Would Luddites find the gig economy familiar?
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
On the other hand, I'm sympathetic to people losing their livelihoods because of Uber and am generally opposed to the 'giggification' of everything that Uber seems to have ushered in. It feels like there was a better way to handle the innovation.
The main issues with Uber are not that it’s a gig economy job, it’s that it externalizes much of the costs to drivers in ways that are difficult for the average driver to amortize. Beyond that, it can be something of a trap. It requires very little skill to drive, and there is essentially no upward mobility or ability to upskill through continued labor. But that is not unique to Uber.
Citation needed regarding what?
That Luddites knew a craft? I thought this was known and/or accepted. The revolt was largely against new machines that delivered lower quality products at a much lower cost, with workers being paid a fraction of what they were used to.
Or regarding that most gig economy workers don’t have qualifications? I thought this, too, was accepted. Not many are SWEs earning 1k a day or more. Most deliver you pizza or stand in line so you can have the newest iPhone on day-1. There’s even a website called TaskRabbit. It doesn’t sound like gigs offered there are very qualified.
And the Luddite movemebr was as much about working condition as it was about pay, e.g. having children do maintenance on running machinery being maimed and crippled. Luddites were no backward people, they wanted a livelihood, one the lost during the industrial revolution.
Maybe that is too hard to research and understand, when you are so qualified and busy making 1k per day as a software whatever.
Nor do I think Luddites were backward people — not at all.
On the contrary, I think that, mutatis mutandis, we could learn quite a bit from their struggle.
Oh don’t worry, that’s changing.
https://www.mckinsey.com/featured-insights/employment-and-gr...
3.5% in 34 years is not exactly something to get all luddite about.
Also keep in mind, that it's not the capital share that's expanding at the expense of labour. It's the share that goes to land that's taking from labour. The capital share is relatively stable. (Alas, few apart from the Georgists care about differentiating between land and capital.)
And even Henry George wasn't really a Geoist. He criticized all forms of unearned income, and called for e.g. abolition of intellectual property and nationalization of banks.
The supply of land is fixed. We can make more capital.
If you tax land or labour, you get less of them. If you tax land, it's still the same amount. Land is also hard to hide [citation needed], so tax evasion is harder.
See Land Value Tax.
Attempts at capitalism haven't worked out so far. They have invariably devolved into 'crony capitalism' despite ruthless profit maximization and widespread selfishness.
Marx generalized capital to roughly mean anything that makes money for the owner without them doing work.
Neoclassical (the current mainstream) definition is quite close to Marx's.
Land is capital.
If you tax beer a lot, people drink wine instead.
If you tax labour or capital, you get less of them. Especially in a globalised economy. But the supply of land is fixed, it's perfectly inelastic. So you can tax land without any deadweight losses to the economy.
The supply of land is perfectly inelastic, it's fixed. So taxing it doesn't burden the economy, there are no deadweight losses.
[0] Yes, I know that land reclamation is a thing, but that's mixing up definitions of 'land'. In the generalised economic sense, sea floor is also 'land'.
Meanwhile the rest of us get lower quality for a lower price and no ability to pay more if we want.
(And you can even give Uber more money to get better service, within some limits.)
Even when going with the cheapest option on Uber, getting a nicer car is luck of the draw. On my last weekend trip where I took a few Ubers, I always picked the cheapest option, and we had 3 new Teslas, Model S, X, and Y, and a new Benz. No beat up old Toyotas. I’ve had people pick me up in luxury SUVs who mention they are Uber Black, but took my fare because I was close, it wasn’t any better than an UberX with a friendly driver.
I’d be curious to know how many people actually pay for things like Uber Black. How long is someone going to be in the car where it’s really worth paying 2-4x the price? It seems like it’s more of a status or ego thing.
All of this for a 20% decrease in fees (which started rising back up the moment a near-monopoly was established) and having them "all in one app", even though there are now 3 "all in one" platforms, each with their own set of quirks that you need to remember just like we had to remember for the different taxi companies before.
The trouble, economically, is that most people have had a vested interest in acquiring that particular knowledge and skill, making it common, and thus, by the properties of supply and demand, not terribly valuable.
Indeed, it is a common skill[1], at least in car-centric North America where there has been a strong incentive for all to learn those skills. That makes it not particularly valuable to offer as a service. Why pay someone to do work you can, in most cases, just as easily do yourself? It has to be quite cheap for you to consider it. But that's something else entirely.
[1] Albeit a dwindling one. While ~85% of American adults have their driver's license, only ~60% of 18-year-olds do, down from ~80% in the 1980s. The youth today are backing away from obtaining this particular skill as compared to the past.
My doctor friends who studied for about 10 years would like a word...
But, like all things in life, there are tradeoffs. While road safety would no doubt improve if everyone had to spend 10 years learning and developing driving skills, there would be a lot of social consequences to keeping people from driving until so late in life. Consequences we have not been willing to accept.
We could just as easily allow medical professionals to practice without such lengthy requirements. Anyone can become a shoddy doctor. It is not hard job to do poorly. But we've selected different tradeoffs there. It is not as socially impactful if a doctor can't practice until later in life, and is arguably more socially beneficial to see them wait until their skills have really developed.
Germans, for example, typically learn driving much later than Americans. Would be useful to check the data to see whether their insurance rates drop at around the same age, or around the same years of driving experience.
Because the obvious null hypothesis to explain your observation of insurance rates is that young people just take more risks.
drivers between the ages of 25 and 67 can expect a discount on the average claim requirement - the insurance premium drops thanks to age being taken into account. Drivers aged 27 to 41 receive the largest discounts of 26 percent, while those aged 63 to 67 benefit from discounts of 6 percent
But older people according to this also have the advantage of having a longer driving record and if you didn't have an accident in that time it can counteract the bad effect of advancing age on your rates.
https://www-gdv-de.translate.goog/gdv/themen/mobilitaet/so-w...
You will find out what it means to have your valuable skills replaced by technology soon enough - just as for example translators have found out.
Before cars also got more common driving skills were more of a craft.
I wonder if the day will come where this happens to lawyers and doctors with ai.
The main point is that the bar is constantly rising and most people can’t stay above it.
What could be different this time compared to the Luddite era is that machine progress happens at an ever faster rate, until you reach fundamental - biologic and social - limits of the humanity's ability to adapt, especially as workers age. The majority of people will never be programmers or stock traders, and the market for those professions is shallow anyway.
This is all to say that it seems the fundamental social contract of capitalism - that the benefits of innovation are redistributed to everybody through competition and growth, employing more people in new industries and lowering real prices of machine manufactured goods to almost nothing - seems seriously threatened going forward in the AI and super-internet-company age. If the majority of the workforce can't adapt fast enough to become productive with the new methods, then they are redundant as far as capital is concerned; not only do they not make a living wage, they won't make any wage, since whatever they are able to do a machine can do it cheaper.
So you would end up with this near-feudal arrangement where returns to capital can be maintained in perpetuity as long as capital owners can maintain IP rights, strong walled gardens, control over limited mineral and natural resources, or keep innovation and disruption going using the services of a few loyal samurai-innovators, the tech salaried class.
The real threat is ai companies stealing people’s products and reselling them.
It’s as if they stole the furniture luddites made, dismantled it, reassembled it and the sold it for a profit.
A real shame that ai has been taken over by Sociopaths. I suppose punishing one or two will send the message.
But artificial intelligence is much more than artistic or text authorship. It will replace most service workers, most agricultural workers, drivers, doctors, vast segments of society become redundant in the next century.
If you could press a button and duplicate the garment made by a Luddite at zero cost, would you consider that machine "stealing"? Should we smash that machine, or should we rather develop a new social contract aware of its existence and power?
Precisely.
> But artificial intelligence is much more than artistic or text authorship.
Correct. But that type of AI takes time to develop. Time we can use to adjust to the changes it brings. ChatGPT, Midjourney, and similar, have developed fast because they are essentially stolen goods resold.
> Should we smash that machine, or should we rather develop a new social contract aware of its existence and power?
As with any tech, we will develop new social contracts and work patterns. Sociopaths want to build tools that completely obliterate industries through theft of people's intellectual property. Those are what's detrimental to society. Everything else is beneficial, and we will change our patterns of behaviour. Computers were meant to eliminate accountants, architects, graphic designers, etc. but we have ever more accountants, architects and graphic designers. Also if everyone is able to use said ai, then everyone is at the same level, meaning we need to figure out ways to get ahead, and for that we need people.
This whole madness that society will end is solely based on the idea that we will steal what they built so far and resell it. We need to push these thieves back to the sewers where they belong.
Are they going to just let that happen?
Feudalism worked because the knights and lords needed people to work their land and provide a product: food. If machines can do that instead then there won’t be any farm workers, so it won’t really be feudalism. But then there won’t be any jobs in the city either, so no one will be able to afford food and all of that farmland will be worthless as well.
The loyal samurai-innovators aren’t enough to consume all that food and consumer goods. The whole economy will collapse in this scenario.
This widespread contraction of production is economic collapse. So you haven’t answered my question.
Wealthy capitalists aren’t going to keep McDonald’s in business: they don’t eat there. If consumers don’t have any money, McDonald’s collapses.
In times of great turbulence, it pays to hold on to fundamentals. Partly because they're a stable beacon that helps one muddle through; partly because there's little else to hold on to anyway.
On that note, a few observations:
1) We're biological animals. People love profit, but ultimately need other people to realize and enjoy that profit. To your point, in the limit, what good is being the wealthiest man on Earth, if you are the last man on Earth?
The rich and powerful are hardwired to flaunt their power and wealth and social status too, just like the apes we all are. Which puts a lower cap on how much they want to reduce the outside human population, whether consciously or as a 2nd order effect of their "whoopsie, I never!" actions. At some point on the concentration-of-wealth vs population-size curve, capitalism self-aligns with humanism, simply to preserve the biological substrate that powers it.
2) Taking off the human-centric goggles, "profit" is a function (one of many) to optimize. Humans love to optimize because Nature loves to optimize.
Nature's favourite goal appears to be bulldozing energy gradients, reducing free energy, increasing entropy. Everything else a downstream corollary: chemistry, biology, humans, civilizations, ecology.
So any plan to pause or subvert this optimization process is immediately suspect. Especially if that plan lacks a clear articulation of the process and ways to counter it. You and who's army? You think putting ink to paper to draft a regulation will do it? Because "Democracy" and "Will of the people" and "We humans are special"?
That's not a call for cynicism or despondency; just an observation of nature's directionality over the past few billion years. You'll be up against some formidable forces; Nature's rat-race to always do more with less is real, and us men and women merely players.
Having a way to model this space rigorously and explore the various equilibria and inflection points would be cool. Rather than humanity bouncing off the walls with new 1st-order-effect ideologies and religions all the time; a few million murdered here; a starvation there; an economic collapse yonder.
Sure, humanity is just another physical process that will ultimately dissolve in a high entropy lukewarm soup, but as long as we have access to low entropy, high energy density sources, we can buck the trend and choose to do quite unoptimal things, such as assigning individual rights to every individual, even those unfit for reproduction.
Zooming out past the current Stelliferous era of the universe and into the distant black hole and dark eras might risk losing quite a bit of nuance about humanity's nature and destiny.
Still, I believe keeping the directionality in mind helps with perspective – even as turbulent whirls and eddies appear to float upstream, miraculously, temporarily.
I now realize I forgot another observation, closer to chongli's original slightly-beyond-human resolution of bust-and-boom economic feedback loops:
3) Most people are pliable and will do as they're told.
Even to their detriment, even all the way to their demise. And the process of human self-domestication is still accelerating.
Historical examples abound; from extremely ancient to uncomfortably recent.
Money is just a made up thing we invented to measure economic value. If a worker is truly valueless, then he gets no money and simply does not participate in the economy. For all the capitalist system is concerned, it's as if he's a starving subsistence farmer in sub-saharian Africa, he's outside the economy and there are no money to be made supplying him with goods and services. The economy does not "collapse" compared to a virtual level where all starving people of Africa are housed, fed, card and amazoned.
Of course you could interpret this as just an extreme form of inequality, where the redundant get some form of food and shelter covering UBI, while the capitalist and the samurai class earn riches beyond comprehension. The system is feudal in the sense that all relative wealth (thus, political power) is concentrated to a small number of people, not that somebody necessarily starves. The serfs could have quite a comfortable life, arguing on HN etc.
I brought up an African country in another comment in this discussion: Eritrea. This is a country where a tiny elite owns pretty much all of the wealth in the country and the bulk of the population live in vast slums of unimaginable deprivation. There is no path for those people to achieve even the most basic working-class lifestyle because they have nothing to offer the wealthy aristocrats of their country.
If we are reduced to that situation, I consider it a collapse, and I think that people take for granted the belief such a collapse is impossible. It is absolutely possible. A wealthy elite tended by an army of robotic servants living in obscene luxury, maintained by a handful of samurai technologists, while untold billions live in squalor. Elections reserved only for the landed elite. The vast population left freezing in the darkness.
Well, you could say the same today: why would the capital owners pay stagnating or decreasing real wages if they sell their products to those very same wage earners?
You can't say the same today. The capital owners right now earn a profit by doing so and their wealth grows. If an AI revolution makes all of their workers redundant then they won't hesitate to lay them all off. McDonald's has already begun the experiment [1].
[1] https://www.newsweek.com/first-ever-mcdonalds-served-robots-...
Such a system also happens to be in the interest of the haves because they need consumers to purchase their products that they generate with machines.
If you can mass produce the production machines to the extent that everybody can have them, you can create a post-scarcity society[0] which is the only condition under which communism is a workable system.
Another possibility would be that the market simply produces other jobs that currently don't exist for all of the people put out of work. So far, that's what has happened after ever "job destroying" technological innovation.
[0]: Post-scarcity means the price of everything falls to 0 or very close to 0 because it is trivial to create.
The alternative to people voting themselves an income is wealthy people taking away the vote. If they can defend their holdings with robotic drone armies and AI-powered mass surveillance then democracy will collapse along with the economy.
We need look no further than Eritrea for a real-world case study of what I’m talking about. A country with vast slums of people in absolute destitution kept separate from the wealthy aristocrats by walls and armed guards. Replace those guards with robots and there’s no reason that couldn’t happen here.
Enough but still limited is not longer scarce.
This is a reasoning that starts with the idea there is some sort of global conspiracy of the global elite making agreements on what to do. I strongly believe there isn't, at least not on the level you are describing. There is however the underlying capitalist system that demands profit optimization.
If there would be some sort of new product or company that would make all other aspects of the economy obsolete but it would bring massive profits for the stakeholders it would absolutely be launched.
Companies don't make predictions on what might happen to the economy if they launch x, y or z.
This isn’t the social contract. There are two classes, workers and capital owners, and each tries to get as much for themselves a they can. But the capital owners have an advantage since they can more easily band together. This has been pointed out since Adam Smith (or that’s the oldest one I know).
But of course it is correct that normal people have benefited from capitalism as well. But you can’t disentangle that from the centuries of class struggle which fought against the tendency of capital taking all the gains for itself. But this fact gets whitewashed as a “social contract”, i.e. a cooperative arrangement, when really the only reason why the so-called middle class thrived in the 50’s USA was because of concessions between the two classes after the struggles of the 30’s and 40’s.
(A sort of We Were Friends All Along history.)
Which is just to say that there absolutely never was a cooperative balance between these two classes under capitalism. There have just been different degrees of imbalance and then class struggle in order to try to correct for that.
There's nothing wrong with technology. But if the whole emphasis is extractive, taking from those with only a little power and wealth, for the benefit of those who have the abilities to constructs world-spanning businesses, this is entirely dystopian.
Eg - who wants privacy? Everyone. But, if you have governments and businesses acting in tandem to force everyone to be de-anonymised, this is dystopian.
Alternative eg - people talk about what happened to the early internet - well it is all sandboxed now, in extractive corporate sites eg facebook, snapchat, insta, etc.
Its hard to see too, because the plan is unfolding over decades - incrementalism towards dystopia is the name of the game, apparently.
I hear the term used here in a derogatory way a lot, by people who think no further than "more == good".
https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/blood-in-the-machine/
I’ve heard Luddite used a couple ways. One is derogatory, the other is by people self-identifying as Luddites when they get tired of the endless pursuit of technology for technology’s sake, or they get tired of “smart” everything. Sometimes a nice mechanical tool that will last generations is better than the new fancy version that will be trash in a very short period of time.
The luddites are also what happens when a group of people who have a historical corner on a market revolt.
IF we let them have their way a shirt would be 8k (at 15 bucks an hour) https://www.sleuthsayers.org/2013/06/the-3500-shirt-history-...
Further, those looms, they evolve to jacquard looms (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacquard_machine) , that are backed by the punchcard. Primitive numerical control at its finest! The fountainhead for Babbage and Lady Ada to conceptualize computing!
IN the end the luddites were skilled labor (the gig economy for the most part isn't). They were being displaced by mass production. Something that happens over and over again (bricks, files, pots...). Industrialization led to us all having enough free time for vacations, the internet and hacker news. The price of progress, haiving to keep up with it.
I believe you forgot to mention that it also led us to ruin our environment in the process.
Not trying to argue that we should always oppose "progress", but maybe there was a better middle ground of shared prosperity a bit before Deliveroo, Amazon and Shein.
Where do you live? The standard, at least in Europe, is 40 hours and 5-day work weeks.
In my country at least the 40 hour workweek required a civil war and a couple of general strikes.
> Industrialization led to us all having enough free time for vacations...
The word "all" here is excluding far, far more people than you realise. Your "better world" is built on the suffering of hundreds of millions.
I never said the factory owners were the good guys.
But let's take your very contemporaneous hot take and play it out.
1. The weavers were skilled labor. The industrial process was so easy a child could do it. The fair pay for operating that machine was never going to be equal to the weavers wage.
2. The difference in rate of production was massive. This wasn't a price drop, it was the floor falling out. Think 1 person now able to produce as much as 500 weavers.
The weavers didn't give a shit about kids or fair wage! They simply were being replaced and mad about the loss of income! Even if they had been hired on by the factory owners, there would have been enough of them unemployed (500 to 1) that it was going to play out the same way!
> The word "all" here is excluding far, far more people than you realise. Your "better world" is built on the suffering of hundreds of millions.
Yes, no more polio, no more rindapest, most of the globe has a cell phone and access to a wealth of knowledge... we didn't die of bubonic plague, we dont have dead siblings or dead mothers in child birth.... It's a much better world.
Im also acutely aware of the human suffering in my PC from cobolt, and rare earths! With a nice side of environmental damage. I'm well aware that the coffee I drink and the chocolate I eat is a product of child labor. I'm aware that by earning more than 100k a year I'm in the top 10% of the global population.
There is no point in moralizing about it, because there is no point in the past where it was "better" than right now! We as a people are making progress and until that stops being true we need to be grateful were at the top and keep moving everyone forward...
Industrialization didn't provide free time automatically. There was a huge political power struggle for higher wages and more free time. That was sometimes bloody and violent even in democracies. Labor organizers had to fight really hard to get it trough.
Attend a May Day celebration sometime. (Not to be confused with the American Loyalty Day or Veteran’s Day or whatever it is now.) It is one of the few times that you get reminded that things like the weekend being free time is not something that comes automatically out of a factory.
0.0hrs/week
>Do they need "free" time?
That free time is where quite a bit of societies progress comes from. Its an oversubscribed cpu, nonessential processes will hang for forever. For you, that means no cell phone, no heat in the winter, no ac in the summer, you are permanently starving, your feet are covered in cuts from walking with poor quality shoes, you will be dead by 35 without intervention. What would you say, do they need it?
From his most excellent book 'The Doubter's Companion', an alphabetically ordered series of delightful rants on various topics.
On the subject of Luddites, he writes somewhat presciently:
"Highly trained individuals whose careers were destroyed by technological progress. This progress was treated as inevitable and uncontrollable. The Luddites therefore occupied the only remaining intellectual position, which consisted of rejecting technological progress.
"This reduction of attitudes to two extreme positions was accomplished between 1811 and 1830 when the introduction of Watt’s steam-engines and water-driven wool-finishing machines made hundreds of handicraftsmen redundant. Industrialization was spreading from sector to sector and quickly eliminated most crafts along with tens of thousands of jobs.
"The Luddites (named after an imaginary leader, Ned Lud) broke up and burnt factories. Their revolt ended in a group trial in 1813. Five were hanged. The attitude of society towards unrestrained technological progress was made perfectly clear. The judge said the Luddites’ actions were “one of the greatest atrocities that was ever committed in a civilized country.” 1
"This was a classic case of provocation and order versus despair and disorder. Wilfrid Laurier described the nature of this type of conflict when he spoke in 1886 about the Riel Rebellion. “What is hateful...is not rebellion, but the despotism which induces that rebellion; not rebels but the men who, having the enjoyment of power, do not discharge the duties of power; the men who, when they are asked for a loaf, give a stone.”
"What society misunderstood early in the nineteenth century when faced by the industrial revolution was the full nature of the change. The debate should not have been over whether there should be technological progress or not. It was more accurately a question of progress in what conditions: what progress, when, in what circumstances? Market extremists would argue that what happened was inevitable and eventually brought general prosperity. Their view ignores the social disorder, followed by suffering, followed by serious social disorder that this approach towards change brought on. Communism was the direct result. England, France, Germany and Sweden suffered recurring internal violence throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, some of it expanding into civil wars. Most of these countries passed within a shadow of revolution.
"The question is therefore not whether technological progress was necessary, but whether it was necessary to go about it in a barbaric manner. It can be argued that the Luddites were wrong in 1811. But society spent the next 150 years rendering progress civilized and thereby proving that the infuriated craftsmen had been right at least in spirit. Did these decades of wasted time, effort, lives and money represent an intelligent use of human talents? "
The recovery of the quote true meaning unquote, and implications of, Luddite feels similar to the change in consensus around a frog's actual response to being in gradually warming water, or a goldfish's actual short-term memory capabilities.
We're aware - and it's uplifting to find TFA dwells on this morphing of our collective understanding - that there was a generally agreed trope, since subverted / rectified, but in this case, unlike our amphibian or piscine revelations, we still find ourselves in desperate need of a way to succinctly describe a relatively calm but firm desire for society to work on an inclusive way of navigating significant social changes wrought by technology before we end up having to react violently to same.