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Comment by popalchemist | Hacker News Reader

Has it occurred to you that it isn't only self-interest but concern for others that drives collective bargaining? It's essentialy a way for the little guys to stand up to the 1% to fight against the unending series of abuses and diminishment of the average person's ability to earn a livable wage and work under fair conditions.

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Yes. But there's a clear difference between, say, stealing someone's voice, identity or intellectual property, and preventing someone from using automation to do labor.

The former is obviously unfair to the person whose identity is stolen. The latter is sour grapes from people who want to control the future.

I also can't bring myself to get incensed over someone using a robot to write code. It's literally the modern equivalent of smashing knitting looms.

You keep framing it as getting incensed over other people using ai to write code; but that isn't what it's about. A dev union would not attempt that; it would attempt to ensure quality of life for your class of people (and their families) as much as possible. It isn't about policing entire industries or other entities; it is about DEFENDING those who they would, do, and always have exploited when binding contracts or legislation don't prevent them from doing so.

Union = a group of people defending their rights and that includes the right to a life that isn't at the utter mercy of perpetual enshittification due to the infinite mechanical plodding of heartless (by definition) megacorporations that would never hesitate to eradicate peoples' livelihoods and treat humans as material for the orphan grinder if they could get away with it.

And by the way, they do, if you haven't noticed.

> it would attempt to ensure quality of life for your class of people (and their families) as much as possible.

What is “your class of people”, and why is it threatened by what other people do with coding robots?

You can try to dress it up as an intellectual argument, but at root it’s the same thing that the luddites were trying to do: defending your preferred lifestyle from technological advances.

We, the ditch diggers of the world, support your unqualified resistance to the use of steam shovels! Fewer holes, slower!

Your argument boils down to the idea that human life is not worth defending, even when capital actively undermines it by undercutting honest people's honest efforts to work for a living.

Thank you for outing yourself as a low-empathy, capital-aligned individual who makes bad-faith arguments, I'll know not to engage you from now on.

A software union probably wouldn't tell you what tools to use when writing code. It would help protect you from being completed replaced by code

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