Comment by miki123211
4 days ago
Two things:
1. Like most labor organizing, I think this would be beneficial for software engineers, but not long-term beneficial for the world at large. More software that is easier to make is better for everybody.
Would you still want to live in a world where your elevator stops working when the elevator operator is sick, or where overseas Whatsapp calls cost $1 per minute, because they have to be connected by a chain of operators?
2. Software engineering is a lot easier to move than other professions. If you want to carry people from London to New York, you need to cater to the workers who actually live in London or New York. If you want to make software... Silicon Valley is your best bet right now, but if SV organizes and other places don't, it may not be your best bet any more. That would make things even worse for SV than not organizing. Same story applies to any other place.
Sure, companies won't more overnight, but if one place makes it too hard for AI to accelerate productivity, people will either go somewhere else, or that place will just end up completely outcompeted like Europe did.
The "world at large" mostly consists of workers, so things that are beneficial to workers are also beneficial to it.
> your elevator stops working when the elevator operator is sick
Can you point somewhere outside of US where this is the case with unions?
The "world at large" mostly consists of workers, so things that are beneficial to workers are also beneficial to it.
When dockworker's unions are able to prevent port automation, is that beneficial to society?
So do you believe that the gains from this technology will be broadly distributed? Or will capital capture the majority of those gains?
what technologies has "capital" captured the majority of gains from?
This would potentially be true for a lot of tech in the last five decades or so. When it gets cheaper to make the things people need and want without those needs and wants changing, you can get away with paying people a lower real wage for the same productivity. Couple that with the fact that the workers themselves also have typically grown more productive from the same tech, allowing companies to undercut competitors and capture more market share until everyone else catches on. I figure capital has benefited enormously from recent tech, very possible it captured the majority of the excess money produced.
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Small newspapers full of classified ads used to be available locally around the world, creating local employment. Google and Meta ravaged that and sucked the money out to a handful of shareholders and tens of thousands of highly paid tech workers. That's just one market.