AI Isn’t Good Enough
skventures.substack.com
On a recent cross-country trip—I (Paul) drove from California to Illinois and back again. On the drive, I saw a sign I had never seen before: In a McDonald’s window it said $1,000 SIGNING BONUS. That was not a thing when I was a teenager doing minimum-wage jobs. No one paid you $1,000 signing bonuses to work for fast-food restaurants.

I thought it was an interesting read. It’s a very Pollyannish piece about the future where AI is somehow able to enable a workforce productivity revolution to save the American economy from its declining labor force.

But in the meantime they make the argument based on some quantitative economic work that in the last few years, growth in employment has slowed because automation is displacing many more workers than new jobs are being created from the automation. They even admit that this is mostly achieved by shoveling costs onto the consumer. The self-awareness is wild.

  • swiftessay@lemmygrad.ml
    6·
    1 year ago

    It’s very telling that in the host of reasons this person gives for the so called “shortage of labor” (which is actually a shortage of an industrial reserve army), not one of the is stagnant salaries.

    No one is willing to admit that in most areas salaries are stagnant when compared to the enormous growth in labor productivity and cost of essential goods and services (food, housing, education, etc) and that’s the root cause of a resistance or workers to enter the “reserve army” in those areas. Simple like that.

    Increase pay, and people will join. If you can’t increase pay enough to find employees, then your business isn’t viable and you need to do something.