Not to collapse the economic system, but to present a credible threat of collapsing the economic system which AI development, as these elite and their platforms know it, relies on. When they're freaking out, we call for negotiations.
This only works if people with "secure" livelihoods not just participate, but drive the effort. Getting paid six figures or more in a layoff-proof position? Cool, you need to be the first person walking out the door on May 1st (or whenever this happens), and the first person at the bank counter requesting your max withdrawal.
You're free to take a vacation or quit working if you want to. Go ahead.
As for bank runs, no one cares. The big banks no longer need retail customer deposits as a source of capital for fractional reserve lending. Modern bank funding mechanisms are more sophisticated than that.
In which the FDIC took unprecedented action, drawing down the DIF to backstop depositors beyond the insured $250k and offering a credit facility to other banks, in order to prevent "contagion" - a panic, a bank run - which was presumed to be likely after the 3rd largest bank collapse in US history. A bank almost no one outside of California had heard of before it died.
Bank runs are serious business, and far from being something "no one cares" about, even just talking about them makes banks nervous, because they can happen to even "healthy" banks. The big banks have been undercapitalized for more than a decade, and even a moderate run on a regional institution threatens the entire system. Which is why it should be done, or at least signaled as incoming; it's good leverage.
>You're free to take a vacation or quit working if you want to. Go ahead.
The implicit, "I'll stay here, where I'm nice and secure," is delusion. People care about your outcomes even if you don't care about ours. Take the invitation to organize with others to secure your own future, to show just how much you're needed before your employer decides that you're not (however erroneously).
You really missed the point. SVB was undone by their own failure to manage interest rate risk, and then by the actions of corporate depositors. Retail banking customers had little to do with it. Corporations certainly aren't going to participate in some sort of pointless consumer protest.
It's a liquidity problem. Retail absolutely can drop any given bank into a liquidity crunch by pulling out too many funds, too quickly. It doesn't even need to put a given bank at risk of insolvency, if the situation is read as widespread and/or growing, because as the event expands, so does the likelihood that someone else is mismanaging their books. Someone who is hooked into another institution, and another, and another. Contagion.
Anyway, corporate depositors have a duty to safeguard their capital. That means that if a bank run is underway by retail depositors, they're in line too, willing participants or not. This is why, again, even discussion of bank runs is discouraged, and their likelihood and effectiveness downplayed. They're built on turning the imperative of self-interest, which the financial industry is built on, on its head.
Nope, you're still missing the point. SVB had a solvency problem, not just a liquidity problem. And some silly consumer protest withdrawals will never be able to cause a liquidity problem for any bank that matters.
Geopolitical realities and considerations require that the effort is synchronized and global. Assume great power X's society revolts and decides to reign in the financial and technological barons and lords, and do away with such things. Meanwhile, great powers Y, Z etc. are not doing this and one day people in X will wake up to AI drone swarms of these powers taking them over and they're back to square 1 and now not even a great power.
Collective humanity needs to think this matter through and take global action. This is the only way I fear, short of natural calamities (act of God) that unplugs humanity from advanced tech for a few generations again.
It's not an economic decision, it's a cultural one. Are you investing to build something useful and sustainable? Or are you exploiting for a profitable quarter?
I read someone compare the mindset to that of a drug-dealer. In any given neighborhood, a handful of people get very wealthy, at the expense of the stability and potential of everyone else. Our elite are drug-dealers - literally, in some cases. And conditions are deteriorating about how you'd expect.
Besides the “its not x, its y” llm smell here, no, comments like this are also part of the hype, just the other side of it. The fact that LLM tooling can replace a lot of tedium typically set aside for junior’s is hardly disputable at this point.
Okay. And you could also still hire the juniors and have them oversee the LLMs, interrogate them about how well they understand the principles and technical details of what they're having the LLM do, correct them when they're wrong, try to get them to explore other approaches or extend the rote approach or synergize with some other task, etc. You know, training. Like companies used to do (or so I hear, such initiatives having been long gone by the time I hit the workforce).
The fact that you won't isn't a productivity, bottom-line decision, as we've already established that the business is trading efficiency now for incompetence later; the financials are a wash, at best. It's a cultural decision to throw your youth under the bus for seniors and shareholders' short-term interests. The best you could say is, "Well, of course. This has been a common narrative across the American economic landscape for the past 30ish years. 'F* them kids,' is the rule."
This would have been a great revelation for decision-makers across the economy to have had about 20 years ago. Instead, they took every opportunity to turn the job market into the Hunger Games. Congrats to the people who survived the Cornucopia; the rest of us have been bleeding out for well over a decade.
What does that look like in practice? Especially with so many transactions done digitally instead of with cash these days. Say, for retail: it used to be that the manager could simply not deposit the till overages, but now only a fraction of purchases are done with funds that don't travel over our heads via the bank cloud. I suppose you could, like, just give products away, and have the customer Cash App or Zelle you (or a store account) the purchase funds. Call it "escrow". Maybe send the cost of the product back to corporate and keep the margin.
I don't disagree, mind you. You probably could just keep the supply chains moving indefinitely while substituting actual trust for the pseudo-trust and obligation Capital's funds are supposed to engender. It would just be interesting to see the first steps.
It might end up like the great depression where people go on bank runs and there is some panic and violence. Or, maybe people also end up just working in kind in a way.
On the one hand I see that money is some forcing factor to prevent everyone from living to some degree of excess. But on the other hand, if there were no money, it isn't like resources come out of the ether to meet demands for excess. I expect it would end up like the lifestyle we see in rural villages, where no one really lives much in excess of eachother, the community is basically sized to the limits of what the resources they manage to bring in can support. There might be different roles in the community but it isn't like one person's day's labor is worth significantly more than another person's in a different occupation like it is in our western society, where we might value someones day of effort the same as the days effort of a thousand people, simply because of their title, not because they have the strength of a thousand people.
In terms of how this might look across the globe, probably everyone moving towards median standard of living whatever it happens to be in that region. No hoarders of wealth any longer. Might be very scary for someone like Bezos, but for most of us probably the exact same standard of living that we already know. Probably better without all the waste going towards filling these unproductive hoards of resources.
The Industrial Revolution increased labor hours by two or three times, depending on circumstances. In the sense that they reduced the time for life (leisure) versus the time spent being a cog in the wheel of an industrial system (labor), it certainly eroded living standards.
For a very specific example: the cotton gin likely increased the demand for slave labor in the American South, leading to harsher conditions for slaves, increased acrimony between slaveholders and abolitionists, and eventually the Civil War (the decimation of the Southern economy, the pivot of Northern society to a war footing w/ associated disruptions, and 600,000 Americans dead).
I disagree only in that there is one last married recourse, which we are fast running out of time to implement, but which is indeed non-violent and would have the effect of robbing the people driving this Thanatosian engine of their fuel. And it is this:
Bank run, general strike.
And it's up to the professional class (and their direct servicers/reports) to implement it. They're the only ones with both the power and incentive. And they're the only ones with the savings and personal networks to bootstrap community-wide mutual aid that will keep themselves and the less well-off workers who participate secure while the owner class make their panic-calculations (and, hopefully, eventually conclude that a smidge of noblesse oblige is preferable to total collapse).
It's a matter of these people realizing that their choice is not between avoiding and not avoiding being driven under the AI wheel/credit crunch wheel that the AI wheel is hiding. It's whether they want to leave their jobs now, willingly, in an act that builds leverage for the negotiations over how the next epoch of human existence will look - or if they want to do it in a few months-to-years, unwillingly, with zero leverage. It's your 3 Year Trap in action.
Most of the younger people don't care about most of those things. That preference just isn't reflected in markets because older generations control a disproportionate (unfair) portion of wealth.
Why not? Same for hiring. People keep trying to impress order on a process that is ultimately, inherently chaotic, because of the reliance on disorderly human agents to carry it out.
Maybe if C-suite bros thought they might lose their golden geese to a coin flip, they'd think twice about instituting layoffs. Ironically, it would put a wall between "labor costs" (actual people with actual lives that are massively disrupted by job loss) and other costs, in terms of what can be excised from the balance sheet with an inconsiderate pen stroke.
There's literally an ad for Amazon's Alexa devices that features not just the gist of your example, but that specific cause of death (which is itself predated by a murderous digital intelligence doing the same thing in AMC's Pantheon series).
In a way, they might have been right. Who knows whether or not a continuation of the active experiment would have pushed it over a tipping point where the positive effects were nullified. Maybe part of the "magic" is that they literally left it there to rot.
This only works if people with "secure" livelihoods not just participate, but drive the effort. Getting paid six figures or more in a layoff-proof position? Cool, you need to be the first person walking out the door on May 1st (or whenever this happens), and the first person at the bank counter requesting your max withdrawal.
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