Comment by czhu12
1 day ago
This article describes a vicious cycle:
Layoff of workers -> Workers stop spending -> businesses suffer
This is not a foregone conclusion. Laid off workers could find other jobs, with higher incomes, due to productivity increases from AI.
This narrative falls into the trap of zero sum thinking, taken at the limit, you can advocate for jobs programs and helicopter money where people get paid to do nothing to keep the economy humming.
did you try to find job these days? it is a nightmare.
did you try to create a business? starting own business has never been harder, competition is extreme. market is over-saturated. monopolies are everywhere. barrier for entry (capital required) never been higher.
and after finding job they likely get into another roudn of layoff. just check RedNote, SWEs complaining just about that. people getting laid off before even first day at work.
You’ve got to be kidding. Starting a business has never been easier or cheaper at any time in history. If you can’t, it’s because you’re short on good ideas.
your ideas never been a problem. check App Store, every single idea has thousands of exact same apps.
and if you are talking about creating company to make your own car/hardware/farm/restaurant/factory. good luck.
Well, even until a few months ago, Dario and Sam were selling this vision to CEOs that they can perform complete workforce replacement. If that really comes to fruition, and they seem hellbent on doing that, I don't see why you can't have a situation where laid of workers can't find jobs, or take up blue collar jobs and end up driving down wages there, ultimately reducing consumer spending.
> helicopter money where people get paid to do nothing to keep the economy humming
have you heard about government issued bonds? or people working and getting paid from government? or government subsidies? or buy-backs and corporate bailouts?
> jobs programs and helicopter money where people get paid to do nothing to keep the economy humming.
The article addresses your concerns already. I know it's long, but you could probably skip a few paragraphs in the middle and start here:
> Piketty, no conservative, has argued that UBI fails to address root structural problems: “unequal access to education and health, low-paying and low-productivity jobs, malfunctioning markets, corruption, and regressive tax systems.” David Shor’s polling data bears this out from the other direction: UBI is unpopular with American voters; a federal jobs guarantee has legs. People don’t want a check. They want work. They want purpose.
But this doesn't summarize the argument, it's just where you need to start reading.
If I try to summarize the argument, it says that jobs are a bargaining chip in the hands of laborers (the largest fraction of our society). Currently, they use it to secure certain freedoms and benefits. If, however, they no longer have jobs, whoever gets the role of distributor of the wealth produced by the AI will not be compelled to distribute it fairly... well, the whole concept of fairness will have to be reinvented (because, roughly, now we base fairness on individual's contribution, but that's not going to work anymore). But, most likely, it will lead to a dictatorship of those with access to AI over those who have none.
* * *
Here's my (unrelated to the article) historical parallel. In the beginning of the 20th century when Jews started campaigning for bringing more Jews into Turkish, then British Palestine, the process often went like this: Jewish community or a wealthy individual buys a plot of land from a Turk owner. Turks never worked that land themselves, and used to hire local Arabs to do the agricultural labor. Jews would not rehire Arabs after acquisition, instead, they used the newly bought land to create jobs for more Jewish immigrants.
This greatly contributed to the animosity between Jews and Arabs in Palestine because even though initially Arabs would be paid off to "go someplace else" after the land purchase, realistically, there was no other place for them to go to. Which led to spreading poverty, which led to sporadic attacks on new land owners. Which led to retaliation... and well, the conflict never really went away, didn't it?
This just might happen on a much larger scale in countries like the US, if suddenly a large fraction of population finds itself powerless and being unable to influence the decisions of the government.
"In the beginning of the 20th century when Jews started campaigning for bringing more Jews into Turkish, then British Palestine, the process often went like this: Jewish community or a wealthy individual buys a plot of land from a Turk owner. Turks never worked that land themselves, and used to hire local Arabs to do the agricultural labor. Jews would not rehire Arabs after acquisition, instead, they used the newly bought land to create jobs for more Jewish immigrants."
I have never heard this one before. And it doesn't really track with the populations that were actually there in 1900. The Arabs at that time, in that place were largely nomadic herders. The largest city in the region at the time only had about 30,000 people in it. And it had been sometime since the Ottomans actually had any real political control of the area. So perhaps it did happen to some extent, but to claim it was the driving force in creating the conflict seems very ahistorical to me. Especially considering the 200 years of Pograms that preceded it. The real reasons for the conflict happened between 1500-1700, and have more to do with trade and the collapse of the Silk Road than Zionism.
PS The Ottomans outlawed selling land to Jews in about 1900. So a lot of the sales weren't recorded so perhaps you have a point, IDK.
Well, I lived in Petakh Tikva and met some people who lived there before 1948. There are still some patches of land (eg. behind Belinson) that used to be in Turkish possession, then were bought by Keren Kayemet le-Israel, and then kinda went nowhere. That one looks like it used to be an... orange orchard (is it what it's called? the orange tree plantation?). Anyways, growing oranges was a very common agricultural activity in that general area. Not really done by the nomads. There's also a park, if you go from Ramat Gan around Bney Brak in the direction of Petakh Tikva, and it has an old mill that used to belong to some Arab family (that whole place used to be an Arab village before 1948). Now it's a museum of sorts.
Petakh Tikva is also commonly called "Em ha-Moshavot" (mother of settlements) because it was one of the first, if not the first settlement by Jewish immigrants. It was very much the pilot in terms of how Jews were trying to get a hold of any plot of land they could and entrench there, including the tactics I described earlier. Of course, this wasn't the only tactics, and it wasn't necessary hostile to the locals. Another tactics that is well-known around that time is called "homah u-migdal" (wall and tower), which refers to the fact that having a wall and a tower was a necessary prerequisite for a place to be considered a settlement (for the purpose of drawing maps), and so Jews, esp. the Solel-Boneh (a well-known today construction company) would invest into building these sorts of "settlements" to claim more territory.
I'm not saying that the expulsion of Arab fellakhin from their peasant jobs was the reason for the confrontation. But it certainly contributed. And it certainly happened. While even to this day there are nomadic tribes in Israel and the occupied territories, none of them are Arabic (they are Bedouin). There are plenty of Arabic agricultural communities, and many of them can be traced back more than a hundred years. For instance, the Jaffa Oranges you might associate today with Israel (they are a popular export good and found in a lot of Western supermarkets) were actually bread by Arab farmers living around Jaffa (south of modern day Tel Aviv).
> workers could find other jobs, with higher incomes, due to productivity increases from AI
From a business point of view, this does not follow. Why would a business offer higher wages to a person to work alongside/with AI, when the business also has to pay the cost of AI?