[vkou]

> But in tech, the price is the price the consumer is willing to pay, as the per-piece cost is essentially close to 0.

1. Just because the marginal unit cost of sofware is ~0, you can't ignore the trillions of dollars that have to be spent in up-front R&D costs. Consumers collectively pay for that.

2. Skilled immigrants do things besides building apps. (But it's not even relevant because #1).

> no company would decrease their price

That says more about the current economic system, monopoly capture, and the incentives around American capitalism than it does about who is doing the work for those companies.

> You are trying to slide the subject.

I'm not trying to dodge anything - this is incredibly relevant to your thesis. You think that productivity gains and lower labour costs, and more people doing more work = bad for workers. AI creates the exact same economic pressures.

> AI is a tool, not a worker.

It is, which is what makes it even worse. It's a tool that doesn't even expect a paycheck, can never demand for better working conditions, and is what is actually putting young, skilled graduates out of a job, because nobody wants to hire a junior in an economy where an LLM can do 90% of their work for $200/mo.

If you actually cared about juniors landing jobs, you need to start cracking down on LLMs, (and other productivity-boosting tools), not immigrants. The former are going to be the real downward pressure on labour this decade.

[Saline9515]

1. No, investors pay for it, not consumers. It's not how R&D works, the final price is the one that optimizes total revenue with no link to software dev costs as producing a new unit is free. If Apple had slave devs fed on biowaste costing $0 to the company, they'd still charge the same price for the icloud subscription as it is the optimal price according to them.

And before you try to argue that "reduced profitability will decrease investment", the US tech sector is already the most profitable in the world, and will still be if the H1B program ends, so it's unlikely to happen. And higher salaries will bring in more local workers, that will attenuate the wage increase overtime.

2. Yes but the focus was tech jobs, which is the main source of H1b workers. I already said that in healthcare it could be beneficial.

Rest is unrelated. Unlike immigration, you can't avoid technological progress, which is why I'm saying that you are trying to slide the conversation with sophistic arguments. And AI is not a total replacement (that's AGI), but rather an help to improve productivity.

[vkou]

Investors pay for it up front, consumers pay for it later. Tech services aren't a magical money printer, someone pays for building them.

> Unlike immigration, you can't avoid technological progress

Sure you can. $10-100K/seat tax on LLM services, going straight into an unemployment/education/sovereign wealth fund.

You can absolutely shape policy around AI to maximize employment, instead of corporate profits. The reason we don't do it, but we do push back on immigration isn't because the right-wing parties care about worker rights. (They don't. They care about corporate profits.)

They do it because they need something to get their base to come out and vote for them, and large parts of that base gets deeply, emotionally upset when they see an immigrant 'steal' their job. It serves as a great distraction.

[Saline9515]

> someone pays for building them

Given the unit economics, the cost of development has no correlation with the end price consumers pay, so it's irrelevant.

> Sure you can. $10-100K/seat tax on LLM services, going straight into an unemployment/education/sovereign wealth fund.

No significant technological change has been withheld, especially in the current world. Even Amish had to change their ways, and North Koreans have mobile phones.

This is ridiculous pilpul to refuse to acknowledge that the labor market has a supply and demand, with salaries as a clearing price. Add more migrant workers, and the salary decreases at the expense of the local ones. AI is an orthogonal problem.

[vkou]

> Given the unit economics, the cost of development has no correlation with the end price consumers pay, so it's irrelevant.

It's completely relevant! It's basic accounting! Money in, money out. The money had to come from somewhere. And that somewhere was consumers.

Higher R&D expenditures can only be financed by more consumer spend.

> No significant technological change has been withheld, especially in the current world.

It's not witholding it, it's just taxing it.

(PS. A robot taking your job is worse for both other workers and the country than an immigrant taking your job. Because the immigrant pays taxes. The robot does not.)

> This is ridiculous pilpul to refuse to acknowledge that the labor market has a supply and demand, with salaries as a clearing price. Add more migrant workers, and the salary decreases at the expense of the local ones.

I'm not refusing to acknowledge it. I very much acknowledge it, in every one of my posts - more supply of labour increases productivity, and reduces consumer cost.

You, however, are refusing to acknowledge it. Because you somehow think that robots aren't flooding the market with an oversupply of labour.

Look at your nearest shipping port. A handful of dockworkers are doing the job that took thousands of hands in the past, because of automation. The same thing is happening with AI, today.

[Saline9515]

> Higher R&D expenditures can only be financed by more consumer spend.

You are sliding into irrelevancy, having more H1bs won't benefit consumers as, as I have stated before the marginal cost is zero and the price is set to the level that maximises revenue, since it maximizes profit at the same time. If you don't understand what I mean, read a introductory book on microeconomics.

> Because the immigrant pays taxes. The robot does not.

Companies owning robots pay taxes, and a robot doing a physical job decreases marginal cost, which does in this case benefit the consumer. And it's amusing how left-wing activists only care about "tax" - culture, homogeneity, ethnicity, and so on, do not seem to exist in their mind. You can see the clear path toward communism.

Robots are not perfect replacements for humans, so they are a different issue than immigration. And more supply of labor doesn't increase productivity, this is plainly false. Capital increases productivity. More supply of labor decreases the average wage.

Just open an microecon book.