World Bank jobs council urges 'crisis-era' employment support measures as IMF warns of AI ‘tsunami’
www.cnbc.com
IMF Chief Kristalina Georgieva warned AI is hitting the global labor market like a “slow-moving tsunami,” with young workers entering the job market the most exposed.
  • goodguys9@lemmy.caEnglish
    11·
    7 days ago

    There’s an open question here about best practice, because ultimately shifting labour capacity from humans to machines should be inherently good, if its labour we did not want to be doing. I’d rather have machines capable of doing everything from my laundry to large data analysis, among many other things that don’t interest me.

    The problem tends to arise in how the transition happens. If capitalists continue to separate labour from surplus value, it’s entirely possible that the benefits of automation are only experienced by capitalists, and the humans who were producing the labour are left destitute.

    Really I would like to see a better regulatory environment mixed with stronger social support systems, so the benefits of automation are felt by everybody. Sometimes it feels like the focus shifts to stopping automation, when in my mind best practice should be to mitigate externalities and spread out the benefits.

    • cecilkorik@lemmy.caEnglish
      41·
      7 days ago

      I’m not really a Marxist, but the guy had a pretty serious and valid point when he draws our attention to who owns and controls the means of production, and it really calls into question why we consider that simple fact of ownership and control to be something that has any economic or social value, much less nearly ALL the economic value those means of production actually produce.

      I’d argue capitalism has some virtues, but it’s an economic tool, not an economic law. We’re not supposed to be using it blindly everywhere for everything, we’re supposed to be using it thoughtfully and where suitable and appropriate. There is zero thought about it anymore, and that’s a bad thing. There hasn’t been any real serious thought about it at least in the western world for around 80 years. That’s an awful long time for unchecked capitalism to really warp people’s minds.

      It is really, really important for us to start to figure this issue out more carefully, if we think that we now might be literally on the verge of automating most of the workforce and actually potentially achieving the life of idle luxury we always dreamed of (for a variety of very real, very significant reasons we’re actually not nearly as close to that as we’d like to imagine, but if that’s what we’re actually planning and attempting to achieve, we need to start planning for it properly.)