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Because this is what capital has told us. Capital always wants to reduce the labour cost to $0.
by oldjim798 8mo ago
Because this is what capital has told us. Capital always wants to reduce the labour cost to $0.
- aurareturn 8mo agoIf labor cost is close to $0, even more businesses that weren’t viable before would become viable. Do you not see the logic?
- squeefers 8mo agoai is bad because it's automated his job. luddites in tech. a real contradiction
- DangitBobby 8mo agoNot really a contradiction, since the entire point of jobs and the economy at all is to serve the specific needs of humanity and not to maximize paper clip production. If we should be learning anything from the modern era it's something that should have always been obvious: the Luddites were not the bad guys. The truth is you've fallen for centuries old propaganda. Hopefully someday you'll evolve into someone who doesn't carry water for paperclip maximizers.
- jason_oster 8mo agoLuddites are a consistent problem regardless of domain. Planck's principle was born in physics.
- menaerus 8mo agoDemand is the driver not only the cost.
- aurareturn 8mo agoNot true. Sell a $0.50 coffee next to Starbucks with the same quality and it will drive demand. Lower prices drive demand.
- menaerus 8mo agoSo, more people will start drinking coffee all together or same amount of people will be redistributed across Starbucks and my new fancy espresso bar?
- aurareturn 8mo agoMore people will drink coffee if it’s cheaper and some people from Starbucks will order from you now. It’s not controversial economics that lower prices drive more demand.
- menaerus 8mo agoEconomics 101, right? Since developing software, writing the technical documentation, and exercising QA became all of the sudden 1000x cheaper than it was a year ago, how come we don't see the substantial increase in demand of software/QA/doc engineers then? I see the opposite happening right now, e.g. many people losing their jobs to $30/month AI model.
- 9rx 8mo agoZero labor cost should see the number of engineers trend towards infinity. The earlier comment suggested the opposite — that it would fall to just 1000 engineers. That would indicate that the cost of labor has skyrocketed.
- DangitBobby 8mo agoThat doesn't make sense. Demand isn't entirely dictated by cost. There is only so much productivity the world is equipped to consume.
- 9rx 8mo agoWhat difference does that make? If the cost of an engineer is zero, they can work on all kinds of nonsensical things that will never be used/consumed. It doesn't really matter as it doesn't cost anything.
- DangitBobby 8mo agoI'm kinda baffled by your suggestion. That's just not how people or organizations run by people operate. Cost is not the only driver to demand.
- 9rx 8mo ago> That's just not how people or organizations run by people operate. Au contraire. It's not very often that the cost of labor actually drops to anywhere close to zero, but we have some examples. The elevator operator is a prime example. When it was costly to hire an operator we could only hire a few of them. Nowadays anyone who is willing to operate an elevator just has to show up and they automatically get the job. If 1,000 engineers are worth having around, why not an infinite number of them, just like those working as elevator operators? Again, there is no cost in this hypothetical scenario. > Cost is not the only driver to demand. Technically true, but we're not talking about garbage here. Humans are always valuable to some degree, just not necessarily valuable enough when there is a cost to balance. But, again, we're talking about zero cost. I expect you are getting caught up in thinking about scenarios where labor still has a cost, perhaps confusing zero cost with zero payroll?