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Comment on Bernie Sanders says that if AI makes us so productive, we should get a 4-day work week

Gorilladrums@lemmy.world ⁨17⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

You can’t resist technology, it will ALWAYS win. Economies always strive to be more efficient, and people will always gravitate towards the convenience of efficiency. Because of this, new technologies get adopted all the time, and economies evolve with them.

Think about computers for a second. How many jobs have they created that didn’t exist 50 years ago? There were no online retailers or social media managers or youtubers or software engineers back then. These are all new jobs that were created recently, and they dominate our economy. Even traditional jobs that didn’t use computers before like an accountant, lawyer, or doctor do now because these are powerful tools.

But it’s not just computers, the same thing happened with the television, the radio, the telegraph, cars, trains, even light bulbs. Before, electric street lamps became a thing, cities used to hire lamplighters who would go around the streets lighting and extinguishing gas lamps. When electric street lamps started being adopted a lot of people complained about how this new technology is going to automate away jobs and hurt the economy… but it didn’t.

Instead, the economy specialized and people created new businesses and took on new jobs. The same thing will happen here. It’s simply going be the next major thing to evolve the economy, and we will adopt it and adapt to it just like the many different technologies before it.

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gandalf_der_12te@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨12⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
There has been a study done in 1970 called The Limits to Growth that predicted that exponential economic growth would come to a halt necessarily, because you cannot have infinite growth in a finite system. It took many decades more than predicted, but I suspect that we’re actually at this point now.

Workplaces mostly exist nowadays to grow the economy. It takes rather little work to maintain the world nowadays. That is why we’re facing a declining demand in human labor.

Since the labor market is a free market, it is regulated by Supply and Demand. That means, if supply is high, prices drop; if demand is high, prices rise. On the labor market, that means that a declining demand for human labor leads to lower prices for that labor, a.k.a. wages.

That is the crisis that the US is currently facing: Declining wages, a.k.a. inflation, a.k.a. Cost of Living crisis.

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- Gorilladrums@lemmy.world ⁨8⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  I don’t disagree with anything that you said, but my point was simply to address the notion that existing jobs are irreplaceable. It is true that technology automates away jobs, but it also creates new onee. Industries and jobs that make up the economy change all the time and that’s okay. Thinking that a new technology like AI is going to doom us is, well, just doom posting.
  
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WarlordSdocy@lemmy.zip ⁨13⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
The problem comes when those technological innovations increase productivity which companies use solely to increase their bottom line. These innovations should be benefitting workers directly.

Outside of that a lot of your argument rests on the idea that there will always be new better jobs for humans to move into. However even the examples you gave aren’t great. How is someone doing manufacturing or transportation or extinguishing the street lights going to suddenly become a computer programmer? Especially considering how atleast in the US you’d have to pay to go to college to do that. And even then we’ve started to see in recent years a lot of these new “high demand” jobs getting saturated. As time goes on and companies use productivity gains to purely to benefit their profits they’re gonna lay off more people and new jobs from new technologies aren’t going to be able to keep up.

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JimmyMcGill@lemmy.world ⁨13⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
Nobody is arguing that technology won’t progress. Even Marx defends that as a precondition for socialism/communism.

The question is the following. Tomorrow a ground breaking technology is developed that makes literally everyone twice as productive. (Please let’s ignore the technical aspect of this. I’m simplifying for the sake of the argument, but this is happening at some paces everywhere).

Now you have 3 options:

Everyone can just work half the time for the same productivity. I.e. the economy can sustain itself with people just working less (which is a MAJOR quality of life increase).

Everyone works the same amount of time but their salaries double.

Everyone works the same amount of time. Their salaries increase a small %, perhaps keeping up with inflation, perhaps a tiny bit more than that, sometimes even not keeping up with inflation. The added productivity results in increased wealth aggregation at the top.

Number 1 is what people are talking about in this thread.

Number 2 won’t happen because salaries aren’t actually tied to productivity. Productivity just sets a higher limit on salary that in any case is never reached. The salaries are actually determined by competition between workers.

Number 3. Has been happening since the seventies and will continue to happen.
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- null_dot@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨12⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  I agree that we’ve been doing number 3 for decades. Sooner or later that has to lead to a revolution though right?
  
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null_dot@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨12⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
You’re correct that this has always been the case in the past.

Advances in technology free people up to do other productive things.

I imagine that trend may stop some time, but I don’t think we’re there yet.

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