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Comment by questinthrow | Hacker News Reader

Mistake or not, life is all about leverage. And the balance of power has swung back from employee to employer now that we're done with the covid bubble. Managers must tame their unruly cattle and punish them for their past transgressions when the cattle briefly had a moment of increased leverage. The sad part is that other industries are even worse about this, I know people in the medical system that have to buy gifts for people higher in the hierarchy in order to advance. So we're still kind of blessed for now, well until AI removes all our leverage at least.

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> until AI removes all our leverage at least.

Oh we still have the leverage of being a big mass then. AI won't beat physical violence in case of a revolution.

Violence can also be automated though, we'll see how we fare against autonomous police and drones

Who will build the drones? Who will provide the raw materials?

People with kids to feed, house and provide health insurance for I presume.

There's a lot of people without scruples around. Humanity on average doesnt really bother with ethics that much.

>AI won’t beat physical violence in case of a revolution.

On a long enough time scale it beats everything.

Yup, guard robots won't be useful until they can beat 30+ people or do something to the first guy that the rest would have to run away. Same for AGI, it won't be called AGI (or conscious for that matter) until it can purposefully do malice.

If things ever came to that then the AI side isn't without their own potential options:

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

At least for a while, there will still be humans needed to manufacture those drones.

In the sense that violence is coercion they have a lot of purely electronic means of persuasion:

  update account
  set balance = 0
  where user = ‘steve1977’;

That‘s why I keep some physical gold.

If you care about leverage then you should consider what kind of immigration policies you support, because bringing in more workers reduces the leverage of the current pool of workers, by increasing supply. The harder it is for your boss to find a competent replacement, the more leverage you have when negotiating with him/her.

It's more expensive for my employer to hire people in my country than to hire people in other countries, because the salaries in other countries are lower. As an effect, they basically don't hire new employees in my country because eastern Europe, India, Vietnam etc is cheaper.

With your reasoning I should definitively support immigration policies which bring more people to my country, since that will make the hiring pool smaller and my leverage will go up. Is that what you meant?

It's pretty hilarious a lot of companies are demanding RTO, but then increasing remote workforce in low cost of living countries.

I'd like to have a conversation with an executive at a company about that. The logical somersaults I'd likely hear would be something else.

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