It’s not just moving industry to countries with cheap labor, there’s also importing cheap labor.
These two things have positive effects for workers elsewhere because they get skilled and comparatively well paid jobs.
A fully globalized economy should eventually balance itself out regarding wages for similarly skilled jobs.
With AI and robots this shifts further. Let’s see where this goes.
It will be fascinating to see a post scarcity economy. Will all people work as artists, personal trainers, motivational speakers, artisanal bakers, and such?
It’s not just moving industry to countries with cheap labor, there’s also importing cheap labor.
These two things have positive effects for workers elsewhere because they get skilled and comparatively well paid jobs.
A fully globalized economy should eventually balance itself out regarding wages for similarly skilled jobs.
In theory. In practice, the planet is too big for unified union action or unified political action. You can unionize on a country level and call general strikes on a country level. You can’t do that on planet scale. Globalized economy sidesteps the power of unions and the power of the people in general.
It will be fascinating to see a post scarcity economy. Will all people work as artists, personal trainers, motivational speakers, artisanal bakers, and such?
Technically, we have been living in a post-scarcity economy for the last 50-70 years already. We have a massive global food overproduction. We have more than enough resources to give everyone a pretty nice standard of living. But on the one hand we have a massively inefficient economical system, where huge parts of the population do redundant work and bullshit jobs, while another huge part of the population do tasks that just exist to prop up the system (e.g. the whole financial and marketing sectors only exists because of the capitalist system, they aren’t doing anything worthwhile at all).
We live in an artificial scarcity society, because capitalism needs artificial scarcity to work.
People sell their labour for money, which they then use to buy stuff from the capitalists, and the capitalists use (part of) the money to buy labour from people.
With AI and robots, this will soon not be necessary any more. The labour of the people will be even less relevant than it is today. So the question then becomes whether (a) the system will collapse and what will happen afterwards or (b) if we will just pump even more bullshit into our bullshit jobs to prop up the old system.
It doesn’t need to stay that way. International labor movements have been attempted more than 100 years ago already and more than once. At a time where there was no instant cheap worldwide communication and cheap machine translation.
robots and AI
You can already run a decently sized LLM on a computer in your own home. 3D printers are affordable. Mass produced electronics and other parts are cheap. More automation makes things even cheaper. Normal people could soon (10 years) own an intelligent robot of their own. First buy one for the price of a car, later being able to build one yourself from easily available parts and free software.
Look at how the Ukraine war used DIY techniques to develop and build drones as effective weapons of war. Something similar will repeat itself.
Capitalism might no longer need humans for labor. It will still need humans as customers and a market.
It’s not just moving industry to countries with cheap labor, there’s also importing cheap labor.
These two things have positive effects for workers elsewhere because they get skilled and comparatively well paid jobs.
A fully globalized economy should eventually balance itself out regarding wages for similarly skilled jobs.
It will be fascinating to see a post scarcity economy. Will all people work as artists, personal trainers, motivational speakers, artisanal bakers, and such?
In theory. In practice, the planet is too big for unified union action or unified political action. You can unionize on a country level and call general strikes on a country level. You can’t do that on planet scale. Globalized economy sidesteps the power of unions and the power of the people in general.
Technically, we have been living in a post-scarcity economy for the last 50-70 years already. We have a massive global food overproduction. We have more than enough resources to give everyone a pretty nice standard of living. But on the one hand we have a massively inefficient economical system, where huge parts of the population do redundant work and bullshit jobs, while another huge part of the population do tasks that just exist to prop up the system (e.g. the whole financial and marketing sectors only exists because of the capitalist system, they aren’t doing anything worthwhile at all).
We live in an artificial scarcity society, because capitalism needs artificial scarcity to work.
People sell their labour for money, which they then use to buy stuff from the capitalists, and the capitalists use (part of) the money to buy labour from people.
With AI and robots, this will soon not be necessary any more. The labour of the people will be even less relevant than it is today. So the question then becomes whether (a) the system will collapse and what will happen afterwards or (b) if we will just pump even more bullshit into our bullshit jobs to prop up the old system.
It doesn’t need to stay that way. International labor movements have been attempted more than 100 years ago already and more than once. At a time where there was no instant cheap worldwide communication and cheap machine translation.
You can already run a decently sized LLM on a computer in your own home. 3D printers are affordable. Mass produced electronics and other parts are cheap. More automation makes things even cheaper. Normal people could soon (10 years) own an intelligent robot of their own. First buy one for the price of a car, later being able to build one yourself from easily available parts and free software.
Look at how the Ukraine war used DIY techniques to develop and build drones as effective weapons of war. Something similar will repeat itself.
Capitalism might no longer need humans for labor. It will still need humans as customers and a market.
No, they will all starve, because they can’t make their own food, and are no longer valuable.