Please stop fantasizing about 'global revolutions'.
Wealth redistribution movements can successfully happen within national borders, or even within tightly knit groups of nations (say EU, or NAFTA).
But there will never be any solidarity between say US and African workers, heck there won't even be any solidarity between Indian and African workers. China in particular violently suppresses unions because they believed it'll result in China outcompeting all other developing countries in manufacturing, which is exactly what happened.
If AI is to replace white collar jobs, the outsourced white collar jobs (low precision, low criticality) will be the first to go. Replaced by one person in the home country doing the job of 5-10 in the past. This fact alone crushes any sympathy across borders.
> won't even be any solidarity between Indian and African workers. China in particular violently suppresses unions
How are these two points related?
> because they believed it'll result in China outcompeting all other developing countries in manufacturing
Oh dear, no.
In particular English speaking westerners really struggle to assign correct motivations, they. struggle to imagine different thinking processes.
Opressive governments like China and Russia has three properties
One - any act of spontaneous self organisation by the population is dangerous. In Russia the police raaids chess clubs and charities that plant trees. Why? Because fuck em, some weirdos organising by themselves, without approval, how dare they.
two - they are paranoid - what if this organisation X is actually a front, organised by my political enemy? Remember, we are deeppy cynical here, noone organises for a common good, people only organise if someone is concocting a plan for gain or profit
three - any civil motion os percieved as disorder. If you are a governor in a opr3ssive regime, and you dont want to interveine in manufacturing dispute, you will have people above you calling you, asking why do you have a mess in your region. Why cant you do your job.
So if you run a genuine charity in Russia, you get raided by police immediately -you might be seen as a threat. But if you run a fake charity, and in fact just steal all the donations, then police doesn't really care.
The throughts about 'our manufacturing is not competitive if we allow strikes' is not the top concern
It is absolutely true that China hates unions because it is form a organisation outside of the parties control. It hates organised religion, NGOs, or even apartment strata/bylaw level organisations.
However, they also do hate labour regulations. They only accepted 5 day weeks because of the WTO, and they absolutely no not enforce it. The CCP genenuiely believes that harsh working conditions and hours is critical to China's success.
China doesn't hate labor regulations so much as rule of law simply isn't really a thing there, especially when you compare it to the west. Labor, conditions have dramatically improved in China, though it's motivated by a sense of Confucian noblesse oblige rather than regulation.
> But there will never be any solidarity between say US and African workers
Why not? If post-covid economics has a theme, it's that things are more interconnected and more fragile than we expected. That fragility is also opportunity.
I can imagine scenarios where overpaid tech workers in the US--rather than striking themselves--instead pay underpaid miners (in Africa, say) to strike, which cascades to hold up manufacturing, which cascades to harm their eventual target.
Why would tech workers pay miners to strike (Lets ignore the insane difficulty of organising that for now)?
Making hardware more expensive, directly and negatively harms software developers. Software devs benefit from cheaper hardware, in the same way car companies benefit from cheaper oil. Car workers don't get paid better because oil prices go up, they get laid off.
Also, most rare earth minerals are mined in China, China does not look kindly to foreign 'interference', such as labour organisation.
Well it wouldn't be any old mine, it would be chosen in a way that deferentially impacts the operations of the company that you want to harm. Yeah, it's a negative sum game, but that's how threats usually work. Even though it might hurt their hand, people sometime punch other people if they're convinced that it'll hurt their target more than it hurts them.
Income disparity would also be part of the calculation:
1) If there are V people with W average income each willing to pay X% of their their income to support Y other people while they strike and forgo their income of Z, then maybe you get more disruption for your buck by targeting part of the supply chain in a country where wages are lower.
2) If you're looking to make your target look scummy, targeting a more direct dependency might not be the right thing. You'd want to be funding a strike that should've happened anyway if only the people could afford it, not one that isn't justified.
As for the "China does not look kindly" thing... don't get caught? We're disrupting here, of course we're going to upset people. That's the point.
Lets just say you need to understand a bit more about the difficulties about 'organizing people'
You are sounding like those businessmen who think building a facebook or programmer just requires hiring some contracted programmer for a few months.
And organizing people across national/linguistic borders is instantly 10x harder. Across long causality chains, 1000x harder. Its like trying to build an app that can run on hardware from the 90s to modern iOS to windows XP. The only company on the planet that can do that is Palantir, and they aren't very profitable.
> Why would tech workers pay miners to strike (Lets ignore the insane difficulty of organizing that for now)?
Why would anyone donate to help anyone else? I've contributed to strike and organized labor funds because it can help others improve and make meaningful changes in their lives.
> Making hardware more expensive, directly and negatively harms software developers.
I doubt many people are pro-miner brutality and exploitation because it might make electronics a bit cheaper.
> Making hardware more expensive, directly and negatively harms software developers.
Global solidarity has more benefits than drawbacks. Plus strikes only last so long, then if successful the workers get better pay. But this is unlikely to lead to higher hardware costs - instead it will just be lower profits for the capital owners. The cost of raw materials is not determined by labor costs, but by global markets - owners just collect the difference between costs and prices for themselves.
This is an interesting idea. I honestly hadn’t considered that we could contribute to strike funds in these countries. Seems like a thing worth organizing
I feel like a network of that sort would have applications all over the place.
Perhaps this is a petty example, but whenever I'm asked to input a tip in a place where tipping isn't appropriate (like a drive-through fast-food restaurant), I'd like to tip $0.05 as a hint that I've contributed $5 to their strike fund (which they could use an app to later verify).
Why not just boycott the places with abusive labor practices instead of some convoluted scheme that only signals your virtuous nature to the exploited employees.
You know, like back in the day when people boycotted goods produced in Apartheid South Africa.
It's not about virtue signaling, do you think that giving them strings-attached money is going to make them like me? It's kind of a jerk move.
It's about establishing communication directly with the workers so that you can circumvent potentially corrupt unions.
As for general purpose boycotts, I don't think they're as effective as they used to be. Modern supply chains are too convoluted.
It's easy to see somebody doing something that you don't like and engage with them directly about how you can help them stop. Mapping an evil to a change in your spending habits that prevents it... I'm sure there are cases where that's still possible, but I don't think it's the majority of them.
Yes, there are altruistic reasons too. I'd like to say the same for myself, but it's not like I've put in the effort to find out how to actually help such people--and presumably those ways exist.
But it even makes sense according to a colder, less human logic (which, regrettably, is often what matters). Like maybe I want to pressure the makers of a VR headset into letting me root it so that I can prevent it from streaming biometrics to the vendor. If I can delay the release of the latest headset versionin a way that causes the news about the delay to focus on how poorly certain workers are treated, I can later threaten to do it again if they don't give me what I want.
No they don't? For a start hardware is a miniscule cost at most software companies, but even asides from that, its not like programmers would be paid more if that cost was lower. They are paid exactly as little as the boss can get away with. If the company you or I work for literally doubled its profits we'd walk away with like a small bonus at most, maybe some small improvement in options if you're lucky enough to get those
Unity allows easy spreading of disease and corruption, cancer cannot spread between different people. If a union in one country is corrupt, it won't automatically affect the unions in another country.
China was a united entity against the mongol invasion, didn't work out very well, because you take out the center, the rest collapses.
Europe was deeply divided, and just because your neighbouring castle surrendered, doesn't mean you will. Because you are the local noble who owns the land, rather than some bureaucrat employed by a distant emperor.
I'm not sure what 'entire history of war' you are reading. Did you only read 19th century history or something?
If large empires always had an advantage, then you would see endless snowballing, and only end up with mega-empire-blobs, and one-world-government.
That is not the case. You have period of imperial blobbing, and also period of intense fracturing. Europe fractured after Rome, because smaller polities were much easier to maintain, with fewer layers of bureaucracy to feed.
The small Frank kingdom (that only owned half of France) was able to fend off the great Jihad from the Umayyads that had crushed the Visigothic Spain. Whereas if you took out Rome, or the Chang-An of China, the rest of the empire would be paralyzed and unable to act.
Mexico has both employer-controlled sham unions and real unions. While there is certainly tension between US and Mexican workers you overstate the situation.
US unions would like Mexico to have strong unions both out of sympathy and self-interest. The more protections Mexican workers have the less attractive it is to move jobs from the US to Mexico.
US unions successfully fought to include pro-union provisions in the USMCA (Trump's NAFTA "renegotiation"). They're using those provisions to help Mexican workers form real unions and defeat the sham employer unions. We don't yet have much experience with how these provisions will work out, but there have been limited early successes.
Describing the prosecution of the head of the teachers union in 2013:
> Mexican Attorney General Jesús Murillo Karam charged Gordillo with money laundering, saying she had used the union funds to pay for airplanes, pilot training, her plastic surgeries, and purchases of luxury items in the United States. Juan Díaz de la Torre, who was a loyal member of her union caucus, became head of the union.
> While Gordillo was very likely guilty of the embezzlement of which she was accused, such practices are common in the Mexican labor bureaucracy. The motive for jailing her was political: first she had betrayed the PRI, and then she had opposed Peña Nieto.
The part about “such practices are common in the labor bureaucracy” is telling.
Corruption is so common, that any prosecution can (accurately!) be labeled political is one of the best signs of a corrupt system.
This isn’t about an employer controlled union. The union is heavily autonomous.
But if Mexican leaders wanted to get rid of unions, all they would have to do is enforce the law.
Guiliani did something similar when mayor of NY. He announced sweeping investigations into union corruption, then negotiated very favorable contracts while prosecution was hanging over union leaders heads, then called off the investigations when he got the terms he wanted.
Maybe I was wrong to focus on employer controlled vs real unions. That's certainly a problem, but as you point out it's not the only problem.
Here's the broader point I was trying to make: Mexico has a problem with corrupt unions. But US unions are trying to help Mexicans solve that problem, not abandoning cooperation with anyone in the country.
I'm not sure if the US teachers union specifically is involved. They'd have less incentive to be because you can't replace a US teacher with a Mexican one.
I don't know what re-unionizing in the face of a corrupt union entails, but presumably if you can pay people's salary while they strike you're at least part of the way there?
>I can imagine scenarios where overpaid tech workers in the US--rather than striking themselves--instead pay underpaid miners (in Africa, say) to strike, which cascades to hold up manufacturing, which cascades to harm their eventual target.
I don't think you've considered the logistical difficulties of what you're describing. It's not like Panasonic has a list of all of the cobalt miners that were part of their supply chain. They themselves have no idea where their cobalt comes from, as they get it through several layers of middlemen. At the root of this supply chain are people like an man who feeds orphans, but forces them to collect peculiar-looking rocks, which he sells to the local warlord's nephew for $2 per hundred pounds. It's not exactly a place that's ripe for unionization. Even could pay somebody to strike, they really have no incentive to do so, as they'd rather earn even more money by not striking and you have no way to keep any individual person accountable.
Also I struggle to see how a worker revolution in Tanzania is going to spread to China, which then trickles down to tech workers. Keep in mind that the GDP per capita of the world is only a 1/10th of what an entry level SWE makes at a FAANG. At some point where workers in developing countries get richer, that's going to affect the quality of life of tech workers.
Language barriers. Cultural differences. Exploitative history. Low trust. Geographic distances.
I think words like Never and Any are too strong, but I don't think we'll see high enough levels of solidarity to form an international labor union for at least 30 years. We seem closer to commercial nuclear fusion power plant.s.
> But there will never be any solidarity between say US and African workers
You'd be surprised - dock workers across the Western World started to refuse to offload Russia-originated cargo after they invaded Ukraine. Cross-national action is difficult, but not impossible.
Obviously this is a different situation, but it shows cooperation at that scale can happen.
> But there will never be any solidarity between say ...
There is international solidarity between people, because they understand each other, are in the same classes or have the same ideas/ideologies.
Between far-right people, across Europe and US and Russia and everywhere.
Between workers, whatever their political taste, because they are in the same class in society.
Between white-collars all around the globe (they even meet a lot).
And on and on.
Be assured that if there's a working promise to unite a group of people worldwide, that aligns with their respective interests, whatever that is, and they have the means to coordinate, why would they refrain?
That's even the whole basic premise of the United Nations, for peace.
> Please stop fantasizing about 'global revolutions'.
why? we are on a prominent site in an industry that likes to speak of “changing the world.” Or is that just a euphemism for “I want to make myself rich”?
Your grasp of history is a bit weak. What do you think caused the cold war? You think the communist bloc happened on a backdrop of happy workers? Why you think Germany had and still has strong pro labor conditions? Because there was legitimate fear of German workers choosing communism
> the communist bloc happened on a backdrop of happy workers
Were workers happy in those countries? Likely no. Was it their populations that chose Communism? No. It was mainly imposed upon countries by Russian imperialism. The cold war was a power struggle, not a struggle between different peoples who chose different ideologies. You can see that in how quickly the Warsaw pact disintegrated after the Soviet Union lost their grasp on those countries, and in how much many of the ex-SU / Warsaw Pact peoples now hate Russia, except for the countries that were taken over by authoritarians.
There were many attempted communist revolutions around Europe in the late 19th century and the early 20th century. In most cases, large parts of the working class had decided that their own country was the enemy that had to be destroyed. They had no loyalty to the state, but they found natural allies in revolutionary communists in other countries.
Emphasis on attempted. We also had a wave of red terrorism around the world in the 70s, which led to nothing but grief. Ultimately, what improved workers' rights in the West was a democratic process. In Latin American countries you get governments swinging from populists on the left and on the right constantly. But either way, I don't see any communist revolution coming about anytime soon, even in very undeveloped countries, many of which already lived under some sort of communist dictatorship in the past, or at least live close enough to one to know it didn't do any good.
Many of those attempted revolutions turned into civil wars. Communists won some of them. Some of the emerging communist states were defeated by foreign military interventions. It was a bloody and confusing era in European history.
The turning point was when capitalists realized that it was not possible to defeat communism by fighting the communists. They gave in and started supporting some of the goals of social democrats and moderate socialists. That deradicalized enough people that even revolutionary communists had to start working within the system.
Revolutions are pretty common around the world. The recent ones have not been motivated by communism or anything similar, but that could change. The world is unpredictable, and major changes happen once in a while.
'Global revolution' was very unlikely in 1870 mostly due to communication speed/bandwidth (telegraph), was made unlikely in 1970 by CIA, United Fruit Company, and various other similar organizations with murderous leaders across the world.
However, global revolution in 2070 is almost a certainty, too many things are getting aligned, to name some:
- climate change: water wars have already started, but they are not yet visible [1] [2], once we get past 2 degrees warmer world we will have unprecedented weather all day, all night. What kind of "border patrol" can stop 3 billion 'immigrants' [3]? A murderous one, sure.
- good-enough statistical learning to automate 99.99% of jobs (from the current 3.32 billion jobs, by 2070, very hard to say what is not automate-able, but let's say around 300,000 people (1.5 Microsofts) continue to have jobs looking after the robots that make robots that make robots).
- ridiculous biotech advancements: from forgetting cancer ever existed to limb regeneration [4], it's all on the pipeline for the next 20-30 years.
- even greater financial consolidation: we will see the $10 trillion company in the next 5-7 years (probably Microsoft), meanwhile BlackRock, Vanguard, and friends will get even bigger, soaring past $100 trillion AUM in 10-12 years (currently at ~$20 trillion, BlackRock + Vanguard + State Street). Are there really any borders if everything is owned/controlled by one company?
The future, as it was in 1870, and in 1970, no matter how many veins Ronald Reagan and acolytes burst, will always be socialism or barbarism. Don't get me wrong, I 100% bet on barbarism, your species doesn't deserve socialism. Nevertheless, the global revolution will come, too little, too late, but just in time to leave this planet in the arms of a better caretaker, one without 4 billion years of history caring only for the local glucose gradient.
Sure, yes. Stuck in a tailless primate's proteins and ion gradients, but refusing to adhere to the traditions, reflex behaviours, and societal constructs of said primate, granting for myself, sine licentia, mental freedom to think in a future where morphogenetic freedom frees one from being stuck in a tailless primate.
All the revolutions so far have failed because there is only one revolution to be made: the post-human turn of the political [1].
It's not a problem of "life", "rights", "representation". These ontic objects are deeply flawed, as can be seen in the present state of the political. Even taking it in ridicule: what is one to do, fight for the right to representation of every paramecium and amoeba?
It's more about seating the political in a realm of the inconsolable (fundamentally every political decision is the bad one), uprooting the current games of bad faith and energy poverty which have constituted the political since the first gathering of hominids. The inconsolable, which at the limit is death itself (of a self, of a society, of a territory, of a universe), is binded to an ever greater cone of care, at the same time bringing closer the post-human and the post-human increasing the cone of care. The lesser-known, brilliant nonetheless, thinker Vladimir Jankélévitch [1] has some more thoughts along these lines in 1971, L 'Imprescriptible and 1974, L'Irréversible et la nostalgie.
A combination of Michael Levin's cognitive light cone [1] from the "Technological Approach to Mind Everywhere: An Experimentally-Grounded Framework for Understanding Diverse Bodies and Minds" paper and the Heideggerian care (Sorge) [3] [4].
The Wobblies are such a joke that there was talk about taking them over around 20 years ago by just getting enough people with your similar mindset to join.
Like the 4chan raiders before the 4chan raiders.
I forget the amount of people it would have taken but it was laughably low.
Speaking as a member, in terms of actual unionized workplaces affiliated with it, it's still extremely marginal. In terms of membership in general, it has grown considerably in the past few years, but most of the new members are those who were (further) radicalized by the contemporary US politics and seeking like-minded folk in general, not specifically to organize.
Thing is, people who try to organize generally expect some immediate gains out of it, which generally favors large established unions who "play by the rules". IWW is a strongly ideological union and has things like an explicit ban on no-strike clauses in its constitution, which makes it much harder to write a collective bargaining agreement for a workshop that employers are willing to accept. Burgerville Workers Union is a recent example of an IWW success story that broke down over this issue.
The KL divergence (number of bits needed to encode one message with the coding scheme of another) is extremely high here between perspectives, so communicating the shared values here may be hard.
You might appreciate taking an opportunity to just listen a bit to where some more downtrodden people are if you have that opportunity come up organically. I've lived in the perspective that you share, and I've lived in others, and it just took me cumulatively a lot of traveling and talking and listening to people to hear and develop other opinions and ways of seeing things (not just how other people in my in-group said how they saw things -- perhaps one of the fronts of some of the most toxic assumptions that I've ever made about people in the end). I ended up changing my opinions to different models as a result.
If the parent message appears to mostly fit within the "I'm angry, so I'm going to burn down the world and do what I want and get my revenge and just take my anger out, including on people who have no control whether or not I get to hurt them in my selfishness" kind of category, I'd encourage you to look a bit deeper at the core of it. It's really hard to summarize lives in bullet points, but having lived within one category of oppression and knowing many people who are oppressed, it's hard to fully communicate what it's like, why people feel like it's the only option, and how it's a way that people are trying to enact change while still minimizing damage on the whole (strange as it may seem. the silent story of people being pushed down in civilly trying to change things is horrifying. i don't pine for violence myself, but i understand it for those who have been downtrodden in the ways that they have).
I know that's not really directly answering it, but walking a mile is really the best solution that I know of that we have in all of the crazy division that there is today.
Yet, still robbing me. This KL difference idea is absolutely interesting though, as I think the view I have is a normal and pretty conventional liberal view. Don't steal from people, don't extort, don't be a bandit, etc. I think compassionate distance is probably the only way to coexist with people who couldn't agree on those things, as to me it's really alien. Sort of interesting to view an idea from the ouside like that though.
Perhaps you need to examine the inequities which have allowed to you amass the wealth you fear being robbed of? In short, profiting off the exploitation of others, if even indirectly, shouldn’t be viewed solely as “earning things”. Further, wealth obeys a power law distribution. Always has. Does that make it fair or right?
Lastly, would you prefer to part with some of your wealth by choice or be parted with it (and maybe your life) by force when economic inequalities pass a tipping point? Regardless of morality and notions of property ownership and personal wealth, history has plenty of examples of violent revolution when the rich few neglect the many. So, rightly or wrongly, sharing the wealth may be a survival strategy, as it were.
>Perhaps you need to examine the inequities which have allowed to you amass the wealth you fear being robbed of? In short, profiting off the exploitation of others, if even indirectly, shouldn’t be viewed solely as “earning things”.
Maybe you need to examine the inequalities in effort that cause so many people to slack of at school and work and spend all their free time watching television or the like, then the inequalities in wealth wouldn't be so surprising to you.
I went to school with the kids of business owners and executives and the biggest refrain I heard was "why do I have to do well in school when I'm just going to work at/inherit my dad's company?" as they partied their way through school and well after it. And they were right.
This argument belongs to a broader theory called "Culture of Poverty" (poor peoples' values rather than structural issues lead to poor choices which perpetuates a cycle of poverty). It was popularized by sociologists in the 50s and 60s, but has since been discredited and is not taken seriously by modern sociologists.
The funny part there is the level of intellectual laziness in that answer itself.
It’d be nice in some ways if it were that easy, wouldn’t it? Poverty would be easily ignored because it’d be chosen. Except, as noted above, even then, when economic disparities pass a tipping point, violent revolution tends to happen. So even if that idea were correct, the rich cannot afford to ignore inequality either.
Thank you for the moderation in the answer, I appreciate it.
What's perhaps even stranger is that physically we're hardwired to generally have the same emotional needs, though obviously with some variety, and that most ways of being are different strategies for meeting those emotional needs. This is a topic discussed in Nonviolent Communication and I rather appreciate it.
What I have seen a number of times is that there's a turning point once I see how someone is meeting a basic emotional need with a particular strategy, and the through-line to it. Without that through line, things can be a bit scary as they don't seem to follow causal rules from the outside, and we're all limited in our models.
I don't always stay in really close to people advocating for violence, for example, as that's not a culture I entirely prefer. I've come to a belief after a while that nearly everyone is an extremely rational agent in their decision-making, and that it's actually the information presented to the person inside their brain at the point of the decision-making that is oftentimes the culprit for the vast differences in behavior for certain people. I've seen it from traumagenic mental health disorders to even normal differences in political opinion. Realistically I can't quite get in to that place of reasoning to speak with that person always, and it's not even really my place to do that or maybe even try. But it is humanizing, and it has helped me keep my head on straight instead of writing someone off so I don't feel disturbed by an unknown unknown rolling around some proverbial emotional garden.
Daryl Davis is another person I really respect and like as well. I look up to a lot of how he handled those kinds of clashes, as the way it resolved for him always has been so strange and mysterious to me. Incredible story, tbh.
I'll leave off with this quote from him here. Of course the goal is not necessarily to convert someone always to a different belief system, but I think it can maybe then be reinterpreted here as finding a peaceable middle ground:
"When they see that you know about their organization, their belief system, they respect you. Whether they like you or not, they respect the fact that you've done your homework. Just like any good salesman, you want a return visit and they recognized that I'd done my homework, which allowed me to come back again.
That began to chip away at their ideology because when two enemies are talking, they're not fighting. It's when the talking ceases that the ground becomes fertile for violence. If you spend five minutes with your worst enemy — it doesn't have to be about race, it could be about anything...you will find that you both have something in common. As you build upon those commonalities, you're forming a relationship and as you build about that relationship, you're forming a friendship. That's what would happen. I didn't convert anybody. They saw the light and converted themselves."
Define robbery. Taking the US as an illustrative example: How about legalising corruption in politics through Citizens United and having laws systemically rewritten to favor the rich? Or the government subsequently effectively pumping investors portfolios with the poor's money through QE (especially using the slap in the face "too big to fall" justification which essentially says the wealthy are more important to the economy than the poor)? How about raising taxes on the poor by not adjusting tax brackets for inflation while corporate taxes have trended down? How about Exxon making record profits by getting government subsidies and further subsidising its own profits by making the world poorer with its pollution?
Paying taxes is not a voluntary choice. Subjecting yourself to inflation is not a voluntary choice. Having your environment polluted is not a voluntary choice. You have no political alternative to this system, no vote you can make to say no to it. The rich taking from the poor is only not considered robbery since the wealthy both (legally) bribe the lawmakers and are the lawmakers. Just look at Clarence Thomas. Only the poor taking from the rich is robbery.
The semantics of what constitutes robbery aside, the world is experiencing a totally unsustainable concentration of wealth which will eventually cause markets for goods & services, consumerism, and the engine of world economics to collapse toppling the entire wealth pyramid. On top of that, global warming and the fact that oil supply seems to be plateauing (So we can't kick the true costs of energy down the road again) is suddenly going to make being poor much more expensive. At some point sheer practicality will prevail and redistribution to the poor will need to happen, and if it doesn't happen voluntarily, it is likely to result in an eventual revolution. If a revolution happens, it's likely that suddenly lawmakers will change the semantic definition of robbery.
it’s robbery because the users here, myself included, would be on the losing end of wealth redistribution. If it’s the other way round it’s good business.
Of course, it's only robbery when those wealthier than me have gotten ahead. The fact that I make dramatically more than some random African Worker for ChatGPT obviously doesn't mean I have to give up any of my money. It's the 1% who need to forfeit their money - to me!
I'm sure many aristocrats would have framed the revolutions against them this way. And if you are willing to look at it from the right angle a great many revolutions throughout history come down to more or less this.
You can claim it's not right, but there's right and there's the reality of human nature. Push the populace hard enough they WILL push back.
Soon the elite will have amassed enough power through technology that they could put down any revolution. This terrifies me tbh.
The most dangerous innovation in this regard is advances in brain scanning is it could make it trivially easy to find the resistance. But robots and AI are factors too. If the rich don't need the labor of the poor it will certainly shift the balance of power.
> most dangerous innovation in this regard is advances in brain scanning
What terrifies me more than the idea of brain scanning that works is the (IMO more likely) deployment of "brain scanning" that doesn't work (but is used anyway) and creating a 21st century witch hunt.
AI is very impressive, but people are getting so used to it performing magic that they believe it can do anything while preserving the veneer of objectivity that algorithms earned in the pre-ML days.
It won't matter if the "brain scanning" actually works or not. Examining the history and effectiveness of polygraphs is enlightening -- even now, polygraphs are used as though they are effective, and in a different light, are an example of an intimidation tactic.
> Soon the elite will have amassed enough power through technology that they could put down any revolution.
As long as the elite still need other lower-class humans, e.g. chauffeurs, nannies and cooks, or security, the revolution can still get to them.
If the chaos so many rich preppers are gearing for comes to pass - their wealth won't protect them. As this[0] article points out: in an apocalypse, there will be nothing stopping their armed ex-special-forces security guards from taking over their New Zealand compounds and throwing them out - or worse. Their status as elites is preserved by the very institutions they are undermining.
If AI and Automation make it so things like nutrition, traveling, security, and shelter don't require humans than wouldn't that mean it's easier to provide these basics to everyone?
The people who own the automation are not interested in sharing. If the choice was between providing basics for others or letting them die in the streets, they'll choose the latter. It's a choice that plays out everyday.
Even one where we just unplug the machines we have?
There are only 1 million sworn LEO in the US, and they work for a paycheck, not loyalty to Jamie Dimon and company. You think those cops are going to bat for former oligarchs versus a population with 3 guns per adult at ready?
If you abuse someone to the point that they break then it's hard to blame them for their actions against you. It's tragic to see someone feel that they have no other avenue than violence.
Who's being robbed: a citizen of the developing world without health care or clean drinking water, or a wealthy computer programmer trying to make online ads 1% more effective?
Theft is defined as the seizure of private property without the consent of the owner, the victim is irrelevant. Leftists always have to make this strange argument where definitions are bent to label an action one way when it happens to a group they support, and another way when it happens to one they don’t. Why can’t you just say “I believe stealing is justified if it would benefit society” instead of “it’s not stealing when we do it to you”?
>Theft is defined as the seizure of private property without the consent of the owner
This is a very contentious definition and central to the question being asked. You can't pass it off as already decided without any debate.
Two situations for your definition, you tell me whether something is stolen:
1) You sell me a Ford Pinto that you know is likely to explode in a crash due to a design defect. I sue you after I'm burned up and win. I seize your private property by court judgement. Have I stolen from you?
2) A slave takes an apple from his master's orchard without permission and eats it. Has he stolen?
Arguably, both cases are theft. We simply decide whether or not it is acceptable with the principle that force is only and always justified in response to force. See how easy it is to be consistent?
Consistent on the definition of "theft", yes indeed. However, it's way harder to be consistent on the definition of "theft" while you also consider theft to be inherently immoral. And that's the center of this subthread. motohagiography asked..
> How is this not literally just a threat to rob people if they don't give up their stuff, and why would anyone take it as anything less?
.. as a clear argument against the base morality of the original comment. This being seen as such hinges singularly on the fact that theft, in all forms, is inherently immoral. If you define theft as any time private property is taken, irrespective of circumstances, then you also have to concede that theft isn't always immoral.
Thus, the whole original argument would have to make not only the case that the original suggestion of wealth redistribution is theft, but that it's immoral theft. That consistent, broad definition of theft thus becomes much less useful as a qualifier.
I don’t recall making that argument. Instead, I’ll argue that both you and I believe in private property, so this isn’t a valid point you can use against me. The only difference being that I am consistent.
You don't own anything because everything was given to you. You don't own the atoms that make you up. You don't own the air you breath.
It's all social constructs however through these constructs societies may be built, art fashioned, science discovered, tools invented. What's up for debate is the best means for which to accomplish that.
"Private property" is an inherently political term. To take an extreme case, for much of human history it was perfectly acceptable to own other people. Once you accept the abolition of slavery as morally correct, then you've accepted that property rights aren't completely inviolable in all circumstances.
Because that's not a universally held definition only "leftists" disagree with?
First, even where property rights are accepted, a well considered definition generally has a caveat is made that property can't be taken "arbitrarily" or "unlawfully" or through a "legally established public necessity" or so on. In practice, every society which has had a legal concept of private property has also simultaneously had the concept that the government could certainly seize said property under certain conditions, and this has generally been treated as legally legitimate and not illegal robbery so long as it serves some common good. If you don't have such caveats, you run into all manner of issues justifying things like:
>Eminent Domain
>Taxation
>Court ordered seizures
>Civil forfeiture
You can also just just straight up deny the right to private property exists altogether. And not even necessarily from the obvious left wing perspective, you can just say the entire realm belongs to the king, so the king taking things to redistribute as they see fit is not theft, since everything was the King's to begin with. People have even claimed that the very concept of property is a form of theft.
Beyond those arguments, the probably most crucial argument here is that the poor's private property was stolen to begin with through government corruption and unindemnified torts to end up with this status quo, and how is restoring private property to its rightful owner theft? It is the very essence of protecting the right to private property! Particularly when people are calling for this private property to be restored through legal reform or through government overthrow (legal reform through extraordinary means). Not through simple anarchistic robbing of people who exist nearby you.
As for why people don't simply roll over and say they're pro-robbery, if you robbed somebody, you are a criminal and what you possess is not your property and subject to restoration to its rightful owner. People want to go beyond robbery, they want it to be legally established that people have absolutely no legitimate right to what they currently possess. People also don't necessary want to claim that if they argue for redistribution of wealth, that they also support grandmothers being subject to purse snatching. There's many obvious reasons why people don't describe their actions as "robbery", and your entire argument mostly is based on an presumption about who truly has a legitimate right to whatever property, as well as these peoples absolute unconditional right to this property, and argues any attack on either this presumption or presumed right (which has never existed) is some sort of leftist sophistry.
This has nothing to do with legality. I simply stated that taking someone's things by force is still theft when it benefits you. I still consider all four of your examples to be theft. Like I said in the other comment, whether we consider theft to be justified depends on the situation, but whether it's theft doesn't depend on your belief that it's justified. You lack the consistency to win this argument and it shows.
If something is or isn't the crime of robbery has nothing to do with legality?
> I still consider all four of your examples to be theft
Fair enough but do you at least recognise that your position is not mainstream, which might explain why people don't simply accept it beyond simply being leftists?
Wealth & power distributions are a little more complex than just 'having stuff.' In biological bodies, excess concentrations of resources in a single organ is associated with illness, exacerbation and proliferation of other conditions, and eventually failure and death. Intense wealth concentration strikes me as the social equivalent of diabetes.
It seems very convenient that "rob" doesn't include things like wage theft, destroying "the commons" for the sake of personal profit, or whatever the fuck happened in 2008. With a more expansive view of what "rob" means, one could argue that people have been getting robbed for years.
In the same way that a chargeback is not a theft from the merchant--a higher authority steps in and corrects the record. Property rights exist because the people consent to them. If there's sufficient consensus, they can be revoked in the same way.
>Property rights exist because the people consent to them.
You clearly have absolutely no understanding of what "rights" mean. They're based on deontological arguments, that's why they're called "inherent" rights, not based on some weird utilitarian notion that anything can be morally right if enough people believe it is. By your view of rights raping someone would be okay if enough people want to do it.
You clearly have absolutely no understanding of how "rights" work in the real world. There is no divine force enforcing your god-given right. There's only power. The reason the current "rights" even exist, is because they are enforced through power - if I steal from you, police comes over to my place and beats the shit out of me. Remove the police (and all other forms of power) from the equation, and you can wipe your ass with your "rights".
Or in other words, deontology is just glorified astrology, a bunch of mumbo-jumbo poppycock.
> By your view of rights raping someone would be okay if enough people want to do it.
You're trying to reduce this argument to absurdity, but in many ancient civilizations, rape, in some contexts, was considered okay.
I'm not an arbiter of what's right and wrong. I'm just some guy who gets to decide which rights I'll stand up and defend, and which ones I'll allow to lapse. My reasons are irrelevant to whether my behavior contributes to the emergence or dissolution of rights (but I think they happen to be deontological arguments anyway).
Bodily autonomy, I'll defend in all cases, no need to argue that one here.
Property, not so much. It's part of a bargain. If the people with an outsized share of the property don't exercise their control over surpluses to ensure some degree of decency for all (which they haven't) then they're in breach of the social contract, and is time for a discontinuity in property rights that gives us a different set of people to try out the same contact on.
Some rights are intrinsic, sure, but what makes you believe that property rights are, and especially abstract property rights that aren't rooted in actual physical possession or use? (i.e. some registry somewhere saying that X is yours actually giving you a natural right to control what other people do with X).
And lest you claim that this is some kind of extreme communist take on it, here's Thomas Jefferson on the subject:
"It is a moot question whether the origin of any kind of property is derived from nature at all... It is agreed by those who have seriously considered the subject that no individual has, of natural right, a separate property in an acre of land, for instance. By an universal law, indeed, whatever, whether fixed or movable, belongs to all men equally and in common is the property for the moment of him who occupies it; but when he relinquishes the occupation, the property goes with it. Stable ownership is the gift of social law, and is given late in the progress of society."
Because we can point to a record of recent history where the elites collide with the politicians to create this situation.
IBM refused to divest from give vacuum tube based computer business so government funded silicon and transistors based computers then gifted the technology to IBM.
There’s story after story of the public having its wealth expropriated.
Well, they usually end up with the people everyone was most angry at for causing the circumstances that lead up to the revolution powerless or dead, as an explicit aim.
So regardless of who ends up in charge after or if that regime succeeds, you can’t say revolutions themselves are not frighteningly effective. After all, every existing country on earth is the result of a revolution against the leaders of its past.
I assume it often starts with "kill those people" and once that nasty business is out of the way and new people are selected to replace them there's a very strongly implied "Now you people make a better life for the rest of us, or else we will go back to the 'kill those people' step and repeat as needed."
I think you're confusing successful revolutions with revolutions. Way more likely the revolutionaries succeed in doing a bit of damage and get crushed.
Fantastic results! Check out how GDP per capita is trending in those areas. It has doubled in Palestine and Haiti over the last couple of decades, and is way up for many sub-Saharan African countries.
Funny that you'd pick those areas and not Asia, where a billion people were lifted out of absolute poverty in the last 30 years! Pure chance, I'm sure.
Haiti has faced 4 straight years of a shrinking economy and the GDP per capita is at one of it's lowest points in the last 60 years.
Yes, many people have been lifted out of poverty but it has happened alongside increasing inequality and there have been some very notable failures and Haiti is one of them.
Wrong. World bank data shows Haiti's GDP per capita has more than doubled since 2000. [0]
You anti-capitalists have already caused a century of misery and wont--can't you just admit defeat? Haiti is the perfect example of the extraordinary benefits of our system. 40% can't read. 60% lack access to electricity. Yet even they can't escape the bounty of global capitalist system!
It's over. Capitalism won, for the benefit of all of humanity.
Human existence is meaningless to the universe so you know; if our existence is to be treated as such I would rather have front row seats to the apocalypse than work a rote office job another 20 years
You jest, but strong arguments have been made on both sides of that counter-factual. Popular narratives of the American Revolution leave much unsaid. Contemporary accounts of inciting events such as the Boston Massacre were often gross distortions or plain lies.
The Townshend Acts were meant to tax the colonies to recoup the cost of their own defense, after the French and Indian War kicked off arguably due to Washington's poor French and inexperienced military leadership:
The majority of blue collar workers, as well as quite possibly the majority of people in many countries outside your own, might have very different views about things than you do.
That's a noble goal and all. Just understand that global wealth equality doesn't mean this community gets richer. It means this community get poorer and by quite a lot.
It's absolutely ridiculous more outrage here isn't directed at wealthy companies who use labor that pays as low as $1.50 an hour.
It's hard to believe these are multi-billion dollar companies paying as low as $1.50 an hour for anything let alone paying for a service which will not only make them rich, but potentially put many more out of work.
What's disgusting is all the defense of it, since it's "above market rate" in those countries. Bald admittance that all the "entrepreneurs" here would pay similar rates if they could get away with it too.
I'm not sure if this is sarcastic or not, but putting aside the impact of this statement from, say, even a non-zero-sum game perspective, this statement, er, almost ironically mirrors perfectly a few choice historical examples of why the flood broke the way it did in the past.
I'm not sure if there's a way I could succinctly share a response detailing the why, other than certain general desires for relatively decent self survival and for the general wellbeing of the population outside of our small walled garden. Theres's a lot of debate that could be had over the second half of that last sentence, so all I can comfortably say is that what we take affects other people.
But the bigger part is probably some of the historical irony in the statement, since it is likely what a museum piece would use if translating historically what has happened in the past into a modern day hypothetical scenario, in terms of how different sides viewed the issue and communicated.
(If you check the other comments this person is making, it appears to be some trolling, which is confusing given the karma of the account. I'll be adding flags to them as well.)
Their comment history doesn't seem that trollish, just this chain of comments. I've seen several dozen accounts with sub 100 karma that are definitely more suspcious.
Because your status is temporary. As long as you have to work for a living, you're vulnerable to whatever 'the market' does.
Additionally, regardless of how overpaid you are, you cannot isolate yourself (to the extent of how billionaires can) from the effects of extreme wealth inequality. These are too many to list in a hn comment, but to give you an example, if a mob turns violent, you'll not have a security detail to evacuate you and your family.
Exactly. Who is VWWHFSfQ and why do I care about one random out of billions? What’s a run of the mill office worker done for me lately I can’t do for myself having grown up on farms fixing machines, growing food, later earning a masters in elastic structures and working on hardware products.
Imma make chips with AI built in; why not make the machine assemble whatever state I ask for without some useless middleman?
You're supposed to care about all the poor souls that can't code and feel guilty that they have no opportunities whatsoever in the future when machine automation and AI drive the economy.
You're not the only conscious being in the universe. Others have their own personal perspectives and as human's we have the capability to care about their feelings, in addition to our own.
Helping someone else does not doom you to suffering. It's not a zero sum game.
>Wealth inequality is cyclical with the same outcomes throughout history - voluntary or violent wealth redistribution.
This is simply untrue. The only large labor revolutions, the communist revolutions in Russia, China and the like, led to a massive destruction of wealth, not a transfer, plunging those countries into extreme poverty with worse standard of living than before. For over a decade after the revolution Russia didn't even have weekends.
And if you're thinking of the French revolution, you should know it wasn't a revolution against the rich; it was a revolution _against the government_! That's why they beheaded the king..
Wish them the best but they only have their jobs because of outsourcing— they’re the cheapest labor available. Ask for too much and the jobs will go to India or anywhere else.
Yeah, they have quite a sad understanding of their bargaining power.
1. Their job easily replaceable by any english speaking, high school educated worker on a planetary level.
2. There is almost no capital expenditure to setup a 'moderation centre', just setup a bunch of computers in an office and you are done. So workers don't have leverage over a company that is unwilling to move.
3. AI will annihilate probably 80% of the offshore call center business in a few years, the workers laid off from call centers, can 1-1 slot into these AI-RL training jobs. Heck AI will also annihilate 80% of those offshore moderation jobs for say facebook. So more competition.
Frankly, the AI companies doesn't even need to move to another country, they can just hire non-unionized workers in those same african countries. When they will do this, depends on when the union asks for too high of a wage.
The most optimistic outcome, is the unions try to work with the AI companies in asking for better conditions, but not neccessarily much better wages. Overplay their hand and they will fail.
1. These jobs are situated in Africa for the precise reason that other usual outsourcing countries have become increasingly expensive and prohibitive for this type of work. These workers are exposed to the most vile things the human mind can produce and they do it for starvation wages day in and day out.
2. Their leverage is their sanity and willingness to be able to be exposed to unconscionable content. Many places in the world would categorically block this kind of gig simply for being damaging to the mind, and rightly so. And even in countries where this work is permissible, it would otherwise expose the company to future liability in terms of emotional trauma.
3. This 80% figure is a number fabricated from thin air. These workers don't work in call centers. They are content moderators in some shape or form -- a job that requires not just reading comprehension but being able to weigh certain current events, cultural queues, unspoken and spoken language, and other data that you can't magically feed into a machine.
These workers are not slaves, they are free to work anywhere else.
If moderating posts on a computer really is worse than say working at a farm, or a a clothing factory, then the workers would leave.
They don't work in call centers of course. But the workers who currently work in call centers, can swoop in and compete for their jobs. I can tell you that plenty of people on HN, would rather deal with moderating awful content, than to talk to endless waves of people who can't read 3 step instructions. And I would prefer either compared to say diving in sewage.
If you don't think GPT-4 can replace offshore call centers very rapidly, then you need to talk to those companies that do employ them. Onshore call centers handle more complex stuff that is harder to outsource, offshore ones not so much.
The workers could leave. Or they could unionize and attempt to improve their employment conditions. Maybe it will work. Maybe the company will fire them and replace them with other workers.
But I have to imagine that the workers’ own assessment of their leverage is more accurate than someone on the other side of the world who read an article headline. And it would appear that at least some of them, based on that assessment have decided to give unionizing a shot.
I'm not sure if saying "quite a sad understanding" is really an appropriate or deserved response in this scenario.
Like anything, there's a lot more beneath the surface. Many white collar folx tend to entirely write off Africa and other third world countries and misunderstand some of the dynamics there.
Yes, of course there will be a decrease in demand, that does not make unionization bad.
You also seem to underestimate the ability for African people to band together into collective movements. Yes there will be scabs, of course, but this is a step forward in the fight.
I do find myself feeling frustrated when someone approaches the comment section on a journey that has taken technical workers _several years_ through the courts system and then offers a dismissal that seems to suggest that the problem could be solved if they thought of it differently or didn't realize how shortsighted they were.
I do hope Africa is able to follow through on its ambitions to have serious punching weight in the global sphere, all problems aside. It is a beautiful continent with many beautiful cultures in it. It certainly feels a bit like a kind of home for me.
It is true that Africans can band together in movements, that's how they forced Europeans out.
It also true, those 'collective movements' don't necessarily result in good outcomes. Look at Kenya on the map. To the east is Somalia, to the north is Ethiopia, South Sudan, Sudan, all countries locked in civil war between different 'collective movements'.
The big opportunity for Africa in the AI era, is to use AIs to serve local healthcare/education/software development needs. There weren't many teachers/doctors/SE engineers etc to begin with, so they have little to lose from mass deploying AI.
I'm not sure unionising to get higher wages from moderation work will make a big impact. I am really curious to see the counterargument here, why will unionisation work in this case?
I can't claim expertise on Africa, something I would add though is that many Africans from Kenya, for example, that I've talked to, generally blame British imperialism for many of the problems today. Because they drew country borders willy-nilly around tribes, sometimes even splitting tribes between countries, and culturally the tribes only vote for their own, the countries are ruled by majority tribes which become the rich and leading class. Ethiopia has this problem too for example. Then tribalism + continued tensions just keep going from there.
Of course there is the rampant corruption. There are also collective community policing strategies too in some communities, for example.
In the African Union I have high hopes for the continent, but still I think there is a a very large, very large, very large barrier to overcome because of the infighting.
As far as the unionization, I think if handled right it can have lower downsides for the amount of bargaining power that it provides. It seems that a lot of African culture thrives on ad-hoc person-to-person movements, so this feels very much within the lines of what could work in Africa. But tribalism inside of each country and between countries could still keep any local movements from having a larger impact within the continent even if, say, a local union is successful.
In any case, it basically moves the Nash Equilibrium but doesn't necessarily abolish it. If handled poorly, or if the company retaliates, then sure, if the company is willing to run the press gauntlet and such. But at the very least, I have hopes.
Also I know of the conflict in Somalia, Ethiopia, South & North Sudan, etc. I haven't checked in on Kenya in a while. I hope all is well over there, it is generally a very beautiful and safe country with a few notable exceptions. Has something happened, or is it in the list mainly due to proximity to the conflict (or something like that?) :'( </3
Kenya is a true bright spot (and really the only one) in the horn of africa region. They have typical internal tensions, but they are a real democracy, I don't think they are interested in civil war given their neighbour's poor examples.
That being said, "Africans from Kenya, for example, that I've talked to, generally blame British imperialism for many of the problems today" is a typical and unimpressive mentality. Tribal conflicts existed way before the British did.
For example, Sudan existed before the British came, and the Arab vs black fights in Sudan is not a British creation. Somalia is mono-ethnic, doesn't stop it from endless wars. Ethiopia was not colonised beyond a short Italian occupation, their current civil war is still the result of ethnic conflicts.
African unity is also a questionable concept. West, Central, East and Southern Africa are four different continents in terms of culture, ethnicities, climate, and size. The only consensus is 'no-changing-borders-by-force', yes, they know that those colonial imposed borders is the only thing keeping africa from falling into a bloodbath free-for-all.
That's why AI is really africa's greatest hope. They have not invested much into white collar knowledge and industries, and AI allows them to leapfrog much of it. It'll be very interesting to see how the african public reacts to AI.
I really and truly hope so. I have a lot to learn about the continent, and I love it much. I've done some work on significantly reducing the experiment cost for small experiments on GPT and convnet models (WikiText and CIFAR10, respectively), and one of the big things that I thought of was how it could help Africans in AI specifically because it allows for good research test signals but isn't prohibitively expensive/slow.
On A100s this particular CIFAR10 network trains in under 7 seconds for example and the network (fp16) is <10 MB IIRC, the relative gains over other previous training speeds is even better on older cards IIRC due to it being pretty memory limited at this point. It could be used as a backbone in other networks and is nice because it is good to run experiments on and also can directly deploy at scale pretty easily. In my experience, cycle time is actually one of the biggest resources for most smaller research initiatives.
I just haven't had the opportunity to talk to anyone yet to see if there's a way that I could interface with the African AI community over it. I don't know how Colab works but they work pretty darn well in the free version of Colab, and both are annotated to help a moderately well-motivated learner pick up some of the ropes themselves.
It seems like you know a little about the space. If you do know anyone or have any pointers as to where I could/should look to talk to people about this, please do let me know! I think OSS can do a lot and would love to give a bit to the community, for sure.
I'm really not sure there's much of an investor interest in helping Africans train their own AIs, your data center costs will be way higher in Africa. And the talent pool there to help with AI is still very small.
There will be a large interest in selling AI to Africans, GPT-4 today, lightly modified, can already radically improve African education. The vastly underpaid and overworked teachers no longer need to waste time in preparing lessons, they just need to control the classroom and perform assessments. Also GPT-4 probably dominates your average English tutor in Africa...
The problem is the cost, a GPT-4 subscription is far beyond the means of an average African. The bottleneck is with server-side inference costs, once that is solved, I expect a AI gold rush in Africa, where western companies compete to sell AI subscription services. Your average African already owns a cheap andrioid phone with 3g connection, which is good enough for an AI chatbot.
> 3. AI will annihilate probably 80% of the offshore call center business in a few years, the workers laid off from call centers, can 1-1 slot into these AI-RL training jobs. Heck AI will also annihilate 80% of those offshore moderation jobs for say facebook. So more competition.
I am dreading that day. Most often when calling a business I need someone to fix something and often it can only be fixed by someone that can make a decision that is kind of "outside of the rules". AI will be trained to always stick to the rules, so I foresee an even more frustrating call center future.
The present flock of LLMs is not exactly good at that whole "stick to the rules" thing beyond surface compliance. GPT-4 was touted as a significant improvement in that regard, but 1) it was jailbroken within days, and 2) most of the methods used to do so still work today.
My experience is that in big companies people stick just as much to the rules (or "processes") as any LLM would. You wouldn't want to know how often sensible and straightforward requests get obstructed because "there's no process for that".
The jobs went to them only after going through India and lots of other developing countries over the last few decades. At this point there aren't a lot of cheaper places left in the world.
Maybe it'll share the fate of China's recycling - the government will realize that the the "profitable" import and processing of harmful materials is not worth the human harm it causes
Don't worry, content moderation for most services, will be performed by GPTs in max 2 years. Pretty sure GPT-4 already exceeds human labellers on average for simple moderation tasks (ie facebook comments, not say reddit communities with fine nuance).
The only moderation workers left, will be for the AI companies, and the efficiency here is train once-use multiple times.
If you are going to outsource that function to some other country, might as well outsource it to GPT, cheaper faster better, with no ethical concerns or bad press.
So those workers don't have to experience those traumas again! They do however have to experience the trauma of unemployment.
So be careful what you wish for.
Getting ML to reliably do something specific like flag an image as inappropriate is (a) already well known in the field (b) impossible to do reliably and not getting easier, which is exactly why these comment moderation places exist. Otherwise we'd already be doing it. None of the recent advances are in a direction that brings us closer to being able to do this.
I think you're probably in the majority though who misunderstands what gpt et al are doing and think of them as an advance in ML generally as opposed to just a different demo that works most of the time.
Are you sure about that? We haven't seen what GPT-4 multimodal can do in the wild, it can even take into context the full conversation history in addition to just the images. If it can understand visual jokes easily, are you sure it can't detect CSAM?
We can also reliably GENERATE inappropriate content now, by simply adding a 'nsfw' tag to Stable diffusion, it flips a normal image to an inappropriate one. It doesn't sound very difficult to reverse this.
Also, for these services, you don't need it to be perfect. If even the flagging accuracy goes up significantly, that's a lot fewer human workers to review it.
The AI ecosystem as a whole is also booming massively regarding hardware, datasets, talent, software infrastructure. So that makes development in traditional ML faster.
As someone who is very optimistic about GPT, you are utterly misunderstanding what content moderation teams deal with if you think GPT can accurately assess a majority of their cases.
The accuracy will not go up significantly if humans are already struggling, and I'm not talking about the mental aspects of the job, I'm talking about being unable to determine if the case is accurately violating TOS or not.
This is going to get even more difficult, for both humans and AI, when content is being generated at alarmingly fast rates by AI. So even with the use of AI to combat AI, there is still going to be a gigantic tidal wave of questionable shit to go through.
The options aren't 100% human vs. 100% AI, though?
I'm no expert so maybe you can clarify why high accuracy/reliability is that important for an initial analysis by AI? I would expect the vast majority of reports are straightforward matters?
There's a human poster involved, who can trigger a review if they disagree with the decision, and that review can be attended to by a much smaller pool of humans.
> Pretty sure GPT-4 already exceeds human labellers on average for simple moderation tasks (ie facebook comments, not say reddit communities with fine nuance).
> "all employed by third party outsourcing companies"
> "Meta’s lawyers said that Motaung was employed by Sama, ...that No action can therefore be brought against Meta...as Meta was not and has never been his employer.”
>Despite the mental toll of the work, which has left many content moderators suffering from PTSD, their jobs are some of the lowest-paid in the global tech industry, with some workers earning as little as $1.50 per hour
It kind of blows my mind that this it's legal for an American corporation to employ third world slave labor instead of American citizens.
Can we not dilute the definition of "slave labor" here?
American consumers would give up their own labor standards before facing the ruinous economic consequences of a world where they could only consume goods made by laborers earning $15/hour with health insurance and OSHA oversight.
> the ruinous economic consequences of a world where they could only consume goods made by laborers earning $15/hour with health insurance and OSHA oversight
Was economy of 1950's USA ruinous?
US did not import manifactured goods from China / almost anywhere at the time. The rest of the world manufacturing was a bomb crater after WW2.
Western manufacturing isn't uncompetitive because of OSHA and health insurance. There are third world countries that have health insurance.
Western manufacturing is uncompetitive because of insane inflation of real estate has parasitic effect on the rest of the economy. You cant pay a worker less than he has to pay his ladlord
>US did not import manifactured goods from China / almost anywhere at the time. The rest of the world manufacturing was a bomb crater after WW2.
Agreed, and unless you propose returning the rest of the world to a bomb crater then you cannot reinduce the 1950s by simply... regulating real estate prices or whatever. You cannot go back to a world where unskilled blue collar laborers earn massive wage premiums in the US vs. India/China like they did in the 1950s, and imagining that you can have "1950s prosperity" or whatever without this (thankfully fleeting) premium is pure delusion.
Are you volunteering to get off your computer and get back into factory work? Bolting some cars together on an assembly line 50 hours a week?
US knowledge work exists because we outsourced manufacturing and physical labor. You can't work a cushy software job and then whine that the economy hasn't improved since the 1950s.
More like economically literate weirdos who understand that the reason why people like cheap consumer goods is not because evil corporations have imposed a false consciousness on them that prevents them from realizing true class consciousness and releasing themselves from their chains.
Any jurisdiction can try to ban goods that are created through low-wage labor, or more generally labor that does not adhere to the regulatory regime of that jurisdiction. It basically never happens in the western world except for the most extreme cases (eg. actual slave labor) for obvious reasons, and when it does it almost always reflects a shameful form of protectionism.
This is not slave labor. These people are paid above median wages for their locale. This allows them to have decent homes, transport, food, water etc. These people would rather have these jobs then not, it is an engagement by choice.
> It kind of blows my mind that this it's legal for an American corporation to employ third world slave labor instead of American citizens.
What will blow your mind even more is that even when Americans, Europeans, or others in rich countries know about this, do they care? Do they boycott those companies? No they don't... Because they want stuff and they want it cheap.
I don’t care because $1.50 is a good wage in the countries where these workers live.
Of course I want cheap stuff, who doesn’t, but I don’t want it to the exclusion of all else. I don’t want to exploit or harm workers to get stuff. In this case, I’m comfortable with the wages paid by these folks, and hope that their employer has some retraining program when moderation is rewritten to use AI and fewer humans.
That's not literal slave labor. From the article it admits that they don't know the source of some of the beans. Nestle isn't finding slaves to work for them.
> In the age of anynimous shell companies owning half of the assets in the country, you expect Nestle to officially employ slaves?
> They purposefully setup and intermediary, and use slave labour in full knowledge
It sounds like you are very convinced that Nestlé knowingly uses slave labor (it sounds a bit conspiratorial if you were to ask me). If you are sure of it, are you avoiding ALL Nestlé products? Otherwise you are enabling such atrocity.
Just have to imprison people. Those are free to be used as slave labour per constitution. They could even use AIs to invent crimes and evidence and then get them prosecuted by state money and reap the benefits of slave labour.
this reveal is easily worth more than the union itself. If you were a futurist, a FAANG thought leader or an evangelist for AI, this should be all you need to know to realize ChatGPT isnt the future.
if youre using chatgpt in a call center, then this is just H1B or other labor fraud with more steps.
they are used for RLHF, its training the AI. Machine learning in general requires a shitton of high quality labelled data. Labelling the data is usually very tedious, and often done via mechanical turk etc.
African workers arent able to write a unique 500 word story about whatever scenario you dream up in about a second in whatever language you choose.
A trickle.
Then a flood.
The labor movement is resurging and rightly so.
We need to welcome this or prepare for violent revolution globally.
Wealth inequality is cyclical with the same outcomes throughout history - voluntary or violent wealth redistribution.