It’s not really the wages they are after. Paying a wage on one end and getting paid market rates on the other end is how they generate profit, no matter how much automation advances.
It is wages they’re after. How much profit there is can be greatly increased by not having to pay any workers.
That’s not how (non-speculative) profit works under capitalism.
All profits that a capitalist accrues are eventually extracted from a laborer who puts in more work than what they are paid, where
the wage is determined by the costs of reproducing labor power (amortized cost of their education, food to keep going, shelter for rest, entertainment to not go insane, costs of bearing and raising children to produce more workers)
the amount of work is determined mostly by the length of their working day
The profit is the difference between the labor power expanded in a working day and the wage (the labor power necessary to maintain a “supply of labor”).
If you remove the wage, and therefore the laborer, you are left with no profit. Capitalists understand that intuitively. Some will speculate on the amount of labor power to manipulate the perceived value of their company (hence the hiring/layoffs cycle), but a sustainable business requires a steady supply of labor for which (at least under capitalism) they must pay a wage.
If, by some miracles, capitalists manage to produce & gain control of an AGI (I strongly doubt this will happen with LLMs), and manage to force us to bootstrap a fully automated supply chain without overthrowing capitalism, we will indeed enter into another economic system entirely, and it won’t be good for most of humanity.
If you remove the wage, and therefore the laborer, you are left with no profit
Not exactly. Because you’re not removing the labor, you’re just bringing it down to virtually nothing.
There’s still the labor of pressing the button to start the AGI.
But the larger problem capitalism has is one of the wage form - my wages are your income as a capitalist, since I buy things with them. You remove wages, and demand (desire plus ability to pay) collapses in the market. Super depression.
It is wages they’re after. How much profit there is can be greatly increased by not having to pay any workers.
That’s not how (non-speculative) profit works under capitalism.
All profits that a capitalist accrues are eventually extracted from a laborer who puts in more work than what they are paid, where
The profit is the difference between the labor power expanded in a working day and the wage (the labor power necessary to maintain a “supply of labor”).
If you remove the wage, and therefore the laborer, you are left with no profit. Capitalists understand that intuitively. Some will speculate on the amount of labor power to manipulate the perceived value of their company (hence the hiring/layoffs cycle), but a sustainable business requires a steady supply of labor for which (at least under capitalism) they must pay a wage.
If, by some miracles, capitalists manage to produce & gain control of an AGI (I strongly doubt this will happen with LLMs), and manage to force us to bootstrap a fully automated supply chain without overthrowing capitalism, we will indeed enter into another economic system entirely, and it won’t be good for most of humanity.
Not exactly. Because you’re not removing the labor, you’re just bringing it down to virtually nothing.
There’s still the labor of pressing the button to start the AGI.
But the larger problem capitalism has is one of the wage form - my wages are your income as a capitalist, since I buy things with them. You remove wages, and demand (desire plus ability to pay) collapses in the market. Super depression.