AI has already taken over, it's called the corporation Here's the thing. All this management? All this efficiency? All this optimization? That's not the bad part. Check it: Frederick Taylor wasn't an AI, he was a guy looking for inefficiencies. Then the companies who hired him got rid of anything inefficient because it made their shareholders money. It's one thing to stand in front of someone else and say "work faster. No, faster. No faster. No you can't take a break, work faster. You need to work faster." Takes a special kind of asshole. BUT - assemble a shareholder meeting to talk about potential efficiency improvements to write code that tracks your scanner that warns employees if they're dropping below a rate recommended by a McKinsey report? That shit's eaaaaaaaaaasy. The problem isn't the automation. The problem is the layers of insulation between the slaves and the slavedrivers. You make Jeff Bezos walk around with a bullwhip to get people to speed up? Suddenly efficiency doesn't look like efficiency anymore. It looks like cruelty.Steam engines and stopwatches had been around for decades before Frederick Taylor, the original optimizer, used them to develop the modern factory. Working in a late-19th century steel mill, he simplified and standardized each role and wrote detailed instructions on notecards; he timed each task to the second and set an optimal rate. In doing so, he broke the power skilled artisans held over the pace of production and began an era of industrial growth, and also one of exhausting, repetitive, and dangerously accelerating work.
At the root of it, it's always done for the shareholder. And it always seems like that layer cannot be touched, because it is what gives you these jobs to begin with. So everything in terms of changes is tried on the levels below. 40 hour week to protect the worker!! 50 years later, a 40 hour week is so optimized that it fucks the worker. I can't imagine having a fixed time for a bathroom break... Companies need to change. Management needs to change etc. But what not "the shareholders need to change"? I know too little about the stock market and how these businesses are run. But who came up with this idea of shareholders and them having complete control over companies and the main goal being profit maximum? Maybe a Mr. Robot style nuke of the whole stock market would get rid of that.
That is not true. Shareholder value as an economic goal was pursued relentlessly by Jack Welch while he was CEO of General Electric. It's been more than ten years since he said that “the dumbest idea in the world. Shareholder value is a result, not a strategy... your main constituencies are your employees, your customers and your products. Managers and investors should not set share price increases as their overarching goal… Short-term profits should be allied with an increase in the long-term value of a company.” It should be pointed out that from a shareholder perspective, GE went from $60 to $11 in the face of external technological threats. Shareholder value is the idea that you can't roll your money back into R&D because it doesn't have any immediate benefit, far better to declare a dividend and keep the people who own your shares happy. Tesla, for their part, gives no fucks about their shareholders. They have been rewarded handsomely for it.At the root of it, it's always done for the shareholder.
Tesla, for their part, gives no fucks about their shareholders. They have been rewarded handsomely for it. Whether we're talking about public or privately owned companies, if there's one real big lesson from companies like Hostess and Toys R Us and Sears and such, is that if you prioritize extracting wealth from company assets instead of using those assets to reinforce the company, you're gonna have a great time making yourself that much richer. Everyone who works for you though? They're gonna have a real bad time society suffers because of it.It should be pointed out that from a shareholder perspective, GE went from $60 to $11 in the face of external technological threats. Shareholder value is the idea that you can't roll your money back into R&D because it doesn't have any immediate benefit, far better to declare a dividend and keep the people who own your shares happy.