I truly hope that at some point, the pain brought upon the American low wage labor market will re-ignite unions. If it doesn't we are heading to a dual class dystopian future.
The Reddit r/antiwork has been getting traction (even with the Fox News debacle) and I'm seeing more and more people talk about wage inequality amongst a lot more social classes than I have in the past decade. Fingers crossed history arcs towards economic equality.
Even with wage inequality fixed, we would still be heading to a dual class dystopian future. The rate of capital return is running off and even those with "good" income will struggle to keep up with people starting their life with family wealth.
It's happening now. Specialists around me can't find an affordable house even with their relatively high salary unless their parents can help with their initial deposits for a mortgage and ,at least for my country, it's looking to get worse with no capital gains tax :^)
One thing that can hopefully change that, is the move to remote work where that is possible. It allows high income earners to move to lower cost of living areas (or never leave them to begin with), removing the power that landlords of existing high jobs areas have purely because of pre existing capital, and potentially help revitalize areas that were in downturns before.
I know that the only reason I left my hometown is because of higher paying jobs in other cities/countries. If I could make what I make here, while living there, I would probably go back so I could be closer to my family, plus have my taxes help my hometown and country, instead of some other country.
I enjoy working remotely and I hope it lasts, but I have to admit a large part of me does worry that it makes my job easier to outsource. If some sort of controls aren't put on companies, I don't know how we can stop massive outsourcing of the white collar jobs, just like what occurred in the manufacturing sector - except with less infrastructure to move.
I've spent the last 20 years working remotely, and 10 of them traveling/living in cities, towns and villages in South America, Europe and Asia. I've been happy to see talented locals get better jobs working internationally and boost their incomes. I've never once been concerned with being displaced by some tidal wave of offshore workers. Here's why:
* You, as a native English speaker, familiar with American business culture and someone with years of experience in the field are always going to be paid an order of magnitude more than someone just learning the ropes.
* You can, if you want, outsource your tasks to other people wherever you are.
* You understand that this luck, this privilege, is not going to last forever, because ultimately these jobs will equalize out around the world. And it's right and fair that they should. So you take the advantage you have now and you parlay it into securing something for your future.
The inequality between an American who can live like a king on $200k a year working remotely in a village in Brazil, and a local kid who's learning Javascript there and making $1k a month, is going to even itself out. And that's a good thing for efficiency, equality, and the global economy as a whole. All you have to do is be on the right side of it, ride the wave while it lasts, pass on some knowledge, and by the time they're fantastic at taking your job over you'll be 20 years ahead all over again. There's no reason to feel insecure or guilty about it. The global south is not behind America because America is trying to restrict education there. America does plenty of damage to its own educational system, but it needs skilled workers abroad. The global south is behind America because it hasn't fully shifted from economies of community to economies of scale. That's a multi-generational change. Not to be blunt, but it's plenty of time to become an owner rather than a worker.
All jobs have creative and procedural elements. The procedural elements can be indefinitely outsourced, and eventually automated. The creative parts… well, they're hard to measure. Companies that outsource procedural elements of a job and discard creative elements will slowly fail, unless they have sufficiently-large monopolies that it barely matters what actually goes on inside the company.
There are language, timezone, and legal (contract and IP enforcement) barriers to completely outsource a core engineering team. Modules, such as QA, however, are up for grabs even today.
Outsourcing for knowledge jobs is currently a giant pile of disasters (as in, not one time have I seen folks happy with the result). Given that this is the case, I wouldn't worry too much about outsourcing as a general trend.
> It allows high income earners to move to lower cost of living areas (or never leave them to begin with)
But the algorithms are already compensating for that. Many companies are paying “location differential” salaries. It will probably result in a new form of outsourcing.
The “good” news, however, is that it won’t last. Many formerly affordable areas are already seeing gentrification and median income jumps, as a result, so they are being flooded with yuppies, and driving out the lifelong residents. I’m watching that happen to Brooklyn, in New York. I know that it is almost catastrophic, in San Francisco. I’ve seen the “Google buses,” on 101.
I’m hoping that unions make a comeback, but that’s a damoclean sword; as the American system is highly adversarial, and can be corrupted fairly easily.
It’s also becoming almost impossible to get jobs, unless you jump through crazy hoops, and don’t get me started on the silly whiteboard tests. It’s resulting in things like “leetcode bootcamps,” and consultants, that will help you to “optimize” your CV for scanning algos.
Background checks are almost certain to find something wrong; especially in this age of social media. I remember, a few years ago, when a teacher was fired, because she posted a Facebook picture of herself on vacation, with a drink in her hand[0], and there’s a prominent Canadian psychologist, permanently barred from the US, because he wrote an article, where he mentioned taking LSD, while in college, in the 1960s[1].
Also, politicians almost always have something in their past, that can be used in “oppo research.”
>But the algorithms are already compensating for that. Many companies are paying “location differential” salaries. It will probably result in a new form of outsourcing.
so, combined services for remote workers -
maintain fake address in high cost of living area, providing phone service with rerouting of calls to your real number, providing vpn service so you have an ip address from that high cost of living area.
Yeah we’ve actually moved to a new country to experiment with the idea of remote working in lower COL area. But it sucks to think that we may not be able to live in the area we grew up in if we want to go back.
As software engineers we are wage inequality. What steps have you taken to reduce your wages towards the median? Obviously you would not make the world an even more unequal place by accepting a raise, right?
Just for some context, the median personal income is $36k, while the median software engineer makes $110k. There are about 1.8 million of us. So by each sending back (to our employers or the Treasury) $74k, we could reduce wage inequality by $133 billion. Not too shabby!
That's an absurd and bad-faith reframing of what it means to take issue with inequality. Voluntarily taking a salary cut with no other stipulation would not help lower-income workers; the surplus would go straight into shareholders' pockets. Unless you're the CEO, and have the authority (and the will) to actually redistribute those funds, it would be comically pointless martyrdom (and I think you know that).
So no, I don't take steps to "reduce my wages" towards the median. But I do make donations to people who are trying to improve the status quo, and I do support unions and other efforts at real power-rebalancing, even if they mean a pay cut for myself one day, because that would be for the sake of an actual positive impact.
Working class people need healthcare. You need healthcare according to how sick you are, not according to how large the professional-managerial class is or how its incomes are trending.
Inequality is a very weird frame for the well-being of a society or its less fortunate. The absurdity of sending back your paycheck being an “improvement” is just one element. We can have rising living standards across the board & call it a catastrophe because those at the top are rising faster. Or we can have a collapse, and say that your schadenfreude at your neighbor’s demise makes you whole. The whole model is absurd.
Not to mention the carelessness between income and wealth. Moving income from high wage earners to the portfolios of shareholders is actually good for income and wage equality. It amplifies wealth inequality, but that gets a lot less play since we mainly tax wages.
What you're missing is that wealth - particularly extreme wealth - isn't just about quality of living, it's about power. That's (a major reason) why relative wealth matters in a society: the extremely wealthy can reshape not just their personal lives, but the entire society around them, to suit their preferences. The extremely wealthy don't have to care if a new public policy is bad for the commons (any given commons; the natural environment, public education, civil freedoms, etc), because they can always just buy their way out of the consequences. Nearly the entire society underneath them can be left to rot, and as long as there's enough of a husk left that their wealth still matters, they don't have to care. They can even make it decay on purpose if it serves to deepen their moat of power.
At the level of "extreme wealth" where you own a newspaper or bankroll a think tank, you're not working for wages, and you're not realizing a dollar more in taxable income than necessary. These people really aren't part of income inequality, or reached by income tax. I assume you're not talking about them.
The professional-managerial class do wield considerably more power than the working class. I don't think that's because they have money, though. I think it's because the state is a large organization. People with the skills to run a state will rarely want for white-collar employment. People who influence bureaucracies for a living will also be pretty good at getting what they want from the state.
Imagine. Who's going to win a national electoral campaign, who couldn't land a job in marketing?
This feels so much like a pointy haired boss wrote this.
"See, if you simply choose to send back half your salary to me there'll be less income-inequality between you and the janitor! Please ignore my golden throne."
This plays right into the class warfare between low and middle class that the hides the real problem - tax avoidance by the ultra rich individuals and corporations.
> What steps have you taken to reduce your wages towards the median?
The way to reign in employer exploitation is by improving the bargaining position and political power of workers (via laws and unions). Taking a voluntary pay cut is as effective as voluntarily paying a higher tax rate if you believe taxes are too low.
Here's an example of how to improve working conditions - see if it includes any workers taking a voluntary pay cut to reduce inequality: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28603398
>we could reduce wage inequality by $133 billion. Not too shabby!
There are about 130 million full time workers in the US. Multiplying that by $36K, which is obviously wrong, but I believe gives an order of magnitude at least, is nearly $5 trillion.
$133 billion would then be a couple or three percent. Which would be good for one year's cost of living increase. Better than nothing.
I'm not endorsing your math, just taking it as given, and please don't take mine too seriously.
But we do own the means of production. Unless you have no personal computer or think the Jira instance we all are forced to use is necessary for coding. =)
Sending it back to your employer would result in getting the people who usually truly do nothing (shareholders, board members etc) to get more money. I cannot really see how this type of action can work out. It has to start from a government or a large company doing it first. In the EU we have this more or less gov controlled and it works ok. But of course software engineers cry they make too little as they compare to the US.
There is only one possible outcome where everybody wins and that is capitalism becomes so incredibly good at eliminating inefficiencies that all possible work is automated away, leading to the collapse of capitalism itself since it depends on continuous consumption which depends on disposable income which won't exist because there are no jobs.
I'd really like to believe this is the point where the world evolves into post scarcity where there is no economy because there is enough for everybody and no need to economize anything. Realistically, the corporations will most likely literally invent new economies out of thin air based on nothing just like they did when they conjured up nonsense like copyright.
The food an other resources exists in abundance and so do the means of production and distribution.
All scarcity problems since 50 or even 100 years ago are artificial self inflicted constructs.
We are post-scarcity the moment we simply decide to be.
The reason we haven't and wont any time soon is property rights and everyone who has anything to lose in any redistribution or any change to future distribution.
I didn't say we were nearing post scarcity. I said that's the only ideal outcome. We're closer to a cyberpunk dystopia where gigacorporations are more powerful than governments.
In what way are we not? The food was fine, the power stayed on and I had water. Sure, it's harder to buy computers but the lifecycle for them was too short anyway.
The problem is whatever advances we make they just quickly become viewed as a natural given by the historically ignorant.
It wasn't that long ago that 30% of children died before age 1. Imagine having a baby and there is a 30% chance it is dead in a year? That is almost all of human history.
The complaint will remain constant no matter what. If everyone owned a BMW some people would complain there is this aristocratic class that has a 7 series while the peasants all own 3 series and that we need to make things more equal.
We are so equal that the richest man in history and a homeless person practically have the same smart phone.
only because you won the lottery of birth. your brain isn't somehow genetically better than others' brains. you had access to more bridges/ladders early in your development, that's it. most people cannot grow further instead of bridges/ladders they meet walls/moats.
> your brain isn't somehow genetically better than others' brains.
You're going to have to elaborate on that, because AFAIK humanity has not solved intelligence to the point that we can say it is entirely nurture. That makes it reasonable to assume that it is part nature, which means that yes. It is genetically better than others' brains. And there's nothing wrong with that.
Isn't the logical conclusion of this that the Darwin's, Newton's and Einstein's of this world weren't genetically predisposed, merely consequences of fate?
You don't believe success is a combination of nature and nurture?
with ladders/bridges and walls/moats i am talking about the existing material reality that has one class (the propertied class) creating unnecessary artificial scarcity (on non-scarce material, i.e. using the intellectual property system) which stops the organic spread of technology and knowledge overall, as it's following the profit motive of capitalism. this article is from a socialist magazine, so it's common to refer to systemic black boxing and alienating/obscuring technology as 'gatekeeping'/'rent-seeking' (creating walls with unaffordable gates (for 99.999% of us)).
This phrasing is already conceding half the battle.
A computer or “algorithm” doesn’t decide goals and values on its own.
The computer executes an algorithm that efficiently implements the values of decisions of the people in charge of developing and deploying the software (and their bosses).
Businesses have done a great job of laundering controversial and sometimes illegal decisions through “algorithms” as though they were some kind of independent entity.
I agree mostly but i think that saying “the algorithm is my boss” really does help the discussion along. I had a friend (“S”) who on hard times sighed up to deliver through uber eats. Their entire tenure included no human interaction. S worked for about 3 weeks, got some bad reviews for delivering food cold, and were “fired” all without ever talking to anyone or seeing anyones face. They would ironically (but truthfully!) claim that their phone was the worst boss they ever had.
Its true that somewhere behind the scenes is a set of people making the algorithm and a set of people implementing it, but for the end user/worker there is no human, no realistic arbitration, no negotiation, no favors, no coworkers, no smiles, no understanding, and no recourse. It reminds me of yesterday’s “Did I just lose $500k?” post. When S got fired it may as well have been mandated by god.
ADDENDUM: I don't want to toot our horn too much, but also remember that as a member of this forum you are probably an order of magnitude better at navigating complex institutions, understanding business objectives, understanding the “intent” if a piece of algorithmic technology, and advocating for yourself than the average person who picks up gig work. To many people it is literally magic, and the further your boss is toward being magical the closer you are to being a slave to them. And I don't think I am being melodramatic with my choice of words.
> ... remember that as a member of this forum you are probably an order of magnitude better at navigating complex institutions, understanding business objectives, understanding the “intent” if a piece of algorithmic technology, and advocating for yourself than the average person who picks up gig work. To many people it is literally magic, and the further your boss is toward being magical the closer you are to being a slave to them.
So true. Not everybody is going to see through the smoke and mirrors.
I run a (non-tech) business and have automated out some of the day-to-day work to a set of Python scripts I wrote.
As weird as this probably sounds, I gave many of the scripts silly names and a couple of them pretend "personalities" (ie error messages/prompts will be phrased as if there's an imaginary character inside the machine).
To call software a scapegoat or "not their boss" seems a bit disingenuous. Each algorithm or script has its own goals, its own quirks and its own strengths and weaknesses, just like a human manager. Sometimes these quirks or misaligned goals lead to good people getting fired, just like with a human manager. These algorithms also replaceable and retrainable by the top-level brass, again just like a human manager.
To me, what seems wrong is not that machines are making decisions, but that there is no appeals process for the people who've had their lives ruined by such a decision.
Agreeing with the sibling comment, it would be much better if Uber’s CEO was their boss. S could call him every time a restaurant was late on their order, negotiate for sick pay, and ask him to help shield from the shit higher-ups are giving S. I actually think it is more disingenuous to say that the CEO is the boss than it is to say the phone is.
The "Uno Reverse Card" for this situation is to ask why we need executives and management when the algorithm does everything. The answer is, as you say, the algorithm isn't actually doing anything really, just what its owners would have done themselves.
I don't think that's quite true. It's like the difference between surveilling someone by tailing them and surveilling them with an automated network of cameras equipped with facial recognition. Scale matters. Much work (especially work we call unskilled) is rendered tolerable by the small human moments you have with your coworkers, a conversation out back when taking out the trash or whatever. Management sees any such thing as "time theft" or a similarly dystopian term and would like to eradicate it, but they cannot be everywhere at once. An algorithm can be everywhere at once. So the conversation "maybe people should not actually have to be doing productive things the entire time they are being paid" never really had to be had before, because people would just do things to make their job tolerable. But now that such simple pleasures can actually be eradicated the conversation does have to be had.
There are other domains where analogous conversations should be had. Many people agree with their laws in the general and even specific senses, but almost nobody would want to live in a society where all the laws are enforced perfectly 100% of the time. Occasional lawbreaking is necessary for society to function. Anybody who objects to this should really think through what they're wishing for.
The solution is to move the burden of accountability from low-level management (which is replaced by machines) to the people in charge. CEOs should not be immune from jail
After reading your comment, I went and read this book. Both terrifying and inspiring. Clearly illustrating two extremes, but it’s obvious in which general direction we’d rather veer. And algorithms as bosses isn’t it.
Thanks for the recommendation!
This is the planned future for us all, unfortunately. Technocracy demands that scientific experts evaluate our reality and then determine what we are and are not allowed to do.
Too much carbon/water/energy use = restraints on your usage. (No restraints if you can pay though.) This is what smart meters, smart phones, smart cities are going to facilitate. (Smart = Spy)
If I agreed with their evaluations and was able to choose to opt in, I might even consider this. But this is not the plan. What will really happen is that the political and billionaire classes will find that it is right for them to assume the role of determining the technocratic goals that the AI driven system should achieve.
We will find that we have a tyrant computer to engage with. There won't be a friendly face to help you by bending the rules in some way. It will be like when you ring up your local governance office to sort something out... but worse. We are not going to be stepping into techno-utopia, that's for sure.
A bio-medical-security-id seems to be a required first step.
Having a friendly face to bend the rules creates a breeding ground for iniquity. We can’t have both - and the current direction seems to be to prefer reducing inequalities, rather than having people help break the rules for others that they like.
That's fine if the rules are applied everywhere, but the reality is that everything - even rules - are for sale. If there is a powerful controlling class that writes the rules that apply to the oi polloi but not themselves, how will you achieve equity?
Humans can learn to have an exceptional judge of character, see the big picture, and quietly subvert bad policy by feigned incompetence. These benevolent bosses/bureaucrats are history's unsung heroes and we need to be very careful before automating them out of our future.
It seems like most people think they’re better than average at judging the character of others, which cannot be true [1].
Under testing, everyone seems to be pretty bad at recognizing liars [2]. It’s especially hard to get good because it’s often an open loop, since good liars are never caught at all (classic toupee fallacy — you think you’re good at catching liars because you don’t know about the ones you missed), you never really get the chance to calibrate.
[1]: maybe with specific definitions of “average” and a very lopsided distribution, but I’m doubting that the people who think they have exceptional judges of character actually believe that they are above the mean but near the mode; usually, if someone is “exceptional,” I assume they’re in a high percentile
> What will really happen is that the political and billionaire classes will find that it is right for them to assume the role of determining the technocratic goals
‘They’ have power and money because ‘we’ give it to them. Not because they take it from us.
Yes. Partly we give it to them, because they do not present their case in a straightforward way. I think there is a lot of social engineering that occurs, that just happens to align and progress the pre-planned agenda. So, imo, we give our money and power over, as we are deceived.
When you have a monopoly on violence (because you effectively own the government), you have a disproportionately large say about who gets what.
The idea that somehow you can have a revolution when the other side has machineguns and all you have is a beer gut and maybe a double-barrel shotgun is naive at best.
This point of view assumes any decision can be scientifically determined as optimal. In reality most large-scale decisions are tradeoffs, you pull from one side and another starts to crumble. Recent example: you introduce lockdowns and reorient hospital care towards COVID, and more people start dying from cancer due to missed checkups.
Such decisions are value-driven, and cannot be replaced by an algorithm. That’s what we have politics for.
The main difference is that business organizations tend to be more authoritative, but that already changes towards more balanced organizations that actually debate on their values.
I read the story... creepy. This kind of blunt AI boss seemed like from an low quality dystopia. But it is true unfortunately, and closing to us in any industry. AI is not intelligent, is just stupid machine on steroids (the algorithm).
I hope here in EU this bleak future is delayed a bit, heard rumors that EU Parl has a series of legal initiatives to fight against.
These stories certainly sound like Amazon is eager to usher the worst dystopian future from so many SciFi stories. I get that Jeff Bezos likes SciFi, but not all of them are examples to imitate.
On the other hand, with algorithms you can actually study how the decisions are made. You can investigate what was given as input and how it affected the results.
With complicated algorithms it may not be obvious, but then you can try to poke the black box with thousands of sample cases to see how it reacts.
Compare this with humans, who often don’t even know themselves what their decisions are really based on.
"On the other hand, with algorithms you can actually study how the decisions are made. You can investigate what was given as input and how it affected the results."
You'd have to have access to it. This is highly unlikely. If testing as a black box, could they identify a test and change its behavior, like VW emissions tests?
Who is the "you" here? Workers certainly do not get to probe the internals of the algorithm that fired them. For liability reasons I'm sure human resource management systems are not exposed to researchers. Maybe a court could but in practice I don't think that's happening and the bar to get that kind of review is incredibly high.
Only the company itself is actually in practice going to be testing their system but they only do so with a view to their own interests.
That should be defined in the legislation. Maybe something where the employee can for example file a complaint of unfair practises and then the issue is investigated. This is pretty much the same case when humans are accused of unfair or discriminatory decions.
I think the GDPR legislation already takes small steps to this direction.
This is nothing to do with GDPR, this is about workers' right against unfair dismissal. Being dismissed without warning, because of rules you cannot know, without explanation or right to appeal is ridiculous.
It has a lot to do with GDPR, because GDPR article 22 explicitly prohibits all kinds of severe decisions (including but not limited to dismissal) from being done by an automated unappealable system.
Like, even if the dismissal was after a warning, because of rules well known in advance and with an accurate explanation, GDPR would still prohibit making this decision solely through automated processing, there has to be a place for human intervention.
Trying to protect basic workers' rights through legislation that protects personal information is downright weird. You'd think workers should be better protected than just random people who share their personal information.
Article 22 even acknowledges this to some extent, making an explicit exception for people who have some other kind of contract (including employment) and for which the law has defined suitable safeguards. U.S. employment legislation is indeed not a sufficient safeguard, but the fact that it insufficiently protects privacy is somewhat of an understatement.
I haven't met many humans who would ever ask the baddies question either - I don't think it ever occurs to people to ask, which is why it makes for a decent comedy skit.
Shame and empathy are built in because we really do work better in at least small groups of up to perhaps a few hundred people.
Yeah, it's easier to investigate a racist algorithm than a racist manager. The article makes the following point, but I'm not sure if it's necessarily worse than the status quo:
> All the while, the potential for discrimination based on race, gender, or disability, especially in hiring and firing software, remains obscured behind the black box of AI.
Triangulation (the narcissistic one) at it's best. Make a machine - or software function in this case - the messenger. As an evil c#nt you get a) plausible deniability, b) smoke and mirrors, c) gas lighting, and d) a scape goat in one. Oh, and your algorithms become your 'flying monkeys' as well.
For personal reasons I had to dive into NPD, BPD and psychopaths (all cluster B personality disorders) the last years. Once I finally understood that sh1t, a whole lot of other stuff made sense. What big tech is doing here is using these same principles on a world wide scale. I'm not saying this is new, because the Romans with their 'divide and conquer' did basically the same.
The solutions to counteract this as an individual are also the same as found in the psychology books: go 'no contact', or at least 'gray rock'. If you are capable, that is. There's going to be a lot of casualties, and I feel for the workers there (or should I say 'victims').
Lack of empathy? Definitely. Impulsive decision making? I'm not so sure.
What you describe sounds pretty BPD, especially with the black/white thinking (although I think hot/cold is clearer wording). I was more thinking along sinister lines here.
And indeed, zero regard for different points of view. Which is very logical when one finally understands that: if you are - in your own mind - the god of the universe and beyond, every other view is by definition beneath you.
They inflated assets wjth the money printing, and now we are all slaves to our huge mortgages and corporate overlords. Money printing and immigration have all helped the capitalist class, and yet the politicians claim they help the common man
Maybe one day, in the distant future, we will have AI bosses and AI doctors and AI judges who make very important decisions entirely on their own. And there's nothing wrong with that. Any bias, moral crises, lapse in judgement that AI has, humans have these as well. There are plenty of real-world bosses and HR who respond in a similar manner to the AI "bosses" described in this article.
But not today. Because AI is not at the level where it makes mistakes at the same rate as humans. AI is better at chess and maybe driving cars, but it's not yet better at critical thinking, empathy, and solving open-ended problems like "how should we address this employee's performance?" Not necessarily because it can't be better, but it isn't yet at that level. Even if Amazon actually tried to make their AI bosses lenient, without some human holding the final decision or appeal, there will be blatant mistakes like the ones the article describes.
The Reddit r/antiwork has been getting traction (even with the Fox News debacle) and I'm seeing more and more people talk about wage inequality amongst a lot more social classes than I have in the past decade. Fingers crossed history arcs towards economic equality.