AI is an attack from above on wages": cognitive scientist Hagen Blix

https://www.bloodinthemachine.com/p/ai-is-an-attack-from-above-on-wages

by NoGravitas • 10 months ago

76 117 10 months ago

roenxi6• 10 months ago

...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.

tartuffe78• 10 months ago

But the lot of low status people is probably only going to improve with more AI

I've got a bridge to sell you...

Enginerrrd• 10 months ago

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.

CodingJeebus• 10 months ago

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.

zmgsabst4• 10 months ago

Steeped in blood compared to what?

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.

matthewdgreen• 10 months ago

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!

impossiblefork2• 10 months ago

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".

zmgsabst4• 10 months ago

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.

palmfacehn5• 10 months ago

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.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_calculation_problem

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nirvana_fallacy

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.

mcv12• 10 months ago

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.

aeon_ai2• 10 months ago

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.

Retric2• 10 months ago

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.

nasmorn4• 10 months ago

Custom sized shirts are cheaper than many designer brands. People don’t care about the fit aspect as much as you’d think

131012• 10 months ago

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).

aeon_ai2• 10 months ago

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

andrewmutz• 10 months ago

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.

zmgsabst4• 10 months ago

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.

lm284693• 10 months ago

~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.

nasmorn4• 10 months ago

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.

pixl974• 10 months ago

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.

fvdessen2• 10 months ago

So many copying monks screaming that the printing press will ruin books forever

lm284693• 10 months ago

"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"

I never understood that argument.

missedthecue2• 10 months ago

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.

martin-t5• 10 months ago

Bad analogy.

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.

adamauckland• 10 months ago

Where's all this wealth going to come from if nobody has any jobs?

mcv12• 10 months ago

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.

9rx• 10 months ago

and everyone else will become a beggar.

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...

sumtechguy• 10 months ago

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 am digging it.

fvdessen2• 9 months ago

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.

everdrive4• 10 months ago

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?

mg794613• 10 months ago

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.

everdrive4• 10 months ago

That's an unfair strawman, and you're putting words in my mouth which I really did not intend. (or even imply)

zmgsabst4• 10 months ago

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.

[0] - Actual term in UN reports.

everdrive4• 10 months ago

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.

martin-t5• 10 months ago

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.

pixl974• 10 months ago

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.

JambalayaJimbo• 10 months ago

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.

sunir• 10 months ago

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.

https://www.amazon.com/Programmers-Managers-Routinization-Pr...

capestart• 10 months ago

[flagged]

pavlov• 10 months ago

The “X is not just Y—it’s Z” sentence pattern complete with em dash is not just exciting writing—it’s a tremendous AI smell.

serf• 10 months ago

agreed, but it's not like it came from nowhere. going to be hard to get the entire world to speak differently for every model released.

palmfacehn5• 10 months ago

Even more so when it is a summary.

martin-t5• 10 months ago

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.

philipallstar5• 10 months ago

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.

philipallstar5• 10 months ago

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.

SoftTalker2• 10 months ago

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.

technothrasher• 10 months ago

We don't haul ice from the arctic any more.

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.

palmotea4• 10 months ago

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.

mallowdram3• 10 months ago

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.

mallowdram3• 10 months ago

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.

azaras• 10 months ago

That is because of the neoliberal ideology. When the ideology changes, workers will be the primary beneficiaries.

pants2• 10 months ago

Uh oh, em dashes, "not X but Y" - I think even this comment is AI. Nowhere is safe, apparently.

LurkandComment• 10 months ago

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".

ponector• 10 months ago

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.

palmotea4• 10 months ago

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!

bespokedevelopr• 10 months ago

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.

sdsd• 10 months ago

Only if the profits and increased productivity aren't used to fund things so you don't need wages.

In social democracy, AI and automation are great news for workers.

otikik• 10 months ago

Seize the means of computation.

martin-t5• 10 months ago

And the product. The workers should collectively own the product they build.

martin-t5• 10 months ago

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.

[0] https://eev.ee/blog/2025/07/03/the-rise-of-whatever/#:~:text...

[1]: Who "make" more money every day than most people make in their lifetime.

ndriscoll3• 10 months ago

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.

palmotea4• 10 months ago

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.

tokai• 10 months ago

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.

BergAndCo• 10 months ago

All the headlines make sense if you know that AI stands for Actually Indians.

Printing money caused inflation caused interest rate hikes that forced companies to operate with a skeleton crew of slave labor.

culll_kuprey2• 10 months ago

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.

IT4MD• 10 months ago

Standard human stuff. Let's use this new technology to shaft billions for the sake of profits, instead of using it to uplift others.

Idealistic, granted, but where is our current path leading us?

mallowdram3• 10 months ago

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.

mattgreenrocks• 10 months ago

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.)

pessimizer• 10 months ago

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.

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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.

stego-tech• 10 months ago

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.

aiisahik• 10 months ago

"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.

AI is an attack from above on wages": cognitive scientist Hagen Blix

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