Re:Shopify to cut 20% of its workforce, beats quarterly reve...
by dangus on Thursday May 04, 2023 @09:26AM
(#35814943)
The problem with your argument isn't the intermediate state, it's the end state.
What you're saying is correct until suddenly it isn't.
First there was agriculture, where the sweat on the brow of the majority of the world used to work to put food on the table, but now machinery is able to farm hundreds of times the acreage that a human with an ox and a plow used to manage. Those farmers moved into cities and industrialized the world.
Hundreds of thousands of factory workers used to build automobiles in Detroit (for example). Today, building cars only takes a few thousand employees who are mostly operating automated machines that their employers own.
So now those workers' children left the factories and work in knowledge fields like software.
But what will happen when AI is able to write any imaginable business logic? Companies will consist of the people with the capital to own the intellectual property, real estate, machinery, etc. Venture Capital firms will no longer need founders or engineers, they'll just spin up new companies via a new set of business logic AI prompts.
That's assuming that there are any customers left to buy the products. Post-industrial capitalism depends on the idea that someone out there has enough wealth to spend on something besides basic food and shelter.
Where will the workers go then? How will these businesses survive when there are no employees to buy the products?
The likely truth is that the continual reduction of the importance of labor will leave the owners of capital existing in their separate utopia while the rest of society exists on scraps. I imagine it looking like Elysium.
What you're saying is correct until suddenly it isn't.
First there was agriculture, where the sweat on the brow of the majority of the world used to work to put food on the table, but now machinery is able to farm hundreds of times the acreage that a human with an ox and a plow used to manage. Those farmers moved into cities and industrialized the world.
Hundreds of thousands of factory workers used to build automobiles in Detroit (for example). Today, building cars only takes a few thousand employees who are mostly operating automated machines that their employers own.
So now those workers' children left the factories and work in knowledge fields like software.
But what will happen when AI is able to write any imaginable business logic? Companies will consist of the people with the capital to own the intellectual property, real estate, machinery, etc. Venture Capital firms will no longer need founders or engineers, they'll just spin up new companies via a new set of business logic AI prompts.
That's assuming that there are any customers left to buy the products. Post-industrial capitalism depends on the idea that someone out there has enough wealth to spend on something besides basic food and shelter.
Where will the workers go then? How will these businesses survive when there are no employees to buy the products?
The likely truth is that the continual reduction of the importance of labor will leave the owners of capital existing in their separate utopia while the rest of society exists on scraps. I imagine it looking like Elysium.