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- Hacker News
- >Automation can, therefore, reduce the value of work before it eliminates jobs.
As automation takes over, the value of labor collapses, and workers' market bargaining power under capitalism is the first to crumble. Ultimately, this drives up the value of real assets. I agree that tech companies can profit and gain the upper hand in negotiations simply by demonstrating a machine before licensing it, as this alone diminishes the value of workers. I am seriously worried these days.
by jdw64 - But what's the point of real assets if you can't do anything with them? No point in holding real estate if nobody can afford to rent/buy your houses or go do whatever money-spending thing you put on your commercial lots.
- > As automation takes over, the value of labor collapses
This is the reverse of how the economy actually works. You need labor and capital to turn raw materials into goods and services. If you invested a lot in capital in automation, you don't want that getting screwed up for want of labor, and so you pay a premium for workers who will do the job right and ensure you're getting full value from your capital.
That's why highly automated companies pay their employees better than less automated companies, and highly automated professions pay better than less automated professions.
by jdm2212 - There is no reason to expect capital to stop trying to squeeze labor just because inference takes the role of labor. With so much competition in the AI space, and no labor laws to protect it, why wouldn't capital drive the value of inference to the absolute bare minimum? And if the value of inference collapses to the bare minimum, who in their right mind would decide to serve inference?
Human labor has value because it is limited. If we keep up our current pace of data center buildouts and breakthroughs in model efficiency, then artificial intellectual labor will become functionally unlimited. Unlimited resources do not tend to hold their value. In that case, there are two potential outcomes: deliberate limitations on the output of artificial intellectual labor, which would require all parties involved to decide to lock themselves into their current market shares; or financial collapse of the whole ecosystem. What happens after that collapse is anyone's guess, but you have to imagine that it's the lenders who financed the whole thing who will be deciding what happens next rather than the failed tech businessmen.
by deepwoods - This paper created some neat theoretical mathematical models but I can't see anything that indicates that they have anything to do with reality.
I thought they'd come up with a neat mechanism that looked at actual wages in real companies where automation was introduced, but no. It's all spherical cows.
by pydry - Isn't that how most economics works? All spherical cows that conveniently prove whatever is good for your boss's boss's boss's boss's wallet, and you get paid handsomely.by mitxela
- Does anybody have a link where I don't need to download a PDF and zoom and it's still messed up for reading? I just want HTML, mannn.by pgt
- >a PDF and zoom and it's still messed up for reading
Works fine on my machine. Maybe don't view from a phone, I guess?
by gruez