Bill Gates says a 3-day work week where 'machines can make all the food and stuff' isn't a bad idea
(www.businessinsider.com)
from L4s@lemmy.world to technology@lemmy.world on 23 Nov 2023 06:00
https://lemmy.world/post/8634126
from L4s@lemmy.world to technology@lemmy.world on 23 Nov 2023 06:00
https://lemmy.world/post/8634126
Bill Gates says a 3-day work week where ‘machines can make all the food and stuff’ isn’t a bad idea::“A society where you only have to work three days a week, that’s probably OK,” Bill Gates said.
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This is the best summary I could come up with:
When Noah asked about the threat of artificial intelligence to jobs, Gates said there could one day be a time when humans “don’t have to work so hard.”
While artificial intelligence could bring about some positive change, Gates has previously acknowledged the risks of AI if it’s misused.
Word processing applications didn’t do away with office work, but they changed it forever," Gates said at the time.
JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon said that the next generation of workers will only have a 3.5-day work week due to AI.
“Your children will live to 100 and not have cancer because of technology and they’ll probably be working three and a half days a week,” Dimon told Bloomberg in October.
Gates once viewed sleep as lazy and told Noah that his life was all about Microsoft from the ages 18 to 40 years old.
The original article contains 335 words, the summary contains 142 words. Saved 58%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
I don’t care what one of the richest people in the world thinks about labour and work/life balance. I care what the average person thinks.
But he’s right about this.
You should, because they are the ones who will be making the decisions.
Bill Gates isn’t making the decisions anymore and hasn’t been for decades now
He still has more decision making power than anyone I’ve ever met and probably ever will meet.
How fuckin high are you to forget how much power comes from being a billionaire?
wdym? He only gets one vote
/s
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Until enough of us say that we don’t care what they think, and we demand better.
So unionization?
Yes. That’s certainly one of the best ways.
Unions are tragically toothless when the federal government can just decide a planned strike is illegal.
More unions need to coordinate and actually create threat of a general strike. The UAW ending their contract on May Day and calling for others to do the same actually seems like a pretty good way to leverage power. I don’t think the government can move quick enough to block that kind of collective action.
Biden literally signed an executive order blocking railway workers from striking. If he has that kind of authority and is willing to use it in that way, then all he has to do is make an executive order declaring all strikes illegal. Also, not trying to be a naysayer, but a general strike is a pipe dream. You can barely get people in the same union to cooperate, let alone multiple unions cooperating for a general.
yea! lets hope really hard and politicians might start taking hope as bribes for legislature
And their decisions equate to: how can we employ the fewest number of people with the least benefits and make the most profit off what we’re selling?
But definitely don’t consider that under- or unemployed people don’t have the money to spend on making those profits happen.
Yeah, every debate about reducing the number of cars always ends at something like “too many jobs are involved in the car industry, so we need to preserve these jobs, and also people need cars to go work in these factories”. I feel like there will hardly be a deep environmental breakthrough if it doesn’t come with a deep social change.
I would rather work down the road at a bakery than drive to the next town to be an engineering apprentice.
Only one of them pays, however.
“We’re too deep in the hole we’ve dug for ourselves. Just keep digging and hope we eventually come out the other side.” That’s what that logic effectively equates to: doing the same stupid thing and hoping it eventually works out for you.
Companies would automate and save on employees, making people poor. Automation only makes sense if basic universal income is applied
If people are that poor they will just deautomate the machines in protest until UBI happens.
People don’t have that kind of power. Especially poor people.
A person doesn’t, but people certainly do. And a small number can do a surprising amount if they’re coordinated enough.
The companies will decide the level of automation
But who will be able to purchase what the machines make?
A reduction in work hours is also a step forward until UBI is instated. If I make the same amount doing 4 or even 3 days of work in a week, while automation does the rest, that works for me. The idea is that people need to work less and make the same if not more. UBI or a reduction in work hours are both good paths forward. UBI being the ultimate goal.
The “””end goal””” would be people working half the time, earning half the money, and stuff costing half as much to make and half as much to purchase.
The issue is we have to force them to translate the manufacturing cost decrease in a price decrease, or it’s never going to happen.
I don’t care what he thinks, but I care that he has a platform that others in his class listen to and may respect. It’s not a position you hear often from those with a lot of wealth. I’m ok with progress coming from any direction, even if it’s self-serving in some form, and I do think it’s self-serving.
But are we still paid the same? Otherwise it would be working 2 jobs which one during “weekends”. Much worse.
Not if you’re a chef.
“where you only have to work three days a week” seems to imply that you will be paid the same. Or perhaps more logically food would be cheaper. I imagine this will hurt the agriculture sector though, at least in the short term.
But it would double the amount of jobs in other sectors as well.
Lots of industries can’t just stop 4 days a week.
I think a lot of industries that aren’t attractive right now would be more attractive with shorter hours. Which would mean they could hire more people.
Exactly. Would require we invest in educating people properly rather than setting them up for minimum wage jobs because we need them filled.
Some of them could be filled by people right now, such as teachers and nurses who left the field because they felt overworked (and underpaid).
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I think it’s unavoidable that humans won’t have enough work in the future since more and more stuff get automated.
I also think the evil people at the top knows this and are no strangers to starting wars to get rid of millions of people, when there is no capitalistic benefit for them to exist.
Their goal isn’t to get rid of people. It’s to have more people. That’s why abortion band and stuff are pushed. More people in this system means more people trading their lives to give profit to the owners. Unless there’s an actual threat of revolution, more people is useful to them.
Yeah but my point is, more people may not mean more profits in the future. Depends on what can be automated.
So basically im saying there are two ways to increase profits, either reduce costs (salaries) or increase sales. It’s possible that in the future, the equation becomes that it’s possible to reduce costs very very much by reducing employees to almost nothing, but someone needs to buy the products for it to be a profit, I agree.
It just seems so primitive what we are doing now. We should build societies where humans are happy, but capitalism is the opposite, and other systems seem to suck also.
Those star trek societies are only possible because they can generate items from thin air…
The “other systems” historically have been sabotaged. For example, Cuba had basically no ability to trade externally because the US wanted them destroyed. They’ve been fairly successful despite this though.
For another example, the Guatemala coup occurred when a new democracy formed and elected a leftist who destributed land to the poor and implemented a minimum wage. The United Fruit Company (Chiquita now) was using the land and cheap labor for their banana empire, so they lobbied to have the US overthrow them. They did, and Guatemala ended up with a dictatorship, which also genocided the natives while the US did nothing to stop them.
There are plenty of other options. Capitalists are just scared of them, so they push the myth they always fail. Instead they fail because they kill them.
Yeah it makes sense. They want to protect what they have built now, all based on interest rates and everyone borrowing money they have to pay back their entire lives by working.
And more competitions for resources. Which means the owners of those resources (landlords, corporations) can drive up the prices. Kill off all the poors and then there’s no demand to rent your apartments or buy your shit. No demand drives prices down and therefore profit down.
I wonder what happens when the work is done and all jobs are successfully automated away. It makes very little sense how a stable world could exist where 10 guys own EVERYTHING.
As if we had a 4 day work week already. Maybe start with that?
Right now we seem to operate on a 5-day work week except somehow it only amounts to about 12 hours of actual work.
The amount of bullshit jobs that exist is insane. So many people in offices that either don’t do anything or barely anything. Then even more who could easily get all work done in half a work day. Then a gigantic amount that could easily do their work in 4 instead of 5 days or 6 instead of 8 hours. I’m typing this at work because of all the downtime I have and I still believe I get more work done then most of my colleagues.
That is completely field dependent. I worked many years of retail and a bit of construction before eventually becoming a software engineer. In my experience, both retail and construction can easily have 9 hours of work in a 10 hour workday. Now that I’m a software engineer, your comment is more akin to my experience with the amount of actual work getting done, while the rest of the work week is filled with time wasting things, like meetings and such.
Also, sick days and vacations are frowned upon, especially in retail, because these kind of places are always trying to get away with the least amount of staff that they can. It’s like the lower paid, ‘unskilled’(no such thing), workers work harder and for less benefits than everybody else. They know they can get away with it, because these people are living paycheck to paycheck, and can’t afford to protest anyways.
<img alt="" src="https://media.tenor.com/9Veu72dKZmAAAAAC/office-work.gif">
It would be a great idea except it’s incompatible with capitalism. It would take away a lot of jobs from less privileged people and society would do nothing to support them. These people could then be exploited even harder due to job scarcity.
Would be nice though if we could have nice things.
Why 3, we could do 0
Sure. Give the wealthy and powerful ownership over literally everything in the world and as long as you follow the rules you can get your survival allowance. Shit maybe even some entertainment if you’re really good.
Dumbest fucking take I have ever heard.
Working 0 days doesn’t imply we can’t collectively own things. 20% of Norway’s population democratically own their houses (housing coops) and like 90% of the Finnish population are member/democratic owners of consumer coops (Walmart grocery stores). Neither of these are workers of the respective coops they’re members of.
The overlap between the kind of people wanting to do 0 work and the kind of people willing to actually physically fight for it is virtually nonexistent.
Who is going to enforce communal ownership of the means of production and all products in the economy when those in charge decide they should reap the benefits of managing that? It certainly isn’t going to be the lazy asses who don’t even want to work literally one day a week.
But that’s how things are now… We work 5–7 days a week for the wealthy and powerful to have more ownership, while getting a survival allowance in exchange.
Maybe have a skill worth something then? Wild concept.
So your “solution” to oligarchs owning everything is…sell ourselves to them?
The parent comment was about the current system, where labor produces everything. If your labor can be easily replaced, your labor isn’t that valuable and you won’t be compensated well for your labor. If your labor can’t be replaced easily, it is valuable and you will be compensated well.
That’s pretty much the opposite of this fictional future dystopia where there is no labor at all and everything is produced by automation. In that world, you as an individual have no value at all. You’re just a leech. There won’t be any innovation, because that’s driven by labor which doesn’t exist in this scenario.
0 forced labor doesn’t mean that humans stop doing things. We are a species which psychologically have a need for something meaningful to do, it’s just that our personal resources are spent after all the meaningless stuff we have to do for the ones in power.
If we don’t maintain the institution of slavery, how will we have any innovation?!
A skill worth to them?
Uh yeah. Like literally all of human history, from the beginning of civilization and will likely last until our extinction.
Source?
If we’re going to be basing pay on “skills” that are “worth something,” CEOs should be getting minimum wage.
Sure, let the food industry do the processing conveniently in three days. Nobody needs these farmers anyway who work their usual six and a half…
/s
I think the idea would be to have machines replace people wherever possible and then have multiple people split the work time where it isn’t. Why does one farmer have to work 24/7 if two could split the work and actually have a life outside of work?
I think ultimately this is going to become the crunch point. Because what kind of jobs can AI eventually take over (with appropriate robotics) in the mid-term future?
Now, when it comes to industrial and farm work. There's a LOT that is already semi-automated. One person can do the job with tech that might have taken 10 or more now. I can see this improving and if we ever pull of a more generalised AI approach, more entire roles could be eliminated.
My main point is, we're already at the point where the number of jobs that need people are considerably less than they used to be, this trend will continue. We know we cannot trust the free market and business in general to be ethical about this. So we should expect a large surplus of people with no real chance of gainful employment.
How we deal with that is important. Do we keep capitalism and go with a UBI and allow people to pursue their passions to top that up? Do we have some kind of inverse lottery for the jobs that do need doing? Where people perhaps take a 3 month block of 3 day working weeks to fill some of the positions that are needed? I'm not sure. I suspect we're going to go through at least a short period of "dark age" where the rich get MUCH richer, and everyone else gets screwed over before something is done about the problem.
Looks to me like Gates is looking ahead at this.
Sorry if that wall of text sounds pessimistic. Just one way I can see things going.
Honestly 10 to 1 is a low estimate. It’s an absurd number like 100 or even 200 to 1 from what it once was with the right equipment.
I think it varies by industry/job position. It was a number out of thin air though, I'll admit.
Disagree to that.
I say, you can trust the markets and businesses to always act as unethical as possible. And with ‘possible’ I mean a lot worse than legally possible.
I don't really see organisations as unethical. They usually don't act ethically, but that's not because as a whole they're unethical.
I see them more like insects. They generally react to stimuli and just do the same as the other insects/organisations, things that have been proven to work. They're also generally driven by one basic instinct, to make more money, and they do it at any cost. The drones (employees) are entirely disposable in this endeavour and if they can entirely remove them from the equation they will do it in a heartbeat.
Even those that perhaps do have some form of ethical streak and don't think they should dump all their employees for AI/robots? Well, good for them, but they'll be driven out of business by those that do.
When you think of a business or other organisation in this way, a lot of the weird things they do start to make a lot of sense.
That doesn’t seem unethical to you??
‘At any cost’ usually means: by forgetting all kinds of laws and all kinds of ethics as well.
My point is, you don't see insects as ethical or unethical. I see organisations the same way. They're acting on instinct, and are just aiming to do what they exist for. Make money. Ethics don't even come into it. Now, peering outside in, you can try to cast society's ethical views on organisations. But, they generally don't even consider them (until they are forced to by local legislation, or that the route to making more money, or indeed not less money is to be seen to be ethical).
This is why there's more often than not a certain kind of person drawn to leadership positions.
You are saying that organisations don’t need any ethics at all, but at the same time you refuse to call this “unethical”.
For me this the point of EOD.
Nope. I think you're not really understanding what I'm trying to say. I'm saying that ethics do not factor into an organisation's decisions in the same way it doesn't for a colony of insects. They are ethically neutral in that respect.
At the same time, if you apply ethics looking from the outside in, of course you will cast their actions as ethical and unethical and many of their actions will be unethical.
I'm actually saying this is a bad thing, but is just a property of how an organisation, and especially successful businesses, operate. We're not going to change that, I suspect. As such we should expect businesses to exploit AI to the fullest ability, even knowing that removing most or all of their employees is bad for the employee, bad for the country (and the world), bad for the economy and ultimately in the future, bad for the business/organisation too. But they simply do not look that far ahead.
What’s the plan/roadmap Mr. Gates?
Edit: he solved tuberculosis or something, how about he eliminates an even bigger and more transmissible scourge on society—economic slavery which modern life constitutes
He’ll get back to you on that later. The third day of his work week is over.
Releasse ze prototype!
Yay! Pay cuts for everyone!
I love that this headline let’s ole Bill sound like a zoned out stoner college freshman.
Such a nice little stoner billionaire /s.
Don’t humanize these assholes. It’s the reason why he says stuff like this. He’s a wealth hoarding bastard that fucked a lot of people over to get where he’s at. If he thought it was a good idea he could easily just start a big trial somewhere. But he doesn’t. Instead he sits on his mountain of money and says cute shit for idiots to drool over instead of taxing him.
I’m more on the side of Marx’s character mask argument on people like Bill. That’s why I can make shitpost comments like mine even without liking him all too much.
Can you give me a summary why character masks make this cutesy billionaire shit ok?
I’m not confident enough in my knowledge about Marx‘s ideas to be arguing about that.
I think I got a grasp on the basics, capitalism creates societal positions like owners and workers, and Bill slipped into the mask of an owner.
But to me that does not mean that humanizing the billionaire class is a good thing. I’d rather say it makes it a worse thing, as it takes away incentives for lower classes to change the system and get rid of the owner class. How do we get anywhere close to equality if people see good ole Bill and Daddy Elon, instead of the ruthless oligarchs that they are?
But like I said, I don’t have a good grasp on this theory so would be happy to be corrected/have it explained to me ;)
It’s not like I’m a scholar on the subject or anything, but to my mind the key thing you said is “changing the system”. That’s the prerequisite for achieving a more just society. You can hate on the owner class all you want, simply getting rid of them will not necessarily overthrow societal power relations. New billionaires will rise, capitalism will not die along with the last rich white dude.
I would even go so far as to say that hating on the owning class kind of deflects from analyzing the contradictions and ideologies produced by capitalist societies themselves. This especially shows in certain sorts of reactionary political movements, who have no problem with capitalism as long as it feeds their nationalist ambitions instead of some globalist billionaire jet-set often described as Jewish.
My comment wasn’t really aimed at humanizing him, I only wanted to poke fun at him although I can see where you’re coming from.
Thanks for the answer, definitely is an interesting perspective! I’ll look more into the masks. And I wholeheartedly agree on the part about reactionaries using these kind of strategies. Something just throws me off about the weird folksy way we see a lot of these guys… be it Daddy Elon or Uncle Bill or Cowboy Jeff, framing them as quirky characters in the reality tv show that is our news media distracts from the real issues that each of those guys represent.
It’s not a bad idea, but it also can’t exist without a complete re-haul of what it means to live in modern society. Right now, replacing workers and cutting hours means people don’t have enough money to live. That is not an acceptable result of automation. I’m not qualified enough to have a reasonable solution to this, but I know it needs to be addressed before we get to that point.
Let’s just keep doing what we’re doing now
Isn’t this the primary argument for universal basic income? If you’re keeping unnecessary jobs around just to give people something to do, you’re not actually keeping them for contributions to society… In the long run ubi could probably even be cheaper than paying to prop up obsolete and wholly unnecessary industries.
While true, UBI would have to be funded by corporate tax.
“We no longer need people to be able to sell and deliver our products”
^ Win for the corporations
“Virtually no (low-income) property is unoccupied now. And my middle class tenants are making more from UBI, so I raised rent”
^ Win for landlords (which are mostly corporations)
“We can now demographically target ads to UBI payouts to get people to spend their money”
^ Win for corporations
It continues, but the general idea is that, while the populace could benefit from UBI, if it just comes from their taxes it’s not going to shrink class division in any way, but increase it
Yes, funding UBI with raised corporate taxes is absolutely not optional, I agree completely.
At the end of the day, simplified, UBI means: massive cuts to the workforce, in lieu of technology that can perform the exact same tasks more efficiently, for less; all the while paying people money at the same or similar levels of what they earned before.
It would be insane to assume the former would just grow wealthier over night while the latter is relegated to being financed by - in this example - wishful thinking. The money’s gotta come from somewhere, and it makes sense it be the same place it’s (supposed to be) coming from now.
If everyone gets UBI, I assume it is still optional to work. Otherwise no one would produce goods and services that we consume in order to live. Or at least fixing the robots.
I assume the incentive for that is additional income.
Wouldn’t this then create an even larger gap in income inequality? And further dilute the spending power of those who are only able to collect UBI?
It would, yes. But, the argument is that a person who wants a higher quality of life than “simply living” would be expected to work.
The right to life is, this way, protected - the right to a quality life, similar to today, would still have to be earned. This is in addition to the social pressure to work.
Also, one idea is that UBI would give people the financial space to pursue their own interests which in turn could easily --at least in some cases-- be turned into productive businesses of their own.
The machine doesn’t require a salary but instead of sending the money it saves to the workers it replaces it is added to the yearly profits, a three day work week with more automatisation can’t happen before that last part is reversed or there’s extreme deflation happening to compensate for lower wages.
Look at this guy who doesn’t have billions he made from the 90s and 2000s to rely on!
In 2010 Bill Gates was worth 50 Billion. He is now worth 117 Billion.
He ain’t exactly coasting. He just has a higher PR budget than he did back in the 90s.
I do wonder if this is even a money thing as even OpenAI has warned investors that money in the future is not certain. Maybe we are going to be forced to look to alternatives other than money as the means of value?
No one wants to work. They want to feel valued, and be productive. So let’s just make it where working isn’t a necessity, pls.
I don’t want to feel valued or productive, so I don’t work
You can get both of those things without working. But if you don’t want them, that’s fine.
As an end goal, with something like UBI and rescaled salaries etc … yes, this obviously true.
The catch is that there’d be a transition period, with uncertainties and states of incomplete capacity either from the AI or the implementation of the rearrangements of salaries etc.
In that phase, there will be opportunities for people or companies to acquire power and wealth over this new future. Who will make and sell the AIs? Who will decide what gets automated and how and with what supervision. That’s where the danger lies. It’s a whole new field of power to grab.
that’s not a problem because I plan on rising to power soon and will not let that happen
Woah there LeroyJenkins, we don’t need you rushing in too soon now
We need to have a plan in place first
I disagree, I vote for Leroy Jenkins to have all the power! All hail our new randomly selected overlord! 😁
Nah, Bill said where the machines make the food. So, we’re good. Least we got chicken.
oh my God he just ran in…
God dammit leroy
Fuck Bill gates
Capitalism and automation cannot coexist. Fallout 76 players know it very well.
I remember him saying that computers would make people work less by being more productive, but in the end the difference was pocketed by the rich. I don’t think it’s just a technology problem…
It has never been a technology problem.
If society was build correct in a democracy, advances in all fields would always be for benefitting the people and the majority.
This has been a problem ever since the industrial revolution and what caused the great depression.
If technology advances to a stage where we only need 75% of the current work force, the answer is not to fire 25%. It is for everyone to benefit and work 25% less or get 25% more pay. (or 12,5% work less and 12,5% more pay. Our choice)
That is a working democracy.
Communist!
/s (well kinda)
The term you’ll get more mileage out of here is Luddite.
The looms are stealing our jobs, so we should organize against them.
You should get 33% more pay as the full work force productivity would be 4/3 of the original in your example.
This difference might be clearer with an example where only half of the work force is required to match the original productivity. In this case, if the full work force continues to work, productivity is presumably doubled. That’s not a 50% increase. It’s 200% of the original or a 100% increase. So the trade-off should be between 50% fewer working hours and 100% more pay.
Of course, instead you’ll work the same hours for the same pay and some shareholders pocket that 100% difference.
It’s all about power. The 1% will not give up their power ( = the opportunity to do whatever they want whenever they want) just because it would be good for the 99% to work less.
That’s not how the world works.
The 1% will continue to make sure that they are in control of whatever the next thing is that grant them the same or more power.
If owning AI gives them power they will do whatever necessary to own AI and let’s not kid ourselves here “they” would be you and me if we had the chance.
It took me way too long to realize that a lot of people think like you do and then project it onto the rest of us.
No. If I’m being honest, I would pass at the chance to have power. I’m not arrogant enough to believe that I’d do the right thing with it. I have a small handful of people who have suffered at my hands throughout my life and I have a hard enough time sleeping over that.
To know that I was making the quality of life worse for people who I’d never even know for my own sake would break me. I’d deserve it too.
Unfortunately, the people who I’ve know that exercise power over their fellow man don’t seem to lose a wink of sleep. They justify everything, but they’re miserable and they don’t have any real friends. They’re constantly paranoid that people are out to take something from them because they are. Some people try to reach the pockets above the foot on their back to take what they can from the situation. I can’t relate to them either, but I can at least empathize with them.
Power corrupts, dilute it as much as possible.
We need a branch of government filled with random people. Politicians are people who seek power, the type of person that wins big elections is not a normal person, thus, normal people are not represented in government.
In the US, I wish the house were filled with random people. Randomly select 3 people for each house seat, have the 3 people debate and explain their personal beliefs, and then people vote. This would fill the seat with someone who is mostly likeable, but is still a normal person and not a career politician.
There is the G1000 initiative in Belgium and the Netherlands. The idea is to have the legislative body be random people. There are even towns that already have implemented it. The concept is simple enough: representative democracy is inherently flawed, so just have legislators drawn by a lottery. With a high enough amount of people, you will get a near perfect representation of the population proportionally represented. For national bodies, the proposal is to have 1000 legislators, hence the number.
Personally I quite like the idea, especially if it were to be paired with a technocratic executive branch.
Too bad the Netherlands is about to go down the shitter with their mini-Hitler.
I wrote test automation for Microsoft for years. My team turned a process that took 6 weeks of a hundred people working full time to produce manual test results into one that could complete in an hour on a couple hundred computers in a lab somewhere. It was a massive breakthrough in productivity on our part. Of course, 90% of the team was laid off when the code they’d written could be maintained by a couple of people.
So yeah, the difference “went to the shareholders”, certainly not to the people that did the work
<img alt="" src="https://links.hackliberty.org/pictrs/image/56622cd9-b55e-4756-a233-73e639de0e17.jpeg">
“I mean, it’s sure been great for me folks!”
You know what sounds even better? Turning this dude into ground meat
So soft and buttery I bet.
He just wants to own the machines and keep all the wealth they create.
What a stupid ass… yeah we’re just gonna magically erase all the inequality that YOU HELPED CREATE because robots can make us sandwiches. Sure. That’ll totally work out.
How are we going to get there, Mr Philanthropist?
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Caveat: I am not a communist. At best, I could be categorized as a “libertarian market socialist”.
Cruelty of “hustle” or “work culture” is an imperative for the parasitic ownership class precisely because it ensures the working classes do not have the free time to collectively bargain.
A 3-day work week is antithetical to keeping the proletariat under the boot heel of wage slavery.
People really need to be reminded how much blood it took for us to get a fucking weekend.
Didn’t we get one day a week since the Old Testament? And then we got a second day because new sky giant disagreed with the days from old sky giant?
Correct about Sunday, but a two-day weekend didn’t become a thing until organized labour fought for it in the 20s, and wasn’t codified into law until 1940.
Well you are right about the first one but also that day was meant to be spent studying up on the importance of hard work and worshipping the man who had earned his free day by putting real work in for 6 days. And then give every last cent you earned extra to an institution that appreciates it and helps buy your way to a perfect workless afterlife.
We will absolutely have automation but the workers will just be fired and all profits will be absorbed by the stockholder.
No cost savings will be passed on the other consumer either.
The problem is that would be wildly unstable. The capitalist class can’t sell automated-produced goods if people don’t have any money because they’re unemployed.
However, those mass layoffs will make this quarter’s numbers go up, and everything else is a problem for next quarter, which is why they’ll do it.
They’ll milk it until society crumbles putting Bandaids® on problems until revolution.
Once AI and robots can do/make anything they want on demand, they won’t even need money, so don’t need to make money by selling stuff. For sure, they will probably have a tough time transitioning from the idea of making money, but they won’t need to any more. The rest of us could split off our own fairer economy, but they’ll probably have the IP locked up on all the technology so we can’t use it and have to keep working 5 day or more weeks.
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Until machines get real AI and humanity get fucked up. 🤣🤣
Real talking: I believe what the majority of people need are better payment and wealth redistribution.
How in the world did Bill Gates go from being a scummy unethical monopolistic figure to now some trusted guru on everything? I need an explanation.
He used the money from the former to launder his image
Money = Infinity Stone
Remember when he depended on the workforce and labor of others? Then remember when he stepped away from running a company and stopped depending on labor?
That’s when he magically turned “for” employee rights and sustainability. Weirdly coincidental, I know.
I applaud and respect Gates for what he stands for now and what his foundation achieves. But he would be the first one to mandate return to office and be against anything that cuts into his bottom line if he was still running a company.
His foundation is a stack of lies. His desire is the same as it always was, control of what should be free.
He strategically bought HUGE amounts of land on top of Aquivers in us and many many other countries…
What he menas here is, HE can provide you with food IF YOU WORK FOR HIM
Lots of PR. I just listened to a QAnonAnonymous podcast episode on him and learned that the foundation isn’t as charitable as it seems. There are many reports that they come in and try to control the charity/project requesting funds, force these groups to give licensing rights to their technology, and often rely on public funds to get their projects off the ground. They likened it to the old Microsoft days where they come in and absorb companies with hostile takeovers.
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We’re already at the point where don’t have to work 4 days a week tho.
We do if we want to pay the rent.
From the employee perspective yes, we have to work 4 days a week, but from the employer perspective, there’s no need to work 4 days a week. In fact, it’s even less productive than working 5 days a week.
Sometimes I wonder what they would do if you could make endless perfect copies of objects like you can mp3s.
Dududdo you wouldn’t copy a car. You wouldn’t copy a cheeseburger Copying is a crime.
Like remember it’s only been recently that it became possible to make endless copies of media at effectively no cost.
Can I introduce you to Star Trek?
In The Orville (Seth MacFarlane Star Trek-like show) they actually have a brief discussion about how if that technology was plonked into a world like we have today, it would not be used to make life better for everyone. It would be capitalised on.
Imagine if you could create food at no cost. You think everyone is getting fed, or do you think one company is going to have massive profit margins selling food that it costs nothing to produce?
I don’t remember that bit but I think I only watched the first season of the Orville and that was years ago.
But yeah really depends on how difficult the equipment itself is to replicate.
If it’s some massive machine the size of a room it’s going to make some company extremely rich, they’d sell product for slightly less than normal market value taking over the market with perfectly consistent product and insane margins allowing legal capture.
Why feed everyone when you can almost literally print money?
If it’s something small that can be easily transported and duplicated? Piracy. Nobody will give AF about patents and everyone will have them within a couple years no matter what laws they try to implement or how they try and prevent it.
This has actually already happened with media and this is exactly how it has played out and a lot of people still seem to be in denial.
They can complain and sick lawyers on as many people as they want but they can still make a million copies of something that cost 400 million to make for less than than the cost of a gumball.
The law surrounding it is completely broken and it’s crazy that so many industries are trying to continue on like nothing has changed.
I think it was a 30 second part of the last episode in season 3, I watched it (for the first time) recently so remember it.
I guess it depends who develops it. If Apple invent it then you can be sure they aren’t selling them to anyone else, it will just be secretly used to print iPhones and no one else will have access to one, so no piracy of iPhones.
If a third party company invents it then starts trying to sell them to other companies, then maybe that outcome will be better.
If it’s room sized and sold to other companies it will rapidly be in multiple countries.
There wouldn’t be any way to keep it to one company with it being public knowledge.
Like realistically I’d think any country would ignore whatever laws on the books and just outright sieze the tech as a matter of national security and duplicate it for their own use if they found out a company was hiding such a thing.
From there it’d again leak to all other major countries in short order.
If it’s small and easy to duplicate, (can it replicate itself?) It would spread like wildfire and would like piracy be completely uncontainable.
I don’t think there is anyway the tech could be either contained or kept secret any real length of time.
Hmm you make a good point. I was assuming Apple would just claim a sort of trade secret, I hadn’t thought that governments may seize it.
The other thing is that technology doesn’t really go nothing->machine that replicates anything
Most likely it will start with a machine that can 3d print edible apples from shelf stable source material or something like that. Then someone improves it to be able to do any fruit from the same source material. Then someone improves it so if you feed in a range of different source materials (say, a bunch of metals, glass, and plastic) you can print usable electronics or something. Then someone improves it so it can do the same thing but with one mix of materials instead of separate ones. And so one and so one until you can make almost anything.
At the print 3d apples stage, it will probably get sold to the army for supply rations. Then the maker will look for other places to sell it, then when technology advances people will get updated versions. There probably wouldn’t be a benefit to a company hiding it because at any point the difference from the publically available one is not that big.
If you look back at any major invention, lightbulb, radio, etc. You find that in fact these things predated their supposed invention, there was just some small change that made it commercially viable from the previous version.
I’ve always envisioned this type of utopia to be robot based, with a few machines thrown in for sure. I’ve thought if you can robots plant, grow and harvest the raw food. Then have autonomous trucks drive that food to processing plants that then have robots and machines processing it. You then again have autonomous trucks drive it to the grocery “store” that then have robots placing the product you could in theory make all food free*. (add a billion asterisks to that last statement) Making the food free would probably require the entire economy to migrate to robot workers as much as possible or at least have it be where the robots make other robots so at least they are low cost/free to make. It’ll never happen, we’re totally destined for a Cyberpunk future instead of Star Trek future, but it’s at least fun to think about.
Unfortunately the Star Trek future had some pretty nasty stuff happen between now and hundreds of years in the future when most of it is set. Pretty sure we are only a few decades away from a global nuclear war in the Star Trek timeline.
Don’t we need transhumans before the nuclear wars?
They would figure it out some way to enforce artificial scarcity. Can’t have poor people getting free stuff without being worthy.
Yea sure, and then slowly slowly even stop those who work 3 per days, right? So the AI csn do all the job. Now they lose money, but once they put AI they will only win money.
AI is good, they develop AI to help us, and then, one day will ditch us.
It is easier to have AI optimize the bullshit jobs than the shit jobs.
Sounds great. Only question is how we get paid well enough to live. A question which went conveniently unasked and unanswered.
We should stop measuring our productivity in hourly and need to go back to salary well paying positions, or everyone needs to share the costs with UBI instead.
Good luck convincing companies to change anything that won’t make them more money. I think the only way it can happen is with UBI, hopefully funded by the hoarded assets of the few biggest companies and billionaires where all the money is getting accumulated.
You mean the people who don’t think healthcare should be a right also would not be down with UBI? I’m shocked I tell you. Shocked.
Salaried wages don’t make sense for a whole lot of positions tho - like you’d have 0 manufacturing employees.
“machines can make all the food and stuff”
Don’t see any reason why we couldn’t have maintainence and repair robots as well, so what manufacturing employees?
There will, for all of the foreseeable future, be a human element in every manufacturing or farming process.
AI can beat replace repeatable behaviors. There will always be someone on-site to address outlier situations.
That really depends on weather we can create AGI or not. Might come sonner than you think.
If we invent AGI all bets are off for everything though. That’s a discovery on par with fire or the wheel.
Sounds like a skilled job for me that ought to be paid then
The point is salaried workers generally would make less.
Exactly, and it shouldn’t be hard to find someone willing to do that job for 3 days a week.
Sure but they’re not gonna want to do it as a salaried employee, because the random overtime required will be more valuable.
machines will make money for us too, everyone gets a magic money machine
Bill Gates supports higher capital gains taxes as well as EITC which is a form of Negative Income Tax, and in his hypothetical we’re going to need a lot of engineers and mechanics to make it work. He also says a UBI could work if automation production increases in the coming decade or so, but he doesn’t currently support it.
You might think “OH BUT EITC DOESNT REALLY HELP THE POOR BECAUSE YOU HAVE TO HOLD A JOB” but the thing is for businesses to stay open more than 3 days a week they would need to start hiring more people for less hours per week.
okay I’ll take it. Bill is one of the few that’s actually thinking things through at least.
Assuming the owners of those machines don’t restrict the people’s access to that “food and stuff”
People who sell things that are in high demand and necessary for survival generally are not in the practice of denying people access to those things.
Um healthcare?
Health care providers are not in the habit of denying care. Health insurers are because they have a perverse incentives to do so - this is why they should not exist
Exactly the people who sell the thing in high demand the issurers are in the business of denying care to people by raising prices on healthcare. I feel like your mind is in the right place I agree insurance companies shouldn’t exist but what you said in your first comment is false large companies who sell high demand products absolutely gouge on prices all of the time.
That’s literally not true though. They compete with each other over offering the lowest price.
That’s funny. In reality they compete on increasing shareholder profits by colluding on prices and paying their employees as little as possible. And to be crystal clear “they” are the CEOS/boards of most major companies.
This is not at all how businesses operate lol
I’d love to see the rock you live under but it absolutely is how most large corporations operate. You quote economic theories as if they are fact, I’m speaking on the history of how large corporations have acted literally my entire life.
Unlike you, I work with senior leaders at big corporations. It is most assuredly not how they operate.
Ah so you’re part of the problem got it. This you?
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It took you this many attempts to make this shitty a post? Lol
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Liver spots are just a skin pigmentation. They don’t get erect.
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In what world? Outside of government exchanges, you’re limited to the plan your employer offers you.
We were discussing large corps that aren’t insurance companies
if you won’t deny a thing to someone it’s pretty hard to sell it to anyone
Then i have got a bridge to sell you. Its quite necessary you see…
Also, What mind bending drugs are you on? Healthcare is riddled with examples of denied insurance claims for treatments.
The only way I can reconcile your statement is if you finish it with “if they can afford it”. Which also makes your statement meaningless. No one was ever arguing that business denies products/services to those who can pay for them.
Health care, food, and shelter are all in high demand, necessary for survival, and if you can’t afford it, you are denied it.
“If they can afford it” suggests otherwise.
Yes, things do indeed cost money and always will until we discover replicator tech.
You think Bill Gates of all people don’t know that? He’s just trying to gaslight us into thinking the stupid-rich gigacorporation owners like him are the solution and not the problem.
I don’t know about that. Young ruthless Bill Gates was another person, older and wiser Bill Gates has already achieved richest person in the world, Forbes #1, etc etc - all that’s in the rearview mirror - I believe he has awakened and realized it takes a village and he wants his legacy to reflect that
What’s more likely, a complete reversal of his world view, or a good PR team and some coaching. I’m not buying the first, especially considering that his Jeffrey Epstein association came after he left MS and started running his charitable foundation.
Just goes to show how you can change your public image with shit loads of money. He just laundered his image real good and you just ate it up.
He has not “awakened” to anything. He’s just very good at selling his BS. What’s even worse is that now if you bring up his shitty ways, you are associated with the anti vax idiots.
Bill Gates hasn’t really changed dude. He’s just developed a thicker veneer. He’s the largest landowner in the US now, because he’s been buying up as much arable land as possible. He can say its BAU all he wants, it’s incredibly sketchy af. Now in conjunction with this statement, its easy to see where once he cornered the software market, you could infer he’s aspiring to do the same with food with full automation.
Michael Burry (guy from the big short) has been doing the same. We all know climate change is going to fuck us, we all know we are headed towards serious water shortages, etc - these guys also know and have money to position themselves - for what final gameplan I don’t know, but at least with Gates his recent history has shown a care for the greater good for humanity at least. Can’t say the same for other billionaires.
I know Bills history pretty well, I just see a difference between him now and how he was a ruthless businessman in his prior life. Maybe he has me fooled, but I don’t really see it other than people’s conspiracy theory stuff. Guys like Elon are another story though
Machines making all the food? I’m out, my pallette deserves better.
Pretty sure you could just make your own on your days off.
Do you only eat food that has been untouched by machines now?
Yeah! I’ll take my certified organic farm-to-table heritage tomato that was sorted and packaged by machines in a factory. But at least it was grown by a real farmer… In a batch of millions and harvested by a machine.
When someone says technology will make your work easier, they’re looking for an excuse to make you work harder.
Or replace you.
Or force everyone to work part time, and drop benefits…
Farmers would disagree
Yes, but farmers also need to know how a CLI works and how to solder microcontrollers in order to get their machines working without forking over their firstborn to John Deere
Yeah no shit. The problem is that capitalism hates it.
“Hmmm… Solve world hunger…Why don’t we do that?..”
“Sir, your dinner is ready.”
“The flies were wild caught yes?”
“From Botswana sir. Just as you like.”
Slurp
The Netherlands, Switzerland, Austria, Hungary and Denmark are all capitalist societies and run on <5 day work weeks. Capitalism is not the problem, North American society in particular is what seems to have the problem.
Each of which have about 2-4x union participation than USA, for example. Which indicates to me that they’re doing a better job of keeping capitalism at bay, not that capitalism is more benevolent in those countries.
Crap, now all the braindead covid conspiracy theorists are going to roll this into their “15 minite cities are open air prisons” conspiracies
I mean…isn’t your pattern recognition starting to ring a little bit?
No.
Because I’m not under the self-important delusion that everything is part of a grand conspiracy out to get me.
It doesn’t ever matter to you people how obvious it becomes over time. Like three years ago when a ridiculous number of people seemed to beleive the policies then wouldn’t result in the reality now, no matter how hard we tried to tell you.
I have learned over the years that reasoned discussion is impossible at this point. You are firmly fixed on your opinions, and I am moderately fixed with mine, and the gulf in between is large.
So I will simply bid you good day.
I’ve not stated an opinion or theory. I asked if you can think.
you sure can’t
that’s almost clever, how long that take you to conceive?
which policies?? You just gonna shit out an example that is generic as fuck and doesn’t actually shed any light on the bs you’re trying to push?
How the hell is a 3day work week result in open air prisons??? You have to back this absurd claim up or literally everything else you say is fucking bullshit.
The fuck are you even talking about?
Literally what bro
Pattern recognition, do you have it?
I’m recognizing a pattern in your comments all right
Is it irritation?
Honestly it’w been a couple days, kinda forgot. Happy Thanksgiving.
People who believe in this insane shit shouldn’t be allowed to vote… in fact, should be in literal prisons, as they’re a danger to themselves and society.
Cultural conservatives (including many leftists) believe that social liberals are a danger to themselves. That’s not a precedent that you want to start.
Just for interesting learning, what leftist groups would you consider to be cultural conservatives?
I wouldn’t say that there’s any specific group.
Anyone who votes conservative against their economic opinions would qualify.
Tankies.
Apologists for Lenin, Stalin, Mao, the CCP, the DPRK, and any other authoritarian genocidal cult that champions “collectivism” for the “people”.
Analogous to the pigs in Animal Farm.
So, you don’t believe in voting as a human right, and you think prisons have ever solved even a single solitary thing in their entire history?
Miss me with that lmao
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I didn’t name a conspiracy theory. I asked if you had pattern recognition. It would seem not.
My pattern recognition tells me there are faces in clouds too, should i believe in cloud giants?
Yes you should, that’s totally the same thing as recognizing trends over time.
You skipped class on the “correlation does not mean causation” day didn’t you?
Walkable cities would be an absolute hellhole, but not for the reasons that conspiracy theorists are claiming. Packing everyone in densely enough to make everything walkable will be a hellhole.
We need affordable options for transportation. Bad weather and the cold also require enclosed vehicles that can’t tip over.
Have you ever heard of the concept of “cities”? Everything important is within walking distance in the capital of my country and if not there is great public transport.
I’m sure they’re aware. Hell is other people.
We used to have walkability. It was actually better than the car infested hellhole we are it right now.
A lot of words to to express “I’m an American who doesn’t even have a passport.”
Can’t even imagine a walkable city, and talking about it like it’s a far-off sci-fi concept, rather than a lot of peoples’ actual everyday life. Yikes.
Walkable cities exist. They’re quite nice.
The term walkable includes public transportation. It’s a multiplier on what locations are considered accessible without owning a car. Common misconception.
If machine’s make everything how can we have work for everyone? Even for 3days a year
I believe the saying is that machines makes most of the manufacturing, simple and mundane services. Humans could then focus on research and development (improving machines), improving our living standard, medicine psychology and so on. And have time to do what you like.
If you listen to sam altman the agi, amachine that improves itself and can do research is 5yr away. Probs marketing talk.
I think the point is to look past the idea of having to work just for the sake of an income.
A 3-day work week would give rise to doing 2 non-concurrent jobs, or a six day work week.
I mean, I could see the benefits - don’t like one of your jobs? Quit one, it isn’t loosing your whole paycheck. Of course, there are weird structural problems like getting scheduled for those 3 days and random times throughout the week making it really a 7-day job with only 3-days of work, and the whole “you can only work 19.95 hrs and if you work more, then we are required to give you health insurance, so you can’t work more than that.”
What? How broken are we all that you first thought is “Nice then I can work two jobs” The only way this really works if they pay living wages for 3 day work weeks. And I know they aren’t even paying those now for 5-6 days but this is a point we have to insist on and make them do it. Workers have managed to enforce a 8 hour work day a long time ago. We need to remember our strength and fight for better conditions.
We are very broken. Rather than improving, the working conditions of most people are declining, and pay isn’t keeping up with living costs.
I believe at some point people won’t take it, but right now I wouldn’t be surprised if people took two job rather than enjoy their free time. Many already do, because they need to.
this is more about an US problem, 10 years without salary adjusts,a and the shit house market, to be fair the house marked is a problem in other countries, like canada, but not the pay check, i’m not trying to start a fight or just saying USA bad, just showing that needing two jobs to live isn’t the norm, and you’ll as a USA citizens need to see that and starting demanding for better pay, and fix the issues of your countries, if other less rich countries can do that why USA can’t, please be safe
I’m not american. This is not an US-only problem, this is a problem of our wider economic system and corporate influence. Even countries that used to have better conditions are increasingly pressured to exploit their people in the same way.
That’s a long sentence
Great. Now tell us about your flights on Epstein’s plane.
He’s ok with it as long as the machines are all running Windows, and he gets his fair share.
I don’t think ol’ Billy cares much about Windows anymore, I’ll be honest.
Given that he has flirted heavily with Samsung as of recently.
What will happen is some people will work more then that at second jobs for more money, and then that will drive down wages for everyone else.
That’s The Jetsons, Bill. You’re describing the setting of The Jetsons.
I mean, I wouldn’t be opposed to that kind of lifestyle, so long as you don’t ascribe to the fan theory that the Flintstones takes place on the ground below the towers
So some kind of techno quasi-socialism. Sounds great. I wonder who’s gonna get in the way of that, Bill?
it will NEVER happen as long as we live in an oligarchy in which the rich are dependent on the lower classes not only for their labor but they also need us to exist for their feelings of superiority. They need people below them to feel good about themselves, they will NEVER let us escape the wage-slave to profit vacuumer dichotomy.
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Exactly.
I don’t think it’s a “need for a feeling of superiority” that’s keeping it this way.
I think it’s because the hunger of the oligarchy is literally bottomless.
Each oligarch is in competition with all the other oligarchs.
Oligarch power is wealth.
So the oligarch feels eternal pressure to get wealthier. To beat the other oligarchs who are also constantly pressured to become wealthier. It’s a variety of prisoner’s dilemma.
And they get wealth by squeezing resources. Resources like us.
The easy solutiont o that is getting rid of the oligarchs then.
I disagree, I think it’s always just about money. Power hungry-ness comes from the fear of losing your current position, the fear of not advancing and getting left behind. With power they secure the position they have. And it’s not just exclusive to the rich. You can see the exact same pattern in a random fucking McDonald’s.
If it was more profitable (and possible) to automate 40% of work at any given company (the ratio Gates said in this article), everyone would do it in a heartbeat.
I wish him to become a monk or someone like that, and disappear forever
If we convert half of the population to food we could cut that workweek down to 2 days.
Great, that can be his next project after making sure the COVID vaccine was subject to patent law.
I’m even ok with the 0-day work week, as long as I get the salary in time.
Utopia would be one where humans can focus on art and science to advance our race while the mundane work of running a society is all automated. Stuff like this is not enough, but it seems like a step in the right direction where income remains the same to maintain a standard of living while still producing the same output
When I was a child I envisioned fully automated luxury communism driven by robots and AI.
Realizing that wouldn’t happen for the dumbest possible reasons as a teen/young adult was immeasurably disappointing