11 ms·

Gig-Economy Workers Are the Modern Proletariat

186 points by koolhead17 8y ago

emayljames 8y ago
Plot twist: There is no such thing as "the middle class".
- fallingfrog 8y ago
  Exactly right! The reason that politicians talk about there being 3 classes is that 3 is a nice, round number that just sounds nice, and also it allows everyone to pretend that they're middle class.
  - geezerjay 8y ago
    There's a collosal social difference between living paycheck to paycheck without any disposable income, thus depending on retaining your job to be able to keep a roof over your head, and being economically self-sufficient to the point where you are free to take multiple holidays throughout the year and even be free to quit your job and live off your savings through long stretches of time. Middle class does exist, and it's existence is rather obvious. Trying to conflate middle class with low class or poverty makes no sense at all, because the plight of a low class worker has absolutely nothing in common to the problems and challenges faced by middle class workers.
    - 113 8y ago
      The rights you have as a member of the 'middle class' have much more in common with the lower class than the highest class. It is also a lot easier to move from middle class to poverty, than it is to fall from the upper class. Yes, it feels like there is a 'colossal difference', but it's not nearly as big as the difference between middle class and the ultra-wealthy.
elvinyung 8y ago
I have a pet theory that goes one step further. In Discipline and Punish, Foucault talks about how in the early modern era, the actions of subordinate individuals (workers, students, soldiers, etc.) became increasingly regimented through more and more precise specifications of procedures as sequences of elementary actions. Then in the 19th and 20th centuries, we started to see "rationalist" economic efficiency projects like scientific management/Taylorism, which essentially tried to deskill factory workers by fragmenting their work based on time and motion studies. The gig economy is the neoliberal revival of these scientific management principles, plastered over with the neoliberal ideals of marketization and entrepreneurialism. Just like before, it aims to improve efficiency by quantifying and compensating work at finer-grained scales than ever before. It has the potential to drastically increase economic efficiency, but at the expense of financial security and the psychological wellbeing of entire generations.
- lotsofpulp 8y ago
  That sounds like a fancy way of saying advances in technology displace the need for certain (and increasing) types of work, increasing the supply of labor, but not the demand, and therefore decreasing the price of labor. Plus globalization and adding women to labor supply.
  - elvinyung 8y ago
    It specifically isn't about that. The idea is that these projects aim to make more and more kinds of manual work fungible and exchangeable by breaking them down into small enough subtasks. Each of these elementary tasks get commoditized into a market of near-perfect competition when they become deskilled this way. It's not automation, it's a hyper-division of labor, like a worldwide assembly line connected by ethernet and optical fiber. It is specifically that it isn't automation that makes it a problem. If you were totally replaced by a machine, then at least you wouldn't have to work. But here, you aren't being replaced by machines -- you are part of the machine, like a component that's completely replaceable and interchangeable.
    - 8y ago
rectang 8y ago
Where would the employment rate be if you eliminated "gig economy" jobs?
jimnotgym 8y ago
I have deleted my whole comment. I didn't mention the Labour party, and I don't think party politics belongs here, but commenters tried to make it about the Labour party. I hope the mods kill the whole thread
- NeedMoreTea 8y ago
  I'm confused. UK Unions have been neutered. The Labour party sounds keen to reform the gig economy and zero hours contracts as both now affect so many, and we're not short of reports of abuses. I've heard no plans about coal - hardly surprising as we barely use any, but Labour have proposed to ban fracking. You may not like their proposals, or believe that they'll fix the issues, but they don't seem to want to hand power back to the NUM to restart 70s power cuts and the three day week. I'd even venture to suggest they are more connected to this century than the current Tory administration. Whether Labour deserve to govern, or whether they have right combination of plans, well there I'm far less certain.
- tonyedgecombe 8y ago
  Not really, they are constantly raising the issue of zero-hours contracts. Nobody in the Labour Party talks about coal miners because there are none left.
  - jimnotgym 8y ago
    I didn't specifically mention the Labour party (because they are not the only socialist group, and also within my life-time were considered a centre-left party) and don't like party-politics on HN, but it seems to me that coal mining is still a big part of their identity[0]. I also wasnt talking about zero hour contracts at all??? I hope HN doesn't become yet another arena where you can't discuss broad categories of political theory without being savaged by Corbynites. [0]:https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2017/jul/07/corbyn-critics-banned-durham-miners-gala-reception https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2017/jul/07/corbyn-crit...
- confounded 8y ago
  The UK’s (democratic socialist) Labour Party have many policies specific to the gig economy and zero-hours contracts, training, and housing for young adults. I haven’t heard them mention coal miners in a while. I’m sympathetic to much of your comment, and policy gets reported far less than parliamentary pantomime, so if you’re not trolling and are genuinely unaware, take a look[0]. I have no interest in a long thread about how the policies make people on HN feel. But it seems worth pointing out that the ‘precariat’ are a primary issue for Her Maj’s shadow cabinet. [0]: https://labour.org.uk/manifesto/ https://labour.org.uk/manifesto/
fogetti 8y ago
Yes, the proletariat disappeared. That's true. Enter precariat instead. Awesome change isn't it!
- tomjen3 8y ago
  You mean that people stopped not having enough clothing and food and got to a point where they only had to fear that they might not have enough clothing and food in the future? Yes actually, that sounds like a great improvement.
  - fogetti 8y ago
    That's a nice strawman argument you have there. Nobody said that the proletariat means `not having enough clothing and food`. Not even Marx. Don't try to put words in my mouth. Maybe you should look it up what it actually means. So basically you are arguing with yourself in effect which again I don't understand why would you do...?
- prolikewh0a 8y ago
  The proletariat did not disappear, it didn't go anywhere. The working class does not own the means of production, and gig economy workers do not own their means of production either. The majority of the country are wage slave proletariat.
  - ozim 8y ago
    As you can notice parent introduced precariat, which in turn is new type of proletariat. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Precariat https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Precariat
Illniyar 8y ago
"In that classic form, Marx’s favorite class doesn’t really exist in the rich world today, except in the so-called gig economy." What? how? What about service workers (which constitute a major section of US workforce)? Do burger flippers at mcdonald's own their means of production? Cleaners? Waiters? Heck even truckers don't own their truck. On the contrary, in the classical sense most gig-economy workers (at least those we associate with the gig economy) are not Proletariat - uber drivers own their car, AirBnB own their houses, Marketplaces (etsy, fiverr etc... which Amazon turk is nominally a part of) own the tools and knowledge to make whatever they sell. Amazon Turkers are really not representative of the Gig Economy (a term that came much later then Amazon's Mechanical Turk) and at least for me I don't really think of them as part of the Gig Economy.
- tomjen3 8y ago
  Most people don't understand Marx idea about the ownership of production, they see it as rich vs poor and a trucker can make a decent amount of money, enough to buy a house and own a personal car. That was never seen as possible in the squalor of 18th Europe. So it is not that weird that people get the two wrong.
- CapacitorSet 8y ago
  Crucially, gig workers do not own an important part of their means of production: the platform that processes rides/rentals/etc, payments and users, which allows the traditional bourgeois to extract surplus value (Mehrwert) in the usual way, and the workers fit the definition of proletarians.
  - Illniyar 8y ago
    True, but they own some of it, and there is competition between platforms for them (I.E. lyft vs uber). In fact many people "work" for multiple platforms. It's similar to a farmer selling his ware in a marketplace, which he must pay rent for. Would you say that because he doesn't own the marketplace (or store) he doesn't own his means of production? Now the question is whether they must own all of the means of production to be considered bourgeois? I would say no, especially in today's world, where most production is a complicated multi-tiered process. But even if you do think so, they are still much better off, Marxist-wise, from virtually every service worker, who own no means of production. In any case, that doesn't mean that there is no exploitation or that the gig economy should not be regulated, but it really doesn't have anything to do with Proletariat.
unknown_apostle 8y ago
I know it pays little and is repetitive. But my question with this kind of analysis is always: why do they keep finding people to do it? There is another problem which I find more worrisome: we are expecting gig workers (and most other workers) to subject to hardcore competition for their jobs, wages and terms. The argument (also my argument above) is that it leads to efficient and honest outcomes because it involves little to no coercion. But at the same time, governments are colluding with and bailing out the financial elites with every market crash. We did it with LTCM, in 2001, in 2008 and who knows when again. The bailout involves mass coercion of savers and an implicit punishment of those who were careful. It may have profoundly changed the mentality of the wealthy. For the last 10 years, "if it gets bad enough, there will be a bail out" has become standard investment wisdom. Socialism for those who own, free markets for those who don't. This contradiction is what'll ultimately do us in.
- choot 8y ago
  It's because some people have low IQ so they are not able to navigate through the meandering job. All they want is a simple job with a well defined task on which they can speed up and later achieve more objective output and not have to please a boss for subjective remark.
  - Illniyar 8y ago
    Actually from what the study says a sizable chunk does this because they prefer work from home or unable to work in an office. Some anecdotes are provided of people with sick parents or young children who for them taking a full time caretaker would be a net loss.
    - choot 8y ago
      The reason they give is based on self evaluation. People are particularly bad at self evaluation. Keep in mind, most people don't know what their IQ is. And most don't consider themselves to posses less intelligence as they don't know what more intelligence feels like. See this video for relationship between job expectation and IQ: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fjs2gPa5sD0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fjs2gPa5sD0
choot 8y ago
Gig economy isn't bad if state ensures universal healthcare, food, housing etc... Entire economy should be setup this way so that no one is tied to a specific career outside of the limited number of professions like doctors etc...
- prolikewh0a 8y ago
  We should absolutely not be subsidizing multi-billion dollar companies like this when they have the ability to provide a living wage.
  - lotsofpulp 8y ago
    The money for it will have to come from “multi-billion” dollar companies or their owners anyway, via taxes.
    - hocuspocus 8y ago
      Social contributions more specifically. Make employers (self-employed or not, doesn't matter) pay mandatory retirement, health-care, incapacity and unemployment contributions / insurances. This is already a solved problem in many countries.
      - Kiro 8y ago
        They would just deduct the social contribution from the earnings. Name a country where it's solved.
- crdoconnor 8y ago
  If the state ensures healthcare, food, housing so few people will want these jobs that the business model will break.
  - swiley 8y ago
    No, plenty of people would do gig economy jobs if they knew they wouldn't have to worry about rent and food. The flexibility is way worth it. I'm pretty sure I even would and I get paid way above the median income.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
ilaksh 8y ago
Mechanical Turk and Uber are likely to be taken over by AI in the next 10 years or so. So the situation will probably get worse.
sarcasm_heals 8y ago
This rings hollow considering who is publishing it. The pot calls the kettle black. The article is published by Bloomberg Media. Bloomberg Corp has a dark, deeply capitalistic culture. Management discards employees as if they were pieces of trash. Employees work far more than 40 hours a week, which was long ago deemed the acceptable number of hours an employer could demand without taking away from a worker's private life. Workers are placed into a gladiator's arena to compete for their own jobs, compelling them to play back-stabbing office politics rather than contribute work of real value. Jacobin. The New Left Review. These are trusted media sources for the left, not Bloomberg.
StreamBright 8y ago
The day when Bloomberg pushes communist propaganda. What a day to be alive. Any person who experienced communism knows that this ideology is the most sinister on the planet, only fools who never experienced it think it is something to consider. "The market, in its pure, unadulterated, Marx-era form, can’t provide satisfactory answers."
- sexydefinesher 8y ago
  Or maybe you should get over your mcarthyism when even Bloomberg speaks in socialistic terms.
  - mmirate 8y ago
    Where are they suggesting that we witch-hunt the Commies? I see no such call-to-action. Or are you saying that is it McCarthyistic to merely remember the past and attempt to avoid repeating it? https://eureconciliation.eu/institutions-promoting-awareness-and-remembrance-of-communist-crimes/ https://eureconciliation.eu/institutions-promoting-awareness...
- dang 8y ago
  Please don't do ideological battle on HN. It's always the same, therefore tedious, therefore off-topic here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
ferongr 8y ago
Imagine getting paid a salary to recite tankie nonsense.
atrilumen 8y ago
I'm building magic software that will require humans to operate and train. I really want them all in house for security, so I'm going to start hiring locally here in Colombia, and fill houses as necessary. But anyway, I am hoping to make this role of teaching and babysitting AI as fun and rewarding as possible. Like a fun video game, along with a sacred duty to take care of users and protect their privacy. I will also ship some form of this to end users eventually, so that it can run entirely offline, or at least without our services. I'm thinking that systems trained with interactive learning might create an entirely new category of job, operating AI. Sure, trained domains will require less babysitting over time, but that just frees up the labor force to expand to more domains.
stillbourne 8y ago
Proletariat? I think the proper word is Precariat.

186 points by koolhead17 8y ago

emayljames 8y ago

Plot twist: There is no such thing as "the middle class".

fallingfrog 8y ago
Exactly right! The reason that politicians talk about there being 3 classes is that 3 is a nice, round number that just sounds nice, and also it allows everyone to pretend that they're middle class.
- geezerjay 8y ago
  There's a collosal social difference between living paycheck to paycheck without any disposable income, thus depending on retaining your job to be able to keep a roof over your head, and being economically self-sufficient to the point where you are free to take multiple holidays throughout the year and even be free to quit your job and live off your savings through long stretches of time. Middle class does exist, and it's existence is rather obvious. Trying to conflate middle class with low class or poverty makes no sense at all, because the plight of a low class worker has absolutely nothing in common to the problems and challenges faced by middle class workers.
  - 113 8y ago
    The rights you have as a member of the 'middle class' have much more in common with the lower class than the highest class. It is also a lot easier to move from middle class to poverty, than it is to fall from the upper class. Yes, it feels like there is a 'colossal difference', but it's not nearly as big as the difference between middle class and the ultra-wealthy.

elvinyung 8y ago

I have a pet theory that goes one step further. In Discipline and Punish, Foucault talks about how in the early modern era, the actions of subordinate individuals (workers, students, soldiers, etc.) became increasingly regimented through more and more precise specifications of procedures as sequences of elementary actions. Then in the 19th and 20th centuries, we started to see "rationalist" economic efficiency projects like scientific management/Taylorism, which essentially tried to deskill factory workers by fragmenting their work based on time and motion studies. The gig economy is the neoliberal revival of these scientific management principles, plastered over with the neoliberal ideals of marketization and entrepreneurialism. Just like before, it aims to improve efficiency by quantifying and compensating work at finer-grained scales than ever before. It has the potential to drastically increase economic efficiency, but at the expense of financial security and the psychological wellbeing of entire generations.

lotsofpulp 8y ago
That sounds like a fancy way of saying advances in technology displace the need for certain (and increasing) types of work, increasing the supply of labor, but not the demand, and therefore decreasing the price of labor. Plus globalization and adding women to labor supply.
- elvinyung 8y ago
  It specifically isn't about that. The idea is that these projects aim to make more and more kinds of manual work fungible and exchangeable by breaking them down into small enough subtasks. Each of these elementary tasks get commoditized into a market of near-perfect competition when they become deskilled this way. It's not automation, it's a hyper-division of labor, like a worldwide assembly line connected by ethernet and optical fiber. It is specifically that it isn't automation that makes it a problem. If you were totally replaced by a machine, then at least you wouldn't have to work. But here, you aren't being replaced by machines -- you are part of the machine, like a component that's completely replaceable and interchangeable.
  - 8y ago

rectang 8y ago

Where would the employment rate be if you eliminated "gig economy" jobs?

jimnotgym 8y ago

I have deleted my whole comment. I didn't mention the Labour party, and I don't think party politics belongs here, but commenters tried to make it about the Labour party. I hope the mods kill the whole thread

NeedMoreTea 8y ago
I'm confused. UK Unions have been neutered. The Labour party sounds keen to reform the gig economy and zero hours contracts as both now affect so many, and we're not short of reports of abuses. I've heard no plans about coal - hardly surprising as we barely use any, but Labour have proposed to ban fracking. You may not like their proposals, or believe that they'll fix the issues, but they don't seem to want to hand power back to the NUM to restart 70s power cuts and the three day week. I'd even venture to suggest they are more connected to this century than the current Tory administration. Whether Labour deserve to govern, or whether they have right combination of plans, well there I'm far less certain.
tonyedgecombe 8y ago
Not really, they are constantly raising the issue of zero-hours contracts. Nobody in the Labour Party talks about coal miners because there are none left.
- jimnotgym 8y ago
  I didn't specifically mention the Labour party (because they are not the only socialist group, and also within my life-time were considered a centre-left party) and don't like party-politics on HN, but it seems to me that coal mining is still a big part of their identity[0]. I also wasnt talking about zero hour contracts at all??? I hope HN doesn't become yet another arena where you can't discuss broad categories of political theory without being savaged by Corbynites. [0]:https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2017/jul/07/corbyn-critics-banned-durham-miners-gala-reception https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2017/jul/07/corbyn-crit...
confounded 8y ago
The UK’s (democratic socialist) Labour Party have many policies specific to the gig economy and zero-hours contracts, training, and housing for young adults. I haven’t heard them mention coal miners in a while. I’m sympathetic to much of your comment, and policy gets reported far less than parliamentary pantomime, so if you’re not trolling and are genuinely unaware, take a look[0]. I have no interest in a long thread about how the policies make people on HN feel. But it seems worth pointing out that the ‘precariat’ are a primary issue for Her Maj’s shadow cabinet. [0]: https://labour.org.uk/manifesto/ https://labour.org.uk/manifesto/

fogetti 8y ago

Yes, the proletariat disappeared. That's true. Enter precariat instead. Awesome change isn't it!

tomjen3 8y ago
You mean that people stopped not having enough clothing and food and got to a point where they only had to fear that they might not have enough clothing and food in the future? Yes actually, that sounds like a great improvement.
- fogetti 8y ago
  That's a nice strawman argument you have there. Nobody said that the proletariat means `not having enough clothing and food`. Not even Marx. Don't try to put words in my mouth. Maybe you should look it up what it actually means. So basically you are arguing with yourself in effect which again I don't understand why would you do...?
prolikewh0a 8y ago
The proletariat did not disappear, it didn't go anywhere. The working class does not own the means of production, and gig economy workers do not own their means of production either. The majority of the country are wage slave proletariat.
- ozim 8y ago
  As you can notice parent introduced precariat, which in turn is new type of proletariat. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Precariat https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Precariat

Illniyar 8y ago

"In that classic form, Marx’s favorite class doesn’t really exist in the rich world today, except in the so-called gig economy." What? how? What about service workers (which constitute a major section of US workforce)? Do burger flippers at mcdonald's own their means of production? Cleaners? Waiters? Heck even truckers don't own their truck. On the contrary, in the classical sense most gig-economy workers (at least those we associate with the gig economy) are not Proletariat - uber drivers own their car, AirBnB own their houses, Marketplaces (etsy, fiverr etc... which Amazon turk is nominally a part of) own the tools and knowledge to make whatever they sell. Amazon Turkers are really not representative of the Gig Economy (a term that came much later then Amazon's Mechanical Turk) and at least for me I don't really think of them as part of the Gig Economy.

tomjen3 8y ago
Most people don't understand Marx idea about the ownership of production, they see it as rich vs poor and a trucker can make a decent amount of money, enough to buy a house and own a personal car. That was never seen as possible in the squalor of 18th Europe. So it is not that weird that people get the two wrong.
CapacitorSet 8y ago
Crucially, gig workers do not own an important part of their means of production: the platform that processes rides/rentals/etc, payments and users, which allows the traditional bourgeois to extract surplus value (Mehrwert) in the usual way, and the workers fit the definition of proletarians.
- Illniyar 8y ago
  True, but they own some of it, and there is competition between platforms for them (I.E. lyft vs uber). In fact many people "work" for multiple platforms. It's similar to a farmer selling his ware in a marketplace, which he must pay rent for. Would you say that because he doesn't own the marketplace (or store) he doesn't own his means of production? Now the question is whether they must own all of the means of production to be considered bourgeois? I would say no, especially in today's world, where most production is a complicated multi-tiered process. But even if you do think so, they are still much better off, Marxist-wise, from virtually every service worker, who own no means of production. In any case, that doesn't mean that there is no exploitation or that the gig economy should not be regulated, but it really doesn't have anything to do with Proletariat.

unknown_apostle 8y ago

I know it pays little and is repetitive. But my question with this kind of analysis is always: why do they keep finding people to do it? There is another problem which I find more worrisome: we are expecting gig workers (and most other workers) to subject to hardcore competition for their jobs, wages and terms. The argument (also my argument above) is that it leads to efficient and honest outcomes because it involves little to no coercion. But at the same time, governments are colluding with and bailing out the financial elites with every market crash. We did it with LTCM, in 2001, in 2008 and who knows when again. The bailout involves mass coercion of savers and an implicit punishment of those who were careful. It may have profoundly changed the mentality of the wealthy. For the last 10 years, "if it gets bad enough, there will be a bail out" has become standard investment wisdom. Socialism for those who own, free markets for those who don't. This contradiction is what'll ultimately do us in.

choot 8y ago
It's because some people have low IQ so they are not able to navigate through the meandering job. All they want is a simple job with a well defined task on which they can speed up and later achieve more objective output and not have to please a boss for subjective remark.
- Illniyar 8y ago
  Actually from what the study says a sizable chunk does this because they prefer work from home or unable to work in an office. Some anecdotes are provided of people with sick parents or young children who for them taking a full time caretaker would be a net loss.
  - choot 8y ago
    The reason they give is based on self evaluation. People are particularly bad at self evaluation. Keep in mind, most people don't know what their IQ is. And most don't consider themselves to posses less intelligence as they don't know what more intelligence feels like. See this video for relationship between job expectation and IQ: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fjs2gPa5sD0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fjs2gPa5sD0

choot 8y ago

Gig economy isn't bad if state ensures universal healthcare, food, housing etc... Entire economy should be setup this way so that no one is tied to a specific career outside of the limited number of professions like doctors etc...

prolikewh0a 8y ago
We should absolutely not be subsidizing multi-billion dollar companies like this when they have the ability to provide a living wage.
- lotsofpulp 8y ago
  The money for it will have to come from “multi-billion” dollar companies or their owners anyway, via taxes.
  - hocuspocus 8y ago
    Social contributions more specifically. Make employers (self-employed or not, doesn't matter) pay mandatory retirement, health-care, incapacity and unemployment contributions / insurances. This is already a solved problem in many countries.
    - Kiro 8y ago
      They would just deduct the social contribution from the earnings. Name a country where it's solved.
crdoconnor 8y ago
If the state ensures healthcare, food, housing so few people will want these jobs that the business model will break.
- swiley 8y ago
  No, plenty of people would do gig economy jobs if they knew they wouldn't have to worry about rent and food. The flexibility is way worth it. I'm pretty sure I even would and I get paid way above the median income.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

ilaksh 8y ago

Mechanical Turk and Uber are likely to be taken over by AI in the next 10 years or so. So the situation will probably get worse.

sarcasm_heals 8y ago

This rings hollow considering who is publishing it. The pot calls the kettle black. The article is published by Bloomberg Media. Bloomberg Corp has a dark, deeply capitalistic culture. Management discards employees as if they were pieces of trash. Employees work far more than 40 hours a week, which was long ago deemed the acceptable number of hours an employer could demand without taking away from a worker's private life. Workers are placed into a gladiator's arena to compete for their own jobs, compelling them to play back-stabbing office politics rather than contribute work of real value. Jacobin. The New Left Review. These are trusted media sources for the left, not Bloomberg.

StreamBright 8y ago

The day when Bloomberg pushes communist propaganda. What a day to be alive. Any person who experienced communism knows that this ideology is the most sinister on the planet, only fools who never experienced it think it is something to consider. "The market, in its pure, unadulterated, Marx-era form, can’t provide satisfactory answers."

sexydefinesher 8y ago
Or maybe you should get over your mcarthyism when even Bloomberg speaks in socialistic terms.
- mmirate 8y ago
  Where are they suggesting that we witch-hunt the Commies? I see no such call-to-action. Or are you saying that is it McCarthyistic to merely remember the past and attempt to avoid repeating it? https://eureconciliation.eu/institutions-promoting-awareness-and-remembrance-of-communist-crimes/ https://eureconciliation.eu/institutions-promoting-awareness...
dang 8y ago
Please don't do ideological battle on HN. It's always the same, therefore tedious, therefore off-topic here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

ferongr 8y ago

Imagine getting paid a salary to recite tankie nonsense.

atrilumen 8y ago

I'm building magic software that will require humans to operate and train. I really want them all in house for security, so I'm going to start hiring locally here in Colombia, and fill houses as necessary. But anyway, I am hoping to make this role of teaching and babysitting AI as fun and rewarding as possible. Like a fun video game, along with a sacred duty to take care of users and protect their privacy. I will also ship some form of this to end users eventually, so that it can run entirely offline, or at least without our services. I'm thinking that systems trained with interactive learning might create an entirely new category of job, operating AI. Sure, trained domains will require less babysitting over time, but that just frees up the labor force to expand to more domains.

stillbourne 8y ago

Proletariat? I think the proper word is Precariat.