In 1987, economist and Nobel laureate Robert Solow made a stark observation about the stalling evolution of the Information Age: Following the advent of transistors, microprocessors, integrated circuits, and memory chips of the 1960s, economists and companies expected these new technologies to disrupt workplaces and result in a surge of productivity. Instead, productivity growth slowed, dropping from 2.9% from 1948 to 1973, to 1.1% after 1973.
a paradox from 40 years ago
In 1987
Oh god I’m old
the 80s was 25 years ago paradox
The year 2050 is closer to today than the year 2000
Wow machines don’t create new value, where have I heard this before?
Marx did not - could not - conceive of thinking machines in Capital. AI is in a different class than a weaving mill.
But AI, at this point and for the foreseeable future, is not a thinking machine. It’s a probability machine. It can do some neat tricks and some helpful things, but it is not thinking.
I would also posit that AI is in many ways less useful than tech that came before it. Computers largely augment what people had been doing on paper for centuries before, just faster, more consistently, easier. AI promises to outsource thinking, which isn’t augmenting something people already do (or at least should do). But at this point, it fails to do even that.
You’re right, it’s an entirely new class of machine. A fucking stupid class that should be taken out back and shot.
The particular qualities of the machine itself are practically irrelevant. It doesn’t matter what the machine does, what inherent qualities it has. What matters is the relation it has to workers and the capitalists.
“Machines were the weapons used by the capitalists to quell the revolt of specialized labor”
– some blurry guy“Marx could not conceive of
thinkingprogrammable machines”All the ways that loom stitching - like a player piano - is not Turing complete, much less like large training set AI.
And those looms inspired Chuck Babbage to build the Difference Engine, which was at the 1862 World’s Fair. Years before Marx started writing Capital.
So again, when you say these machines are inconceivable to Marx…
Blah blah blah
The difference engine was never built by Babbage.
This is a false comparison built upon a false presumption.
What was at the 1862 World Fair then? That pesky word you used…
Your beliefs rest on
- This clearly conceived thing not being conceived
- An implied assertion Marx wouldn’t be aware of specific large events
If you could prove either, I guess you’d be in the clear, but for some reason you’re insisting upon both.
These machines don’t think, though. They are the same glorified calculators we’ve been using, just with slightly updated formula sets. What we should be focusing on is the advent of quantum computing, which will supercharge everything we’re currently dealing with. That will be our generation’s Y2K. I read recently that quantum will become cheap enough to start disrupting things as early as 2029, which is not very far away.
But human society is still somehow connected to human effort.
Economists: “We can’t be wrong. The results are obviously a paradox. Yeah, that’s the answer.”
I guess it takes years of study and experience to just double down over and over again instead of admitting the “miracle” tech you’re hyping accomplishes a fraction of what you’re trying to make it do. Very illuminating to us plebs that wouldn’t know better.
That’s reductive. I’m no economist but it goes like this: there are models that predicts the effects of certain industry changes. The invention of certain technologies at a certain time had effects that didn’t match the prediction and they don’t know why. Someday somebody will figure it out and the model will be better. In the mean time, the model continues to work just fine with other stuff.
The invention of certain technologies at a certain time had effects that didn’t match the prediction and they don’t know why. Someday somebody will figure it out and the model will be better.
Also known as “being wrong”. Being wrong is fine. It’s great even. It means that there’s more to discover and improve. Calling it a “paradox” is a pathetic, self-serving attempt to save face when presented with evidence that makes them look bad. Instead of saying “We don’t know, but we’re working on it,” they pass it off as unsolvable.
Paradox was a word chosen by the journalist for clicks.
Not knowing enough is not the same as being wrong. They are different things.
You’re angry at journalism, not social science.
Maybe. Until they start calling this out for the farce it is, I’m gonna blame them as much as the journalists pushing the hype.
You’d be helped by learning something about social science rather than rail against it ignorantly. You could then make constructive critiques to improve everything.
I’m angry at social science. Just not about this specifically.
And yet the layoffs continue…
AI is a nice scape goat for justifying firings.
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Time per task, output per time, sales, products, whatever the company does.
Compare with whatever the same data showed before pushing ai.
Cheapest possible exploitation of the labour of others
Firing workers
Yet wages stagnate while profits rise. Productivity is being generated somewhere.
Profits aren’t always productivity-related. It’s theft.
It is enshittification and state intervention. Also theres like 8 different kinds of productivity, but as leftists i believe we are most concerned with the productivity of living labor.
Like the other commenter said, its theft.
Corporations are locked in a death spiral of declining rate of profit.
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Covid made workers more productive by letting them work at home, which allowed us to regenerate our energies and take care of things in our lives, rather than obsessing over and shopping for new outfits and spending an hour in the car every day commuting.
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Covid killed so many people, particularly older people, that it reduced the unemployed population by 12-15%. Lower unemployment is deeply connected to higher wages, as is higher unemployment to lower wages. Many workers were able to get promotions or find better jobs/leave dead end industries. This raised wages while productivity increased further. (This point is interesting given your name, Marx abandoned his formulation of the lumpen by the time he wrote Capital, but his analysis of the lumpen in the 18th Brumaire still has some relevant lessons.)
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Increase in wages leads to increases in prices. Not because the money supply has become tighter or because theres a significantly higher demand for eggs; but because businesses increase prices when wages increase. Despite the war in Ukraine causing some cost increases, at least 50% of inflation was driven by corporations arbitrarily increasing costs to goose their bottom line. Well, it isn’t arbitrary. Capitalism compels corporations to compete with each other.
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Bosses didn’t like their employees having a better standard of living (see note) so they ordered people back to work. Labor productivity returns to baseline.
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When political and economic pressures forced companies to stop raising prices, they started shrinking packages in order to cut costs and add value to their bottom line. Again, competition forces everyone to do this in different ways.
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When political and economic pressures forced companies to stop raising prices, the American business community elected Trump to do another tax break. DOGE gutted federal services and created the concrete basis for demolishing the USAmerican social and natural welfare state. This created a basis for reduced corporate taxes introduced in the Big Beautiful Bill, which will goose profitability in the short term.
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Long term, the plan is for Ai to replace workers; eliminating intellectual workers and forcing a more competitive market and/or higher qualification hurdles for decent paying tech jobs, and lowering wages across the whole sector. This is necessary because tech skills are going to be really valuable of the AI grift actually works, and we can’t be paying workers the value of their labor. Over years it will increase unemployment as lower paying jobs are also automated away. That is, if AI actually works the way the grifters claim, which in my opinion is mathematically impossible.
However the economic effects of building all this tech infrastructure, like data centers and chip factories, will have varied impacts across various sectors. While there’s lots of uncertainty in the economy, my experience with the 2007 financial crash was that all these housing construction companies and related services started going under about 6-12 months prior to the second, larger crash, that included all the big banks and insurance companies.
There’s also an element of unemployment/reserve army related to people in prison. ICE raids drive down wages in industries that rely on immigrant labor; while putting stress on small farms to find workers. Small farms go under, get bought by big farmers and landlords, goosing the monopolization tendency of capitalism. And incarcerated people who are compelled to work are a part of the national productive apparatus, and drive down wages even further across all sectors.
Note from point 4, a quote from Karl Marx :
To the capitalist, every luxury of the worker seems to be reprehensible, and everything that goes beyond the most abstract need – be it in the realm of passive enjoyment, or a manifestation of activity – seems to him a luxury
Exactly 666 words lol
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No impact on employment? People have been getting laid off and people in college can’t get their first job out of college in their field. tf are you on about?
But it did give them an excuse to fire people and keep wages lower.
Yet another thing that we saw happening in the 70s and 80s, even talked about it, and yet kept going full speed into the abyss.
Speaking of unearthing an old tradition, history sure seems to suggest that a guillotine works marvels at changing one’s tune rather quickly, one way or the other.
