This kicks the can down the road a bit, but I don’t see how this is cause for celebration. Businesses will just open a new company and avoid having that company hiring humans to escape labor laws that relate to job elimination. This can all likely be escaped with a little legal hopscotch.
That’s what regulation is.
Making things inconvenient over and over again so worse things don’t happen, or take significantly longer and require more concerted effort to happen. It’s a good thing. We should make it harder for bad actors to do shitty things.
Pretending something is pointless because it may not be 100% effective is absurd.
Honestly I think its China just protecting its economy, western businesses are already finding that AI now costs more than just hiring humans and gives a worse output, the chinese government is just preventing their own economy from falling into the same trap.
It’s so they don’t have to think about/implement the utopia of no one having to work. If they made it possible for people not to need to work, those people without work would have time to educate themselves and think about how their ruling class is fucking them over, and to organize. This would probably lead to the ruling class going out of power, so they can’t have that, it’s better to keep them employed even though they don’t have to be.
Alternatively, if people go out of work and they don’t implement the no-work utopia, the ruling class loses power because people whose survival is threatened will kill their leaders.
The best the ruling class can do is keep inventing jobs no one needs and continuing to deceive people that the jobs need to be done.
I dunno. I think this is better than getting laid off due to fake corporate bs (when it’s actually outsourcing, layoffs, and a hidden recession)
I like this, and so should anyone who wants to see China on an ethical gradient, not black or white. This is unironically one of the advantages of centralized, authoritarian and undemocratic government: you can make decisions like this, just like that. And sometimes these decisions are good, far-sighted.
Now let’s not forget about the downsides of China’s totalitarianism.
This doesn’t seem like a totalitarianism issue, though. The High or Supreme courts (other courts are available) could rule that replacement with AI is not a valid reason for termination of employment, and the result would be much the same.
Those courts in china aren’t independent. They very much take orders from the government.
I appreciate your nuanced take of recognising achievements where they are made for humans and humanity, while also recognising that no country is perfect and that we are allowed to ask for more from our government and a better future for ourselves without exploitation.
Something most of the tankies can’t seem to appreciate for themselves.
Nobody’s considered who is gonna buy all the stuff when all the employees are laid off
I think a statistic I saw recently was that nearly 50% of American consumer spending is attributed to the top 10% of consumers.
Which would largely indicate that it doesn’t matter because those who have the money will continue to spend it and those that don’t will continue to get poorer.
This is what’s happening to Vegas, the number of visitors is dropping but the casino profit is increasing. The city no longer caters to the middle class but to millionaires.
Do Vegas casinos own a sizeable stake in online gaming? If so, it would be interesting to see what part of those increasing profits are due to us poors spending on online gaming increasing while we never set foot in Vegas.
The future is two corporations, eternally B2Bing back and forth across the desiccated husk of the Earth. A perfect, all-encompassing synergy.
This feels like the makings of a good one-off SciFi short in an anthology book or something.
They already did it. An episode of Philip K. Dick’s Electric Dreams.
Who cares, the Dow is at a record high! Wish I didnt have to eat tree bark tho
They’ll give the people more debt.
Well I guess if you have millions of robot slaves you don’t need the people anymore at all.
The legal reasoning cuts through corporate justifications—AI implementation is a voluntary business decision, not an unforeseeable catastrophe.
It makes sense. Nobody is ready to figure out what to do with those workers cause the chuds of the world are afraid of what happens when you give people UBI (they want to lord over other people through wealth and inequality)
There are definitely worse worlds than one where UBI is what comes out of the AI race… One can dream.
It’s not a dream. It’s a requirement.
The alternative is a nightmare.













