Remix.run Logo
Animats 3 hours ago

Yes. It's very Derrida in style. Derrida is not mentioned, but, inevitably from that crowd, Marx is. Once you get used to that style, you realize they're not saying much.

Quoting from Marx: “An ardent desire to detach the capacity for work from the worker—the desire to extract and store the creative powers of labour once and for all, so that value can be created freely and in perpetuity." That happened to manufacturing a long time ago, and then manufacturing got automated enough that there were fewer bolt-tighteners. 1974 was the year US productivity and wages stopped rising together.

As many others have pointed out, "AI" in its current form does to white collar work what assembly lines did to blue collar work.

As for how society should be organized when direct labor is a tiny part of the economy, few seem to be addressing that. Except farmers, who hit that a long time ago. Go look at the soybean farmer situation as an extreme example. This paper offers no solutions.

(I'm trying to get through Pikkety's "Capital and Ideology". He's working on that problem.)