Just in time for Labour Day, China makes it illegal to fire humans if AI takes their jobs A Chinese court has ruled that it’s illegal to replace human workers with AI. China’s State Council, the nation’s highest executive and administrative authority, saw fit to publish a state media report about the case, which saw the Hangzhou Intermediate People's Court consider the case of a worker who was hired for duties …
> The worker’s employer started using AI for some of that work and offered the employee a demotion and reduced salary.... the case established the legal principle that using AI to perform a worker’s job does not automatically justify terminating a contract.
In other news, large Chinese company announces it is offshoring jobs to the US as it offers market leading, AI compatible labour protection.
Yes and no. The whole point of China is that the government actually thinks of the good of the country, as opposed to the perfect model of "the good of all the people" or the western model of "the good of the elite". (More or less, because I'm sure that in China the good of the elite is important, too)
Anyway the Chinese elite understands that if in the near future 50% of the human workers are REPLACED (not helped) by AI, then the country will collapse into a civil war, and the elite will be executed. Which is something that western elite does not understand, or maybe chooses to ignore.
Apart from this, no one gives a duck about "human rights".
This. 110% this.
The western world simply can not continue with the status quo where a paltry few reap all the gains of GDP increases as time goes by, which is what has been happening since the mid-1970s - the last time someone could buy a home, buy a car, furnish said home, marry a spouse, raise a modest family, and do it all on a single 40-hour-a-week salary.
Ever since then, the billionaire/investore class has reaped the majority of society's gains. You can actually pin this change in society almost to the day that the US decided corporations were legally people and with the further future nail in the coffin that their sole driving motivation was to earn profit. Now you have the corporations and their owners running roughshod over all of the world...
Which companies can survive only selling to the top say 5% of consumers? That's a bad strategy for the overwhelming majority of companies. Sure luxury brands or businesses that sell goods/services to said luxury brands wouldn't be hurt too much. And I suppose businesses that sell necessities at rock bottom prices like Walmart would take a big hit but still be OK.
There's just no way the masses would accept permanent unemployment if a combination of "good enough" AI and "good enough" robots rendered half the population unemployable, and depressed wages for most of the rest because there would always be a bunch of "employable, but there aren't enough jobs so very desperate" people willing to bid down the salaries being offered.
I think if you reached 20% structural unemployment in a country like the US with so many people armed there is no way the elites would survive. You wouldn't even need to attack them directly in their fortresses. Just lay siege to it and block any vehicles trying to deliver goods to it and shoot down any drones doing the same, and you can starve them out just like a determined enough medieval army could starve out the lords in their castles.
You can send the military after them but because the US abandoned the draft in the 70s it is no longer a cross section of the US population like it used to be. Now the enlisted are heavily concentrated in the lower classes, both white and minorities - the exact people who would be on the bottom in this new world. Being asked to turn their guns on people like them is going to make some of them question what is happening, and make it very hard to recruit new people. Though I suppose they could import a mercenary army from an even more desperate country.
Luxury goods work like this. You produce 10 cars a year, they cost 2 billion euros each, sell them to 10 customers, profit. Or watched, or jewels. But this way you are living of a very small minority of customers, and once everyone has 2 or 3 luxury cars, what do you do? You hope they are so rich and so bored that every time you make a new car, they buy 3 of them just for fun. It seems to work, more or less, but you still depend on the whims of a very small (10? 100?) group of people in the whole world.
That's how it would work if limited runs of luxury items didn't accrue value.
People are buying luxury items out of runs of 100 to sit and admire it. It's a store of value and a way to move wealth around in channels outside of the banking system.
This is pretty much the sole reason fine art never goes down in value. If you need to move $10m easily, you buy a painting...you might buy it in Christies in London, ship it to New York and sell it again a month later. You have now moved your capital out of the UK and into the US with very little paperwork, you probably made 10% (because your purchase might have been record breaking, raised awareness of that piece and thus it's value) and the cycle continues for the next person that buys that piece.
Some people genuinely collect fine art, but most of the people involved do not...they buy it to sit on it to store wealth...the clever part is they get to be seen to "donate" it to a gallery for a period of time, so the "public can benefit" from it...but really, it's about ensuring that piece remains publically well known, which improves it's value...crucially, the responsibility to protect and insure it falls on the art gallery, not you...Art Galleries are not public institutions for the benefit of the general public...they're fully insured bank safe deposit boxes you can walk around in.
Whilst I tend to agree, I think it's important to note that the working classes have in the past fought to keep things running that ceased requiring to run simply for the sake of jobs.
What we actually need is law and regulation that mandates the transition of labour so that it can never just be axed outright.
If you need to close a coal mine for example, provisions need to be made ahead of time in order to retrain and support those workers for a short period afterwards. The problem is, when something like a coal mine shuts, you end up with thousands of specialised workers with no other training suddenly out of work and without an income. This "clean break" is the problem. Societies suddenly poor, unemployed and with no prospects, it ruins entire towns...if a side fund to cushion the blow was legally mandated to be kept in the event of a wrap up, sale, liquidation...whatever it may be...the closure of a sector, loss of business, loss of jobs etc might not be so bad.
Execs get golden parachutes for being ejected, workers get nothing. That seems grossly unfair.
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"Execs get golden parachutes for being ejected, workers get nothing. That seems grossly unfair."
That always the thing that gets me, I screw up and trash a production cell costing 500K ... hello dole queue and no money, get hired as CEO , screw up and burn the company to the ground... walk away with 2 million quid.
The cause is the contracts, as employee , you are employed on a weekly/monthly basis and can be terminated for $reasons, as CEO you are hired on a 2 year fixed term contract with optional extensions AND payment in case of early termination. hence the screw ups getting a shed load of cash while I dont
For sure.
A small dose of common sense is necessary though...workers shouldn't be invincible...I think anything that was out of a workers control should be treated as such, instant firing is unreasonable and some kind of inquiry / tribunal should occur. In a respectful, non-adversarial fashion...it should be about identifying the cause of a problem, not specifically designed as a mechanism for proving someone is a twat. We don't want Japanese style "salary men".
Golden parachutes for execs should just be banned in situations where incompetence or some kind of rapid exit is necessary. Sometimes those parachutes are actually just a stock buy back because they don't want the outgoing exec to still be holding stock etc...but I think they should be just stripped of the stock. No buy out...and that stock should be time locked until it can be issued again. It goes back to the company but cannot be sold, leveraged or re-issued for a fixed period of time, maybe a quarter or two. It becomes locked up capital essentially to prevent any backstabbing / aggressive moves to get rid of an exec just to get their equity.
"You can actually pin this change in society almost to the day that the US decided corporations were legally people"
Really? The 10th of May, 1886? Are you nostalgic for the 1870s?
There are a lot of causes for the decline you cite, almost none of which have anything to do with a relatively basic legal construct which is in use nearly everywhere to decomplicate contract law.
Globalization has contributed, and in my opinion this was inevitable. Decreased power of unions was another contributory factor, both through changing laws around worker protections and employee choices to unionize or not. Real estate pricing, which came from a large increase in the number of people wanting houses and not as much increase in houses existing, made similar wages buy less housing, and since that's usually the most expensive thing in the household budget, made the change apply to more people because even someone earning the same relative amount would have a harder time affording that. Many smaller changes added to this over the years. You could propose solutions to these problems or at least be aware of them, whereas if you think it's as simple as a misunderstood legal concept, you will be unable to solve it by being pointed in the wrong direction. Many politicians and campaigners like to point in that direction or one of a few others ([x] group of people took something, all other countries took something let's have tariffs, etc.) because those incorrect arguments are easy for them to make and for voters to accept and the real causes are difficult to solve.
As far as I can recall, it was around 1980 or so that the US declared corporations to be legally people entitled to lobby politicians and whose sole purpose was to earn profit. That shift may have been justified by the law you cite, but it wasn't treated that way until the '80s: curse you Ronald Reagan.
Can some politician float passing a law that would basically "establish the legal principle that using AI to perform a worker’s job does not automatically justify terminating a contract."?
The screams of the Tech Bros and CEOs seeing all their dreamed up profits disappearing would be hilarious? The crashes on the stockmarket as investors realise that all those dreamed up "cost savings" by replacing workers with AI was just a pipedream would be just the icing on the cake... And you know what it might just make this whole AI bollocks a bit more sane?
*sigh* A man can dream...
Don't you need to be within the boundaries of a nation on Earth to be subject to its' laws? In short, the astronauts are so freakin' high that the laws really don't apply to them, unlike when egotistical media "stars" claim the same for themselves. If you're an earthbound mortal, you're subject to earthbound laws - and the wrath of the masses if the courts refuse to be sane.
> Don't you need a licence to be a commercial brewer / distillery?
They didn't actually distill anything, they just fermented some foodstuff. There is no law prohibiting fermentation. The actual distillation part has certainly been done on the ground, in the company's facilities.
The work I used to do in data science/ML has been slowly replaced with being the guy the other people in the office come to to get AI to orchestrate some computational workflows, do research and make nice charts that are actually accurate to the data. A law like this would give me peace of mind that the nepobaby manager I have can't just replace me because ChatGPT learns how to read their intent around the chat slang and emojis they pollute their context window with.
