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Bernie Sanders says that if AI makes us so productive, we should get a 4-day work week (techcrunch.com)
submitted 1 year ago by to c/workreform@lemmy.world
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[–] 28 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Wait until automated freight delivery services (from trains and trucks down to little carrier bots) kill about a third of the jobs that exist.

In ten years people would be working less than twelve hours a week, but rich and powerful people will not give up a jot or penny of wealth and power.

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  • [–] -5 points 1 year ago (4 children)

    You can't resist technology, it will ALWAYS win. Economies always strive to be more efficient, and people will always gravitate towards the convenience of efficiency. Because of this, new technologies get adopted all the time, and economies evolve with them.

    Think about computers for a second. How many jobs have they created that didn't exist 50 years ago? There were no online retailers or social media managers or youtubers or software engineers back then. These are all new jobs that were created recently, and they dominate our economy. Even traditional jobs that didn't use computers before like an accountant, lawyer, or doctor do now because these are powerful tools.

    But it's not just computers, the same thing happened with the television, the radio, the telegraph, cars, trains, even light bulbs. Before, electric street lamps became a thing, cities used to hire lamplighters who would go around the streets lighting and extinguishing gas lamps. When electric street lamps started being adopted a lot of people complained about how this new technology is going to automate away jobs and hurt the economy... but it didn't.

    Instead, the economy specialized and people created new businesses and took on new jobs. The same thing will happen here. It's simply going be the next major thing to evolve the economy, and we will adopt it and adapt to it just like the many different technologies before it.

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  • [–] 4 points 1 year ago* (1 child)

    There has been a study done in 1970 called The Limits to Growth that predicted that exponential economic growth would come to a halt necessarily, because you cannot have infinite growth in a finite system. It took many decades more than predicted, but I suspect that we're actually at this point now.

    Workplaces mostly exist nowadays to grow the economy. It takes rather little work to maintain the world nowadays. That is why we're facing a declining demand in human labor.

    Since the labor market is a free market, it is regulated by Supply and Demand. That means, if supply is high, prices drop; if demand is high, prices rise. On the labor market, that means that a declining demand for human labor leads to lower prices for that labor, a.k.a. wages.

    That is the crisis that the US is currently facing: Declining wages, a.k.a. inflation, a.k.a. Cost of Living crisis.

    That crisis cannot be tackled by technology alone. We need socialism, i.e. the basic decency to treat humans well because humans deserve to be treated well; independent of economic output.

    That is what i'm advocating for: UBI (Universal Basic Income), which means that everybody gets enough resources to live.

    However, that UBI has to be financed somehow. Printing new money doesn't work because it leads to hyperinflation. So, the money must be collected through taxes. It is straightforward that only the rich can pay these taxes, because they are the only one who has a lot of money to actually give.

    To end this article, i'd like to point out that further economic growth is not possible inside Earth's limited space, but it is possible in outer space, because there's infinite space above. Humans just have to go there.

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  • [–] 0 points 1 year ago

    I don't disagree with anything that you said, but my point was simply to address the notion that existing jobs are irreplaceable. It is true that technology automates away jobs, but it also creates new onee. Industries and jobs that make up the economy change all the time and that's okay. Thinking that a new technology like AI is going to doom us is, well, just doom posting.

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  • [–] 3 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    The problem comes when those technological innovations increase productivity which companies use solely to increase their bottom line. These innovations should be benefitting workers directly.

    Outside of that a lot of your argument rests on the idea that there will always be new better jobs for humans to move into. However even the examples you gave aren't great. How is someone doing manufacturing or transportation or extinguishing the street lights going to suddenly become a computer programmer? Especially considering how atleast in the US you'd have to pay to go to college to do that. And even then we've started to see in recent years a lot of these new "high demand" jobs getting saturated. As time goes on and companies use productivity gains to purely to benefit their profits they're gonna lay off more people and new jobs from new technologies aren't going to be able to keep up.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago

    My point isn't based on an idea, it's based on history. We've literally had the same thing happen before many, many times in the past.

    Your arguments is based on the assumption that humans are static like sims characters. That they can only ever do one job, which isn't true. You also know that it isn't true, otherwise you wouldn't appeal to extremes. There's a lot in between being a truck driver and being a programmer that you're intentionally skipping over. When people lose their jobs, they don't automatically become eternally useless because they can't do a highly specialized job that doesn't utilize any of their skill sets, that's not what history shows us. Instead, these people find other roles that use their skills.

    In this case, truck drivers usually have skills like spatial awareness, logistics knowledge, mechanical aptitude, and time management. These skills are transferable, and other jobs do demand them. For example, they could work as safety inspectors or warehouse supervisors or logistics support or remote vehicle operators, field service support, and the list goes on and on. People adapt, that's economies progress.

    I don't even understand what you're argument is here. Should we just straight up freeze technological advancement and stop society from evolving because some people work outdated jobs? If things were left up to you, would you just not implement electric street lamps so lamplighters wouldn't lose their jobs? You could make the some argument for people who work specialize for health insurance companies, so should we never have universal healthcare because these people might lose their jobs? It's a ridiculous argument.

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  • [–] 3 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    Nobody is arguing that technology won’t progress. Even Marx defends that as a precondition for socialism/communism.

    The question is the following. Tomorrow a ground breaking technology is developed that makes literally everyone twice as productive. (Please let’s ignore the technical aspect of this. I’m simplifying for the sake of the argument, but this is happening at some paces everywhere).

    Now you have 3 options:

    1. Everyone can just work half the time for the same productivity. I.e. the economy can sustain itself with people just working less (which is a MAJOR quality of life increase).
    2. Everyone works the same amount of time but their salaries double.
    3. Everyone works the same amount of time. Their salaries increase a small %, perhaps keeping up with inflation, perhaps a tiny bit more than that, sometimes even not keeping up with inflation. The added productivity results in increased wealth aggregation at the top.

    Number 1 is what people are talking about in this thread.

    Number 2 won’t happen because salaries aren’t actually tied to productivity. Productivity just sets a higher limit on salary that in any case is never reached. The salaries are actually determined by competition between workers.

    Number 3. Has been happening since the seventies and will continue to happen.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago (1 child)

    But we're talking about different things though. I don't disagree with the notion that the work week should decrease or that people should get more based on their production. We're in total agreement here. I'm arguing that automation is going to bring about the apocalypse like the person I replied to implied because history shows us that this wasn't the case when similar situations arose in the past. Technology does progress, the economy does evolve, old jobs and industries do die out, and people do lose their jobs because of it. But what is also true at the same time is that new jobs and industries do get created because of the new technology, and the people who lose their jobs do adapt and end up getting new roles that utilize their skill sets. People who get laid off don't become forever useless, people aren't that rigid.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago (1 child)

    Yes new jobs will be created but more and more wealth is concentrated at the top

    It’s not the apocalypse but it’s also not not bad in many ways.

    Technological progress should only be a good thing but in a capitalist society like ours it has a lot of downsides too (for the majority of the population ofc)

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago (1 child)

    But this isn't an issue of technology or economic progress, but of politics. These are two different discussions. Jobs being automated away isn't new nor is it going away. It's simply a part of the evolution of economies. The issues we have stem from a flawed political system that's not doing it's job.

    For our system to work as intended, we need to have a robust democratically elected government that proactively regulates the economy on the behalf of the people to protect consumers, the environment, and the health of the economy. This is one of the fingers of the invisible hand. A government is supposed to break up monopolies, ban deceptive and predatory practices, protect consumers from harmful products, make sure that businesses don't pollute the environment, protect workers from exploitation, and so on. In other capitalist countries like Sweden, Germany, and Ireland they have this, we don't... at least not anymore.

    The reason for this is because there's no accountability in our government anymore. No politician faces any consequences no matter the crime or controversy. Our public officials no longer fear the public, and this type of unchecked power allows them to be corrupt because they know they can get away with it. They have lost any incentive to do their job of holding bad actors in the country accountable and instead started doing their bidding (like endless deregulation and tax cuts for the rich). That's the root of our issue, and blaming AI for it is just silly.

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