Two things:

1. Like most labor organizing, I think this would be beneficial for software engineers, but not long-term beneficial for the world at large. More software that is easier to make is better for everybody.

Would you still want to live in a world where your elevator stops working when the elevator operator is sick, or where overseas Whatsapp calls cost $1 per minute, because they have to be connected by a chain of operators?

2. Software engineering is a lot easier to move than other professions. If you want to carry people from London to New York, you need to cater to the workers who actually live in London or New York. If you want to make software... Silicon Valley is your best bet right now, but if SV organizes and other places don't, it may not be your best bet any more. That would make things even worse for SV than not organizing. Same story applies to any other place.

Sure, companies won't more overnight, but if one place makes it too hard for AI to accelerate productivity, people will either go somewhere else, or that place will just end up completely outcompeted like Europe did.

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int_19h 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

The "world at large" mostly consists of workers, so things that are beneficial to workers are also beneficial to it.

> your elevator stops working when the elevator operator is sick

Can you point somewhere outside of US where this is the case with unions?

	▲	orangecat 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		The "world at large" mostly consists of workers, so things that are beneficial to workers are also beneficial to it. When dockworker's unions are able to prevent port automation, is that beneficial to society?

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SirensOfTitan 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

So do you believe that the gains from this technology will be broadly distributed? Or will capital capture the majority of those gains?

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wilg 3 days ago | parent [-]

what technologies has "capital" captured the majority of gains from?

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squibonpig 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

This would potentially be true for a lot of tech in the last five decades or so. When it gets cheaper to make the things people need and want without those needs and wants changing, you can get away with paying people a lower real wage for the same productivity. Couple that with the fact that the workers themselves also have typically grown more productive from the same tech, allowing companies to undercut competitors and capture more market share until everyone else catches on. I figure capital has benefited enormously from recent tech, very possible it captured the majority of the excess money produced.

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wilg 3 days ago | parent [-]

name something so we can look into it and figure out if its true!

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squibonpig 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

I don't think that's possible to analyze for most technologies. How could we determine the effect of, say, OLED technology specifically on workers' real wages across the economy? Even doing the same for a particular seller's margin, say LG, would be difficult and wouldn't tell the full story. If you have an idea of how to do that for something let me know.

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wilg 3 days ago | parent [-]

Well, that's part of the problem isn't it? Do we just assume the worst, or what's the solution?

	▲	squibonpig 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		We'd probably want to use a measure of worker productivity itself as a proxy for technological improvements and look at various measures like real wages in relation to it rather than restricting our analysis to any one technology.

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macintux 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Does Musk's trillion dollar bonus count?

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oblio 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Small newspapers full of classified ads used to be available locally around the world, creating local employment. Google and Meta ravaged that and sucked the money out to a handful of shareholders and tens of thousands of highly paid tech workers. That's just one market.