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China definitely doesn't want that many workers suddenly disenfranchised and angry
Ding ding ding
I really doubt they'll actually stick to this in practice. Keep in mind, China is not a place with binding rule of law.
When it gets in the way of whatever industrial expansion, workers rights to not have toxic rocket fuel falling on them or to get paid for their house being demolished aren't even respected.
Will they suceed?
I like this, and so should anyone who wants to see China on an ethical gradient, not black or white. This is unironically one of the advantages of centralized, authoritarian and undemocratic government: you can make decisions like this, just like that. And sometimes these decisions are good, far-sighted.
Now let's not forget about the downsides of China's totalitarianism.
US government is gonna use this to talk about how anti ai movements are "cawmmunist"
I appreciate your nuanced take of recognising achievements where they are made for humans and humanity, while also recognising that no country is perfect and that we are allowed to ask for more from our government and a better future for ourselves without exploitation.
Something most of the tankies can't seem to appreciate for themselves.
This doesn't seem like a totalitarianism issue, though. The High or Supreme courts (other courts are available) could rule that replacement with AI is not a valid reason for termination of employment, and the result would be much the same.
Those courts in china aren't independent. They very much take orders from the government.
This kicks the can down the road a bit, but I don’t see how this is cause for celebration. Businesses will just open a new company and avoid having that company hiring humans to escape labor laws that relate to job elimination. This can all likely be escaped with a little legal hopscotch.
That's what regulation is.
Making things inconvenient over and over again so worse things don't happen, or take significantly longer and require more concerted effort to happen. It's a good thing. We should make it harder for bad actors to do shitty things.
Pretending something is pointless because it may not be 100% effective is absurd.
Pretending something is pointless because it may not be 100% effective is absurd.
I feel like this point needs to be made more and more lately. Perfect is the enemy of better.
Eating is also just kicking the can down the road, you'll just get hungry again later.
I never understood this kind of argument. Everything is just kicking the can down the road, that doesn't make it not worthwhile.
Honestly I think its China just protecting its economy, western businesses are already finding that AI now costs more than just hiring humans and gives a worse output, the chinese government is just preventing their own economy from falling into the same trap.
The legal reasoning cuts through corporate justifications—AI implementation is a voluntary business decision, not an unforeseeable catastrophe.
It makes sense. Nobody is ready to figure out what to do with those workers cause the chuds of the world are afraid of what happens when you give people UBI (they want to lord over other people through wealth and inequality)
There are definitely worse worlds than one where UBI is what comes out of the AI race... One can dream.
It's not a dream. It's a requirement.
The alternative is a nightmare.
Nobody's considered who is gonna buy all the stuff when all the employees are laid off
The future is two corporations, eternally B2Bing back and forth across the desiccated husk of the Earth. A perfect, all-encompassing synergy.
Alien earth kinda covers this utopia (sarcasm) already. Few huge corporations run earth as a corporatocracy.
This feels like the makings of a good one-off SciFi short in an anthology book or something.
They already did it. An episode of Philip K. Dick's Electric Dreams.
I think a statistic I saw recently was that nearly 50% of American consumer spending is attributed to the top 10% of consumers.
Which would largely indicate that it doesn't matter because those who have the money will continue to spend it and those that don't will continue to get poorer.
I have always loved the saying: Lie, outrageous lie, statistic.
Data is a wonderfull thing, but it often can be really easily to be presented in a way, that while being true, is not representing the truth.
Like if we would just look the numbers containing just necessities and remove the luxury products it would not be that lopsided.
This is what's happening to Vegas, the number of visitors is dropping but the casino profit is increasing. The city no longer caters to the middle class but to millionaires.
Do Vegas casinos own a sizeable stake in online gaming? If so, it would be interesting to see what part of those increasing profits are due to us poors spending on online gaming increasing while we never set foot in Vegas.
Who cares, the Dow is at a record high! Wish I didnt have to eat tree bark tho
Well I guess if you have millions of robot slaves you don't need the people anymore at all.
Appleseed?
They’ll give the people more debt.
They say they don't want to replace workers. They say they just want to use AI to make existing workers more efficient. Very well; let's hold them to their word.
How?
See the article or provide other suggestions before sea-lioning.
It's possible that I'm just a dumbass, but...
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.
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 a part of 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.