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points by simias 3 days ago | 0 comments
I'm very pro-union but I feel like at this point attempting to organize will just speed up the process of replacing as many people as possible with machines, not slow it down. It's too little, too late.

I don't understand what kind of society we're building right now. Anthropic and other AI labs at $20T valuations, the 1% monopolizing all the wealth and the rest of us out of a job and fighting for the scraps?

There seems to be some sort of magical thinking within the AI crowd at the moment, that it'll all work itself out in the end.

- Build the God Machine

- ??????

- POST-SCARCITY UTOPIA!

[–] chasd00 3 days ago
Software devs have been devastating industry after industry for the 30 or so years I've spent in my career. If you want to see the future for software devs look to the past and see what happened to everyone else ( good and bad ).

I don't think unions are the answer, at least not for knowledge workers. The knowledge of the workers is the bargaining power in that case and AI makes the knowledge worth way less than it was before.

[–] haizhung 2 days ago
If unions were truly ineffective, companies wouldn’t spend millions on union busting firms.
[–] keybored 3 days ago
> I'm very pro-union but I feel like at this point attempting to organize will just speed up the process of replacing as many people as possible with machines, not slow it down. It's too little, too late.

Ah, the shut up it’s too late gambit.

[–] iugtmkbdfil834 3 days ago
Maybe, but from simple game theory perspective assuming one assumes this is the end product, union gives at least a chance at favorable outcome.
[–] lkey 3 days ago
> I'm very pro-union BUT

You are 'pro' an abstract, unrealized union, which is not 'pro union' at all.

You have abdicated your obligation to align your actions with your stated beliefs.

Do not give up before trying. Do not believe the hype that your labour power doesn't matter. Even Amazon couldn't stop their most exploited workers from unionizing, is your company bigger that that? Is your position weaker than theirs?

Worse that can happen is that you started talking with your fellow workers and they aren't interested.

Just because SV is run by several millenarian cults doesn't mean you should take their delusions about neo slavery and feudalism (Thiel/Yarvin; your doomerism stems from here) or apotheosis (anthropic, EA) as inevitable. You should assume they believe their own hype, but not assume they understand material reality outside their insular social bubbles.

Thiel's last 3 or 4? attempts at building his techo-utopia collapsed before even starting; They have no motion outside of what they can purchase.

[–] neutronicus 3 days ago
The position is weaker in the sense that an effective SWE union probably has to span national boundaries, and will likely be a short-term loss for SWEs in high-cost geographies.
[–] redwood 3 days ago
No one is giving them a 20T valuation. That's an order of magnitude larger than the market is currently targeting
[–] npc99 3 days ago
They are probably adding up Anthropic + a number of other companies
[–] simias 3 days ago
Yeah that's me making up a big number to evoke an "AI maximalist" future, where automated labor swallows a huge chunk of the economy.
[–] 10111001 3 days ago
> I'm very pro-union but I feel like at this point attempting to organize will just speed up the process of replacing as many people as possible with machines, not slow it down. It's too little, too late.

Honestly, I think the only shot workers have is unionization plus really aggressive political action.

The problem is successful action will require setting aside pretty much all the culture war issues that are used to divide the working class, and I don't really see that happening. If anything culture-war polarization is getting worse. It will also require some formerly-privileged groups like software engineers to jettison their self-deceptive libertarian delusions, and properly understand their true role in society (software engineers should have unionized pre-2022 when we had more economic power, but economic comfort and those delusions prevented it).

Edit: fix typo pointed out in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50259693

[–] smallmancontrov 3 days ago
The trouble with unionization is that it doesn't really address supply and demand, just bargaining. There are a dozen un-pulled levers available to bring aggregate labor supply and demand in balance. Overtime law, vacation policy, retirement policy, education funding, tax law (this is a big one -- taxes are obscenely lopsided on the labor/consumption economy vs the capital/investment economy), and so on. We need to pull those levers instead.

Yep, it's going to be a helluva fight.

[–] Sindisil 3 days ago
Why instead?

All those should absolutely be addressed (especially taxes), but organizing labor could be both a powerful way to push for those changes, as well as a force to maintain better labor/capital balance going forward.

[–] 10111001 3 days ago
> The trouble with unionization is that it doesn't really address supply and demand, just bargaining. There are a dozen un-pulled levers available to bring aggregate labor supply and demand in balance. Overtime law, vacation policy, retirement policy, education funding, tax law (this is a big one -- taxes are obscenely lopsided on the labor/consumption economy vs the capital/investment economy), and so on. We need to pull those levers instead.

All those other levers are political policy levers, correct? Besides bargaining, unions can also do political organization and lobbying.

[–] coldtea 3 days ago
The result of unioninzing includes pulling those levels.
[–] rexpop 3 days ago
Major state interventions that altered labor supply or rebalanced wealth (eg such as standardizing the 8-hour workday, establishing public pensions, or funding universal education) were won through waves of union mobilization and working-class political pressure.

It's not one or the other. Unionization is literally (figuratively) the hand that pulls those levers.

[–] rayiner 3 days ago
There is a reason nobody is willing to capitulate on the “culture war” positions they care about to “unify the working class.” People aren’t fungible economic automatons pursing material gain and they don’t believe policy is self-executing. If people have fundamental differences in how they view the world, what they value, what they think “good” is, they’re not going to capitulate on those in support of paper economic policies that may or may not work anyway.
[–] 10111001 3 days ago
> There is a reason nobody is willing to capitulate on the “culture war” positions they care about to “unify the working class.” People aren’t fungible economic automatons pursing material gain and they don’t believe policy is self-executing. If people have fundamental differences in how they view the world, what they value, what they think “good” is, they’re not going to capitulate on those in support of paper economic policies that may or may not work anyway.

I'm not saying capitulate, I'm saying set aside, as in table them to focus on more pressing issues.

Preserving some working class power in the face of the kind of automation being imagined now is going to take a large, unified political coalition that can prioritize effectively. Precisely because "nobody is willing to capitulate" on those issues, make them very useful in fracturing that coalition into non-existence or ineffectiveness.

[–] amanaplanacanal 3 days ago
If the "other side" doesn't put aside the culture war issues too, then "our side" will lose on them.

If you would explicitly state which culture war issues you are talking about, we might be able to have a productive discussion about it. Some issues are less important than others.

[–] 10111001 2 days ago
> If the "other side" doesn't put aside the culture war issues too, then "our side" will lose on them.

You can't have it all. Would you rather burn your energy to make little progress on them and lose on working class economic issues?

Call a truce, aim for a stalemate. Tolerate people from the "other side" to make more progress on other issues. AI has drastically changed the situation, and it's a massive fuck-up to continue to run the same strategy.

> If you would explicitly state which culture war issues you are talking about, we might be able to have a productive discussion about it. Some issues are less important than others.

The normal list: abortion, gun control, LGB and especially T stuff, etc.

[–] amanaplanacanal 2 days ago
I doubt many on the left would be willing to throw their brothers and sisters under the bus to fight against AI. I wouldn't ask them to.

Part of the complexity here is pitting current obviously visible specific harms, vs vague future potential harms.

I could be wrong about this, though.

[–] 10111001 2 days ago
> I doubt many on the left would be willing to throw their brothers and sisters under the bus to fight against AI. I wouldn't ask them to.

And IMHO, that mentality is the problem: they want to have it all, on every issue, so they'd rather drive the bus (and everyone in it) off the cliff than tolerate an ally who is not in total agreement.

[–] rayiner 3 days ago
You can’t “table” cultural issues because people’s view of what’s good and desirable arises out of their culture. That makes it extremely difficult for people with divergent cultural views to cooperate on shared economic goals. Viewing this as some top-down effort to “fracture the coalition” overlooks that the coalition doesn’t exist in the first place. If you look all over the world, people unify over ethnicity, culture, and ideology—usually in that order.
[–] 10111001 2 days ago
> You can’t “table” cultural issues because people’s view of what’s good and desirable arises out of their culture. That makes it extremely difficult for people with divergent cultural views to cooperate on shared economic goals.

What I'm saying is people need to learn to be grown ups and work with people who are different than them on common issues.

> Viewing this as some top-down effort to “fracture the coalition” overlooks that the coalition doesn’t exist in the first place. If you look all over the world, people unify over ethnicity, culture, and ideology—usually in that order.

It's not a top down effort, but I wouldn't but it past oligarchical economic interests to fan those flames a bit. These issues fracture the working class coalition nonetheless.

And it's not like this is some kind of impossible ask: the Democrats of the 1980s (say) did a far better job of it than the Democrats of the 2020s.

[–] hollerith 2 days ago
It seemed to me that the Democrats of the 1980s achieved almost nothing to stop or to slow down the biggest threats to working-class economic power of the 1980s, namely low-skilled immigration and offshoring (then called "globalization").
[–] 10111001 2 days ago
> The Democrats (in the US) of the 1980s did very little to stop or to slow down the big threats to working-class economic power of the 1980s, namely automation and offshoring (then called "globalization").

Wasn't that the 90s? IIRC, globalization was mainly a Republican big-business project, and the Democrats of that era were the biggest source of opposition, and it only got passed because of some defections.

Also globalization was sold as a bill of goods. IIRC, it was claimed (probably by many economists) that it would increase domestic manufacturing, but when that was shown to be a lie, there was no course-correction, and the sales pitch was changed to "but you got cheap stuff." I hope people have learned their lesson from that, to not trust economists.

But that wasn't really my point. My point was they were better able to handle divisive culture war issues, so you had lots of Democratic representatives from "red" states, even with popular Republican presidents. Today, the only way Democrats can hope to win those seats is if they're handed them through abject Republican incompetence.

[–] rayiner 2 days ago
> What I'm saying is people need to learn to be grown ups and work with people who are different than them on common issues

This is like saying “people should grow up and learn to solve their disagreements without war.” I’d argue that view is the one that exhibits a childish utopianism. It overlooks what actually drives the formation of coalitions.

[–] chrisweekly 3 days ago
"formally-privileged" -> "formerly-privileged"
[–] Ar-Curunir 3 days ago
The middle part is most likely that many will die. (This is not an endorsement!)
[–] yoyohello13 3 days ago
This is my prediction. The extractors will continue to extract until it becomes untenable. Then a lot of people will die and we will find a new balance. This cycle is basically human history in a nutshell.

Do those calling for unionization forget how the railroads dealt with workers trying to unionize? Ever heard of the Pinkertons.

[–] thereader12 2 days ago
They unionized because people were already dying.
[–] NoidFonsense 3 days ago
billions must die?
[–] donbox 3 days ago
But but but... organizing.. be it in form of democractic/market processes (non-violent or otherwise) can act as a speed breaker.
[–] pixl97 3 days ago
Hopefully we're not too late.

Large companies have been spending millions in propaganda and attacks to ensure that people in the US think that unions are pure communism. By the time we get enough people to make a difference there may be T100's stepping on our bones at this point.

[–] solyin 3 days ago
The problem is everyone's financial cliff is different. If I lost my job today, I have enough saved up to last me X months. Yours is Y, someone else's is Z. I'm going to go hungry at the end of X plus whatever. But since you're going to go hungry at Y plus whatever, we aren't forced to agree on what the right time to stop and stand up is. Z over there has rich parents so they've got longer. Nevermind poor W over there who doesn't, and has shorter.

What a convenient little trap we've set for ourselves. If everyone's money was set to run out at the same time, there'd be problems.