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If companies are faced with the choice between:

- employ you at 60k/yr

- replace you with a machine that costs a lot of money, and also send you UBI of 60k/yr

It should be obvious the latter is not an option that is ever going to happen.


The problem is, companies will go for the third route: hire a company in India to launder AI. It has already worked out once with the offshoring wave.

This will still wind up with them paying UBI eventually

For the Indians?

What if the machine in this context is 3x as productive as you?

Then it replaces 3 people's jobs, requiring paying 3 UBI's in this thought experiment.

What un-corrupted person or system is going to perform this assessment?

The solution to the subsequent devaluation of labor, and ability for tech oligarchs to pocket the cash instead, will not be found in capitalism.

Unless we are all to become serfs, a new way to distribute resources needs to be on the table.

UBI is a salve, offered to keep victims of the system out of abject poverty. It is too little, too late.


We are returning to feudalism, with a cyberpunk spin on it.

You will not own anything. You don't even really own your tech now.

The writing is on the wall: you will not be allowed to modify what you own.


Totally onboard with some managed risk of injury being ok. Very much not onboard with the parents who trust their six year olds to face mortal peril alone and make good choices.

I read through the comment you replied to multiple times and I’m not seeing any mortal peril referenced. What are you referring to?

all risk comes with some small chance of tragedy

This part. I’m not going to assume what that person meant, but there’s always a few people about in these conversations lamenting that when they were six, they were certainly never hit by a car, and really you have to let your children take a few risks etc…


Every time someone drives their child somewhere, they are being put into a position of a small chance of tragedy. The chance of tragedy doesn't go away, only our perceptions of it. People seem to be more okay with dying with their child than their child dying away from them, so I guess that makes sense.

So what do you recommend instead, a dice roll?


Why not? Same for hiring. People keep trying to impress order on a process that is ultimately, inherently chaotic, because of the reliance on disorderly human agents to carry it out.

Maybe if C-suite bros thought they might lose their golden geese to a coin flip, they'd think twice about instituting layoffs. Ironically, it would put a wall between "labor costs" (actual people with actual lives that are massively disrupted by job loss) and other costs, in terms of what can be excised from the balance sheet with an inconsiderate pen stroke.


I mean - you don't want to keep the unlucky people, right?


Good when the damage is done, bad as a method of approving new chemicals.


No living breathing human deserves to be subjected to my level of overthinking, and vanishingly few share my fascination with my favorite topics.


It certainly killed a lot of my tinkering outside of work, but that's more a matter of when I'm already doing the thing for most of the day, even though I like it I don't always want to continue doing it for the rest of the day too when I get home.


If that reduced trafficking, would it not be a worthwhile exchange?


I keep asking it questions, and as I dialogue about the problem, I walk right into the conclusion myself, classic rubber duck. Or occasionally it will say something back, and it’s like “of course! That’s exactly what I’ve been circling without realizing it!”

This mostly happens with things I’ve already had long cognitive loops on myself, and I’m feeling stuck for some reason. The conversation with the model is usually multiple iterations of explaining to the model what I’m working through.


It’s often lamented that some employees have a difficult case to argue for their impact on the bottom line, and as a result probably get paid a lower fraction of their value to the business than other roles where the link is easy to measure.

I can at least “imagine” a model that tries to crack this nut.


But your value to a company doesn’t just come from your impact, but how tough you are to replace, how much others value your skills, etc.

Nike’s logo designer was paid $35. One model says she should’ve gotten hundreds of thousands of dollars, because of what her work product went on to become. Another model of the value says it was worth $35 because that’s what she agreed to.

If, as an employee, you think you’re massively undervalued for the impact you generate, go out to the market and either get another job or start your own business making widgets - either you’ll get that pay bump you expect, or you’ll see you actually were relying on a lot of other supporting mechanisms to generate that value.


If this was all unequivocally true and the end of the story, then no one would make commission, and yet some do.


That’s the odd psychosis here. Everyone knew loc was a terrible measure. But perhaps the instinctual pull was always there, and now that you can generate halfway coherent tens of thousands of loc in hours, our sensibilities are overwhelmed.


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