What I’m getting at is that it’s something given to babys to make them feel like they’re doing something. In the case of AI, it’s sold to CEOs as a way to automate labor, when it really just produces worthless dogshit that appears to be useful to the untrained eye. The busy work should absolutely be automated and people should be freed from drudgery but these planet-destroying toys controlled by corporations are not the way to get there.
It is necessary to the maximization of profit. Capitalists don’t employ all those marketers, salesmen, accountants, HR people, etc. for fun and charity. They do it because capitalism requires massive amounts of socially useless labor to get the maximum sales volume and market dominance.
Is a certain quantity of this socially useless labor mathematically vital to the survival of capital, or is the proliferation of this labor a sort of unchecked outgrowth that’s an unforeseen outcome?
“The answer clearly isn’t economic: it’s moral and political.”
It’s literally straight out of the article that coined the term “Bullshit Jobs”, a point that’s made several times
It’s not at all clear to me how capitalists are directly compelled to do what they do by macroeconomic forces alone, in such a way that it is not possible to imagine them acting otherwise. That is a far-reaching claim that demands the burden of proof.
Large swathes of human labor is spent on busy work, because improving society would have untold and unprofitable consequences for the current regime.
What I’m getting at is that it’s something given to babys to make them feel like they’re doing something. In the case of AI, it’s sold to CEOs as a way to automate labor, when it really just produces worthless dogshit that appears to be useful to the untrained eye. The busy work should absolutely be automated and people should be freed from drudgery but these planet-destroying toys controlled by corporations are not the way to get there.
Capitalist apologists will tell you that all of this busywork is economically necessary, critical even.
It is necessary to the maximization of profit. Capitalists don’t employ all those marketers, salesmen, accountants, HR people, etc. for fun and charity. They do it because capitalism requires massive amounts of socially useless labor to get the maximum sales volume and market dominance.
Is a certain quantity of this socially useless labor mathematically vital to the survival of capital, or is the proliferation of this labor a sort of unchecked outgrowth that’s an unforeseen outcome?
that’s not at all clear to me
It’s literally straight out of the article that coined the term “Bullshit Jobs”, a point that’s made several times
It’s not at all clear to me how capitalists are directly compelled to do what they do by macroeconomic forces alone, in such a way that it is not possible to imagine them acting otherwise. That is a far-reaching claim that demands the burden of proof.