Doesn't work as well these days when everything is too big to fail and gets bailed out, instead of letting the economy endure the destruction part of creative destruction.

This is kind of like saying in war, old weapons getting phased out reduces violence. While I am relieved I don't have to worry about musket ball injuries, the new weapons are more effective at what they are designed to do and the people driving the need for newer and more effective weapons have not fundamentally changed in their motivations.

The businesses themselves aren't driving the economy or how the megarich really make their money. Businesses are only the tools used by what's actually driving the economy which is Capital. The same Capitalists which drive businesses to behave ruthlessly in a marketplace, grow rapidly, and ultimately collapse under their own weight will simply reinvest in an entity which will competently bring in a return on investment. The only redistribution of wealth happening is Capital investment being diverted to other tools of Capitalism. Capitalists don't care which businesses or industry they're investing in, they only care about maximising the return on their investment and using their influence to ensure that happens as much as possible.

When I think of historical wealth distribution which has had major impact on the lives of regular people, I can't think of any which were caused by an outdated business clearing up some room in the market for newer and more lucrative capital investments to take its place. I have seen it through government action though.

The investment class realized it's way more profitable to cellar box a struggling company and that you can short sell the stock and never have to pay up when the company goes bankrupt. Free money!

with some of the money making its way back into society as a whole.

I'd laugh, but it hurts too much.

I've been following Doctorow for decades now (BoingBoing) and yes, he's an idiot in this situation.

I'm still working with the organizations I started automating for more than a decade ago. I'm sitting in the office of one of them right now. It's worked out great, nobody is complaining about the fact that this office space now has people at separated desks instead of crunched together like they were when I started. If it makes you feel any better, I almost exclusively do this for government and public organizations (I'm at a post-secondary education institution right now) though I really don't care.

Stopping or stalling productivity improvements is stupid, that job is effectively useless if it can be automated, it's nothing more than make-work to keep it. We should pass laws to redistribute wealth to solve that problem, not keep them in useless jobs by preventing automation.

Yeah. This is something that to me isn't getting enough attention in the whole conversation. I'm trying to get myself up to speed on how to code effectively with AI tools, but I feel like understanding the code at a deep level is required in order to be able to do that effectively.

In the future, I think the "earning" that gives you that type of knowledge won't be something that people are forced to go through anymore, because AI can do the simple stuff for them, and so the inevitable result is that very few people will be able to do more than rely on the AI tools to either get it right or not, because they don't understand the underlying systems. I'm honestly not sure what future is in store a couple generations from now other than most people being forced to trust the AI (whatever its capabilities or incapabilities are at that point). That doesn't sound like a good scenario.

Anecdote are not statistics.

Head counts increasing at one company are often offset by losses from their competitors as they take market share due to increased productivity.

The number of auto mechanics went up as the number of horse ranchers went down.

I honestly have no idea what the solution is. To me the issue is that with technology where it is, only about 20% of us actually have to do any work to keep all the wheels turning and provide for everyone. So far, in the western world, the solution has been to occupy people with increasingly-bullshit jobs (and, for some reason, not giving a lot of people who do the actual work enough to live on), but as technology keeps getting more and more powerful we're more and more being faced with the limits of "you have to work to live" as a way to set things up.

tip: you can actually get organized in a union and strike just to get more money, no need for AI or getting fired. CEOs hate this trick!

✊🏼

Sort of. But people in society CAN act in solidarity. It's obviously unlikely (something tech CEO's calculated in these layoffs).

Obviously, capitalist exceptionalism is going to cause them not to do this. No one wants to loan their neighbor some money to weather a strike that WILL eventually lift ALL BOATS because of the whole "fuck you, got mine" vibe of EVERYONE in cutthroat capitalist societies. If I had the money, I'd certainly take part in this kind of collective action...and I'd also argue that many tech workers can because they were paid INCREDIBLY well in comparison to most trades....but you and I know they won't.

I'm a member of a stagehand union that will NEED to strike during the summer (our busiest season) in order to gain some ground back from what price gouging, austerity, and inflation has taken from us. I can easily guess how likely the membership will be to endorse a strike when we will have been out of work for more than a year when negotiations start. That doesn't make what I said less true; just about as unlikely as a third power coming to power in the United States two party electoral system.