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

  • emizeko [they/them]
    ·
    3 years ago

    https://hexbear.net/post/122725

    this whole thread will help

    • Machinery that streamlines, quickens, and/or expands production does not create new value. Machines are embodiments of large amounts of living labor bound up in a fixed, dead form. It does not create new value, it merely transfers its embodied value into its outputs over time, which manifests as depreciation. Machines and facilities are represented as being fixed constant capital .
    • zifnab25 [he/him, any]
      ·
      3 years ago

      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.