Inhuman Machine Favours Efficiency

We currently find ourselves in new and interesting times. How will the current climate play out? I had mentioned a company Klarna in one of my previous posts where they've replaced 700 real people with AI agents working as customer support. From their own metrics it looks as though AI agents perform better than humans and customers are more satisfied with their calls/chats.

A new development in that story in this article titled "Klarna stopped all hiring a year ago to replace workers with AI"...Don't think I really need to put that in perspective if you've found your way to this blog post, it's a shitty time to be a labourer. Might be kinda shitty to be an elite too, as there will be profits in the short term but no one to buy excess widgets tomorrow.

Siemiatkowski said that while the total wage bill is shrinking, he’s been able to convince employees to get on board with the shift by promising they’ll see a chunk of any productivity gains they reap from AI in their paycheck.

Awful nice of them to share the AI labour profits with those who enabled them. Is that going to be in perpetuum? Or will they be rewarded once for their effort while Klarna finds it's way to being the next Walmart or Amazon as other companies are left in the dust?

So I mean this is pretty much what I'm afraid of. In our capitalist system, it's the most innovative and lean companies that tend to succeed. When one company adopts such methodology, it becomes a fools errand to compete with human labour(aka slower, costlier, more prone to mistakes), when you can train a bot to do so. There's a misconception that some might think is codified into the letter of the law. It is that publicly traded companies must generate the most capital for their shareholders. There's no such law, but if there's money on the table and the shareholders see it... they aren't going to let leadership remain much longer without embracing it. They won't allow executives to not use AI, because it could be an existential threat to the company's livelihood to not adopt and be left behind. There would be money they can quickly grab off the table (cull their numbers), but then they could also become more bullish by training AI so these numbers can dwindle even more. To extract even more profit from our withered bodies.

Here's a brief video to add context to my own career. I'm a software developer, and this X'er seems to have a lot of good content for what AI can do in today's age. In the video below, this individual is talking to Google Gemini and getting help to program...

Check out more of the posters content if you want a glimpse day by day of things that I don't cover here. I'm not monetizing this content so I'm not making it a career. It's just a place for you to expand your worldview into something that is closer to the nature of reality. We need to find solace in the fact that we as a worker might have our days in the pasture with the horses. Automation replaced their labour, but they are still novelties to be enjoyed by the elite. Maybe we can be jesters to provide some novelties to our oligarchs so they won't let us go hungry?

So I don't know best how to end such a post. I think the writing has been on the wall for a while, and this is just sorta bringing it home. Unemployment is going up daily in Canada, housing is unaffordable, food is going up what feels day by day. We're really getting the squeeze. I guess the only thing I can add that while our fiat currency systems will likely leave us even more poorer than we are today. We have distributed ledgers that has inflation baked in. Things like bitcoin and ethereum, they are situated on tech that is inherently democratic. Our current cave, our current system that rewards capital, means that there's some Fear Uncertainty and Doubt baked into current market prices of cryptocurrency. But we have disparate economies, and the market cap of something like Bitcoin is much smaller than current reserve currencies due to it's finite nature.

Bitcoin is a weird thing, cryptocurrency is filled with wolves in sheeps clothing so it's easy to understand if you don't come to the same conclusion as me. We'll have mined the last bitcoin in about 115 years from today. It will be the last bitcoin to ever be mined, and I think as we get closer to that time. As we get to the point of our labour being worthless, we'll need a system that will allow us trade but without the mismanagement of government. Some economical easing vessels will be gone as government bodies no longer control their currency. But a distributed ledger, one that doesn't require a fixed address or a social insurance number is one that works for the people. 💪

Be sure to send this around to make sure everyone understands that the failings, the cracks we see it's not the fault of the individual. It's the cave we find ourselves in, we see shadows dancing on the wall and we must figure out the nature of reality. There are people casting these shadows, giving an illusion that they create reality. The real idea is that we make our own reality every day we wake up. My reality is doing my 9-5, but not too sure how much longer that's a game I get to play.

Isaac