No doubt, but the issue I think they keep running into is they don't understand how useful those "human tools" are, so they keep trying to replace the functions humans provide with AI, without realizing all the other functions that the humans also provided.
My partner had booked a table for lunch for us and our friends. Six adults and six children. One of the couples had forgotten a party earlier that morning, so we tried to move the booking a couple of hours later.
Unfortunately the only phone line was answered by an AI bot who stubbornly refused to move the booking, simply telling us there was no availability within an hour of our booking.
Fortunately my partner was passing so was able to go in and speak to someone is person who was happy to move our booking back 2 hours. Lunch and drinks for our party must have come to several hundred pounds.
I'd estimate our party was between a third or maybe half of all the customers there. Had we chosen to book elsewhere I bet someone would still be patting themselves on the back about how clever they were to save a few minutes a day on actually answering the phone to actual customers.
Marx had a way to think about that. He would distinguish between labour as in generalized socially necessafy labour, and specific skilled labour.
Value is measure in generalized labour, since that the universal measure of human effort. The genealized amount of time a human being must spend to produce something from its parts. Generalized labour is also what's bought from labourers. You don't pay them to do something specific, you pay them to labour in general.
This contrasts against specific labour, which is whats actually required in the moment. Generalized labour power must be the right kind of specific labour to actually produce anything of value.
The AI leaders have been told that AI is labour. To the extent that it currently is, which I believe is only the case because the market hasn't adjusted, it's not the right specific labour to male anything valuable.
I find this comment, on it's face, very hard to understand. An apparent abundance of qualifiers without definition. Is this an example of circular reasoning?
It seems to me that the text is saying that generalised labour produces value, but then only specific labour produces actual value. What is the difference between actual value and value in general? Is some value somehow more valuable that other? Are we even speaking the same language? Is this just making shit up as you go along and hope nobody notices because the general idea is appealing?
It's the conceit of capitalism. We've structured our entire society around giving the boardroom class most of the rewards from our societal output, so they've taken that to mean they create most of the value. They are job creators, deliverers of technology, builders of nations, and how it gets done at the low level is an fungible implementation detail. Whether it's slaves or workers or robots down in the fields / mines / factories, the board are the ones driving the ship and therefore doing the real, important work.
And yes, this does mean they view us workers as somewhere between slaves and robots, replicable by a token predictor.
I wish I could work somewhere where I’m _marginally_ less subject to the whims of the Boardroom class.
I’m sure they’re having a great time, and getting filthy rich doing it, but I don’t enjoy having my livelihood attached to the consequences of their repeatedly-stupid-behaviour.
