cross-posted from: https://mander.xyz/post/51382283
Related: Bernie Sanders, labor leaders warn of AI risks for workers.
Yes.
The tech oligarch vision of the future is simply feudalism updated for a new generation of propertied gentry, which of course requires a new generation of serfs, and leaves no room for a working class.
I kept saying that software development was the most socialist profession. It is nearly impossible to deprive software developer of their tools of trade.
Turns out software developers are their own worst enemy.
This was always the case. Word processors eliminated the “typing pool”, and the goal of automating everyone else’s jobs out of existence has been the goal ever since. They want an “every man for himself” world, and if you’re not “alpha” enough to cut it against the “top dogs”, then life’s gonna be shit for you.
I feel it must be said… blowing up a factory full of robots instead of workers is a lot less problematic.
They don’t want to replace. They want to make them desapear.
Damn, so these “AI Oligarchs” want to abolish the working class completely and end the systemic exploitation via wage labor according to Bernie? In that case, why would anyone but the most conservative of fascists and business owners fight back against this?
Not only that, but capitalism as a whole wouldn’t be able to survive without workers, since making a profit under average conditions requires wage labor, where people are being paid less than the value they created (difference being surplus value), with machinery and automation merely transferring their value into the commodity being made or the service being provided, eventually having to be maintained/replaced.
Blud really is Mussolini reborn based on his populist word salad nonsense ngl
making a profit under average conditions requires wage labor
Why should it be impossible in principle to cut workers out of it entirely? At the very least, this is what tech oligarchs are claiming as their objective; rewriting the value equation to exclude human workers, or at least diminish to near irrelevance.
If they do claim that, it’s likely to be just pure nonsense designed to market their own businesses since they’d be the ones selling the AI solutions. In reality, replacing all your workers with machines will just cause the profits to go close to 0 due to what value is and how it works, there’s no rewriting it as it’d be akin to rewriting something like what gravity is.
As to why, it’s a bit complicated of a topic but essentially, value is the socially necessary labor hours required to produce something rather than being something subjective (if same quantities of gold and silver had the same value but gold required 10x more work to obtain, nobody would be mining for gold).
Production requires investment into constant capital (i.e. machinery, raw inputs) which, under average market conditions, are already essentially “priced in”, they embody the labor hours already invested in them and merely transfer their own value over into the new commodity. During production, raw materials get used up, machinery wears out and needs to be replaced and so on.
Then there’s variable capital which is the workers who are paid a wage, and is where profit comes from since wage labor allows capitalists to pay less to the worker than their labor produces, with wage essentially being a “subsistence fee” for the worker to renew their labor power.
If you remove variable capital, you remove the only reliable point in production that allows capitalists to extract value. Ofc, there’s a chance that they can hit some bargain deal and get constant capital under market price, but it tends to average out as time passes, this can be seen right now with AI and the companies struggling more and more.
This model of value is just a model though. Imagine if there was a model of transportation that represented transit as a function of horses, from a time when that was somewhat accurate and had been for thousands of years. The existence of that model wouldn’t mean it is literally impossible in the real world to invent the combustion engine and then send the horses to the glue factory since their exploitation is no longer required to achieve the desired result.
