I am aware that the West’s best time was essentially at the expense of the rest of the world - but where can one find opportunity and prosperity of those times today? Was this a great anomaly of history? Is it time to hedge your bets on living out the Chinese dream?
Is it time for the West to accept that what our parents experienced will never exist again?
Will the world overall need to accept that the western living standard of that time will never be reached again? (It’s too unsustainable - for the planet, and because superprofits won’t flow as they once did)
What has actually happened that’s caused it to collapse?
Value comes from the pairing of labor with technology. A farmer is nothing without the plow, a plow pales in comparison to a tractor.
LLMs are tractors for knowledge workers. But it’s a poison pill in that most of the value shift that comes is in the automation of rote tasks. The point I’m making is that businesses won’t get dramatically more productive, maybe a bit on the margin, but they’ll be able to strip out a massive amount of labor from their operations. This will be a huge boon for return on capital which is the only productivity the capitalists actually care about.
And my point is that they can’t actually strip out that much labor because these chatbots can’t actually replace workers. Tractors actually do the job they’re made for, chatbots can’t do even close to what they’re selling them to do. They can maybe reduce a small amount od labor on the margins, but that’s it.
It’s almost like arguing about religion at this point in that we have fundamental disconnections in worldview that cant be reconciled, but as someone in the industry I assure you they absolutely can replace workers… they already have, and will continue to do so at an accelerating pace
As someone in manufacturing I can tell you these pieces of shit need to be constantly babied even as management desperately tries to reduce labor.
They have these new automated replacements for forklifts and they keep hitting stuff and dumping parts on the ground and need to be babied all day. My own welding cell has cameras that are supposed to detect faults and only pass good parts, but they’ve basically trained them to pass all parts because they kept failing good parts. I have to double-check everything anyway, just like I as before, and it saved no labor at all.
I just don’t see it from where I work.
That’s exactly why they can’t profit from it. The tractors for knowledge workers comparison would be accurate if the capitalists were merely expecting to cut down their human workforce, but they aren’t, what capitalists are trying to do isn’t just reduce the workforce but eliminate it entirely, they want to do away with the artists, the researchers, the programmers, the accountants, the lawyers and even the very workers who are making these AIs for them in the first place.
But that cannot work because as you said value comes from the pairing of labor and technology, so what’s going to happen is that, at first, the first few companies to figure it out will, yes, increase their profits massively by taking advantage of their more efficient than average production process to propose a slightly lower price than competitors can offer, but only for a time.
As Marx showed, once a new productive technology spread through the industry competition and the price war comes back with a vengeance and forces the prices down to the level of the new value = the cost of materials and running the machines (dead capital) + the value created by workers using the machines to produce (the worker’s wage + the surplus that the capitalist takes).
In other words, if AI works out the way the bourgeoisie wants and they are able to eliminate labor completely, there won’t be any workers to create new value i.e. no surplus for the capitalists to pocket. They will be stuck selling at the break-even point (or at best so insignificantly above it that it doesn’t really matter) without being able to walk away because any who try to hire labor again will have their costs go up and therefore be out-competed by the fully AIs companies.
AI as the capitalists want to implement it makes profit making impossible. Sure, that doesn’t mean they will lose their wealth, as I said they will be forced to sell at the break-even price neither profiting nor losing so if they make sure to plug any wealth sink they might have they will be able to keep their fortune.
But the point is, that’s the end of the road for them, without the ability to continue accumulating profits there is nowhere for them to go, no direction in which to take their ventures, all they can do is sell everything and spend the rest of their lives off off the huge piles of cash they managed to make when business was still profitable.
Yes exactly. It’s the difference between the medium and the long term. That’s the piece of the vision they are missing, that ultimately they are sowing the seeds of their own destruction
Contrast this against a society where the workers own the means, then these technologies become beneficial to society instead of destructive. This is precisely why imo the US is cooked, the flaws of the economic model are about to be magnified
I also drank 2 IPAs so there’s a good chance I’m arguing with myself lol