Obviously this has some glaring flaws on the surface level, but I'm just sitting here wondering which lucky so called "third world" country gets the first contract to virtually drive American streets for a dollar an hour. Oops, internet lagged a bit, and your uber driver just drove into the delta, sorry bud.
This also can potentially skirt an immense amount of labor laws, and since big tech looooooves to "disrupt" things I have zero faith in its safety. https://www.fastcompany.com/90653650/halo-driverless-car-sharing-service
It's almost like you can only generate surplus value by exploiting workers
why?
:marx-joker:
Because the only things of value are social product and a machine cannot create social product, only consume and convert it to another form. Arbitrage during moments of innovation and market change can lead to the creation of commodities with a higher price than their actual value, but the value still comes from the labor put into both the dead labor/means of production (machines and fractional products) and living labor that created the commodity.
Basically, bubbles keep forming and bursting because capitalism is incapable of reconsiling the contradictions that lead to the arbitrage that destroys the economy. The economy only functions smoothly when commodities have a price equal to their value and crashes when insane stuff happens that totally changes the relationship between price and value leading to massive accumulation of currency by the owners and stagnation of wages for the workers.
This wouldn't matter if most of the people on earth weren't proletarians and their subsistence came from social production and instead came from subsistence farming or some sort of feudal arrangement, but alas, that is not the case and now someone inventing an app that changes the division of labor in the transportation industry has ripple effects through the entire economy leading to collapse and crisis.
(Also, always remember that price and value are very different things! Price is just an attempt to represent labor value by means of another commodity which in turn is defined by its own labor value. This contradiction is the primary one used to suppress wages and increase the rate of profit/surplus value generation. Your work has a true value and you are given a portion of it in wages/the price of your labor while your employer gets to keep the rest)
Machines can only act as a store of value, their cost over the long run evens out to cover all the benefits
https://hexbear.net/post/122725
this whole thread will help
Seems like they would better be described as a labor multiplier. X hours to build a piece of durable good and Y hours to operate it yields Z value, which is some percentage higher than the same Y hours spent without the durable good in hand.
Giving a guy an Excel spreadsheet to crunch numbers rather than doing it all on paper (or, god forbid, in your head) for instance.
Then you get economies of scale as you manufacture and distribute the durable goods. So, the first computer costs far more to build than the 101st or the 10,000,001st. And, similarly, coding the first iteration of Excel is far more expensive than copying that file and distributing it.
Yes, there's a discrete cost to creating the durable good. And this cost could be spent doing the work that the durable good is intended to do. But the yield provided by direct labor absent the good scales linearly, while the yield provided by crafting the good and passing it on to others scales geometrically.