Jeffrey Funk gathers up a long list of fake AI successes. In each case the machine was only doing part of the work, with humans in India doing the rest.
There’s a real Turk inside the Mechanical Turk. There’s a little man named Ramesh behind the curtain in Oz.
The same illusion was forced on us by the Tech Tyrants in the tech generation before AI. The tyrants told us, and the fake skeptics agreed, that automation had taken most of the factory jobs in the 70s and 80s.
FALSE. Factory automation was essentially complete by 1950. What happened in the 70s and 80s was actually LOWER TECH. The predatory capitalists didn’t finish automating the factories, they shipped the factories to China where lower-wage workers did MORE of the work with LESS automation.
From 1950 to 1980, American workers were the ‘last mile’ in factory automation. They setup the machine for different batches, watched the machine while it ran, and did quality control on the result. This was less creative than hand-building each car or hand-packing each box, but it was also very well paid, with decent hours and good benefits.
Now we have the same shared lie for AI. Instead of replacing American jobs with machines, the tech tyrants have replaced American workers with Indian workers.
Factories in the ’50s and ’60s were immensely profitable. WELL-PAID AMERICAN WORKERS WERE ABLE TO PAY HIGHER PRICES FOR PRODUCTS. Now the workers are paid much less, so they can only afford Chinese-made crap.
Both ways yield profit to capitalists. The only difference is that modern capitalists hate America and hate workers. They are ascetic fanatics.
The pony in this shit is the similar profit in both ways of doing the job. If capitalists who don’t hate humans started to bring work back onshore, there would still be profit for the bankers and salesmen, and more people would be able to buy more things.
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