AI can’t replicate human labor, but it sure can approximate it at 1/10th the quality for 1/1000th the price.
The idea that automation would create widespread destitution and lower quality goods and services is simply insane. It just boggles the mind that capitalism does shit like this.
Insane, and yet it's what happens every time since the Clearences unless we stop it. We have the power to. I know it seems like we're weaker than during the great revolutions, but the contradictions of the system are much greater too. One big push, and it comes tumbling down (and then we have to work out how to build a new one in three days before the supermarkets empty)
Fascists: Organizing, taking over school boards, marching in the streets, and doing stochastic shootings
Leftists: We've tried nothing and we're all out of ideas
LOL this will work for approximately two minutes before Amazon just starts doing it themselves and cuts out the middleman
Weird that type of thing keeps happening. Seems like some kind of tendency.
It's insane to me that people aren't openly rebelling about the reallocation of wages to owners' bank accounts.
I think it was learning about the automation -> destitution of workers, as in the Luddite example, that lifted me out of middle school Ron Paul libertarianism...
A few years back people were whining about the student protests in Quebec regarding tuition hikes.
My brother in christ, you do realise that's exactly why they have the lowest tuition in Canada, right?
My grandmother pulled that shit with me and I lost it. This is a woman who worked for 20 years, and retired early with a $6000/month state pension for teaching grammar in a community college.
She said "it's not a big deal, ours is way higher and it needs to be because who's gonna pay for it!".
The majority of people are whipped and tired and feel powerless
that and class aspiration / false consciousness causes a meaningful segment of working people to lag behind their material interests. feels like people are starting to catch on though, slowly.
:newsflash-asshole: they've been relocating wages into their bank accounts the entire time!
I'm all in favor of automating shit like fast food work etc. but seeing this tech take over creative fields is absolutely despicable.
Lol my brother's work got that. It apparently made doing everything 3x more complicated and just added tons of random annoyances like not letting him book days off more than one pay period in advance.
Yeah the UI is not great. We had peoplesoft which at least showed breadcrumbs to know where you were but it’s all hidden now and it has unexpected new tab vs new window behavior. Go live was literally yesterday and apparently shit broke already
People recognize this already when discussing menial things like dress codes. Few large companies have actual, delineated dress codes (barring safety stuff) but people know they have to dress a certain way because of implied social pressure especially pressure from above
I absolutely fucking HATE Workday. It's such a broken piece of shit.
Get ready for random ERRORs because ... checks notes ... you input all the information in correctly.
I fucking hate Workday:fuckin-deserve:
Legit one of the most awful pieces of software I've ever had to deal with. And since I'm a supervisor at my job I have to use it a lot.
All of our talent acquisition, performance evaluations, development is gonna be through it now 💀
Afaik it’s a newer type of HR system that has logic and additional analytics to give the company more insights into performance and whatnot. It’s all dystopian when you see that a black box is determining your ability to retain employment or get hired in the first place. These systems have existed but the evolution is just the intensification and generalized use of them
Every Fucking tech company is following the Amazon “productivity” model these days
Hell on earth
They’re doing this to middle management as we speak especially since some frontline work areas have consistently reduced staffing through automation or outsourcing or both which basically eliminates a prescribed span of control for managers and directors. If they can’t justify the positions beneath them then they can’t justify themselves to the organization. As always it’s the snake eating its own ass
Imo, the goodness of automation is fully dependent on the security of the workers displaced by the automation process. I think there’s a tendency to assume that prioritizing the automation of jobs starting with the jobs whose conditions are worst, but in reality automation is only used to weaken workers’ bargaining power. High turnover and regular “restructuring” hides the natural cruelty of maintaining the reserve army of labor behind the abstraction of a market (which is all that markets are really good for anyway) and the capitalists get to have it both ways. They know that mass layoffs are inciting incidents for labor solidarity, so instead of replacing entire teams with machines, they bring the machines in, cut people’s hours, and let them quit one at a time over months. Or maybe they build a new factory that’s fully automated and close one that isn’t so everyone blames “China stealing our jobs”. There are so many tricks to hide the cruelty.
I think we can find some solace in the existence of bullshit jobs. The idea that there is still fat to be cut from the system in order to keep everybody employed. But who knows how long that will last as everything becomes gig work?
I kind of hope this means the indie scene grows even larger when all the creative types get kicked out of the bigger studios in favor of shitty AI material. Maybe get a successful United Artists sort of thing going on for other industries.
I hope we're on the cusp of new subcultures that turn away from the internet and go back to doing things in person. Because if we aren't, shit is about to get real bleak
It's very easy to easy prove when your expensive fast food robots aren't performing. It's much harder in the bullshit prone creative and knowledge economies where the end products are so subjective and honestly low risk for the investor.
For anyone who’s like, “why wouldn’t I just get the ebook and use my screen reader then?” remember that these companies have poured billions into DRM tech to make sure people can’t access ebooks outside of their proprietary apps. I wouldn’t put it past them to disable “3rd party” screen readers as well.
It's not like that worked though, there's a bunch of amazon ebooks on libgen
It’s an arms race, but it’s one they continue to sink money into because it makes piracy less convenient
Time to start a business selling “vintage” audio books. Ship people hard drives of MP3’s encoded in the wrong bit depth and then sell a proprietary piece of software that plays them at the “correct” one.
"4K audio restoration, now in color." ..... anniversary edition!
It really says something about the world we live in wherein the idea of reducing labor and work is seen as a bad thing, and even more so the idea of changing that is seen as more impossible than somehow preventing the development of technology.
Lol, I wonder if it's just the same voice-to-text software that's been around for a while.
there are a bunch of new AI speech models that are more convincing than the old stuff. Like the things used to make the Trump/Obama/Biden gaming memes
Yeah but those are funny for a TikTok video. I really doubt people are going to want to listen to them for ten hours for an audiobook. Personally, I think there is a good chance this fails because it is premature.
oh yes, absolutely going to be a degraded listening experience. people will probably buy fewer audiobooks. question is, will the sales impact be greater than the savings from automation? and when people realize there's nowhere to go, will the sales come back?
Actually it'd probably be fine.
In an ideal world this would mean all the little books would have at least some kind of audiobook available and that would be worth celebrating
Voice-to-text is "AI" in a very loose sense, but so are the methods for handwritten digit recognition that I'm pretty sure USPS has been using for close to 30 years now. I'm somehow doubting anything charging $20/month rather than a significant fraction of the human labour cost is very modern, lol.
I'm so glad I live in an underdeveloped country where implementing this shit is damn near impossible because of poor infrastructure.
1/10th the quality is generous - $20/mo for a recording throughput requiring multiple full time voice actors on payroll is gonna get you some microsoft sam tier shit
can't get cheaper than the piracy we were already doing, or the community projects with volunteers reading theory on youtube
I remember the complaints of the Agrarian Proto-Socialists like Lord Byron. Byron of course was mostly complaining about how his lace was now shit and almost as expensive and now he also had to walk past a bunch of abandoned buildings in the local village and a bunch of homeless people in town.
He was a horrible person in a lot of ways (possibly made worse by what looks like Bipolar disorder that ran through his family, Ada described it as " Radical Enthusiasms, separated by Deep Melancholy.") but unlike most he had the capability of growing a conscience. Genuine hero in Greece too.
Also reading about the 1st Opium War, and how the British Populace, Civil Service, Nobility, most businesses including East Asian colonial ones, and both the Whigs/Peelites/Radicals and Tories were all aghast at the prospect and clear about it's utter immorality, and the East India Company and it's satellite traders rammed it through by saying "nice economy there, shame if it were to collapse."
Doesn't matter if no one wants it, only matters if it increases margins and reduces Labour power.
