Tesla is reportedly planning a reveal of its self-driving robotaxi on the Warner Bros. lot amid widespread anger in the industry over the brand’s controversial CEO, Elon Musk, resulting in a rejection of its cars.
Tesla is reportedly planning a reveal of its self-driving robotaxi on the Warner Bros. lot amid widespread anger in the industry over the brand’s controversial CEO, Elon Musk, resulting in a rejection of its cars.
What’s the plan when all the low skill low pay jobs are automated? With each new advancement, it doesn’t feel cool and futuristic but sad and distopian. Like we all see it…
Eventually they end up homeless and then they can be arrested?
I mean, it’s not a problem until it’s my problem, and then it’s an urgent one. Am I doing this right?
If only there was a way to Know the crisis is here…
And it’s fully constitutional to enslave convicts. So tons of free labor for every company who wants it, and then I guess export everything they help to make since nobody here can buy anything?
I often wonder this. Who do these companies think will be paying for their goods and services when nobody can afford them? And a little further down that stretch, when they pay so little that working full time still doesn’t cover rent and groceries, who will bother with showing up to work at all? If you’re gonna be homeless and starving anyway, might as well just own your own time and find your own food and shelter on your own terms.
I don’t think they understand that if they exploit much harder, they’ll be causing a societal collapse that will render their power meaningless. They’re stripmining both America’s labor pools and consumer pools in one fell swoop, and they won’t be invited to neighboring mines afterward. And then the most capable people will understand what is happening and leave, so only poor, uneducated, and underskilled people will remain. Basically Mississippi, but for the whole country.
They are already planning for it, like a race to extract all before that point
https://www.theguardian.com/news/2022/sep/04/super-rich-prepper-bunkers-apocalypse-survival-richest-rushkoff
That preview thumbnail of the bunker looks like it was shot by Stanley Kubrick.
This would be a good opportunity to highlight free education and/or technical certification for all. Whether it be college (white collar), trade school (blue collar), or something else, an educated work force will be well-equipped to handle such dramatic shifts in advancement.
Best I can do is siphon more tax dollars away for private education.
Can we parlay this into some school vouchers?
Yes, but they’re expired because the private school they were for closed due to due to being forced to accept more low-income students.
If you’re not aware, look up the automation paradox: https://ideas.ted.com/will-automation-take-away-all-our-jobs/
Every* automation advancement has lead to an increase in employment, not decrease. Most often jobs in the immediate sector are lost, but the rise in supporting sector jobs are bolstered.
Classic examples are the cotton mill and combine harvester. The number of agricultural workers declined, but the number of jobs processing agricultural product increased. Or with ATMs, the number of tellers needed per bank location decreased, but the total employment in the banking sector increased (banks opened more branches, namely in places where it was previously cost prohibitive).
As more things are automated, what’s being automated becomes cheaper and more prolific, often increasing (or creating) new opportunities. There are so many historic examples of this, it’s hard to justify “this time is different” predictions… Even for things like AI automating white collar jobs.
*Edit: almost every. It depends a bit on how you count the secondary jobs, and where those are located (automation combined with offshoring results in a net decline in some countries, but increase overall).
I think the underlying dynamic there is that automation in one industry led to cheaper goods, which led to consumer savings, which led to greater demand, which led to increased employment in other industries that eventually absorbed the displaced workers.
The differences with the current situation are that, firstly, decades of corporate consolidation have reduced competition and enabled automators to channel most of the savings to corporate profits instead of lower prices; and secondly, the fact that automation is affecting the whole economy at once instead of a specific industry means that an economy-wide increase in demand doesn’t cause a corresponding increase in the demand for labor.
So if the difference is corporate consolidation… Sounds like that’s the real underlying issue then, not automation.
Economics has well established that monopolistic behavior by firms harms consumers & the overall economy (that’s why we have anti-trust laws in the first place).
Don’t conflate the one problem with another, as I agree the erosion of anti-trust laws is a bad thing and needs to be reversed. But that doesn’t mean firms further automating things is now also bad.
I’d also say “automation affecting the whole economy at once” isn’t unique. The industrial revolution was not isolated to one industry, its effects were economy-wide. Also true for the transportation revolution (trains & steam boats moved everything), telecommunications, and the internet…
No one’s been arguing against automation per se—the comment you originally replied to was asking what the plan was after automation. Because the marginal effect of automation in the current economy, if corporations are left to their own devices, stands to harm as many as it benefits.
And yes, the industrial revolution isn’t a bad parallel for what we’re potentially facing now. It brought about some of the most miserable conditions working people have ever endured short of slavery, and it took the labor movement several bloody generations to end the worst of it.
Recent studies suggest the science on this is less clear than that TED talk suggests. So I wouldn’t put too much emphasis on either the idea that automation will or won’t take away net jobs.
I dunno, this feels like the whole ‘infinite growth’ problem of capitalism. Sure that’s been true so far, but it can’t continually result in more jobs forever. At some point they’ll just automate too much and it’ll be a tipping point.
I like the horse analogy for this. Cars came and replaced horses they never found new jobs. This time they want to replace the people with AI. Whee are they supposed to go? Don’t need that many mechanics or technicians to repair the cars.
EXCELLENT POINT, FELLOW HUMAN. LET US CEASE OUR REPRODUCTIVE EFFORTS TO STICK IT TO CAPITALISM.
What happens when we move all the way from manual labor automation and start doing service and information work? Not everyone’s an AI developer
Probably what happens in Charles Dickens novel, except everyone has smartphones now.
But tech bros don’t think literature or history are important disciplines, so they don’t even know what happens in a Charles Dickens novel.
A techbros familiarity with Charles Dickens is about on the level of Philomena Cunk’s familiarity with him.
At least Philomena Cunk is a character.
Techbros are, frighteningly, real.
That’s an insult to Philomena Cunk.
Death for poor people thru war, disease, or famine.
Classic story.
Replenishment through forced birth rather than supporting families.
Am I the only one who has noticed that direct-to-consumer sales are floundering and business-to-business sales are up?
They’re just planning on bailing on the consumer market entirely. Expect things like your shopping to be more ad-supported than ever, because they know regular-ass-people don’t have disposable cash.
Businesses on the other hand, have loads of money to spend, so we’re seeing the economy twist itself into knots to just support businesses buying and selling to other businesses, with taking care of the humans doing the work as an afterthought to be handled by someone else (see: Walmart educating their employees on how to apply for Food Stamps). Why worry about making sales to consumers when businesses have boatloads of money to spend on “services.” So many businesses farm out their “labor” to third party companies these days, everything from payroll to janitorial.
They already have a plan, they are in the middle of executing it. Our futures will be ad supported, much like One Million Merits of Black Mirror fame. Expect all four walls of your ‘apartment’ to be covered in ads you can’t avoid just so you can afford an apartment. Expect ads and bullshit everywhere to “support” your life while closing doors to consumer access to almost anything. They don’t like poor people having access to information, and right now the only thing they have to fight access to information is disinformation and misinformation. They’ll drop those pretenses once the consumers are locked out.
“What will happen if their employees are too poor to buy anything?” Nothing, they don’t give a damn that their employees are too poor to eat. They stopped marketing to consumers, they’re marketing to other businesses which have money. They’re genuinely not concerned with what happens to their employees.
“You’ll own nothing and be happy” is a threat, just not in the way stupid right-wing capitalists think it is.
Example: NVIDIA is making way more money selling fleets of GPU’s aimed at AI processing to businesses than they are selling video cards to the consumer gaming market. Gamers are like “when will GPU prices ever come down?” They won’t, gamers are not the key market anymore.