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It's interesting to see a marxist/materialist analysis of labor and technology in a mainstream academic paper. Technology and automation increase the total pro
by nabnob 8y ago
It's interesting to see a marxist/materialist analysis of labor and technology in a mainstream academic paper.
Technology and automation increase the total productivity in an economy, but only people who own these technologies benefit from the profits.
For example, say that Uber succeeds with creating self-driving cars in a particular city (but Lyft does not). People in that city might benefit from having cheaper Uber rides - but is that benefit offset by the number of people who can no longer make a living driving for Uber? Let's say those drivers now only drive for Lyft - in the economy of this city, these Lyft drivers now compete with self-driving Ubers that have a much lower cost of operation because Uber doesn't have to pay minimum wage.
The paper mentions a couple areas where AI would help increase productivity and lower costs in a way that benefit working people as a whole - in healthcare, education, and augmented reality. I think AI could also be very useful for people who are disabled.
However, in a capitalist economy, the biggest incentive for creating AI is to reduce labor costs - compare something like a warehouse worker, who must be paid every week, with a warehouse AI robot. After the initial investment developing this warehouse AI, the company that owns this warehouse AI has a source of productive labor with a very low operational cost, much lower than employing warehouse workers.
The incentive for developing AI that can replace physical human labor is huge - and humanity as a whole could reap the benefits if we collectivized owenership of these technologies, rather than allowing a few shareholders to extract profit from their perpetual labor machines.
- CryptoPunk 8y ago>>Technology and automation increase the total productivity in an economy, but only people who own these technologies benefit from the profits. That is not true. It lowers consumer costs, reducing living expenses and making it easier for more people to come to own technology. Look at smart phone ownership rates since 2007. It went from 40 million people owning one to 2.5 billion owning one today. Thanks to the proliferation of automation, in the form of factories with mechanized manufacturing processes, smart phones are much more affordable today than in 2007. A smart phone is a computer with a camera and microphone that enables and automates many tasks, meaning the automation of smart phone manufacturing is increasing the automation technology that people own. >>However, in a capitalist economy, the biggest incentive for creating AI is to reduce labor costs - compare something like a warehouse worker, who must be paid every week, with a warehouse AI robot. Lower labor costs per unit of output means more people can afford services and products, including products that allow them to automate their own personal production.