Bloviations: đ¤ Maybe *the devil you know* is worse
TL;DR: We already exploit factory workers and donât care. Soon, we wonât need to exploit them at all. Can we please talk about what happens next?
I am, occasionally, a reply guy. âBloviationsâ is a series in which I preserve my unhinged rants before they disappear into the feed. This one is a reply to Garment workers in India are being underpaid to train AI robots that will soon replace them đ¨ by trendyjosh_
Isnât it a bit more complicated than that? These people arenât doing these jobs out of love for sewing. These are not fun jobs. They do them out of necessity to survive. Industry can exploit them because of their desperation, and it has every incentive to maintain that desperation so it can continue to exploit them. Our goal shouldnât be to maintain this status quoâbecause it sucks. The real issue is what happens when work disappears.
When automation displaces humans, labor loses its bargaining power. The ability to withhold labor is the foundation of every material gain workers have ever won. Without it, there is no structural incentive for anyone with capital to care about workersâ interests because they wonât need workers at all. Menial jobs, if they continue to exist, will essentially become a kind of welfare: paying a human to do a task for moral or aesthetic reasons, even though automation will be better, faster, and cheaper.
This creates two massive problems. The first is wealth distribution: if people arenât paid for their labor, how do they survive? The second is social organization: our entire society is structured around work. Without it, how do people organize their time and find meaning?
This is precisely why guaranteed basic income gained traction a decade ago. I havenât read Fully Automated Luxury Communism, but the title suggests a future where drones displace delivery driversâand delivery drivers are elevated to the status of the people ordering the food they deliver. That would require some buy-in from the power elite. Ford, at least apocryphally, priced his cars so his workers could afford them. The elite today seem more focused on building bunkers in New Zealand or decamping to Mars (troublingly shortsighted, given that their power is socially enforced).
Here's the uncomfortable truth: we don't give a f*ck about factory workers right now. We just want the cheap clothes, and we exploit these people to get them. Soon, we'll get them without exploiting anyone, and there won't be any incentive to exploit them either. But then what will happen? Do they just die? And when we're displaced by robots, do we die too?
If you read all that and your answer is still âstop shopping at SHEINâ or whatever, you missed the point. Every previous wave of automation destroyed jobs and created new ones, so itâs likely to happen again. But it might not, in which case we have to imagine a post-work future, a future organized around something other than the monetization of labor. Right now, I guess thatâs investing? I donât have an answer.
I just find it extremely frustrating that everyone is always sidestepping the question!!!!
(I havenât read it in a while, but I think Iâm pulling some of these ideas from Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a World Without Work by Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams.)
The technology discussed in this post appears to be the Egolab.ai headset, described in this pitch deck and this Instagram video. The pitch deck promises factories efficiency reports and "access to robots" in exchange for supplying AI training data to Tesla, Boston Dynamics, and Figure AI.