It is in their interest to find explanations for reductions in labor that don't assign the blame to corporate greed.

For example, a call center might use the excuse of AI to fire a bunch of people. They would have liked to just arbitrarily fire people a few years ago, but if they did that people would notice the reduction in quality and perhaps realize it was done out of self-serving greed (executives get bigger bonuses / look better, etc). The AI excuse means that their service might be worse, perhaps inexcusably so, but no one is going to scrutinize it that closely because there is a palatable justification for why it was done.

This is certainly the type of effect I feel like underlies every story of AI firing I've heard about.

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jclulow 6 days ago | parent | next [-]

How is firing a bunch of people because you made a machine that you believe can do their jobs not textbook corporate greed? It seems like the worst impulses of Taylorism made manifest?

	▲	ajkjk 6 days ago \| parent [-]
		This is worse: this is just pretending like the machine does their jobs because it benefits them. The big (biggest? ) problem of modernity is that quality is decorrelated from profit. There's a lot more money in having the optics of doing a good job than in actually doing it; the economy is so abstracted and distributed that the mechanism of competition to punish bad behavior, shitty customer service, low standards, crappy work, fraud... is very weak. There is too much information asymmetry, and the timescale of information propagation is too long to have much of an effect. As long as no one notices what you're fucking up very quickly you can get away with it for a long time. Seems even worse to me. At least in the 'competition' paradigm there's a mechanism for things getting better for consumers. No such thing here.

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HumblyTossed 6 days ago | parent | prev [-]

> It is in their interest to find explanations for reductions in labor that don't assign the blame to corporate greed.

Exactly.