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Rolling the ladder up behind us

xeiaso.net

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Re: Rolling the ladder up behind us

#21

Post by schmidtleonard »

derektank wrote: post #15
schmidtleonard wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a whole list of things I'd like from my car that the market does not provide because it is more profitable not to. Why do I get the feeling that instead of seeing this as a horror story you would scold me for unreasonable expectations, even though it is the identical mirror form of the horror story you just told?

My take would be to scold you to start your own company that provides the features you want from your car if it's not already being provided by the marketplace

I'd have more luck petitioning the Central Car Design Committee because

> it is more profitable not to

...and if anyone thinks this is ridiculous, I'd ask them if they are for or against repealing all of our current motor vehicle regulations. If "for," they have admitted to being a hopeless libertarian, and if "against," they have acknowledged that important reasonable features can be incompatible with the profit motive of a free market and it no longer seems so strange that I might have a list which is more of the same.

Re: Rolling the ladder up behind us

#22

Post by paxys »

The part that is always skipped when making the clothing analogy is that for most of human history good clothes were a luxury. At the time of the industrial revolution it was common for a family to spend 15-25% of their annual income just on clothing. A single shirt from that era would cost the equivalent of £2,000 today when considering material and labor. New clothes were something you may be able to afford once a year, if at all. Like the article says, weavers were the equivalent of PhD scientists who could charge whatever they wanted for their skills (and they would cater pretty much exclusively to kings and the 0.1% of the time). Great if you're the weaver, not so for everyone else.

So the industrial revolution wasn't a conspiracy to put down the lower classes. The lower classes were in fact the biggest benefactors of the industrial revolution.

If software can go the same way, I'd say good riddance. The profession has always kept free from gatekeepers, and that's a good thing.

Re: Rolling the ladder up behind us

#23

Post by stego-tech »

kevmo314 wrote: post #6

> Actually, what are we going to do when everyone that cares about the craft of software ages out, burns out, or escapes the industry because of the ownership class setting unrealistic expectations on people? Nothing, I guess? There's an implicit assumption that software written by humans is a necessity. If the future finds that software written by computers is more profitable then that's just what it is. The univers…

Profit motives are a relatively recent phenomenon, though, and are often erroneously cited as analogous to efficiency gains (despite mountains of evidence to the contrary).

> Even food is not able to escape this hole: it's not profitable to manually cultivate food anymore if you wanted to do that as a career.

Does this not horrify you? That the foundational discipline of humanity - nutrition via hunting, gathering, or growing - is no longer a "profitable enterprise"? Something every human needs in order to survive, has been perverted and denigrated to the point that it is no longer profitable?

That should be horrifying. It should be the red flag that spurs action against a gross system of exploitation and goal misalignment. For all the crowing about AI misalignment wiping out humanity, we have actual economic misalignment leaving humans homeless, starving, and dying of curable illness not from lack of supply or demand, but purely from placing profit above all.

To see defeatists and fatalists jump in comments and say "that's just how it is" while prostrating themselves in worship to the almighty share price should infuriate us as a species, for these are humans who willingly accept their own demise at the hands of others rather than doing anything of value for their own self-preservation, let alone preservation of the species.

Re: Rolling the ladder up behind us

#24

Post by hinkley »

kevmo314 wrote: post #6

> Actually, what are we going to do when everyone that cares about the craft of software ages out, burns out, or escapes the industry because of the ownership class setting unrealistic expectations on people? Nothing, I guess? There's an implicit assumption that software written by humans is a necessity. If the future finds that software written by computers is more profitable then that's just what it is. The univers…

> it's not profitable to manually cultivate food anymore

It is if you stay niche. It’s called market gardening. It will never equal farm automation for employment or revenue, but it’s a thing you can do as long as not too many people do it. The same happened to woodworking, and manufacturing. What you see are shops that can remanufacture parts that have either aged out of the manufacturer’s warehouse or where the material is the expensive part and reworking it is cheaper and almost as fast as ordering a new one.

The consumer base of these is smaller, so the supply has to be smaller as well, but not zero.

Re: Rolling the ladder up behind us

#25

Post by kevmo314 »

stego-tech wrote: post #23
kevmo314 wrote: post #6

> Actually, what are we going to do when everyone that cares about the craft of software ages out, burns out, or escapes the industry because of the ownership class setting unrealistic expectations on people? Nothing, I guess? There's an implicit assumption that software written by humans is a necessity. If the future finds that software written by computers is more profitable then that's just what it is. The univers…

Profit motives are a relatively recent phenomenon, though, and are often erroneously cited as analogous to efficiency gains (despite mountains of evidence to the contrary). > Even food is not able to escape this hole: it's not profitable to manually cultivate food anymore if you wanted to do that as a career. Does this not horrify you? That the foundational discipline of humanity - nutrition via hunting, gathering, o…

> are often erroneously cited as analogous to efficiency gains

Sure, I can believe that, but...

> doing anything of value for their own self-preservation

Even your own comment relies on some metric of value.

I agree that profit motives are not an ideal metric of value but as your comment suggests, we as a species do rely on some metric of value. I'm not infuriated until there's a better metric.

Re: Rolling the ladder up behind us

#26

Post by WalterBright »

dontlaugh wrote: post #13
WalterBright wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you really want a return to the days when "women's work" was spending every free moment spinning and weaving cloth by hand? When cloth was so valuable there was a profession called "rag pickers"? Where new clothes were rare, hand me downs were the usual, and people wore clothes until they disintegrated? And poor people made clothes out of flour sacks?

That’s not what the Luddites wanted. They praised the technology itself and recognised it would save a lot of time. But they also recognised that they the workers wouldn’t reap any of those benefits, they’d just lose their jobs. Do you really think capitalists would choose to shorten the working day with no loss of pay as productivity increases? If so, you are incredibly naive.

The workers did reap the benefits. The Law of Supply and Demand ensures it. 1.1% of the US labor force works at minimum wage jobs.

When wages are raised by the government, job losses happen. 16,000 to 36,000 people lost their jobs when California raised the minimum wage for fast food workers.

> Do you really think capitalists would choose to shorten the working day with no loss of pay as productivity increases?

During WW2, production needed to increase, so hours were increased to 60 hour weeks. The labor force, very patriotic, was all for this. Production increased for a few weeks, and then fell below what was produced in a 40 hour week. Companies wanting to maximize profits are aware of this effect.

Also, if you track employee total compensation (not just wages) against productivity increases, the two lines form the same curve. The reason for this is the Law of Supply and Demand pushes those two lines together. The more productive a worker is, the more they get paid, as such workers are more in demand.

Re: Rolling the ladder up behind us

#27

Post by stego-tech »

paxys wrote: post #22

The part that is always skipped when making the clothing analogy is that for most of human history good clothes were a luxury . At the time of the industrial revolution it was common for a family to spend 15-25% of their annual income just on clothing. A single shirt from that era would cost the equivalent of £2,000 today when considering material and labor. New clothes were something you may be able to afford once a…

> The part that is always skipped when making the clothing analogy is that for most of human history good clothes were a luxury.

Literally what OP discusses in their text, right in the first part. Go RTFA.

> and they would cater pretty much exclusively to kings and the 0.1% of the time

Oh yeah, I totally remember reading about how people in pre-modern civilizations were almost always semi-clad or fully nude due to the expense of clothing.

Oh, wait, no I don't, because people still bought clothing and wore it regularly. They just also had economies around mending clothing, updating it, tailoring it, altering it, reusing and recycling it. Rather than building an economic system of destruction for the sake of a handful of profiteers, it was an economy of artisans who provided a staple resource at reasonable rates and quality to support themselves. Because clothing was often tailor-made rather than ready-to-wear, people took care of it - and themselves - for longer periods of time. Techniques were used to keep articles sturdy for longer, rather than disposable machine stitches that fall apart in a washing machine.

Experts and artisans are not "gatekeepers", they are skilled craftspeople worthy of respect and deserving of compensation for their skills. To demand anyone be able to do anything of any complexity is to demand a complete elimination of anything that differentiates humans from one another, to create a homogenous mass of genetics with no incentive to grow and evolve.

Nobody is "gatekeeping" software developers, or Doctors, or plumbers, or weavers, or artists. Those all take skill, and people with a suitable level of skill can easily pass good credentials checks and tests.

Re: Rolling the ladder up behind us

#28

Post by whatshisface »

WalterBright wrote: post #4
Refreeze5224 wrote: post #2

This is the true problem with AI. It's with who owns it, and what they will inevitably use it for. Whether it can do cool stuff with code or equal a junior developer is irrelevant. What it can do is less important than what it will be used for. The owning class will use it to reduce payroll costs, which from their perspective is a cost center and always will be. If you're not an owner, then you have no control over t…

> The owning class will use it to reduce payroll costs Of course. That's been going on since the invention of the plow. That's why today we can do more interesting things than turn over the earth with a pointy stick all day every day. > economic democracy, where average people regain control over their lives History shows us that this inevitably means people lose all control over their lives, because the state will m…

That's kind of a silly example, your congressman could write a bill allocating 53% of cars to the two seater lobby and 47% to the four seat lobby.

Re: Rolling the ladder up behind us

#29

Post by [deleted] »

asmxyz wrote: post #19
WalterBright wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The owning class will use it to reduce payroll costs Of course. That's been going on since the invention of the plow. That's why today we can do more interesting things than turn over the earth with a pointy stick all day every day. > economic democracy, where average people regain control over their lives History shows us that this inevitably means people lose all control over their lives, because the state will m…

There are _other options_! You're argument is that the only two alternatives are that the ruling class and owning class be separate groups of people, or the same group of people. And either way the labor class if F'ed. You're right that having the ruling class and the owning class being the _same people_ is terrible. That's what we're living in right now! But what about the labor class being the owning class? What if…

[deleted]

Re: Rolling the ladder up behind us

#30

Post by sundaeofshock »

kevmo314 wrote: post #25
stego-tech wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Profit motives are a relatively recent phenomenon, though, and are often erroneously cited as analogous to efficiency gains (despite mountains of evidence to the contrary). > Even food is not able to escape this hole: it's not profitable to manually cultivate food anymore if you wanted to do that as a career. Does this not horrify you? That the foundational discipline of humanity - nutrition via hunting, gathering, o…

> are often erroneously cited as analogous to efficiency gains Sure, I can believe that, but... > doing anything of value for their own self-preservation Even your own comment relies on some metric of value. I agree that profit motives are not an ideal metric of value but as your comment suggests, we as a species do rely on some metric of value. I'm not infuriated until there's a better metric.

If we don’t figure out a way to keep people alive and relatively happy, the metric may become pitchforks per angry mob.

I used to wonder if a Butlerian Jihad was plausible or just an interesting plot device. Now, it seems more plausible every day.

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