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[Tyrone Slothrop]

Originally Posted by sebastian_dangerfield

OK. I still don't know how this addressed my original point, but I agree with it. It is true. But it also misses something. Tech is not like the automobile. Cars put buggy whip makers (a tiny piece of the economy, btw) out of business collaterally. The intent was not to eliminate the costs of buggy whips (indeed, cars were a bit pricier than horses and horse appliances). The express intent of many forms of tech - and how it makes the huge sums it does for the fortunate few - is to eliminate massive pools of labor by doing the work that labor does via robot, platform, or algorithm.

Cars were the tech of an earlier time. Buggy whip makers may have been a small part of the economy, but horses were lots of work for lots of people.

And you are not quite right about the express intent of many forms of tech. The idea is to "disrupt" by creating something new and better. Eliminating labor is a collateral effect, but not the objective.

Many forms of tech prosper enormously because consumers pay the tech creators (let's say, 10 people in a tech firm), XXX dollars, which is a huge amount of money when split by so few, instead of paying the hundreds of workers who used to perform the service replaced by that tech XXXXXXXXXXXXX dollars in aggregate.

Maybe so, but almost always there is a creation of new value, not just a shifting of labor costs to tech company owners. Uber hurt a lot of taxi drivers, but now you can use an app to get a car much faster.

Tech makes its huge margins in this regard by diverting and eliminating wages that would otherwise be paid to people. In this regard, it is predatory.

Were cars predatory because they eliminating buggy whip makers? No one says that.

NTTAWWT. That's how innovation works. But I never hear anyone in tech describe what they do in terms of paring labor costs and eliminating jobs. It takes people like me, responding to people like you, to force that concession.

I think we all want to focus on the value we are creating. Some of that is replacing things that don't work as well.

It is creating lots of jobs in certain sectors, many of which are located in a few cities.

Yes.

Nothing. I'd vote for UBI. But that isn't happening. So I'll just do what I do. I'll avoid paying any assistants for work I can use tech to deliver.

I'll rephrase that for you: "Many of us believe that our enormous profits at cost to the displaced workers should continue, but the entire country should subsidize a safety net for those we displace. I want the orthopedic surgeon to pay more in taxes to support the workers my tech firm puts on unemployment."

You like to talk about this problem, but you're not actually willing to do anything about it, are you? Except UBI, of course, the exception that proves the rule.

If you think tech should bear the burden for the safety for the rest of the country, explain how that should work.

I'd let it get ugly to the point that the pitchforks come for tech, finance, and everybody else who's profiting at cost to the little guy. Let a class war erupt. I can hide.

What does the class war accomplish?

Nothing ever really gets fixed unless there's a terrible crisis. And crises provide profit opportunities. (By strange circumstance, I think my household might actually make money and be far stronger relative to others coming out of this pandemic.)

You can't explain what a "fix" even is, unless you mean UBI. What do you think should be done?

And I'm not preying on anyone.

If you don't use tech, then you can be holier-than-thou about who pays. But you do. You want the benefits that tech creates for consumers, but you want to let someone else pay the costs.

This makes no sense, for obvious reasons. One of which would be, if it were true, huge companies would have campuses in one location rather than own office space all over the place, as most of them do.

Or, huge companies would have a lot of large campuses, like they do.