African Workers for ChatGPT, TikTok and Facebook Vote to Unionize
time.com
time.com
A trickle.
Then a flood.
The labor movement is resurging and rightly so.
We need to welcome this or prepare for violent revolution globally.
Wealth inequality is cyclical with the same outcomes throughout history - voluntary or violent wealth redistribution.
So regardless of who ends up in charge after or if that regime succeeds, you can’t say revolutions themselves are not frighteningly effective. After all, every existing country on earth is the result of a revolution against the leaders of its past.
The Townshend Acts were meant to tax the colonies to recoup the cost of their own defense, after the French and Indian War kicked off arguably due to Washington's poor French and inexperienced military leadership:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Jumonville_Glen#Afte...
Funny that you'd pick those areas and not Asia, where a billion people were lifted out of absolute poverty in the last 30 years! Pure chance, I'm sure.
https://tradingeconomics.com/haiti/gdp-per-capita
The actual facts don't match your rosey summary.
Haiti has faced 4 straight years of a shrinking economy and the GDP per capita is at one of it's lowest points in the last 60 years.
Yes, many people have been lifted out of poverty but it has happened alongside increasing inequality and there have been some very notable failures and Haiti is one of them.
You anti-capitalists have already caused a century of misery and wont--can't you just admit defeat? Haiti is the perfect example of the extraordinary benefits of our system. 40% can't read. 60% lack access to electricity. Yet even they can't escape the bounty of global capitalist system!
It's over. Capitalism won, for the benefit of all of humanity.
https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.KD?location...
Wealth redistribution movements can successfully happen within national borders, or even within tightly knit groups of nations (say EU, or NAFTA).
But there will never be any solidarity between say US and African workers, heck there won't even be any solidarity between Indian and African workers. China in particular violently suppresses unions because they believed it'll result in China outcompeting all other developing countries in manufacturing, which is exactly what happened.
If AI is to replace white collar jobs, the outsourced white collar jobs (low precision, low criticality) will be the first to go. Replaced by one person in the home country doing the job of 5-10 in the past. This fact alone crushes any sympathy across borders.
Why not? If post-covid economics has a theme, it's that things are more interconnected and more fragile than we expected. That fragility is also opportunity.
I can imagine scenarios where overpaid tech workers in the US--rather than striking themselves--instead pay underpaid miners (in Africa, say) to strike, which cascades to hold up manufacturing, which cascades to harm their eventual target.
Making hardware more expensive, directly and negatively harms software developers. Software devs benefit from cheaper hardware, in the same way car companies benefit from cheaper oil. Car workers don't get paid better because oil prices go up, they get laid off.
Also, most rare earth minerals are mined in China, China does not look kindly to foreign 'interference', such as labour organisation.
But it even makes sense according to a colder, less human logic (which, regrettably, is often what matters). Like maybe I want to pressure the makers of a VR headset into letting me root it so that I can prevent it from streaming biometrics to the vendor. If I can delay the release of the latest headset versionin a way that causes the news about the delay to focus on how poorly certain workers are treated, I can later threaten to do it again if they don't give me what I want.
Perhaps this is a petty example, but whenever I'm asked to input a tip in a place where tipping isn't appropriate (like a drive-through fast-food restaurant), I'd like to tip $0.05 as a hint that I've contributed $5 to their strike fund (which they could use an app to later verify).
You know, like back in the day when people boycotted goods produced in Apartheid South Africa.
Today, unless there’s an app for that…
It's about establishing communication directly with the workers so that you can circumvent potentially corrupt unions.
As for general purpose boycotts, I don't think they're as effective as they used to be. Modern supply chains are too convoluted.
It's easy to see somebody doing something that you don't like and engage with them directly about how you can help them stop. Mapping an evil to a change in your spending habits that prevents it... I'm sure there are cases where that's still possible, but I don't think it's the majority of them.
It's not exactly a major player, though, and hasn't been for many decades now.
Income disparity would also be part of the calculation:
1) If there are V people with W average income each willing to pay X% of their their income to support Y other people while they strike and forgo their income of Z, then maybe you get more disruption for your buck by targeting part of the supply chain in a country where wages are lower.
2) If you're looking to make your target look scummy, targeting a more direct dependency might not be the right thing. You'd want to be funding a strike that should've happened anyway if only the people could afford it, not one that isn't justified.
As for the "China does not look kindly" thing... don't get caught? We're disrupting here, of course we're going to upset people. That's the point.
You are sounding like those businessmen who think building a facebook or programmer just requires hiring some contracted programmer for a few months.
And organizing people across national/linguistic borders is instantly 10x harder. Across long causality chains, 1000x harder. Its like trying to build an app that can run on hardware from the 90s to modern iOS to windows XP. The only company on the planet that can do that is Palantir, and they aren't very profitable.
We've only been doing this whole widespread-global-communication thing for a few decades, who knows what'll happen in the next few.
Global solidarity has more benefits than drawbacks. Plus strikes only last so long, then if successful the workers get better pay. But this is unlikely to lead to higher hardware costs - instead it will just be lower profits for the capital owners. The cost of raw materials is not determined by labor costs, but by global markets - owners just collect the difference between costs and prices for themselves.
Why would anyone donate to help anyone else? I've contributed to strike and organized labor funds because it can help others improve and make meaningful changes in their lives.
> Making hardware more expensive, directly and negatively harms software developers.
I doubt many people are pro-miner brutality and exploitation because it might make electronics a bit cheaper.
No they don't? For a start hardware is a miniscule cost at most software companies, but even asides from that, its not like programmers would be paid more if that cost was lower. They are paid exactly as little as the boss can get away with. If the company you or I work for literally doubled its profits we'd walk away with like a small bonus at most, maybe some small improvement in options if you're lucky enough to get those
Mexican unions are very corrupt, and even being near them would expose American unions to insane legal liability.
I see the same problem with regards to Africa. Corruption is … an issue.
Unity allows easy spreading of disease and corruption, cancer cannot spread between different people. If a union in one country is corrupt, it won't automatically affect the unions in another country.
China was a united entity against the mongol invasion, didn't work out very well, because you take out the center, the rest collapses.
Europe was deeply divided, and just because your neighbouring castle surrendered, doesn't mean you will. Because you are the local noble who owns the land, rather than some bureaucrat employed by a distant emperor.
I am sorry, is this like troll logic?
The entire history of war is large and powerfull empires bullying smaller ones.
This is so silly I am not even sure how you can argue this. Like did USA fight world war 2 as 50 seperate armies, one for every state?
That is not the case. You have period of imperial blobbing, and also period of intense fracturing. Europe fractured after Rome, because smaller polities were much easier to maintain, with fewer layers of bureaucracy to feed. The small Frank kingdom (that only owned half of France) was able to fend off the great Jihad from the Umayyads that had crushed the Visigothic Spain. Whereas if you took out Rome, or the Chang-An of China, the rest of the empire would be paralyzed and unable to act.
https://freebeacon.com/policy/labor-leaders-say-illinois-fir...
https://www.nhregister.com/news/article/New-Haven-firefighte...
https://www.shrm.org/resourcesandtools/legal-and-compliance/...
I don't think I'd care to imagine fighting a corrupt union entails.
US unions would like Mexico to have strong unions both out of sympathy and self-interest. The more protections Mexican workers have the less attractive it is to move jobs from the US to Mexico.
US unions successfully fought to include pro-union provisions in the USMCA (Trump's NAFTA "renegotiation"). They're using those provisions to help Mexican workers form real unions and defeat the sham employer unions. We don't yet have much experience with how these provisions will work out, but there have been limited early successes.
See for ex https://apnews.com/article/biden-labor-unions-united-states-...
Describing the prosecution of the head of the teachers union in 2013:
> Mexican Attorney General Jesús Murillo Karam charged Gordillo with money laundering, saying she had used the union funds to pay for airplanes, pilot training, her plastic surgeries, and purchases of luxury items in the United States. Juan Díaz de la Torre, who was a loyal member of her union caucus, became head of the union.
> While Gordillo was very likely guilty of the embezzlement of which she was accused, such practices are common in the Mexican labor bureaucracy. The motive for jailing her was political: first she had betrayed the PRI, and then she had opposed Peña Nieto.
The part about “such practices are common in the labor bureaucracy” is telling.
Corruption is so common, that any prosecution can (accurately!) be labeled political is one of the best signs of a corrupt system.
This isn’t about an employer controlled union. The union is heavily autonomous.
But if Mexican leaders wanted to get rid of unions, all they would have to do is enforce the law.
Guiliani did something similar when mayor of NY. He announced sweeping investigations into union corruption, then negotiated very favorable contracts while prosecution was hanging over union leaders heads, then called off the investigations when he got the terms he wanted.
Here's the broader point I was trying to make: Mexico has a problem with corrupt unions. But US unions are trying to help Mexicans solve that problem, not abandoning cooperation with anyone in the country.
I'm not sure if the US teachers union specifically is involved. They'd have less incentive to be because you can't replace a US teacher with a Mexican one.
Language barriers. Cultural differences. Exploitative history. Low trust. Geographic distances.
I think words like Never and Any are too strong, but I don't think we'll see high enough levels of solidarity to form an international labor union for at least 30 years. We seem closer to commercial nuclear fusion power plant.s.
I don't think you've considered the logistical difficulties of what you're describing. It's not like Panasonic has a list of all of the cobalt miners that were part of their supply chain. They themselves have no idea where their cobalt comes from, as they get it through several layers of middlemen. At the root of this supply chain are people like an man who feeds orphans, but forces them to collect peculiar-looking rocks, which he sells to the local warlord's nephew for $2 per hundred pounds. It's not exactly a place that's ripe for unionization. Even could pay somebody to strike, they really have no incentive to do so, as they'd rather earn even more money by not striking and you have no way to keep any individual person accountable.
Also I struggle to see how a worker revolution in Tanzania is going to spread to China, which then trickles down to tech workers. Keep in mind that the GDP per capita of the world is only a 1/10th of what an entry level SWE makes at a FAANG. At some point where workers in developing countries get richer, that's going to affect the quality of life of tech workers.
How are these two points related?
> because they believed it'll result in China outcompeting all other developing countries in manufacturing
Oh dear, no.
In particular English speaking westerners really struggle to assign correct motivations, they. struggle to imagine different thinking processes.
Opressive governments like China and Russia has three properties
One - any act of spontaneous self organisation by the population is dangerous. In Russia the police raaids chess clubs and charities that plant trees. Why? Because fuck em, some weirdos organising by themselves, without approval, how dare they.
two - they are paranoid - what if this organisation X is actually a front, organised by my political enemy? Remember, we are deeppy cynical here, noone organises for a common good, people only organise if someone is concocting a plan for gain or profit
three - any civil motion os percieved as disorder. If you are a governor in a opr3ssive regime, and you dont want to interveine in manufacturing dispute, you will have people above you calling you, asking why do you have a mess in your region. Why cant you do your job.
So if you run a genuine charity in Russia, you get raided by police immediately -you might be seen as a threat. But if you run a fake charity, and in fact just steal all the donations, then police doesn't really care.
The throughts about 'our manufacturing is not competitive if we allow strikes' is not the top concern
However, they also do hate labour regulations. They only accepted 5 day weeks because of the WTO, and they absolutely no not enforce it. The CCP genenuiely believes that harsh working conditions and hours is critical to China's success.
Like the 4chan raiders before the 4chan raiders.
I forget the amount of people it would have taken but it was laughably low.
It’s still quite small as umbrella unions go, though.
Thing is, people who try to organize generally expect some immediate gains out of it, which generally favors large established unions who "play by the rules". IWW is a strongly ideological union and has things like an explicit ban on no-strike clauses in its constitution, which makes it much harder to write a collective bargaining agreement for a workshop that employers are willing to accept. Burgerville Workers Union is a recent example of an IWW success story that broke down over this issue.
Were workers happy in those countries? Likely no. Was it their populations that chose Communism? No. It was mainly imposed upon countries by Russian imperialism. The cold war was a power struggle, not a struggle between different peoples who chose different ideologies. You can see that in how quickly the Warsaw pact disintegrated after the Soviet Union lost their grasp on those countries, and in how much many of the ex-SU / Warsaw Pact peoples now hate Russia, except for the countries that were taken over by authoritarians.
You are talking about much later events.
Many of those attempted revolutions turned into civil wars. Communists won some of them. Some of the emerging communist states were defeated by foreign military interventions. It was a bloody and confusing era in European history.
The turning point was when capitalists realized that it was not possible to defeat communism by fighting the communists. They gave in and started supporting some of the goals of social democrats and moderate socialists. That deradicalized enough people that even revolutionary communists had to start working within the system.
Revolutions are pretty common around the world. The recent ones have not been motivated by communism or anything similar, but that could change. The world is unpredictable, and major changes happen once in a while.
But that's not the point. :)
Was there solidarity among workers internationally? Yes. Because they're in the same class in society.
If you're a US worker you have an interest in workers in other countries being well paid, so that that they do not undercut you on price.
> China in particular violently suppresses unions
True
> because they believed it'll result in China outcompeting all other developing countries in manufacturing
I suspect the main reason is that independent unions would represent a separate locus of power, which would be a threat to the Communist party's rule.
However, global revolution in 2070 is almost a certainty, too many things are getting aligned, to name some:
- climate change: water wars have already started, but they are not yet visible [1] [2], once we get past 2 degrees warmer world we will have unprecedented weather all day, all night. What kind of "border patrol" can stop 3 billion 'immigrants' [3]? A murderous one, sure.
- good-enough statistical learning to automate 99.99% of jobs (from the current 3.32 billion jobs, by 2070, very hard to say what is not automate-able, but let's say around 300,000 people (1.5 Microsofts) continue to have jobs looking after the robots that make robots that make robots).
- ridiculous biotech advancements: from forgetting cancer ever existed to limb regeneration [4], it's all on the pipeline for the next 20-30 years.
- even greater financial consolidation: we will see the $10 trillion company in the next 5-7 years (probably Microsoft), meanwhile BlackRock, Vanguard, and friends will get even bigger, soaring past $100 trillion AUM in 10-12 years (currently at ~$20 trillion, BlackRock + Vanguard + State Street). Are there really any borders if everything is owned/controlled by one company?
The future, as it was in 1870, and in 1970, no matter how many veins Ronald Reagan and acolytes burst, will always be socialism or barbarism. Don't get me wrong, I 100% bet on barbarism, your species doesn't deserve socialism. Nevertheless, the global revolution will come, too little, too late, but just in time to leave this planet in the arms of a better caretaker, one without 4 billion years of history caring only for the local glucose gradient.
[1] "2021, Syria Water Crisis: Up to 40% less drinking water after 10 years of war", https://reliefweb.int/report/syrian-arab-republic/syria-wate...
[2] "April 2023, Utah’s Great Salt Lake risked disappearing. Unprecedented weather is bringing it back", https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/apr/15/utah-great-s...
[3] "January 2023, A dire forecast: Scientists used AI to find planet could cross critical warming threshold sooner than expected", https://edition.cnn.com/2023/01/30/world/global-warming-crit...
[4] "2022, Acute multidrug delivery via a wearable bioreactor facilitates long-term limb regeneration and functional recovery in adult Xenopus laevis", https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.abj2164
All the revolutions so far have failed because there is only one revolution to be made: the post-human turn of the political [1].
[1] "2017, Life as a Political Problem: The Post-Human Turn in Political Theory", an overview, https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/147892991772043...
It's more about seating the political in a realm of the inconsolable (fundamentally every political decision is the bad one), uprooting the current games of bad faith and energy poverty which have constituted the political since the first gathering of hominids. The inconsolable, which at the limit is death itself (of a self, of a society, of a territory, of a universe), is binded to an ever greater cone of care, at the same time bringing closer the post-human and the post-human increasing the cone of care. The lesser-known, brilliant nonetheless, thinker Vladimir Jankélévitch [1] has some more thoughts along these lines in 1971, L 'Imprescriptible and 1974, L'Irréversible et la nostalgie.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vladimir_Jank%C3%A9l%C3%A9vitc...
[1] What are Cognitive Light Cones? (Michael Levin Interview), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YnObwxJZpZc
[2] https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fnsys.2022.7682...
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heideggerian_terminology#Care_...
why? we are on a prominent site in an industry that likes to speak of “changing the world.” Or is that just a euphemism for “I want to make myself rich”?
There is international solidarity between people, because they understand each other, are in the same classes or have the same ideas/ideologies.
Between far-right people, across Europe and US and Russia and everywhere.
Between workers, whatever their political taste, because they are in the same class in society.
Between white-collars all around the globe (they even meet a lot).
And on and on.
Be assured that if there's a working promise to unite a group of people worldwide, that aligns with their respective interests, whatever that is, and they have the means to coordinate, why would they refrain?
That's even the whole basic premise of the United Nations, for peace.
But who will power, own and regulate AI in your opinion?
If AI is to have any impact on society, it's just a tech, it will just move the lines, people will move with them, and solidarity likewise.
You'd be surprised - dock workers across the Western World started to refuse to offload Russia-originated cargo after they invaded Ukraine. Cross-national action is difficult, but not impossible.
Obviously this is a different situation, but it shows cooperation at that scale can happen.
You can claim it's not right, but there's right and there's the reality of human nature. Push the populace hard enough they WILL push back.
The most dangerous innovation in this regard is advances in brain scanning is it could make it trivially easy to find the resistance. But robots and AI are factors too. If the rich don't need the labor of the poor it will certainly shift the balance of power.
There are only 1 million sworn LEO in the US, and they work for a paycheck, not loyalty to Jamie Dimon and company. You think those cops are going to bat for former oligarchs versus a population with 3 guns per adult at ready?
What terrifies me more than the idea of brain scanning that works is the (IMO more likely) deployment of "brain scanning" that doesn't work (but is used anyway) and creating a 21st century witch hunt.
AI is very impressive, but people are getting so used to it performing magic that they believe it can do anything while preserving the veneer of objectivity that algorithms earned in the pre-ML days.
[0]https://www.reddit.com/r/ChatGPT/comments/1354ju1/scientists...
As long as the elite still need other lower-class humans, e.g. chauffeurs, nannies and cooks, or security, the revolution can still get to them.
If the chaos so many rich preppers are gearing for comes to pass - their wealth won't protect them. As this[0] article points out: in an apocalypse, there will be nothing stopping their armed ex-special-forces security guards from taking over their New Zealand compounds and throwing them out - or worse. Their status as elites is preserved by the very institutions they are undermining.
0. https://www.theguardian.com/news/2022/sep/04/super-rich-prep...
Isn’t this the point of the fears of AI and automation? A truly sovereign individual, singular, against all others.
You might appreciate taking an opportunity to just listen a bit to where some more downtrodden people are if you have that opportunity come up organically. I've lived in the perspective that you share, and I've lived in others, and it just took me cumulatively a lot of traveling and talking and listening to people to hear and develop other opinions and ways of seeing things (not just how other people in my in-group said how they saw things -- perhaps one of the fronts of some of the most toxic assumptions that I've ever made about people in the end). I ended up changing my opinions to different models as a result.
If the parent message appears to mostly fit within the "I'm angry, so I'm going to burn down the world and do what I want and get my revenge and just take my anger out, including on people who have no control whether or not I get to hurt them in my selfishness" kind of category, I'd encourage you to look a bit deeper at the core of it. It's really hard to summarize lives in bullet points, but having lived within one category of oppression and knowing many people who are oppressed, it's hard to fully communicate what it's like, why people feel like it's the only option, and how it's a way that people are trying to enact change while still minimizing damage on the whole (strange as it may seem. the silent story of people being pushed down in civilly trying to change things is horrifying. i don't pine for violence myself, but i understand it for those who have been downtrodden in the ways that they have).
I know that's not really directly answering it, but walking a mile is really the best solution that I know of that we have in all of the crazy division that there is today.
What's perhaps even stranger is that physically we're hardwired to generally have the same emotional needs, though obviously with some variety, and that most ways of being are different strategies for meeting those emotional needs. This is a topic discussed in Nonviolent Communication and I rather appreciate it.
What I have seen a number of times is that there's a turning point once I see how someone is meeting a basic emotional need with a particular strategy, and the through-line to it. Without that through line, things can be a bit scary as they don't seem to follow causal rules from the outside, and we're all limited in our models.
I don't always stay in really close to people advocating for violence, for example, as that's not a culture I entirely prefer. I've come to a belief after a while that nearly everyone is an extremely rational agent in their decision-making, and that it's actually the information presented to the person inside their brain at the point of the decision-making that is oftentimes the culprit for the vast differences in behavior for certain people. I've seen it from traumagenic mental health disorders to even normal differences in political opinion. Realistically I can't quite get in to that place of reasoning to speak with that person always, and it's not even really my place to do that or maybe even try. But it is humanizing, and it has helped me keep my head on straight instead of writing someone off so I don't feel disturbed by an unknown unknown rolling around some proverbial emotional garden.
Daryl Davis is another person I really respect and like as well. I look up to a lot of how he handled those kinds of clashes, as the way it resolved for him always has been so strange and mysterious to me. Incredible story, tbh.
I'll leave off with this quote from him here. Of course the goal is not necessarily to convert someone always to a different belief system, but I think it can maybe then be reinterpreted here as finding a peaceable middle ground:
"When they see that you know about their organization, their belief system, they respect you. Whether they like you or not, they respect the fact that you've done your homework. Just like any good salesman, you want a return visit and they recognized that I'd done my homework, which allowed me to come back again.
That began to chip away at their ideology because when two enemies are talking, they're not fighting. It's when the talking ceases that the ground becomes fertile for violence. If you spend five minutes with your worst enemy — it doesn't have to be about race, it could be about anything...you will find that you both have something in common. As you build upon those commonalities, you're forming a relationship and as you build about that relationship, you're forming a friendship. That's what would happen. I didn't convert anybody. They saw the light and converted themselves."
Lastly, would you prefer to part with some of your wealth by choice or be parted with it (and maybe your life) by force when economic inequalities pass a tipping point? Regardless of morality and notions of property ownership and personal wealth, history has plenty of examples of violent revolution when the rich few neglect the many. So, rightly or wrongly, sharing the wealth may be a survival strategy, as it were.
Maybe you need to examine the inequalities in effort that cause so many people to slack of at school and work and spend all their free time watching television or the like, then the inequalities in wealth wouldn't be so surprising to you.
It’d be nice in some ways if it were that easy, wouldn’t it? Poverty would be easily ignored because it’d be chosen. Except, as noted above, even then, when economic disparities pass a tipping point, violent revolution tends to happen. So even if that idea were correct, the rich cannot afford to ignore inequality either.
This is a very contentious definition and central to the question being asked. You can't pass it off as already decided without any debate.
Two situations for your definition, you tell me whether something is stolen:
1) You sell me a Ford Pinto that you know is likely to explode in a crash due to a design defect. I sue you after I'm burned up and win. I seize your private property by court judgement. Have I stolen from you?
2) A slave takes an apple from his master's orchard without permission and eats it. Has he stolen?
Consistent on the definition of "theft", yes indeed. However, it's way harder to be consistent on the definition of "theft" while you also consider theft to be inherently immoral. And that's the center of this subthread. motohagiography asked..
> How is this not literally just a threat to rob people if they don't give up their stuff, and why would anyone take it as anything less?
.. as a clear argument against the base morality of the original comment. This being seen as such hinges singularly on the fact that theft, in all forms, is inherently immoral. If you define theft as any time private property is taken, irrespective of circumstances, then you also have to concede that theft isn't always immoral.
Thus, the whole original argument would have to make not only the case that the original suggestion of wealth redistribution is theft, but that it's immoral theft. That consistent, broad definition of theft thus becomes much less useful as a qualifier.
No private property in nature bud. The rules are what we decide they are.
You start from the premise that the property is yours, that it's belonging to you was granted via some divine right. It was granted by the state.
Edit: The only property you own is that which you can violently defend.
It's all social constructs however through these constructs societies may be built, art fashioned, science discovered, tools invented. What's up for debate is the best means for which to accomplish that.
First, even where property rights are accepted, a well considered definition generally has a caveat is made that property can't be taken "arbitrarily" or "unlawfully" or through a "legally established public necessity" or so on. In practice, every society which has had a legal concept of private property has also simultaneously had the concept that the government could certainly seize said property under certain conditions, and this has generally been treated as legally legitimate and not illegal robbery so long as it serves some common good. If you don't have such caveats, you run into all manner of issues justifying things like:
>Eminent Domain
>Taxation
>Court ordered seizures
>Civil forfeiture
You can also just just straight up deny the right to private property exists altogether. And not even necessarily from the obvious left wing perspective, you can just say the entire realm belongs to the king, so the king taking things to redistribute as they see fit is not theft, since everything was the King's to begin with. People have even claimed that the very concept of property is a form of theft.
Beyond those arguments, the probably most crucial argument here is that the poor's private property was stolen to begin with through government corruption and unindemnified torts to end up with this status quo, and how is restoring private property to its rightful owner theft? It is the very essence of protecting the right to private property! Particularly when people are calling for this private property to be restored through legal reform or through government overthrow (legal reform through extraordinary means). Not through simple anarchistic robbing of people who exist nearby you.
As for why people don't simply roll over and say they're pro-robbery, if you robbed somebody, you are a criminal and what you possess is not your property and subject to restoration to its rightful owner. People want to go beyond robbery, they want it to be legally established that people have absolutely no legitimate right to what they currently possess. People also don't necessary want to claim that if they argue for redistribution of wealth, that they also support grandmothers being subject to purse snatching. There's many obvious reasons why people don't describe their actions as "robbery", and your entire argument mostly is based on an presumption about who truly has a legitimate right to whatever property, as well as these peoples absolute unconditional right to this property, and argues any attack on either this presumption or presumed right (which has never existed) is some sort of leftist sophistry.
> I still consider all four of your examples to be theft
Fair enough but do you at least recognise that your position is not mainstream, which might explain why people don't simply accept it beyond simply being leftists?
IBM refused to divest from give vacuum tube based computer business so government funded silicon and transistors based computers then gifted the technology to IBM.
There’s story after story of the public having its wealth expropriated.
You clearly have absolutely no understanding of what "rights" mean. They're based on deontological arguments, that's why they're called "inherent" rights, not based on some weird utilitarian notion that anything can be morally right if enough people believe it is. By your view of rights raping someone would be okay if enough people want to do it.
You clearly have absolutely no understanding of how "rights" work in the real world. There is no divine force enforcing your god-given right. There's only power. The reason the current "rights" even exist, is because they are enforced through power - if I steal from you, police comes over to my place and beats the shit out of me. Remove the police (and all other forms of power) from the equation, and you can wipe your ass with your "rights".
Or in other words, deontology is just glorified astrology, a bunch of mumbo-jumbo poppycock.
> By your view of rights raping someone would be okay if enough people want to do it.
You're trying to reduce this argument to absurdity, but in many ancient civilizations, rape, in some contexts, was considered okay.
Bodily autonomy, I'll defend in all cases, no need to argue that one here.
Property, not so much. It's part of a bargain. If the people with an outsized share of the property don't exercise their control over surpluses to ensure some degree of decency for all (which they haven't) then they're in breach of the social contract, and is time for a discontinuity in property rights that gives us a different set of people to try out the same contact on.
And lest you claim that this is some kind of extreme communist take on it, here's Thomas Jefferson on the subject:
"It is a moot question whether the origin of any kind of property is derived from nature at all... It is agreed by those who have seriously considered the subject that no individual has, of natural right, a separate property in an acre of land, for instance. By an universal law, indeed, whatever, whether fixed or movable, belongs to all men equally and in common is the property for the moment of him who occupies it; but when he relinquishes the occupation, the property goes with it. Stable ownership is the gift of social law, and is given late in the progress of society."
Paying taxes is not a voluntary choice. Subjecting yourself to inflation is not a voluntary choice. Having your environment polluted is not a voluntary choice. You have no political alternative to this system, no vote you can make to say no to it. The rich taking from the poor is only not considered robbery since the wealthy both (legally) bribe the lawmakers and are the lawmakers. Just look at Clarence Thomas. Only the poor taking from the rich is robbery.
The semantics of what constitutes robbery aside, the world is experiencing a totally unsustainable concentration of wealth which will eventually cause markets for goods & services, consumerism, and the engine of world economics to collapse toppling the entire wealth pyramid. On top of that, global warming and the fact that oil supply seems to be plateauing (So we can't kick the true costs of energy down the road again) is suddenly going to make being poor much more expensive. At some point sheer practicality will prevail and redistribution to the poor will need to happen, and if it doesn't happen voluntarily, it is likely to result in an eventual revolution. If a revolution happens, it's likely that suddenly lawmakers will change the semantic definition of robbery.
Delving into the history of the labor movement in the 1930s might be insightful, too.
The majority of blue collar workers, as well as quite possibly the majority of people in many countries outside your own, might have very different views about things than you do.
This is simply untrue. The only large labor revolutions, the communist revolutions in Russia, China and the like, led to a massive destruction of wealth, not a transfer, plunging those countries into extreme poverty with worse standard of living than before. For over a decade after the revolution Russia didn't even have weekends.
And if you're thinking of the French revolution, you should know it wasn't a revolution against the rich; it was a revolution _against the government_! That's why they beheaded the king..
It's hard to believe these are multi-billion dollar companies paying as low as $1.50 an hour for anything let alone paying for a service which will not only make them rich, but potentially put many more out of work.
It's really disgusting...
1. Their job easily replaceable by any english speaking, high school educated worker on a planetary level.
2. There is almost no capital expenditure to setup a 'moderation centre', just setup a bunch of computers in an office and you are done. So workers don't have leverage over a company that is unwilling to move.
3. AI will annihilate probably 80% of the offshore call center business in a few years, the workers laid off from call centers, can 1-1 slot into these AI-RL training jobs. Heck AI will also annihilate 80% of those offshore moderation jobs for say facebook. So more competition.
Frankly, the AI companies doesn't even need to move to another country, they can just hire non-unionized workers in those same african countries. When they will do this, depends on when the union asks for too high of a wage.
The most optimistic outcome, is the unions try to work with the AI companies in asking for better conditions, but not neccessarily much better wages. Overplay their hand and they will fail.
2. Their leverage is their sanity and willingness to be able to be exposed to unconscionable content. Many places in the world would categorically block this kind of gig simply for being damaging to the mind, and rightly so. And even in countries where this work is permissible, it would otherwise expose the company to future liability in terms of emotional trauma.
3. This 80% figure is a number fabricated from thin air. These workers don't work in call centers. They are content moderators in some shape or form -- a job that requires not just reading comprehension but being able to weigh certain current events, cultural queues, unspoken and spoken language, and other data that you can't magically feed into a machine.
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They don't work in call centers of course. But the workers who currently work in call centers, can swoop in and compete for their jobs. I can tell you that plenty of people on HN, would rather deal with moderating awful content, than to talk to endless waves of people who can't read 3 step instructions. And I would prefer either compared to say diving in sewage.
If you don't think GPT-4 can replace offshore call centers very rapidly, then you need to talk to those companies that do employ them. Onshore call centers handle more complex stuff that is harder to outsource, offshore ones not so much.
But I have to imagine that the workers’ own assessment of their leverage is more accurate than someone on the other side of the world who read an article headline. And it would appear that at least some of them, based on that assessment have decided to give unionizing a shot.
Like anything, there's a lot more beneath the surface. Many white collar folx tend to entirely write off Africa and other third world countries and misunderstand some of the dynamics there.
Yes, of course there will be a decrease in demand, that does not make unionization bad.
You also seem to underestimate the ability for African people to band together into collective movements. Yes there will be scabs, of course, but this is a step forward in the fight.
I do find myself feeling frustrated when someone approaches the comment section on a journey that has taken technical workers _several years_ through the courts system and then offers a dismissal that seems to suggest that the problem could be solved if they thought of it differently or didn't realize how shortsighted they were.
I do hope Africa is able to follow through on its ambitions to have serious punching weight in the global sphere, all problems aside. It is a beautiful continent with many beautiful cultures in it. It certainly feels a bit like a kind of home for me.
It also true, those 'collective movements' don't necessarily result in good outcomes. Look at Kenya on the map. To the east is Somalia, to the north is Ethiopia, South Sudan, Sudan, all countries locked in civil war between different 'collective movements'.
The big opportunity for Africa in the AI era, is to use AIs to serve local healthcare/education/software development needs. There weren't many teachers/doctors/SE engineers etc to begin with, so they have little to lose from mass deploying AI.
I'm not sure unionising to get higher wages from moderation work will make a big impact. I am really curious to see the counterargument here, why will unionisation work in this case?
Of course there is the rampant corruption. There are also collective community policing strategies too in some communities, for example.
In the African Union I have high hopes for the continent, but still I think there is a a very large, very large, very large barrier to overcome because of the infighting.
As far as the unionization, I think if handled right it can have lower downsides for the amount of bargaining power that it provides. It seems that a lot of African culture thrives on ad-hoc person-to-person movements, so this feels very much within the lines of what could work in Africa. But tribalism inside of each country and between countries could still keep any local movements from having a larger impact within the continent even if, say, a local union is successful.
In any case, it basically moves the Nash Equilibrium but doesn't necessarily abolish it. If handled poorly, or if the company retaliates, then sure, if the company is willing to run the press gauntlet and such. But at the very least, I have hopes.
Also I know of the conflict in Somalia, Ethiopia, South & North Sudan, etc. I haven't checked in on Kenya in a while. I hope all is well over there, it is generally a very beautiful and safe country with a few notable exceptions. Has something happened, or is it in the list mainly due to proximity to the conflict (or something like that?) :'( </3
That being said, "Africans from Kenya, for example, that I've talked to, generally blame British imperialism for many of the problems today" is a typical and unimpressive mentality. Tribal conflicts existed way before the British did.
For example, Sudan existed before the British came, and the Arab vs black fights in Sudan is not a British creation. Somalia is mono-ethnic, doesn't stop it from endless wars. Ethiopia was not colonised beyond a short Italian occupation, their current civil war is still the result of ethnic conflicts.
African unity is also a questionable concept. West, Central, East and Southern Africa are four different continents in terms of culture, ethnicities, climate, and size. The only consensus is 'no-changing-borders-by-force', yes, they know that those colonial imposed borders is the only thing keeping africa from falling into a bloodbath free-for-all.
That's why AI is really africa's greatest hope. They have not invested much into white collar knowledge and industries, and AI allows them to leapfrog much of it. It'll be very interesting to see how the african public reacts to AI.
On A100s this particular CIFAR10 network trains in under 7 seconds for example and the network (fp16) is <10 MB IIRC, the relative gains over other previous training speeds is even better on older cards IIRC due to it being pretty memory limited at this point. It could be used as a backbone in other networks and is nice because it is good to run experiments on and also can directly deploy at scale pretty easily. In my experience, cycle time is actually one of the biggest resources for most smaller research initiatives.
I just haven't had the opportunity to talk to anyone yet to see if there's a way that I could interface with the African AI community over it. I don't know how Colab works but they work pretty darn well in the free version of Colab, and both are annotated to help a moderately well-motivated learner pick up some of the ropes themselves.
It seems like you know a little about the space. If you do know anyone or have any pointers as to where I could/should look to talk to people about this, please do let me know! I think OSS can do a lot and would love to give a bit to the community, for sure.
There will be a large interest in selling AI to Africans, GPT-4 today, lightly modified, can already radically improve African education. The vastly underpaid and overworked teachers no longer need to waste time in preparing lessons, they just need to control the classroom and perform assessments. Also GPT-4 probably dominates your average English tutor in Africa...
The problem is the cost, a GPT-4 subscription is far beyond the means of an average African. The bottleneck is with server-side inference costs, once that is solved, I expect a AI gold rush in Africa, where western companies compete to sell AI subscription services. Your average African already owns a cheap andrioid phone with 3g connection, which is good enough for an AI chatbot.
Even my limited knowledge of the situation is enough to tell that this is neither historically accurate nor a fair portrayal.
This does not sound like a good faith argument.
No collective movements means no American revolution, no Civil war, no French Revolution, no Glorious revolution in Britain.
We'd still bow down to Kings and have slavery
I am dreading that day. Most often when calling a business I need someone to fix something and often it can only be fixed by someone that can make a decision that is kind of "outside of the rules". AI will be trained to always stick to the rules, so I foresee an even more frustrating call center future.
There have been some awful stories about how difficult -- and sometimes traumatic -- the content moderation work can be.
When content moderation of really nasty stuff is necessary, people doing it should be getting proper safeguards, care, compensation, and respect.
The only moderation workers left, will be for the AI companies, and the efficiency here is train once-use multiple times.
If you are going to outsource that function to some other country, might as well outsource it to GPT, cheaper faster better, with no ethical concerns or bad press.
So those workers don't have to experience those traumas again! They do however have to experience the trauma of unemployment. So be careful what you wish for.
I think you're probably in the majority though who misunderstands what gpt et al are doing and think of them as an advance in ML generally as opposed to just a different demo that works most of the time.
We can also reliably GENERATE inappropriate content now, by simply adding a 'nsfw' tag to Stable diffusion, it flips a normal image to an inappropriate one. It doesn't sound very difficult to reverse this.
Also, for these services, you don't need it to be perfect. If even the flagging accuracy goes up significantly, that's a lot fewer human workers to review it.
The AI ecosystem as a whole is also booming massively regarding hardware, datasets, talent, software infrastructure. So that makes development in traditional ML faster.
The accuracy will not go up significantly if humans are already struggling, and I'm not talking about the mental aspects of the job, I'm talking about being unable to determine if the case is accurately violating TOS or not.
This is going to get even more difficult, for both humans and AI, when content is being generated at alarmingly fast rates by AI. So even with the use of AI to combat AI, there is still going to be a gigantic tidal wave of questionable shit to go through.
I'm no expert so maybe you can clarify why high accuracy/reliability is that important for an initial analysis by AI? I would expect the vast majority of reports are straightforward matters?
There's a human poster involved, who can trigger a review if they disagree with the decision, and that review can be attended to by a much smaller pool of humans.
AFAIK reddit mods and "fine nuance" are oxymorons
https://www.dailymaverick.co.za/article/2010-08-03-samasourc...
I predict the next Federal Works Program will be for unemployable web programmers and not completely unlike the old ones for displaced farmers.
With subsidies and tax breaks I think, if we try hard enough, we can get the actual wages paid by the companies below $2/hr.
> "Meta’s lawyers said that Motaung was employed by Sama, ...that No action can therefore be brought against Meta...as Meta was not and has never been his employer.”
that's how it works.
It kind of blows my mind that this it's legal for an American corporation to employ third world slave labor instead of American citizens.
What will blow your mind even more is that even when Americans, Europeans, or others in rich countries know about this, do they care? Do they boycott those companies? No they don't... Because they want stuff and they want it cheap.
These companies are doing things that should be made to be illegal.
Paying a wage that both parties agree to should not be illegal.
https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2016/mar/02/n...
They purposefully setup and intermediary, and use slave labour in full knowledge
> They purposefully setup and intermediary, and use slave labour in full knowledge
It sounds like you are very convinced that Nestlé knowingly uses slave labor (it sounds a bit conspiratorial if you were to ask me). If you are sure of it, are you avoiding ALL Nestlé products? Otherwise you are enabling such atrocity.
Of course I want cheap stuff, who doesn’t, but I don’t want it to the exclusion of all else. I don’t want to exploit or harm workers to get stuff. In this case, I’m comfortable with the wages paid by these folks, and hope that their employer has some retraining program when moderation is rewritten to use AI and fewer humans.
Can we not dilute the definition of "slave labor" here?
American consumers would give up their own labor standards before facing the ruinous economic consequences of a world where they could only consume goods made by laborers earning $15/hour with health insurance and OSHA oversight.
If you're allowed to do bad things, you make laws to prevent it.
More like economically literate weirdos who understand that the reason why people like cheap consumer goods is not because evil corporations have imposed a false consciousness on them that prevents them from realizing true class consciousness and releasing themselves from their chains.
Any jurisdiction can try to ban goods that are created through low-wage labor, or more generally labor that does not adhere to the regulatory regime of that jurisdiction. It basically never happens in the western world except for the most extreme cases (eg. actual slave labor) for obvious reasons, and when it does it almost always reflects a shameful form of protectionism.
Was economy of 1950's USA ruinous?
US did not import manifactured goods from China / almost anywhere at the time. The rest of the world manufacturing was a bomb crater after WW2.
Western manufacturing isn't uncompetitive because of OSHA and health insurance. There are third world countries that have health insurance.
Western manufacturing is uncompetitive because of insane inflation of real estate has parasitic effect on the rest of the economy. You cant pay a worker less than he has to pay his ladlord
Are you volunteering to get off your computer and get back into factory work? Bolting some cars together on an assembly line 50 hours a week?
US knowledge work exists because we outsourced manufacturing and physical labor. You can't work a cushy software job and then whine that the economy hasn't improved since the 1950s.
Agreed, and unless you propose returning the rest of the world to a bomb crater then you cannot reinduce the 1950s by simply... regulating real estate prices or whatever. You cannot go back to a world where unskilled blue collar laborers earn massive wage premiums in the US vs. India/China like they did in the 1950s, and imagining that you can have "1950s prosperity" or whatever without this (thankfully fleeting) premium is pure delusion.
2018
Living Wage Individual - 209.281 USD/Month
Wages High Skilled - 567.779 USD/Month
$1.50 * 40 * 4 = USD$240.
this reveal is easily worth more than the union itself. If you were a futurist, a FAANG thought leader or an evangelist for AI, this should be all you need to know to realize ChatGPT isnt the future.
if youre using chatgpt in a call center, then this is just H1B or other labor fraud with more steps.
African workers arent able to write a unique 500 word story about whatever scenario you dream up in about a second in whatever language you choose.