Great, I was just thinking about buying an Intel Arc VGA…
If Intel had trotted out Chip and then announced it would be creating a universal basic income scheme based on the savings the company was amassing by using Chip, then I’d be clapping along with the audience. As it stands, it just seems like bad taste during a difficult time.
I’m not sure the author of the article has a realistic understanding of Intel’s role or ability to affect change public policy.
It’s true that Intel probably shouldn’t be handing out UBI, but if companies want to promote how much they don’t need people’s labor anymore, then that should be taken into consideration in policy making.
Somewhere along the line we lost one of the basic things underpinning our current economic structure – that corporations are supposedly better at allocating, distributing, and utilizing resources than a centrally planned economy with a governmental overlord. It sure sounds to me like Intel and other companies that are handing out pink slips for every bit of thing they automate cannot find anything to do with the human resources they’ve got.
To put it more simply, corporations aren’t allowed to exist purely because they “make money”. One of their primary functions is to employ people.
It’s true that Intel probably shouldn’t be handing out UBI, but if companies want to promote how much they don’t need people’s labor anymore, then that should be taken into consideration in policy making.
Yes exactly, policy making at the government level, not at the corporate level as the author was suggesting.
To put it more simply, corporations aren’t allowed to exist purely because they “make money”.
Under capitalism, yes they are.
One of their primary functions is to employ people.
I’d argue under capitalism, that isn’t even a secondary function. Employing people may be tertiary at best.
Employing humans is a bug, not a feature
I’m not sure I’d call it a “bug”. It can be exploited to obtain tax breaks, which benefits the “make money” primary goal.
If you look at what many consider to be the golden age of American corporations after the second world war, the notion of a “company man” was a celebrated one, and companies bragged about how they treated their employees. In that era, unlike today’s, shedding employees was not seen as an achievement but rather either a necessary evil, or a sign that the company was going down the tubes.
Over time and with complacency, we’ve ceded the territory on these things. We can say that is inevitable under capitalism that this happens if it makes you happy, but either way at one point it was a major part of the stated purpose of corporations to employ people and help them live productive lives.
Edit: I agree that what you currently have with corporations are resource devouring, profit-pursuing, psychopathic immortal monsters, but none of those things, philosophically speaking, justifies their existence as legal entities.
The platonic ideal of a corporation that owns everything, builds everything, controls everything, and employs nobody will never be fully realized, because the people it is harming will eventually rise to destroy it, or die trying.
So they’ll lower prices. Right?
It’ll take another massive quality scandal, or just a generation of shit products, but sure
Padme: Right?
Anakin:
Nah. This just increases profits.
Something a lot of people don’t understand (you obviously do) is that pricing is not based on what something costs. It’s based on the absolute maximum a consumer is willing to pay. If they cut costs somehow, they just pocket the difference. If it costs more to make than a consumer will pay they just don’t make it.
An AI robot to look for sensors that can be already read since decades? What is that marketing bullshit?
