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- Hacker News
- Marx foresaw and correctly predicted the rise of what he calls "organic composition of capital" (simplifying, machines and automated production) and the diminishing of human labour.. which can also be seen as accumulated past (dead) labour over living labour.
There is a famous fragment about how this, taken to the extreme, results in a contradiction that breaks the law of value, and it makes no more sense to use labour time as exchange value: https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1857/grundrisse/...
We are now seeing an almost literal realization of this passage:
What Marx didn't imagine AFAIK, was fully autonomous machines that not only can reproduce themselves but that they can also use guns (and surveillance, prediction, germs, etc) against all humanity, transcending capitalist relationships and potentially controlled by a single master (hi Elon) or none (Skynet), without workers involvement. That kind of machine is outside Marx analysis but doesn't contradict it. We are seeing the first glimpses of it in the AI systems used to execute the Gaza genocide. In such scenario who controls the ASI controls the world, more like Hitler with an Aladdin's lamp than the metabolism and historical evolution described in Das Kapital we saw until now.The accumulation of knowledge and of skill, of the general productive forces of the social brain, is thus absorbed into capital, as opposed to labour, and hence appears as an attribute of capital, and more specifically of fixed capital, in so far as it enters into the production process as a means of production properby nahuel0x - > If AI displaces human workers faster than the economy can reabsorb them, it risks eroding the very consumer demand firms depend on. We show that knowing this is not enough for firms to stop it.
That's why we are going to get some for of government mandated UBI eventually. Because workers are optional but consumers are obligatory for any market and company to function.
Rich can't get richer without consumers and that's the only thing that drives decision making.
by scotty79 - A lot of words here for something I think is simple and should be obvious to anyone who thinks about it for 5 minutes. Companies that can, will reach for AI to reduce cost. Those that can't will be killed by those that have. AI eventually leads to 100% automation, ie human economic value becomes 0. Humans no longer have the means of earning, which means they can purchase nothing. Companies can thus make no sales and the marketplaces crash. Good riddance to unsustainable Capitalism, hello to that thing especially the US's politically red has been trying to kill for decades.by skeledrew
- i'm sure it's meant in some kind of technical sense that is precisely defined in the field of economics, but this use of the word "rational" is irritating:
> This demand externality traps rational firms in an automation arms race, displacing workers well beyond what is collectively optimal.
you can't be trapped in a sub-optimal situation and be rational at the same time. the rational thing for these rational competitors to do would be to agree to slow their deployment of ai, because the cost savings will be more than lost to demand destruction down the line. so if they won't or can't do that, they aren't rational. on the flip side, if it is actually impossible to slow ai deployment, then the firms are rational and the situation they find themselves in isn't actually sub-optimal.
it's irritating to me because i often see persuit of self-interest even to one's eventual detriment held up as "rationality", which may be true in some technical sense within the field of economics (i really couldn't say), but is certainly not true for, like, actual rationality. myopic selfishness is never rational.
by pasquinelli - Daron Acemoglu (2024 nobel economist) is on a book tour with some new ideas about fundamental changes to our economic theories from Ai (automation/technology are not uniform), this was a great interviewby verdverm
- Excellent article:
> This last point is crucial: it’s not that capitalist CEOs are just evil people—well, some definitely are—no, the structural logic is coercing them to do something destructive in order to survive. They can’t help themselves.
I spend a lot of time thinking about how much of the world going sideways is from bad actors and how much is from emergent behavior of complex systems. The answer is both.
In particular, there is a level above this that I want to draw attention to. The structure of corporate competition coerces executives into choices that are bad for the world. This is true even for entirely well-meaning executives.
However, executives are not stupid or unaware. So over time, it becomes known that being in an executive position will require you to make choices that are perhaps "economically rational" for the firm but otherwise require compromised morals. And once that awareness gets out, the system selects CEOs that are OK with that moral compromise.
So it's less a question of "is it bad actors or bad systems" and more "it's a bad system that produces bad actors".
by munificent - > I wasn’t sure how I felt about these local moratoriums or about the tech-optimist gung-ho “let’s build” attitude. Both seemed kind of wrong to me. I think we need to be very deliberate—we need to have a robust public debate and understanding of just how and where we apply AI technology. Not “smash the machines” and not “let it rip” either.
My understanding regarding the moratorium is that that is exactly the objective: the current regulatory environment fails to price in the negative externalities of data centers, so their primary investors have an incentive to hem-and-haw on negotiations for revised regulations. A moriatorium is an action that can be taken unilaterally that changes those incentives, that brings them to the negotiating table.
edit: this sentiment is also produced in a comment in the substack (Ben Verschoor):
The thing with the data center issue is that a moratorium is the moderate option, because it gives us space to actually think about what we want to do with this technology and implement it. Recently there was an earnest, centrist-y guy who works for the industry but has concerns who came to our anti-data center group asking us to participate in some roundtable dialogue event. My answer was that as long as these data center projects are still moving forward, using our limited time and bandwidth to engage in dialogue rather than slow and stop their approach would amount to unilateral disarmament.
by jhanschoo - U.S. unemployment rate is steady at ~4% and we are now almost 4 years after the release of ChatGPT. The Jobs Apocalypse seems to be always on the horizon. UBI is being pushed by college educated workers burnt out of white collar work (understandably), but when you suggest to them working construction, teaching school, or working in a hospital, they deflect and go quiet.by bwhiting2356