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The AI Termination Ban: Why Chinese Courts Just Made It Illegal to Replace Workers with Robots
(finance.yahoo.com)
this post was submitted on 01 May 2026
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It's so they don't have to think about/implement the utopia of no one having to work. If they made it possible for people not to need to work, those people without work would have time to educate themselves and think about how their ruling class is fucking them over, and to organize. This would probably lead to the ruling class going out of power, so they can't have that, it's better to keep them employed even though they don't have to be.
Alternatively, if people go out of work and they don't implement the no-work utopia, the ruling class loses power because people whose survival is threatened will kill their leaders.
The best the ruling class can do is keep inventing jobs no one needs and continuing to deceive people that the jobs need to be done.
That is absolutely not the subject of this ruling. The ruling forbid the termination of a work contract for the reason of it being replaced by AI. That is a significant difference : the problem is not to replace workers with AI, it is of who will pay in the society for it. China rules that companies will pay for the transition, not the workers and the state.
I don't understand your point, your job has just been made automatable, your skills superfluous... But you're supposed to stay employed at the same place for the same thing? And "paying", is not happening anyway, automation is a good thing, I guess you meant who is supposed to benefit from it? I completely agree that workers should not "lose" (https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/68074600/25823579), but it just logically does not make sense to stay employed when your job literally does not need to exist anymore... Instead, as a worker, you should just be able to chill now and do nothing, not indefinitely stay at a company that doesn't need you anymore.
This isn't something that makes sense to be handled by companies. What if someone can not find a job in the first place because while they were studying, there was a breakthrough that made their field of study superfluous? Or someone loses (or voluntarily quits) their job because of any other reason, and then while searching for a new job, the automation breakthrough happens? Etc etc etc. Which company pays for them?
This is just simply nothing that makes sense to be solved by individual companies, but by the government.
The Chinese generally don't care that much about this sort of thing like westerners think they do. To claim the Chinese are "uneducated" is borderline xenophobic propaganda.
If you give somebody a house, a job, food on the table with money to spare, they're generally not going to revolt. A lot of issues with getting a job in China also stem from culture which the government is actively trying to combat in order to make more jobs
The whole world, including my countrymen, is letting themselves get exploited by a few capitalists. I do not think the Chinese are particularly bad at this, so I'm not sure how you arrive at xenophobic propaganda.
I think the Chinese are better at preventing this from happening. Notice how their infrastructure is better yet their billionaires are substantially less wealthy
Are you assuming that AI could actually effectively repkace humans? Because cost-wise it simply can't.
No matter what AI currently means, originally it is just a term for artificial systems that can do intelligent things that previously only humans were able to do. As such, yes, I do think that AI can effectively replace humans, because it actually has done so in a lot of industries for a lot of tasks. For example, AI is a visual imaging system that can differentiate bad potatoes from good potatoes and automatically remove the bad potatoes from the conveyor belt. Previously that was done by humans, now, that is mostly done by AI.
LLMs are just the latest flavor of AI, which also can effectively replace workers for certain tasks. The tasks LLMs effectively replace workers by is very limited though, and currently, LLMs are used for too many applications for which they are not suited for, at which they are not effectively replacing workers.
For example copywriting ad texts, I think LLMs are perfectly capable of that and can and should effectively replace a large share of human workers.
In an utopian society, everything is automated by AI (not LLMs) and humans can focus on whatever they want to without having to worry about anything except keeping the automation running.
Fair, I fell into the trap of equating AI with LLMs. I should know better.
I dunno. I think this is better than getting laid off due to fake corporate bs (when it's actually outsourcing, layoffs, and a hidden recession)
The issue is not laying off people whose jobs were replaced by AI, the issue is what happens when people are laid off.
Firstly, regarding the people that were laid off, if they continue to get paid their salary for some time, and then indefinitely get some basic social security, then being laid off is basically no problem for them, it just means some less luxury for some time.
Secondly, if the profit from laying someone off goes towards public funds instead of the owner class' pockets, then simply everyone benefits from more automation.
Of course, none of this is happening in China (and in the US, where you're probably from), so "continuing to do your job even though your job could be automated" seems like a good deal, but it is really not. But that's why I made my original comment, because we should be striving for the real solutions, not band-aids that maintain the status quo.