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You have three minutes to escape the perpetual underclass

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Re: You have three minutes to escape the perpetual underclass

#111

Post by duskdozer »

teiferer wrote: post #77
HotGarbage wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Big tech is making everyone's life miserable: social media, advertising, surveillance. By working for them you are enabling this.

> Big tech is making everyone's life miserable: I understand that sentiment, but it's very one-sided. I enjoy having the worlds knowledge at my fingertips. I enjoy being able to video-call my family from anywhere in the world at any time. I enjoy never being lost cause I always have a map showing where I am. I enjoy having group chats with all my different social groups, big and small. I enjoy being able to easily wo…

You could do all those things 10 if not 15 years ago, with maybe the exception of the last one - mainly driven by the onset of the COVID pandemic forcing people to think differently about things for a brief time - in a much less hostile climate. And big tech isn't even required for let alone the best implementation of all those things, it's merely situated itself as the default.

Re: You have three minutes to escape the perpetual underclass

#112

Post by DiscourseFan »

pram wrote: post #110
DiscourseFan wrote: post #61

All this talk of neofeudalism and yet not a single bushel of corn has been taken by my lord! Capital leads to class difference, often immense class difference, which is not a claim against our society as primarily capitalistic but in favor of it. If you took away all the food grown in America and the clothes woven in Bangladesh and the laptops manufactured in China, there would be no Amazon, no Google, no Microsoft,…

The "feudal" part implies the productive assets of the 21st century are monopolized and owned by Big Tech, and even the capital class has to pay rent for access to this. It doesn't mean people are literally serfs on their lords manor growing substance crops. Are you serious?

This is completely false. The owners of big tech must pay capitalists like the owners of TSMC to produce the chips to power their services. Just because we don't produce the chips in the US does not mean that there isn't a distinct commodity producing class.

Re: You have three minutes to escape the perpetual underclass

#113

Post by benashford »

I think I get the gist of the moral of this story. But I'm not sure I'm fully agreeing with the specifics.

The nub is something I've thought about before. My contingency plan for AI turning the industry I work in upside down is to make hay while the sun shines before that point. Have enough saved or invested for a (lean) retirement (depending on how far away that point is).

But what if AI turns every industry upside down. Will there be enough overall economic activity to actually invest in at all. Then we're all poor regardless of how much we've individually saved, or what kind of social safety net exists, simply because there's not enough economic activity to fund it.

That is, at the moment, and I hope forever, a very remote possibility. For a whole host of reasons, technological and economic ones. But if that did happen in the next 20-30 years...

Re: You have three minutes to escape the perpetual underclass

#114

Post by OgsyedIE »

mitthrowaway2 wrote: post #46
mmaunder wrote: post #19

The premise is economically incoherent because labor is not a single task category that technology can delete. It is the input that continuously reconstitutes itself around whatever remains scarce, valuable and socially demanded as productivity rises. This is the lump of labor fallacy- the belief that there’s a fixed amount of economically valuable work that technology and capital can eliminate through automation or…

I don't know about your labor, but as far as my labor goes, there are basically only three things I am capable of doing: manual labor with my hands and legs, mental labor with my mind, and selling personal charm with my handsome face. If you can perform all the same jobs I can for a penny a day, and food and rent cost a dollar a day, I'll have a hard time earning enough to remain fed and housed. Until now, I've alway…

Even though the three categories you describe include niches like museum attraction or vehicle piloting in legal niches that still respect humans, a little creativity expands your options for post-ASI work:

1: verbal/literary labour with your vocal cords, or the use of an output tool, to playback existing works in environments where mechanical methods are disallowed,

2: aesthetic labour through precise recreations of other's mental labour in the performing arts,

3: legal labour in acting as an agent to help or hinder existing legal processes in systems that give humans standing,

4: biological labour as a substrate for growing certain transplantable products,

5: smuggling labour (either non-invasive or surgically invasive),

6: political labour to incrementally sway electoral results in any polity where you are still enfranchised,

7: security labour as a canary for infohazards (such as 'diplomat' programs produced by another ASI) inside of a quarantined environment,

8: frontman work as a deniable patsy to enable economic forgery, deception, revenge or warfare by a patron ASI, possibly without your knowledge.

There are plenty of ways to gain some currency token that can pay for your negentropy upkeep costs.

Re: You have three minutes to escape the perpetual underclass

#115

Post by Llamamoe »

teiferer wrote: post #77
HotGarbage wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Big tech is making everyone's life miserable: social media, advertising, surveillance. By working for them you are enabling this.

> Big tech is making everyone's life miserable: I understand that sentiment, but it's very one-sided. I enjoy having the worlds knowledge at my fingertips. I enjoy being able to video-call my family from anywhere in the world at any time. I enjoy never being lost cause I always have a map showing where I am. I enjoy having group chats with all my different social groups, big and small. I enjoy being able to easily wo…

You enjoy individual benefits and completely disregard the fact that electronics addiction and loneliness get worse year by year. You've been able to Google anything and chat with anyone back in 2010, all we've achieved since is making the average person spend 4-5h mindlessly doomscrolling on their phone and watching YouTube instead of having meaningful social interaction.

Also, we've got an entire generation growing up on ads, algorithmic brainrot, and now ai slop.

You're also forgetting algorithmic price fixing, algorithmic pricing, the billions in R&D into making internet platforms and services more addicting and effective at siphoning out your money, etc.

Re: You have three minutes to escape the perpetual underclass

#116

Post by harvey9 »

camgunz wrote: post #78
IshKebab wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're not making my life miserable. I definitely wouldn't want to go back to the tech we had in the 90s. You don't have to use social media. Advertising is annoying but it's not really any worse than TV ads back in the day.

You don't think the political situation is a teensy bit worse now?

The west was enjoying the peace dividend while Russians were dealing with the collapse of the USSR so the answer to your question depends on who you ask.

Re: You have three minutes to escape the perpetual underclass

#117

Post by hnlmorg »

phyzix5761 wrote: post #34

Honest question, if large portions of labor are automated or marginalized who ultimately buys the goods and services that companies produce? Markets depend on consumers having purchasing power. It seems economically rational to keep the average worker making just enough to afford goods and services over the long term. We can see this logic reflected at times in business history. Ford paid workers double the daily wag…

The problem is companies are increasingly looking at the economy as someone else’s problem. And that results in a race to the bottom as each business sees what the other does and then makes the same cuts to improve their own margins too.

What we’ve also seen in recent decades is a massive shift to people borrowing money to pay for luxury goods. This means that businesses can still continue to tank the economy because their profits are propped up by other people’s debts.

And in fairness, it’s not just consumer goods that are sold this way either. Entire businesses are run on borrowed money and suppressed wages with the hope that they win the “business lottery” and receive a massive buyout. Often they’re deliberately selling their products below cost price to boost their client portfolio and thus making it entirely uneconomical for normal businesses to compete on price.

And then we wonder why the economy is so volatile. The whole thing is held together by gum and prayers and the only people benefiting are those who are already wealthy.

Re: You have three minutes to escape the perpetual underclass

#118

Post by wickedsight »

pharrington wrote: post #37
vaughands wrote: post #8

This post seems to be haphazardly proposing that big tech will inevitably make everyone's lives miserable. And by working for them, you are enabling this. It offers no constructive alternative and the author (yes, I know who he is) seems to have no issue with Google hosting their email. It's hard to take this too seriously (even if there is some legitimate worry here)

We are over a decade into Big Tech already making everyone's lives miserable (the malicious wielding of social media is something even the mainstream knows about now). His alternative of not working for big tech is literally the only way out of this. There is some nuance in what "not working for big tech" means though. The general gist is to not take work making tools that can foreseeably be used to hurt people and t…

> His alternative of not working for big tech is literally the only way out of this.

This won't actually work though. The only reason we even have this discussion is because we're rich enough that pure survival isn't even really in our instinct anymore. Most of us haven't experienced actual hardship for years and we live in luxury.

There are plenty people in the world who are smart and poor and living tough lives, who are ready to replace people who quit because they have te luxury to quit. Just look at the huge amount of Indian people moving across the world to work in tech. These people aren't going to let the opportunity to significantly improve their lives go because they're going to work on software that might negatively impact society at some point. You could see this exact thing happen when Elon took over Twitter. Many people left because they disagreed with Elon, while many H-1B stuck around because they (and their families) actually had something to lose.

I don't think many of us on HN realize how incredibly spoiled we are with the lives we live.

Re: You have three minutes to escape the perpetual underclass

#119

Post by DiscourseFan »

Llamamoe wrote: post #97
mmaunder wrote: post #19

The premise is economically incoherent because labor is not a single task category that technology can delete. It is the input that continuously reconstitutes itself around whatever remains scarce, valuable and socially demanded as productivity rises. This is the lump of labor fallacy- the belief that there’s a fixed amount of economically valuable work that technology and capital can eliminate through automation or…

> It is the input that continuously reconstitutes itself around whatever remains scarce, valuable and socially demanded as productivity rises. Even if, AI is going to tank the bargaining power of the working class even harder than it already is. It's already the reality for many that they're working for minimum wage, in toxic environments, with no benefits, and more overtime than legal in places that regulate it sole…

You think that these ridiculously high wages that companies like Mercor are paying for data generation are "tanking" bargaining power? Its the complete opposite: there is now a massive sector of highly skilled, specialized labor that produces the very data which trains these models, a task that will not end as long as there is demand for newer and better and more specially trained models. That is a massive amount of bargaining power. It would take far more severe shocks to the system to kill the possibility of revolution, and that whatever that would be would be bad for everyone.

Re: You have three minutes to escape the perpetual underclass

#120

Post by [deleted] »

teiferer wrote: post #77
HotGarbage wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Big tech is making everyone's life miserable: social media, advertising, surveillance. By working for them you are enabling this.

> Big tech is making everyone's life miserable: I understand that sentiment, but it's very one-sided. I enjoy having the worlds knowledge at my fingertips. I enjoy being able to video-call my family from anywhere in the world at any time. I enjoy never being lost cause I always have a map showing where I am. I enjoy having group chats with all my different social groups, big and small. I enjoy being able to easily wo…

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