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by 9rx 19 days ago
Exactly. Hence why productivity has increased while wages haven't. Wages have increased alongside the productivity increases of those wages, of course, but wages are decidedly for human labor, by very definition, not robot (computing, automation, whatever you want to call it) labor. If you want to capture the value of robots you need to use your human capacity to deploy robots, not to sell your labor.
1 comments
jandrese 19 days ago
That sounds like a roundabout way of saying that the capital owners have captured the gains from productivity without increasing the compensation to the workers.

But this belies the fact that the workers had to grow more skilled to operate and maintain those machines. They took on additional costs in education that are not being compensated. They're being asked to get more work done by being higher skilled, but the bosses are collecting all of the additional revenue generated.

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9rx 19 days ago
> That sounds like a roundabout way of saying that the capital owners have captured the gains from productivity without increasing the compensation to the workers.

What do you mean in a roundabout way? It says that quite explicitly.

> But this belies the fact that the workers had to grow more skilled to operate and maintain those machines.

No they didn't. What is a capital owner going to do if the labor didn't become more skilled? Just shut everything down and take the ball home? Ha ha. No. Not a chance in hell. This is the silliest thing I've read all day.

> They took on additional costs in education that are not being compensated.

One wonders why. When they said "go to college to make more money" they were clearly talking about using college research labs to develop capital. Exactly so that you become the one deploying robots, not selling your labor. That is where the "more money" comes from. How people — traditionally smart people, even — got it into their head that meant go to college to get a low paying job, the same job they would have gotten anyway, boggles the mind. I suppose smarts don't transcend into every subject.

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