alt Hacker NewsThe opening premise baffles me. What kind of illusion must one be under to believe that employers would ever pay you the same amount of money to do less work?
Realistically there were only ever two possible outcomes: you do more work for the same amount of money, or you’re one of the ones who were laid off and your work was transferred to the former.
The only way it will result in less work and the same or better quality of life is if you’re self-employed or are employed by a compassionate human. Sadly that does not apply to the majority of people.
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By your logic, the quantity of work will eventually expand to the point where 1 person (or less) does everything. I agree with you.
I did a deep dive with AI last night and asked it: if we extrapolate the level of industrialization vs the rate of job loss due to AI, what year does it become cheaper to live off-grid in an independent community?
The AI's answer? Between 2030 and 2035.
Meaning that money will soon require so much productivity to acquire, that it will eventually become easier to produce goods and services independently and provide for ourselves.
The main reason is that currently labor represents 60% of the workforce while owners represent 40%. That is flipping to 45/55, meaning that labor is on the verge of losing its majority stakeholder status and collective bargaining power.
When that happens, we'll only be left with market forces propping up wages. Meaning that AI automation will gradually undermine wages to the point of subsistence.
When that happens, the opportunity cost of exiting the traditional economy drops to 0. Why would anyone work at the behest of an owner when they could be an owner themselves for the same or lesser labor?
Now, we could reject that and pretend that supply and demand curves won't be undermined by a falling cost of production. We could do that, but I'll leave that as an exercise for the reader who won't hear a word I'm saying anyway.
If we stay rooted in history and extrapolate, we're left with at least these options:
a) Allow free market capitalism to regress into authoritarian neofeudalism and create conditions similar to those of the early 20th century when robber baron industrialization caused widespread wage stagnation, leading to revolution and the seising of industry by displaced workers (communism or more accurately state capitalism like Russia's Bolshevik Revolution in 1917).
b) Raise taxes on the wealthy/capitalists (the owners of the means of production) through increased regulation, and use the proceeds to buy back and nationalize those economic inputs to fund public services and UBI (socialism like China's Second Centenary Goal or 2049 Plan).
c) Embrace the rapidly falling cost of technology to get ahead of widespread unemployment and bring about something like solarpunk, where open source tech like AI and 3D printing allow society to reduce the cost of living to nearly 0, so that people have the leisure time to embrace art, culture and the humanities to finally achieve widespread self-actualization (post-scarcity economics a.k.a. Star Trek when it eradicated poverty, hunger and war around 2113, 50 years after Zefram Cochrane achieved warp drive in 2063 and the Vulcans made first contact, as the story goes).
I'm partial to one of these, and have been putting my efforts into a home economics that can provide for at least one other person so that it can go viral. If we dream big enough, we could finally have what the wealthy and powerful will never have: enough.
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> The opening premise baffles me. What kind of illusion must one be under to believe that employers would ever pay you the same amount of money to do less work?
I guess the idea that AI will do all the work and either take care of us or kill us all. Which will probably happen, but the transition takes years and in the meantime we work much harder. People were expecting a fast takeoff.
Technological progress only serves the ruling class. Can we say that?