[jmyeet]

It has been the dream of the wealthy to eliminate labor since at least the Industrial Revolution (and probably much longer). Workers are annoying. You have to pay them. They demand things like time off and safe working conditions. They hurt profits.

Through the 20th century we saw increased automation that displaced so-caleld blue collar workers who were repeatedly told "get better skills" like this was somehow their fault.

In 2000 we had the dot-com crash that saw massive unemployment in the tech sector. A lot of these people left the industry and never came back. The software engineer to plumber pipeline was a real thing.

2008 saw a crash that eliminated entry-level jobs in many white-collar fields that never came back. This decimated the millenials who did the right thing, went to college and accurred massive debt and then found there were no jobs for them so ended up as baristas, working at Walmart or, ultimately, doing gig work.

And now in the mid-2020s, the tech people who told people to do computer science in college are now seeing automation come for their jobs. And now it's somehow an emergency worth addressing. Weird.

The core problem is that if the wealthy succeed and replace all the workers, who will buy their products? How will society survive if people don't have jobs? The only growth area is healthcare because you need everyone from orderlies to surgeons, at least until automation comes for those jobs too.

This is why I think we're headed for systemic collapse. The flood waters keep rising and we're running out of high ground to retreat to.

[kakacik]

> the tech people who told people to do computer science in college are now seeing automation come for their jobs. And now it's somehow an emergency worth addressing.

You are in tech mostly forum, is it really that hard to grok why we discuss this more than other professions? Most folks out there are just happy with llms that they do a better search or help them do bureaucracy more efficiently and don't bother with it further.

[jmyeet]

Therein lies the problem with hyper-individualism. It's not a virtue. It's just selfish. And short-sighted. It's the basis of First They Came [1].

It's even worse for tech people because tech fundamentally is about systems. Society is a system.

The reaons some of us care so much about how the least of us are affected by these changes is because the fabric of society depends on so many people and it hurts all of us when society falls apart. You don't have to be disabled to care about disabled rights, for example, because everybody is one incident away from being disabled. Just look at long Covid.

This isn't some Darwinian game where the "strong" "win". Or at least it doesn't have to be.

[1]: https://hmd.org.uk/resource/first-they-came-by-pastor-martin...

[posix_compliant]

I agree on sensing some kind of systemic collapse. It feels those with more resources are getting increasingly efficient at extracting wealth from those with fewer resources.

[dd8601fn]

I'm still trying to make sense of it.

Every tool increases efficiency at the expense of labor, but when it was the power loom and sewing machine the unemployed seamstresses and weavers couldn't afford to buy one.

This time everyone gets a power loom, though. So... what happens to the value of woven goods? And if we apply this to all modern knowledge work, what happens to the overall economy?

[drzaiusx11]

I'd argue that the cost of today's "loom" is less affordable than ever before. Billions of dollars to build a new frontier model from scratch. We're just taking turns playing on someone else's loom.

[eudamoniac]

AI still can't cook me food, so I guess we become a purely service economy.

[iwontberude]

I get the same feeling when thinking about fast food restaurants turning a profit and then usually there is some element I don’t understand like McDonalds land investment play that justifies weaker operational margins. It’s probably going to work out fine but we are too far removed to intuitively get why.

[willio58]

> This is why I think we're headed for systemic collapse.

Unfortunately I think the only thing that will save us long term is systematic collapse triggering mass social and political movements to tax the billionaires.

We have severe cost of living issues for so many Americans, yet we haven’t actually reached that cusp where large swaths of Americans literally start starving, or losing their homes.

Until then, normal Americans will happily consume and believe the lies of politicians saying “grocery prices are going down”, “gas prices are going down”.