Women who make Samsung semiconductors are striking(english.hani.co.kr) |
Women who make Samsung semiconductors are striking(english.hani.co.kr) |
While abuse of assembly line workers has always happened, as factories become increasingly automated,
1. Some workers lose their jobs to automation.
2. The remaining ones have a weaker negotiation power, as their jobs are on the way out anyway. So companies have even more incentive to abuse them.
> 2. The remaining ones have a weaker negotiation power, as their jobs are on the way out anyway. So companies have even more incentive to abuse them.
I wonder what the eventual end game is, when you let everything play out to its logical conclusion. Eventually, business owners will no longer need people at all. They'll own a magical fully-automated factory that maintains and repairs itself, and a magical AI box that makes optimal business decisions, and then just sit there owning these magical things and harvesting money every quarter. Humanity consists of the few who own all the boxes, living in opulent luxury, and the many who don't and barely subsist enough to buy the products.
I'm not so convinced, I think this comes from the limited mental model of thinking of the economy as a system for making widgets.
Rather, the economy is what happens when a society organizes its member's aggregated needs and desires.
Being a valued member of a community is a rather basic human need. As such, the economy will find novel ways to meet that aggregated desire, if it's not being met anymore by jobs that employ many workers today.
That's a rather unconventional view maybe, but I'm rather convinced it's the right one.
Of course, it leaves all the details open and the path to get there might be rocky.
Look at life in Gaza or on the streets of Kensington today, and that is the sort of destiny we are bound for -- if fully replacing all humans really ever happens -- to become totally disposable people, who only continue to survive because someone has found it too much hassle to get around to getting rid of you at least just yet.
But that's an endgame state, it's not a path for getting there, thank goodness. I believe it would not be so simple. It would happen gradually, and it would engender resistance, eventually violent resistance once people have little to lose.
Power grows out of the barrel of a gun after all.
Now, OTOH, if at that point, robot/AI weapons are sufficient so you only need 10 people to run the entire US Army.... then it's game over.
But can you even get to that state without provoking a war before you get there? AI is extremely vulnerable in war because of its reliance on datacenters and fabs, which are fantastic military targets in wartime. So easy and quick to sabotage and so expensive and slow to build.
Number of people producing goods has been shrinking for a longest time, its under 20% now. It'll likely keep shrinking as automation becomes more advanced, and in the future "service" would be much more important.
When I was a kid, I've read some sci-fi stories about societies like those, where most people were working in service industry.
[0] https://www.advisorperspectives.com/dshort/updates/2023/09/0...
That will mark the time when technology is advanced enough that humanity will fracture with small independent groups going out and fending for themselves, possibly in outer space. Some SF scenarios call them "great houses", because they somewhat resemble feudal kingdoms where a kind of extended family rules, except there are no peasants.
The world economy today isn't driven by lack of supply (for the vast majority categories of products), rather it is by lack of demand. Whoever owns the demand owns the power in this dynamic. One can have all the factories in the world when consumer stop buying it's in for a rough time, like China is finding out.
If you're talking about a world where AI has become so advanced that humans have literally nothing to contribute to society, in any field, then that's called a post-scarcity society, where the very concept of a "business owner" (not to mention the concepts of "business" and "owner") starts to lose all meaning.
Horses weren't needed and they became pets; same for average human.
This can only happen perfectly if the manufacturers eventually start to come after those who are self-reliant, which I believe is in line with the psychology of humans.
Funny thing is this is ALSO analogous to what we have done certain animals.
How? Who pays for their stuff when most of the people are out of work. Sometimes people forget that the workers are also consumers. You may displace some, but to replace all, blue and white? Not that easy.
It can be argued that it already started - globally the number of children born peaked around 2013-2017. The pandemic only accelerated the process.
Maybe? This has been hypothesised since the Industrial Revolution. We’re nowhere close to labour obsolescence.
To me that represents lingering inhumanity.
There are still plenty of people around the world who have maintained this high lifestyle proudly since their early ancestors first got into opulent condition. But there are even more descendants who have not been able to maintain a previous level of opulence at all and would do anything to get it back.
Then you've got a whole bigger group who never came close and are even more envious than those who once had luxury. So much of the time it's easy to recognize that improved wealth is a result of fortune one way or another. When you get an aggregate amount of greed focused on manipulating fortunes, the best they can do for themselves is when everyone else ends up barely subsisting.
IIRC, civilization was supposed to bring an end to the barely subsistence thing.
Doesn't look too civil when things trend backward toward medieval.
The government will then redirect that labour to other stuff they can make and export; and make more money.
You can already see this at work on platforms like Etsy or Amazon. People are buying tools like crickets, CNC, or 3d printers, then starting a business selling their products (often copies of other successful products) on these platforms.
Eventually, someone will make copy-cat platforms, then someone else will build a tool for building copy-cat platforms, etc. There's no end game, it's just a loop of people trying to replicate the success of others.
Making machines that think will turn out to be a lot cheaper and easier than building machines that can do general purpose physical work. People are cheap to make and maintain, especially if you're not very concerned with their well-being.
It'll start with just businesses owning the prototypes of them but once common folk know that such a machine is possible they'll build one themselves and then use it to build as many as they want.
If it's a very large machine it will be miniaturized until it fits inside the human body and everyone will have synthetic ribosomes that can be used to produce whatever they want provided they have access to enough energy and raw material.
What happens then is anyone's guess.
And if voting doesn't work, there's the possibility of a revolution.
So the capital owners will probably make it so that they please a majority of people just enough to stay in power.
We've already seen how over-invested LLMs have gotten relative to their financial returns. A magical AI box with optimal business decisions is even more fantastical - computibility isn't there, and the resulting homogeneity of a 'perfect' approach in business strategy would by game theory promote decisions counter to the prevalent strategies.
The more likely result in a dynamic world is a market crash in the domain of factories as everyone and their dog tries to get in on the "free easy money, last chance to get rich!". The end profit margins would be tight indeed and collapsed values of good.
Not to mention the whole value of money is that it can get you other goods and services while shielding you from the logistical hellscape of trying to DYI. If everything is being auto-produced anyway then currency isn't even desirable a commodity, now is it?
Who will they sell to? For business/markets to exist, it needs people who can buy.
And unlike the last times where feudalism was overthrown, these days police is often enough on par with the military, and the governments can track us whenever and wherever we want by the tiny little bugs we carry around in our pockets. Call for a revolution or for violent acts online, and a day later the FBI knocks on your door and takes everything digital you have.
The end game for the US is a small group of people(approx 36M) having fun. It's not too different from how it is now, but rather than be supported by human labor, it's supported by the labor of machines.
If all wage labor is automated, and ignoring the issue of the social and political implications of a mass of people with nothing else to do, the remaining professions will be SME business owners, investors, and landlords[1].
We can estimate the size of this population.
There are approximately 28 million American SMEs[2]. SMEs can have owner-employees or hired labor, all of which will be automated. Considering SMEs as financial black boxes, the inputs, and outputs remain the same with the exception that salaries are replaced by a presumably smaller figure representing either the purchase or rental of automated labor.
An estimated 7 million[3] high-net-worth individuals(HNWI) reside in the US. These are people with large investment portfolios who can live off gains indefinitely. It's difficult to estimate the number of full-time investors, but some estimate range from 200k-1million, and arguably, and these are folks who are doing potentially automatable work anyways.
The upperbound of US landlords is 10.6 million people[4], or 7.1%. There are 5.9 million[5] commercial buildings in the US, compared to 44 million[6] residential rental properties. Let's estimate the number of commercial landlords to be around 1 million people in the US. We can also presume that maintenance and repair is automatable labor.
The common features these groups share is the ability to generate income without labor. Presumably, this leaves them plenty of time to engage in leisure activities.
Looking toward HNWI individuals as an indicator, they spend much more of their time engaged in "active" leisure, that is to say praying, socializing, exercising, hobbies, and volunteering[7].
1. I'm assuming self-employed people are automated away.
2. https://ustr.gov/trade-agreements/free-trade-agreements/tran...
3. https://www.capgemini.com/insights/research-library/world-we...
4. https://www.doorloop.com/blog/landlord-statistics-by-categor...
5. https://css.umich.edu/publications/factsheets/built-environm...
6. https://www.statista.com/statistics/187577/housing-units-occ...
7. https://www.forbes.com/sites/traversmark/2019/07/13/how-do-t...
If the rest of the economy is doing badly, they can't threaten to walk about (or at least they can't threaten that as easily and credibly).
I think this is a typical case of a bad manager at the top of the 8 inch line, and not of some larger theme of automation leading to worker abuse.
Depends on whether we re looking at a system in equilibrium or out of equilibrium. Maybe the "shortage" is the equilibrium for the unyielding crappy conditions the company is offering.
It's especially soul-crushing when you think what the next Xnm process translates to in the real-world. Incrementally better performance for encoding cat videos or whatever. No thanks.
This doesn't sound like you were interviewing for a typical job with Samsung then. Getting a fab off the ground seems to imply it's a newly constructed, or under construction fab. You were interviewing to be part of the crew that builds and sets up a new fab.
There's a reason salaries for this type of work as so large...
That's not the reputation that salaries of places like this have.
AFAIK, this is actually part of their culture. They are very strict about hierarchy and it is seen as a kind of honor that is ingrained even in their language. There's even a case where this resulted in an air disaster.
I really hope that the current trend of culture interchange between Korea an "the west" may influence both societies for the better.
> “Technically, we get an hour for lunch, but the machinery never stops operating, so someone has to fill that spot at all times,” Worker A added.
Samsung being the successful company that it is, I can't imagine they don't know that they don't understanding that taking people out of a work team requires putting in a replacement, so I'll take "Malicious compliance with work safety" for 500 Alex.
Doesn't matter if it's South Korea, Taiwan, Japan, Vietnam, China, Philippines, India, Indonesia, etc - these are common work conditions, and it's usually the same managers in all those countries.
If native SKeans, TWese, JPese don't want to do these jobs the employers just bring "Interns" from Indonesia, Vietnam, Philippines, etc and pay them $7,000 a year - which beats earning $2,000 a year either underemployed or doing the same job in those countries.
It's horrid, but that's the reality of the gizmos you and everyone else likes using.
> which was destroyed in a welding incident in the Samsung plant being built in the area
I don’t doubt it, just curious how that occurred?
To the employee: find a new job if you can get the above
I’ve read the article, but it doesn’t explain why the disparity between sexes.
We are not supposed to compete on who can abuse their workers the most to improve efficiency and to cut costs. Thankfully, knowledge work does not seem to scale the same way as manual labour, meaning that more abuse of the workers does not mean more output over the long-term.
I would say they're quite photogenic myself ;)
One of the original advantages of semiconductors over vacuum tubes is that they were built to last.
Tubes were expected to eventually wear out and be replaced sooner or later, sometimes on a regular basis. So they came in sockets and many were very easily user-replaceable.
Other than that, the equipment was usually built to last for decades. It would have been the stupidest thing in the world to get a new radio every 5 or 10 years when all it needed was a new tube or two. And once you had a radio that was satisfying, most people never wanted to buy another radio again. They most often went forward focused on additional types of long-term technology acquisitions, like TV sets and an automobiles with automatic transmission.
Semiconductors made almost all tube equipment obsolete as fast as the expanding variety of devices could be developed, so silicon booms are nothing new. Corresponding bust cycles must also have been endured by semiconductor companies who have prospered over the decades.
The demand for semiconductors is real strong again, especially the more complex and innovative developments.
But as time goes by, the demand for the semiconductors needed to produce products having long-term value is not the demand causing the complaints about overwork.
It's the extreme demand for disposable semiconductors, and the manufactured-for-landfill products that incorporate them, which has been gradually putting more pressure on fabrication workers in the same production facilities where it didn't used to be this bad.
Gapjil (Korean: 갑질) is an expression referring to an arrogant and authoritarian attitude or actions of people in South Korea who have positions of power over others. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gapjil)
Gapjil is typically used to describe the abusive dynamics of one person above another in a hierarchy but has also been extended to describing the power abuse dynamics of large businesses interacting with smaller ones (e.g. small suppliers).
As you mentioned, Korean language and society reflects a "high-context" culture where language itself uses and encodes social hierarchy position through the use of "honorifics," speaking to or addressing to people above by their title/rank or "treatment."
"Over 80% of public perceive 'gapjil' problem as serious: survey" (2021) https://www.koreaherald.com/view.php?ud=20210113000769
The practice was made illegal in South Korea (2019) under its Labor Standard Act (LSA), but the effectiveness of that law has been scrutinized quite a bit, as many surveyed state it remains highly prevalent in the workplace:
(Law fails to protect Koreans from workplace bullying) https://asiatimes.com/2020/01/south-korea-fails-to-stamp-out...
The only option is to become an expat and end up perpetuating the same traumas, as Pinoy, Thai, Chinese, Vietnamese, Indian, Indonesian, etc employees of Korean companies in their countries can attest to.
Korean work culture is itself a reflection of Japanese work culture back when SK was Japan's version of Mexico before the 2010s.
The imbalance in medical accessibility and quality for urban vs. suburban areas was well known for decades so that the reform itself was very much desired, but the current government did it so ineffectively that they just had to give up after the strike.
Lets not forget Sewol disaster 'recovery efforts' https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5_A8dq2fA5o https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/the-sinking-of-the-... where no rescue was even attempted before letting President decide (establishing video feed to command center).
The idea is that you sell your stuff to people who are employed in other industries/companies that haven't been so successful at automating all their employees out of a job.
At Samsung, for instance, the workers are not the main consumers: Samsung is a huge exporter, and most of their customers are outside of Korea. Even if all their current and former employees suddenly decided to stop buying Samsung products, it wouldn't even be noticeable in their balance sheet.
What you're describing is a situation where all the companies have managed to eliminate most of their workforces, which has never happened. If it comes even remotely close to that point, societies will be forced to change their economies somehow, perhaps with UBI.
The whole "Star Diaries" series is such a gem. Many stories are exploring this question of "what is the endgame for societal trajectory X" in a form of some remote planet that Tichy visits on his trip.
[0] https://www.netflix.com/title/80174608 (Volume 2: "Pop Squad").
I'm pretty sure this is completely unique to the USA.
The consumption machine has a wealth effect which is an artifact of a ponzie economy. This mathematically cannot last forever, even if it has lasted for a long time and will continue to last for a long time. What matters to wealth is production. Traditionally highly technical production needed a decent middle class, but efficiencies mean fewer such people are needed to maintain the same proficiency. Coupled with globalization where a smart person anywhere can design technical things that can then be used everywhere. This decouples the wealth of the rich from the health of the middle class and the rich would be happily sacrifice the middle class in the alter of cheaper labor and will whisper sweet nothings in your ear while doing so. Not them personally but the people they pay to operate on their behalf. To me it makes perfect sense to promise UBI to undermine resistance and then not deliver on that promise to again undermine resistance. I think the middle class would be fools to believe that UBI will come and save them.
UBI is a power play and the worst outcome for a sovereign citizen.
Eugenics has always been the end game for the monarch class. Capitalism was a stepping stone.
What's wrong with ready-made chocolate cake? Freshly-baked might be better, but there is value in convenience. It's the same reason people buy pizza: if you're a master pizza chef and have a proper pizza oven at home, you could probably make a better pizza, and of course have it a bit fresher, but most people simply can't make a pizza that comes close to those made in real pizza ovens by people who make them every day. Some people don't even have an oven in the first place.
So AI can build everything except the factory itself? Sounds like there's still a need for human labor.
And if the opposite is true and AI can build the factory, then it's not going to "cost tens of billions of dollars to build"; the factory will be just as cheap as the goods its producing. Literally everyone could have their own factory.
So whoever builds the first one will be able to quickly expand, buy more land and solidify their lead.
Land is likely what would cost billions in this specific scenario.
If you don't have land or materials then there is nothing your AI can do, because it doesn't have anything to build things from.
Yet they did NOT increase the number of resident positions and left reimbursement rates at the same level as almost a decade ago. Also, the average doctor in SK works 100 hours a week instead of 60 like in the US.
This meant that both junior and senior doctors ended up having to work more (they'd need to increase the number of medical students per training doctor post-degree) while still earning their existing salary and needing to pay off college loans (which in Korea are state school level despite incomes being a fraction of the US).
Instead of negotiating with doctors, the government decided to instead revoke striking doctor's medical licenses.
There is now a significant brain drain as Korean doctors look to immigrate to Japan or the US.
And this is how a strike was resolved against white collar workers.
Blue collar unskilled workers have even less leverage, because you can always import a "Trainee" from Vietnam, Phillipines, Indonesia, Nepal, etc for a pittance.
https://www.reuters.com/business/healthcare-pharmaceuticals/...
If they have English skills, many aim for America and other Anglophone nations. But ironically, the American Medical Association pushed for caps on schools and residencies like their Korean counterparts and it was rather humorous seeing trainee doctors complaining about this.
So far we have automated more and more, including and especially grunt work.
Why would grunt work come back?
Especially if you have machines that can help you design more efficient machines, and can help you re-design production processes to be more efficient and amenable to further automation.
If you're willing to deny them all that then they're cheap and easy to replace.
Whereas building a machine that can do even the basics of what a human hand can do is quite expensive.
It's not about what the employer is willing to do, it's about what people are willing to accept; especially if there's competition for their services.
> Whereas building a machine that can do even the basics of what a human hand can do is quite expensive.
We even have robots that can wash dishes, and they are cheap enough to be in a substantial proportion of households. There's lots of of basics and not so basics that we automated.
Of course, build a machine that can do _all_ the basics of a human hand is expensive (at least so far). But people can and have arranged their business processes around these limitations: you don't expect your welding robots to wash dishes; you use a dishwasher for that.
There's still enormous room for abuse, but automating suppression drops even the imperfect checks that we have on the power of the few to oppress the many
They will, as did monarchs in feudal times, draw their power base from the multitude of disenfranchised commoners seeking guidance, respite from the bleak outlook for those with little or no prospect of upward mobility, and a rallying point from which to focus any semblance of pushback against the landed baronial classes. But they will all the while be paying a hefty tax to those who maintain the broadcast infrastructure that enables them to marshall and monetize their followers, so even these kings and queens will need to stay in the graces of some potentate or other.
1. Supply drives demand. If nobody produces anything with which to buy the factory output, then the factories will not be valuable.
2. If most people are somehow living "outside" the economy, then they would form their own economy.
Those are but two trivial rebuttals, and by no means anywhere near exhaustive.
If with enough automation that's not necessary then it doesn't matter. Why operate a sneaker factory to get the money to buy caviar from the caviar factory when you can just operate the caviar factory directly?
Put another way, china thanks to it's new middle class is a great market for a business to sell to. That's because they have something of value to trade back.
But the Congo, full of people or not, isn't. They don't have anything any capitalist could want that would equal the value of finished middle class goods. All they have to offer is cheap raw materials or perhaps labor to extract. If people are made useless, we will all be from the Congo except the legacy capital owners, who can trade with each other for everything they might want.
Regarding #2, they would form their own garbage shit economy whose size and per capital size are like specks of dust compared to the main one, with obvious consequences for power dynamics when the two economies interact. Think of the underground economy in a prison, a homeless encampment, or a warzone, or subsistence farming peasanta deep, deep in thr Congo. Or the "economy" formed by insects trading pollen services for nectar with plants. That's how small and weak the economy of the leftover people with no access to the global industrial machine would be by comparison.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kensington,_Philadelphia the Crime section
But you didn't mention the Soldier class. Some security people are needed, with an ok decent life, to keep the masses in check, and put up surveillance cameras and collect everyone's photos and biometrics
A bit like in Uganda, "Uganda's surveillance state is built on national ID cards" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40603692
> Now, OTOH, if at that point, robot/AI weapons are sufficient so you only need 10 people to run the entire US Army.... then it's game over.
I'm sorry. You are claiming that the poor will buy job-alternatives from the market once they don't have a job to sustain themselves?
You seem to be missing a slight power imbalance.
I'll tell you what I'd do with it.
I'd ask that genie for more wishes and have it start making copies.
First:
Human desire literally knows no bounds, yesterday's luxury is today's basic necessity.
If the prices for many products go towards zero, they'll become uninteresting and new products will be invented for which, for whatever reason, the price can't be zero.
Second:
The aggregated desire of billions of people is a formidable force. Whoever finds a way to satisfy it will have found a way to become incredibly wealthy.
I hear this quite often but I don't think it's true. I don't think we've quite hit the stopping point yet for consumption but I mean you give somebody 2 Yachts and they'll probably try to sell both of them and bank most of that money. Like ask yourself what'd you do with a 100k, 1M, 10M, 100M, 1B, 10B windfall? Surely at some point you stop spending it on yourself (possible save it in a rainy day fund but w/e; consumption stops).
Of course you give everybody 10M right now it'll cause massive inflation as there isn't enough stuff actually being produced. However, GDP (adjusted for inflation) has been increasing so at some point we'll make more stuff than one can reasonable consume and at that point it'll probably be Wall-E world. However, we are talking about a windfall of 10M which is 151x the US GDP/Capita so assuming current rate of growth remains linear it'll take another 250 years for the Real GDP/Capita to be 10M (~1k in 1790 [1] to ~66k in 2023 => 151 / 66 ~= 2.5).
> If the prices for many products go towards zero, they'll become uninteresting and new products will be invented for which, for whatever reason, the price can't be zero.
I generally like the argument that price (of a competitive good) should reflect the amount of energy it took to create. So if energy becomes significantly cheap in the future I'd expect a lot of new goods to be cheaper than today's goods (which also makes it easier for everybody's consumption to go up). Of course many goods are sold by few suppliers and monopoly pricing reflects the value perceived by the consumer so there's a giant wrench.
[1]: https://www.measuringworth.com/datasets/usgdp/result.php
the past couple centuries have seen a great advancement in application of the economic mode to greater areas of life. there are both clear and nominal benefits and downsides. its advance doesn't necessarily mean it's satisfying equivalent needs and desires, nor that it is more effective or objectively preferable.
it's well-documented that often it has advanced by threats, dispossession, and violence. and it's certainly possible that could continue, or that it might lose ground on some externality, or sustain hegemony by those same tools.
I don't know that there's really any study or data that would back it up, but if a large amount of people don't have the structure and expectations that employment provides, things would deteriorate quickly.
Obviously there's a spectrum here, and mindless jobs that pay as little as legally allowed aren't exactly providing fulfillment that people need. In any individual case, of course it makes sense to say "why should I/they have to do this? they should be able to chase passions or find other opportunity" but when you talk about that being "granted" to large chunks of the population (happening at essentially the same time).. I don't see it working out super well in the short or long term.
I like that definition.
There was a podcast I listened to on this subject "The Plunder of the Commons" which I found really interesting. [1]
That said, we're a long ways away from reaching the point where literally not having anywhere left on the planet to build becomes your primary obstacle to starting a business.
[1]: https://politicalorphanage.libsyn.com/the-plunder-of-the-com...
Only for a limited definition of "spending on myself". Self actualization is where desire truly is boundless. 10B is not a lot of money if your goal in life is now to end malaria or build a city on Mars.
Another issue with your thought experiment is that you're now relatively rich. If in some distant future you have the purchasing power of a billionaire of today without being relatively rich, many people will be looking for new ways of outdoing each other.
Of course, consuming zero cost goods is not a measure of wealth, so they'll be consuming whatever isn't zero cost then.
> I generally like the argument that price (of a competitive good) should reflect the amount of energy it took to create.
I don't. The price of physical energy fluctuates with how difficult it is for humans to tap it.
I prefer the mental model that the price reflects the human difficulty - perseverance, pain, time, intelligence, physical force, ... - required to provide something.
This makes me wonder, what happens to the dogs.
What exactly will be different in the future from the current situation?
It's no longer human culture in animal nature; but owner culture in anthroposcenic nature.
What happens when one that can live centuries in an intellectual enlightened form lives in a world of pollutatition, cities, old infastructure—and of course the organic leftovers?
---
Noteworthy to say this makes up perhaps half of cyberpunk's foundations—one should not ever define cyberpunk solely with this idea.
(or today's, in some places)
For example, when I lived in Vietnam I'd often see a road crew of ten people with shovels because it was cheaper than hiring one backhoe. A washing machine would be an unimaginable luxury for all of them.
Though I'm not sure what you are trying to say? I guess you are agreeing with me? Yes, if there are many companies that compete for your services and can put them to productive use, you have a lot of bargaining power in those negotiations. Conversely, where those options are lacking, you have less bargaining power.
Yes, Vietnam started from a fairly low base, but has seen phenomenal growth in the last few decades. See eg https://www.imf.org/external/datamapper/PPPPC@WEO/VNM?zoom=V... You can bet your hat that workers' absolute bargaining power has improved by leaps and bounds.
As a consequence, at https://tradingeconomics.com/vietnam/wages you can see how average Vietnamese wages have exploded over time. (Even if their data only goes back to 2011, the growth is still very impressive.)
Apparently washing machines are a real growth segment in Vietnam: https://www.statista.com/outlook/cmo/household-appliances/ma...
These days around 58% of households in Vietnam have a washing machine.
Yes, in general many people around the world used to be dirt poor. And while things have improved, many of these people merely graduated from 'dirt poor' to 'poor'. But that's still progress, and we are continuing to advance. To future generations, even our richest people alive today will look poor by comparison.
I’d like to agree with your final assessment but assuming that the growth arc of the last 50 years is going to continue requires a lot of optimism.
That can be solved, too. Some other (now deleted?) comment mentioned the inevitability of killbots, which will have to be created and deployed for this dystopia to stick. The elite living in Elysium will need a controllable, automate-able, way to keep the underclass in line, one that doesn't involve less-reliable human enforcers.
I thought the rich elites living in Elysium had to completely depend on one weird mercenary dude on Earth with a shoulder-fired rocket launcher that somehow had rockets that could achieve escape velocity in order to protect Elysium from spaceships with illegal immigrants attempting to invade and use their magic healing machines.
> police-adjacent things before they were called the police
Why don't you think it would follow the same cost curve as integrated circuits?
Yes. What's the cost of relocating software, or a movie, or an audio file? Very close to 0 (a few cents at most), and yet observe how much our current system prices each of those items. Capitalism, as practiced today, maximizes profits, not competition, I don't see that changing any time soon
You can see similar effects in hardware too, since even without self-replication there are already massive economies of scale. How much does it cost to get access to the output of most advanced chip fabrication technology on the planet? The answer is whatever the price of the latest flagship smartphone is.
A job can be truly 'lost' if it's replaced by a machine. But it's merely reshuffled, if a foreigner does it.
Also it wouldn't have happened hadn't it been for Gorbatjov who introduced the glasnost (transparency) policy reform. Another Stalin, and history would have looked different.
Average person - not average American or individual from developed countries. I know of software that's well out of reach of even the average American.
> The answer is whatever the price of the latest flagship smartphone is.
Therein lies the problem with the assertion that prices will inevitably driven downwards: the price of a flagship phone is not driven by cost of making it - instead the OEMs select a price-point first and then work backwards from there. When was the last time the price of a flagship smartphone series decreased? Compare this to the number of times has it increased.