While abuse of assembly line workers has always happened, as factories become increasingly automated,
1. Some workers lose their jobs to automation.
2. The remaining ones have a weaker negotiation power, as their jobs are on the way out anyway. So companies have even more incentive to abuse them.
> 2. The remaining ones have a weaker negotiation power, as their jobs are on the way out anyway. So companies have even more incentive to abuse them.
I wonder what the eventual end game is, when you let everything play out to its logical conclusion. Eventually, business owners will no longer need people at all. They'll own a magical fully-automated factory that maintains and repairs itself, and a magical AI box that makes optimal business decisions, and then just sit there owning these magical things and harvesting money every quarter. Humanity consists of the few who own all the boxes, living in opulent luxury, and the many who don't and barely subsist enough to buy the products.
I'm not so convinced, I think this comes from the limited mental model of thinking of the economy as a system for making widgets.
Rather, the economy is what happens when a society organizes its member's aggregated needs and desires.
Being a valued member of a community is a rather basic human need. As such, the economy will find novel ways to meet that aggregated desire, if it's not being met anymore by jobs that employ many workers today.
That's a rather unconventional view maybe, but I'm rather convinced it's the right one.
Of course, it leaves all the details open and the path to get there might be rocky.
Look at life in Gaza or on the streets of Kensington today, and that is the sort of destiny we are bound for -- if fully replacing all humans really ever happens -- to become totally disposable people, who only continue to survive because someone has found it too much hassle to get around to getting rid of you at least just yet.
But that's an endgame state, it's not a path for getting there, thank goodness. I believe it would not be so simple. It would happen gradually, and it would engender resistance, eventually violent resistance once people have little to lose.
Power grows out of the barrel of a gun after all.
Now, OTOH, if at that point, robot/AI weapons are sufficient so you only need 10 people to run the entire US Army.... then it's game over.
But can you even get to that state without provoking a war before you get there? AI is extremely vulnerable in war because of its reliance on datacenters and fabs, which are fantastic military targets in wartime. So easy and quick to sabotage and so expensive and slow to build.
Number of people producing goods has been shrinking for a longest time, its under 20% now. It'll likely keep shrinking as automation becomes more advanced, and in the future "service" would be much more important.
When I was a kid, I've read some sci-fi stories about societies like those, where most people were working in service industry.
[0] https://www.advisorperspectives.com/dshort/updates/2023/09/0...
That will mark the time when technology is advanced enough that humanity will fracture with small independent groups going out and fending for themselves, possibly in outer space. Some SF scenarios call them "great houses", because they somewhat resemble feudal kingdoms where a kind of extended family rules, except there are no peasants.
The world economy today isn't driven by lack of supply (for the vast majority categories of products), rather it is by lack of demand. Whoever owns the demand owns the power in this dynamic. One can have all the factories in the world when consumer stop buying it's in for a rough time, like China is finding out.
If you're talking about a world where AI has become so advanced that humans have literally nothing to contribute to society, in any field, then that's called a post-scarcity society, where the very concept of a "business owner" (not to mention the concepts of "business" and "owner") starts to lose all meaning.
Horses weren't needed and they became pets; same for average human.
This can only happen perfectly if the manufacturers eventually start to come after those who are self-reliant, which I believe is in line with the psychology of humans.
Funny thing is this is ALSO analogous to what we have done certain animals.
How? Who pays for their stuff when most of the people are out of work. Sometimes people forget that the workers are also consumers. You may displace some, but to replace all, blue and white? Not that easy.
It can be argued that it already started - globally the number of children born peaked around 2013-2017. The pandemic only accelerated the process.
Maybe? This has been hypothesised since the Industrial Revolution. We’re nowhere close to labour obsolescence.
To me that represents lingering inhumanity.
There are still plenty of people around the world who have maintained this high lifestyle proudly since their early ancestors first got into opulent condition. But there are even more descendants who have not been able to maintain a previous level of opulence at all and would do anything to get it back.
Then you've got a whole bigger group who never came close and are even more envious than those who once had luxury. So much of the time it's easy to recognize that improved wealth is a result of fortune one way or another. When you get an aggregate amount of greed focused on manipulating fortunes, the best they can do for themselves is when everyone else ends up barely subsisting.
IIRC, civilization was supposed to bring an end to the barely subsistence thing.
Doesn't look too civil when things trend backward toward medieval.
The government will then redirect that labour to other stuff they can make and export; and make more money.
You can already see this at work on platforms like Etsy or Amazon. People are buying tools like crickets, CNC, or 3d printers, then starting a business selling their products (often copies of other successful products) on these platforms.
Eventually, someone will make copy-cat platforms, then someone else will build a tool for building copy-cat platforms, etc. There's no end game, it's just a loop of people trying to replicate the success of others.
Making machines that think will turn out to be a lot cheaper and easier than building machines that can do general purpose physical work. People are cheap to make and maintain, especially if you're not very concerned with their well-being.
It'll start with just businesses owning the prototypes of them but once common folk know that such a machine is possible they'll build one themselves and then use it to build as many as they want.
If it's a very large machine it will be miniaturized until it fits inside the human body and everyone will have synthetic ribosomes that can be used to produce whatever they want provided they have access to enough energy and raw material.
What happens then is anyone's guess.
And if voting doesn't work, there's the possibility of a revolution.
So the capital owners will probably make it so that they please a majority of people just enough to stay in power.
We've already seen how over-invested LLMs have gotten relative to their financial returns. A magical AI box with optimal business decisions is even more fantastical - computibility isn't there, and the resulting homogeneity of a 'perfect' approach in business strategy would by game theory promote decisions counter to the prevalent strategies.
The more likely result in a dynamic world is a market crash in the domain of factories as everyone and their dog tries to get in on the "free easy money, last chance to get rich!". The end profit margins would be tight indeed and collapsed values of good.
Not to mention the whole value of money is that it can get you other goods and services while shielding you from the logistical hellscape of trying to DYI. If everything is being auto-produced anyway then currency isn't even desirable a commodity, now is it?
Who will they sell to? For business/markets to exist, it needs people who can buy.
And unlike the last times where feudalism was overthrown, these days police is often enough on par with the military, and the governments can track us whenever and wherever we want by the tiny little bugs we carry around in our pockets. Call for a revolution or for violent acts online, and a day later the FBI knocks on your door and takes everything digital you have.
The end game for the US is a small group of people(approx 36M) having fun. It's not too different from how it is now, but rather than be supported by human labor, it's supported by the labor of machines.
If all wage labor is automated, and ignoring the issue of the social and political implications of a mass of people with nothing else to do, the remaining professions will be SME business owners, investors, and landlords[1].
We can estimate the size of this population.
There are approximately 28 million American SMEs[2]. SMEs can have owner-employees or hired labor, all of which will be automated. Considering SMEs as financial black boxes, the inputs, and outputs remain the same with the exception that salaries are replaced by a presumably smaller figure representing either the purchase or rental of automated labor.
An estimated 7 million[3] high-net-worth individuals(HNWI) reside in the US. These are people with large investment portfolios who can live off gains indefinitely. It's difficult to estimate the number of full-time investors, but some estimate range from 200k-1million, and arguably, and these are folks who are doing potentially automatable work anyways.
The upperbound of US landlords is 10.6 million people[4], or 7.1%. There are 5.9 million[5] commercial buildings in the US, compared to 44 million[6] residential rental properties. Let's estimate the number of commercial landlords to be around 1 million people in the US. We can also presume that maintenance and repair is automatable labor.
The common features these groups share is the ability to generate income without labor. Presumably, this leaves them plenty of time to engage in leisure activities.
Looking toward HNWI individuals as an indicator, they spend much more of their time engaged in "active" leisure, that is to say praying, socializing, exercising, hobbies, and volunteering[7].
1. I'm assuming self-employed people are automated away.
2. https://ustr.gov/trade-agreements/free-trade-agreements/tran...
3. https://www.capgemini.com/insights/research-library/world-we...
4. https://www.doorloop.com/blog/landlord-statistics-by-categor...
5. https://css.umich.edu/publications/factsheets/built-environm...
6. https://www.statista.com/statistics/187577/housing-units-occ...
7. https://www.forbes.com/sites/traversmark/2019/07/13/how-do-t...
If the rest of the economy is doing badly, they can't threaten to walk about (or at least they can't threaten that as easily and credibly).
I think this is a typical case of a bad manager at the top of the 8 inch line, and not of some larger theme of automation leading to worker abuse.
Depends on whether we re looking at a system in equilibrium or out of equilibrium. Maybe the "shortage" is the equilibrium for the unyielding crappy conditions the company is offering.
It's especially soul-crushing when you think what the next Xnm process translates to in the real-world. Incrementally better performance for encoding cat videos or whatever. No thanks.
This doesn't sound like you were interviewing for a typical job with Samsung then. Getting a fab off the ground seems to imply it's a newly constructed, or under construction fab. You were interviewing to be part of the crew that builds and sets up a new fab.
There's a reason salaries for this type of work as so large...
That's not the reputation that salaries of places like this have.
AFAIK, this is actually part of their culture. They are very strict about hierarchy and it is seen as a kind of honor that is ingrained even in their language. There's even a case where this resulted in an air disaster.
I really hope that the current trend of culture interchange between Korea an "the west" may influence both societies for the better.
Gapjil (Korean: 갑질) is an expression referring to an arrogant and authoritarian attitude or actions of people in South Korea who have positions of power over others. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gapjil)
Gapjil is typically used to describe the abusive dynamics of one person above another in a hierarchy but has also been extended to describing the power abuse dynamics of large businesses interacting with smaller ones (e.g. small suppliers).
As you mentioned, Korean language and society reflects a "high-context" culture where language itself uses and encodes social hierarchy position through the use of "honorifics," speaking to or addressing to people above by their title/rank or "treatment."
"Over 80% of public perceive 'gapjil' problem as serious: survey" (2021) https://www.koreaherald.com/view.php?ud=20210113000769
The practice was made illegal in South Korea (2019) under its Labor Standard Act (LSA), but the effectiveness of that law has been scrutinized quite a bit, as many surveyed state it remains highly prevalent in the workplace:
(Law fails to protect Koreans from workplace bullying) https://asiatimes.com/2020/01/south-korea-fails-to-stamp-out...
The only option is to become an expat and end up perpetuating the same traumas, as Pinoy, Thai, Chinese, Vietnamese, Indian, Indonesian, etc employees of Korean companies in their countries can attest to.
Korean work culture is itself a reflection of Japanese work culture back when SK was Japan's version of Mexico before the 2010s.
The imbalance in medical accessibility and quality for urban vs. suburban areas was well known for decades so that the reform itself was very much desired, but the current government did it so ineffectively that they just had to give up after the strike.
Lets not forget Sewol disaster 'recovery efforts' https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5_A8dq2fA5o https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/the-sinking-of-the-... where no rescue was even attempted before letting President decide (establishing video feed to command center).
> “Technically, we get an hour for lunch, but the machinery never stops operating, so someone has to fill that spot at all times,” Worker A added.
Samsung being the successful company that it is, I can't imagine they don't know that they don't understanding that taking people out of a work team requires putting in a replacement, so I'll take "Malicious compliance with work safety" for 500 Alex.
Doesn't matter if it's South Korea, Taiwan, Japan, Vietnam, China, Philippines, India, Indonesia, etc - these are common work conditions, and it's usually the same managers in all those countries.
If native SKeans, TWese, JPese don't want to do these jobs the employers just bring "Interns" from Indonesia, Vietnam, Philippines, etc and pay them $7,000 a year - which beats earning $2,000 a year either underemployed or doing the same job in those countries.
It's horrid, but that's the reality of the gizmos you and everyone else likes using.
> which was destroyed in a welding incident in the Samsung plant being built in the area
I don’t doubt it, just curious how that occurred?
To the employee: find a new job if you can get the above
I’ve read the article, but it doesn’t explain why the disparity between sexes.
We are not supposed to compete on who can abuse their workers the most to improve efficiency and to cut costs. Thankfully, knowledge work does not seem to scale the same way as manual labour, meaning that more abuse of the workers does not mean more output over the long-term.
I would say they're quite photogenic myself ;)
One of the original advantages of semiconductors over vacuum tubes is that they were built to last.
Tubes were expected to eventually wear out and be replaced sooner or later, sometimes on a regular basis. So they came in sockets and many were very easily user-replaceable.
Other than that, the equipment was usually built to last for decades. It would have been the stupidest thing in the world to get a new radio every 5 or 10 years when all it needed was a new tube or two. And once you had a radio that was satisfying, most people never wanted to buy another radio again. They most often went forward focused on additional types of long-term technology acquisitions, like TV sets and an automobiles with automatic transmission.
Semiconductors made almost all tube equipment obsolete as fast as the expanding variety of devices could be developed, so silicon booms are nothing new. Corresponding bust cycles must also have been endured by semiconductor companies who have prospered over the decades.
The demand for semiconductors is real strong again, especially the more complex and innovative developments.
But as time goes by, the demand for the semiconductors needed to produce products having long-term value is not the demand causing the complaints about overwork.
It's the extreme demand for disposable semiconductors, and the manufactured-for-landfill products that incorporate them, which has been gradually putting more pressure on fabrication workers in the same production facilities where it didn't used to be this bad.