I fail to see the difference between AI-employment-doom and other flavors of Luddism.
As AI gets more prevalent, it'll drive the cost down for the companies supplying these services, so the former employees of said companies will be paid lower, or not at all.
So, tell me, how paying fewer people less money will drive their standard of living upwards? I can understand the leisure time. Because, when you don't have a job, all day is leisure time. But you'll need money for that, so will these companies fund the masses via government to provide Universal Basic Income, so these people can both live a borderline miserable life while funding these companies to suck these people more and more?
Who cares? A rising tide lifts all boats. The wealthy people I know all have one thing in common: they focused more on their own bank accounts than on other people's.
So, tell me, how paying fewer people less money will drive their standard of living upwards?
Money is how we allocate limited resources. It will become less important as resources become less limited, less necessary, or (hopefully) both.
Money is also how we exert power and leverage over others. As inequality increases, it enables the ever wealthier minority to exert power and therefore control over the majority.
Separately, is it "rising tide lifts all boats" or "pull yourself up by your bootstraps" that drives the common person's progress? You seem confused which metaphor to apply while handwaving the discussion away.
Apparently people who are not wealthy enough to buy a boat and afraid of drowning care about this a lot. Also, for whom the tide rises? Not for the data workers which label data for these systems for peanuts, or people who lose jobs because they can be replaced with AI, or Amazon drivers which are auto-fired by their in-car HAL9000 units which label behavior the way they see fit.
> The wealthy people I know all have one thing in common: they focused more on their own bank accounts than on other people's.
So, the amount of money they have is much more important than everything else. That's greed, not wealth, but OK. I'm not feeling like dying on the hill of greedy people today.
> Money is how we allocate limited resources.
...and the wealthy people (you or I or others know) are accumulating amounts of it which they can't make good use of personally, I will argue.
> It will become less important as resources become less limited, less necessary, or (hopefully) both.
How will we make resources less limited? Recycling? Reducing population? Creating out of thin air?
Or, how will they become less necessary? Did we invent materials which are more durable and cheaper to produce, and do we start to sell it to people for less? I don't think so.
See, this is not a developing country problem. It's a developed country problem. Stellantis is selling inferior products for more money, while reducing workforce , closing factories, replacing metal parts with plastics, and CEO is taking $40MM as a bonus [0], and now he's apparently resigned after all that shenanigans.
So, no. Nobody is making things cheaper for people. Everybody is after the money to rise their own tides.
So, you're delusional. Nobody is thinking about your bank account that's true. This is why resources won't be less limited or less necessary. Because all the surplus is accumulating at people who are focused on their own bank accounts more than anything else.
From what I understand of history, while industrial revolutions have generally increased living standards and employment in the long term, they have also caused massive unemployment/starvation in the short term. In the case of textile, I seem to recall that it took ~40 years for employment to return to its previous level.
I don't know about you guys, but I'm far from certain that I can survive 40 years without a job.
The other things you state are not even close.
First, lowered employment for X years does not imply one cannot get a job in X years - that's simply fear mongering. Unemployment over that period seems to have fluctuated very little, and massive external economic issues were causes (wars with Napoleon, the US, changing international fortunes), not Luddites.
Next, there was inflation and unemployment during the TWO years surrounding the Luddites, in 1810-1812 (starting right before the Luddite movement) due to wars with Napoleon and the US [1]. Somehow attributing this to tech increases or Luddites is numerology of the worst sort.
If you look at academic literature about the economy of the era, such as [2] (read on scihub if you must), you'll find there was incredible population growth, and that wages grew even faster. While many academics at the at the time thought all this automation would displace workers, those academics were forced to admit they were wrong. There's plenty of literature on this. Simply dig through Google scholar.
As to starvation in this case, I can find no "massive starvation". [3] forExample points out that "Among the industrial and mining families, around 18 per cent of writers recollected having experienced hunger. In the agricultural families this figure was more than twice as large — 42 per cent".
So yes there was hunger, as there always had been, but it quickly reduced due to the industrial revolution and benefited those working in industry more quickly than those not in industry.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luddite#:~:text=The%20movement....
My bad for "massive starvation", that's clearly a mistake, I meant to write something along the lines of "massive unemployment – and sometimes starvation". Sadly, too late to amend.
Now, I'll admit that I don't have my statistics at hand. I quoted them from memory from, if I recall correctly, _Good Economics for Hard Times_. I'm nearly certain about the ~40 years, but it's entirely possible that I confused several parts of the industrial revolution. I'll double-check when I have an opportunity.
The availability of cheaply priced smartphones and cellular data plans has absolutely made being homeless suck less.
As you noted though, a home would probably be a preferable alternative.
The problem is that the preferable option (housing) won't happen because unlike a smartphone, it requires that land be effectively distributed more broadly (through building housing) in areas where people desire to live. Look at the uproar by the VC guys in Menlo Park when the government tried to pursue greater housing density in their wealthy hamlet.
It also requires infrastructure investment which, while it has returns for society at large, doesn't have good returns for investors. Only government makes those kinds of investments.
Better to build a wall around the desirable places, hire a few poorer-than-you folks as security guards, and give the other people outside your wall ... cheap smartphones to sate themselves.
Perhaps there is a theory in which productivity gains increase the standard of living for everyone, however that is not the lived reality for most people of the working classes.
If productivity gains are indeed increasing the standards of living to everyone, it certainly does not increase evenly, and the standard of living increases for the working poor are at best marginal, while the standard of living increases for the already richest of the rich are astronomical.
Not if you count the global poor, the global poors standard of living has increased tremendously the past 30 years.
Off course any graph can choose to show which ever stat is convenient for the message, that doesn’t necessarily reflect the lived reality of the individual members of the global poor. And as I recall it most standard of living improvements for the global poor came in the decades after decolonization in the 1960s-1990s where infrastructure was being built that actually served people’s need as opposed for resource extraction in the decades past. If Hans Rosling said in 2007 that the standard of living has improved tremendously in the past 30 years, he would be correct, but not for the reason you gave.
The story of decolonization was that the correct infrastructure, such as hospitals, water lines, sewage, garbage disposal plants, roads, harbors, airports, schools, etc. that improved the standard of living not productivity gains. And case in point, the colonial period saw a tremendous growth in productivity in the colonies. But the standard of living in the colonies quite often saw the opposite. That is because the infrastructure only served to extract resources and exploitation of the colonized.
This just isn’t true, necessarily. Productivity has gone up in the US since the 80s, but wages have not. Costs have, though.
What increases standards of living for everyone is social programs like public health and education. Affordable housing and adult-education and job hunting programs.
Not the rate at which money is gathered by corporations.
In 2012, Musk was worth $2 billion. He’s now worth 223 times that yet the minimum wage has barely budged in the last 12 years as productivity rises.
>Productivity gains of the last 40 years have been captured by shareholders and top elites. Working class wages have been flat...
Wages do not determine the standard of living. The products and services purchased with wages determine the standard of living. "Top elites" in 1984 could already afford cellular phones, such as the Motorola DynaTAC:
>A full charge took roughly 10 hours, and it offered 30 minutes of talk time. It also offered an LED display for dialing or recall of one of 30 phone numbers. It was priced at US$3,995 in 1984, its commercial release year, equivalent to $11,716 in 2023.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motorola_DynaTAC
Unfortunately, touch screen phones with gigabytes of ram were not available for the masses 40 years ago.
Rather than a luxury, they've become an expensive interest bearing necessity for billions of human beings.
Warlords are still rich, but both money and war is flowing towards tech. You can get a piece from that pie if you're doing questionable things (adtech, targeting, data collection, brokering, etc.), but if you're a run of the mill, normal person, your circumstances are getting harder and harder, because you're slowly squeezed out of the system like a toothpaste.
AI could theoretically solve production but not consumption. If AI blows away every comparative advantage that normal humans have then consumption will collapse and there won’t be any rich humans.
