The top 1% consumer in the world is basically comfortable at this point. There isnt really a consumerist way of making their lives better. Like you can sell more high quality stuff beyond the top 1% by making it cheaper through process improvements, but its not necessarily tech advancement.
That’s never what held back capitalist expansion, the direction of economic surplus towards the luxury of a tiny minority is a defining trait of feudal production that capitalism substantially reduced. It only played a role in technological progress back at a point when meaningful advancement was still achievable by kind of resources and directed effort of the eccentric and idle rich pursuing experimentation.
The stagnation we have isn’t a result of a lack of possible gadgets for the 1%, it’s us pressing more and more often against the boundary of what research can be incentivized by the profit motive. Capitalist technological innovation has always been primarily about process improvements and expansion to/creation of new markets, with resources only directed where capital returns are reasonably expected; any scientific discovery is purely incidental. There’s also the fact that most scientific advancement within capitalism has been state-backed, and neoliberalism has eroded the institutions involved.
There’s also less incentive to do process improvements when there’s cheap labor available. So the current arc of “development” is casting more and more people into greater and greater poverty.
Without the ballast of a proletarian state that prevents or fights capitalist expansion into new labor markets, the capitalist solution is to create death, destruction, and poverty to force people’s surplus value out of them.
yeah but it also relies on paid labour to design it and they don’t stay relevant that long. I’m not saying it isn’t exploitative I’m saying it will never be cheaper than this other form of exploitation
That’s never what held back capitalist expansion, the direction of economic surplus towards the luxury of a tiny minority is a defining trait of feudal production that capitalism substantially reduced. It only played a role in technological progress back at a point when meaningful advancement was still achievable by kind of resources and directed effort of the eccentric and idle rich pursuing experimentation.
The stagnation we have isn’t a result of a lack of possible gadgets for the 1%, it’s us pressing more and more often against the boundary of what research can be incentivized by the profit motive. Capitalist technological innovation has always been primarily about process improvements and expansion to/creation of new markets, with resources only directed where capital returns are reasonably expected; any scientific discovery is purely incidental. There’s also the fact that most scientific advancement within capitalism has been state-backed, and neoliberalism has eroded the institutions involved.
There’s also less incentive to do process improvements when there’s cheap labor available. So the current arc of “development” is casting more and more people into greater and greater poverty.
Without the ballast of a proletarian state that prevents or fights capitalist expansion into new labor markets, the capitalist solution is to create death, destruction, and poverty to force people’s surplus value out of them.
the real reason that AI will never catch on is that child labour is just cheaper
AI is catching on because it relies exclusively on unpaid (captcha) or underpaid (tagging) labor.
yeah but it also relies on paid labour to design it and they don’t stay relevant that long. I’m not saying it isn’t exploitative I’m saying it will never be cheaper than this other form of exploitation
Yeah, but the bulk of the labor involved in machine learning systems is training and tagging.
It’s profitable right now because the average wage of someone doing the “data mining” required for training are making like $1 a day.
yea i think you nailed what i was reaching for much more succinctly here
Out of curiosity how old are you roughly
I’m asking because you have good sentence structure
early 30s