result and provide nothing useful, waste our time click and read just to serve some ads? Yeah, like many worried before, what if computer replaced our jobs? Well, they need people to make the computer work. AI isn’t going to be fully automated and self improve, we are pretty far from that. many successful model needs guided training, and usually prevents additional feedback into the system to avoid degrading the performance.
The main issue though is the economic system, not the technology.
My hope is that it shakes things up fast enough that they can’t boil the frog, and something actually changes.
Having capable AI is a more blatantly valid excuse to demand a change in economic balance and redistribution. The only alternative would be destroy all technology and return to monkey. Id rather we just fix the system so that technological advancements don’t seem negative because the wealthy have already hoarded all new gains of every new technology for this past handful of decades.
Such power is discretely weaponized through propaganda, influencing, and economic reorganizing to ensure the equilibrium stays until the world is burned to ash, in sacrifice to the lifestyle of the confidently selfish.
I mean, we could have just rejected the loom. I don’t think we’d actually be better off, but I believe some of the technological gain should have been less hoardable by existing elite. Almost like they used wealth to prevent any gains from slipping away to the poor. Fixing the issue before it was this bad was the proper answer. Now people don’t even want to consider that option, or say it’s too difficult so we should just destroy the loom.
There is a markov blanket around the perpetuating lifestyle of modern aristocrats, obviously capable of surviving every perturbation. every gain as a society has made that reality more true entirely due to the direction of where new power is distributed. People are afraid of AI turning into a paperclip maximizer, but that’s already what happened to our abstracted social reality. Maximums being maximized and minimums being minimized in the complex chaotic system of billions of people leads to inevitable increase of accumulation of power and wealth wherever it has already been gathered. Unless we can dissolve the political and social barrier maintaining this trend, it we will be stuck with our suffering regardless of whether we develop new technology or don’t.
Although doesn’t really matter where you are or what system you’re in right now. Odds are there is a set of rich asshole’s working as hard as possible to see you are kept from any piece of the pie that would destabilize the status quo.
I’m hoping AI is drastic enough that the actual problem isn’t ignored.
Agreed, the labor-saving devices were supposed to save labor for all of us. There is nothing wrong with doing things more efficiently if the fruits of that efficiency are shared equitably.
Also it seems you accidentally commented twice. Cheers!
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