My experience with AI/LLMs summed up. The baseline expectation got higher. I didn't get any time back. My life didn't become easier.
To paraphrase Marx, "And so, the equivalent amount of labour required to produce the goods needed to sustain a worker for a day is, say, 4 hours. But that doesn't mean the selfsame worker can work for no longer that 4 hours! He can be forced to work six, or eight, or twelve hours a day, and whatever additional goods he produces — that's the surplus product, which in this case goes straight to line up the factory owner's pockets".
Marx is great at building a narrative that generates resentment if you buy his frame. But you don't need to buy his frame, and if you don't, you suffer a lot less resentment. It's no way to live.
It encourages one to generalize from instances to the group, and from the group to individuals.
Cherry-pick your examples and you smear the group. Invoke the smeared group, and you target the individual.
It's structurally isomorphic to racism and any other -ism.
Class is the shape of power and exploitation under capitalism. Some own, others work to enrich those that own. That's all class is. Being frank about the real power differences in our society and our world isn't an ism.
Reality varies between these two extremes in different labor markets. In some labor markets, the employer has so much leverage they’re essentially a local monopolist; in other markets, employees have enough leverage that the respective labor market is close to perfectly efficient.
Thusly, both yours and Marx’s narratives about the labor markets are typically wrong, but serve good extremes on a spectrum. These extremes help you calibrate the respective spectrum and as you turn the dial between the amount of power the employee vs employer has in a respective market, you can induce how well employees get treated.
Moreover, if there exists a mismatch between employee treatment and their respective leverage, there essentially exists an arbitrage opportunity to exploit. For example, in 2022 Musk (especially when he bought Twitter and laid of 80% of the workforce) and other tech oligarchs conjectured that tech workers were being overcompensated and that employers had enough leverage to start treating them worse. Largely this bet paid off whether or not it was justified during the time. On the other hand, RenTech saw that highly skilled people were being under compensated and was able to get top tier talent without having to compete with others firms that much since they were undervaluing this labor.
I think right now tech labor is being undervalued by the market and that there is an arbitrage opportunity to get highly skilled people since the cut-throat competition for these workers is much less than it was in 2021. That is my conjecture. Regardless if my conjecture is true, I hope I sufficiently illustrated why this spectrum mental model is more useful than presupposing a monopoly labor market or a perfectly efficient labor market: both of these are unlikely to be true and are just meant to be oversimplified mental models with strong assumptions that can be loosened later. From these strong assumptions, we can loosen them to build more robust mental models as I describe above.
But in a perfectly efficient market, the good would be traded at its marginal price. And the marginal price of labour is the sustenance wage, not the marginal product of labor as neoclassical economists seem to believe.
Even if I give into your premise — which I don’t — marginal price would differ for different careers, such as doctors who had to take on more education costs and opportunity cost and thus have a higher marginal price above bare sustenance.
Nope! Marx explicitly presupposes fully free market, where everything (including labour) is bought and sold at the marginal cost. But the marginal cost of labour is less than what that labour produces — workers produce more than they get to consume, you know, otherwise we wouldn't have been able to feed the children, the elderly, the politicians, the priests, etc.
Likewise, AI will not lead to a future where the machines are working for us while we can enjoy our free time; it’s just increasing the required output from AI-augmented workers. That will probably increase economic output, but like before not leisure time.
Years ago I outbid some other people for a house in rural Ireland. (This is a longer way of saying "I bought a house"). It was a very cheap house. Those other people have their career choices* (like making pottery for a living vs being a remote software developer) constrained because they were outbid, in the same way that my own choices (like working 4 days a week vs 5) are constrained by e.g. people who are willing to work 5+ days a week 12 hours a day.
* To be clear, I know very well that most people don't even have such a choice in the first place.
We had plenty of think pieces about making people obsolete, about destruction, generally in celebratory tone. I cant even think of period where AI think pieces would promises much positive - it was sold to CEOs, so pitch was always "higher unemployment".
https://www.newsbytesapp.com/news/business/ari-emanuels-3b-v...
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2023/06/11/ignore-the-d...
https://time.com/6268804/artificial-intelligence-pissarides-...
> I cant even think of period where AI think pieces would promises much positive - it was sold to CEOs, so pitch was always "higher unemployment".
Higher unemployment means people work less.
Higher unemployment typically mean that people who are employed work more and under worst conditions - because their negotiation positions is much worst. Just about the last thing high unemployment means is that "the average employed person has more leisure time" or "average person in general have easier life".
Conflating high unemployment with "worker has more free time" is beyond absurd.
But OK, I dont read telegraph nor seen what that hedge fund guy was saying.
In many places it is more likely to reduce pay rather than hours or conditions because of legal limits.
Yeah? What is this?
I remember many people even on this very site claiming AI would help humanity. I think the most ridiculous the most ridiculous claim was helping fight climate change, but helping produce more leisure time by automating work was definitely what some people thought, or at least what they wanted us to think while pushing their crap.