I saw someone joking recently about the disparity in furniture prices. They said that if you want a table, your choices are either a $14,000 art piece made by hand from a tree that was kissed every day, or a table made of sawdust, paper, and glue for $140.
The reason is mass production through mechanized industrialization. A factory full of machines and workers on an assembly line can crank out lots and lots of tables very cheaply, and they can do it even faster and cheaper if they're using cheap materials that are easier to form. The companies that do this race each other to the bottom, and quality suffers as a result.
The woodworker who wants to do things the old way can't compete on price. His materials would cost more than the competitors' finished product. Never mind the fact that doing each piece by hand, one by one, means that his labor cost per piece is also much higher. If he simply does it the old way with actual wood, and produces just a modest, functional table made to appeal to an average (working class) consumer, the table will cost several hundred dollars even if the woodworker's cut amounts to poverty wages. Furthermore, the difference in functionality won't be great enough for that low-end consumer to justify spending the extra money, so the craftsman will be working himself into the ground just to produce pieces that he can't even sell.
If he wants to use authentic materials and methods, he has to target the high-end consumer. He needs to make a boutique luxury item, a piece of such quality that it conveys status. He needs to create a treasure piece for a multi-millionaire to buy. This is the only way he's going to make a living at this (other than changing the methods or materials).
The internet has allowed such artisans to reach a wider market. Instead of having to maintain a retail store that's sufficiently inviting to draw in the millionaires, they can simply create a website with good photographs and sell online. While that's revolutionary in allowing more people to become self-employed, it doesn't actually do anything to speed up the process of making the table (other than maybe facilitating the procurement of materials). The internet doesn't do the cutting and sanding for you. You still have to do that part by hand, one at a time.
But some creators can use the internet to amplify their productivity. If you create a song, or a video, or a book, or a computer program, you don't have to hand-produce a single copy from scratch for each person who buys one. You make one, just one time, and you can sell an infinite number of digital copies. Moreover, you can ship them worldwide, instantly, without any shipping fees or delays. Think about that--you set up a camera and record yourself playing a song on your guitar, upload that to the internet, and you earn money from it passively for years.
That business model is as far ahead of the factory cranking out sawdust tables as the factory is ahead of the traditional woodworker. And so it's no wonder that we're in an information age, where most middle-class and better jobs are ones involving data rather than physical goods. We've become a sedentary society because the office jobs are the ones that offer the greatest return on investment of labor. (Yes, you might earn more as a pipefitter or a tower climber, barely, but your body is going to pay the difference.)
Of course, capitalism being what it is, any business model is going to draw predators, the sort of people who try to squeeze in as middlemen or set themselves at the top to claim a cut of other people's work. This one has been no different. So in this age of YouTube millionaires who independently produce and market their own content, we also have huge entertainment companies that have content creators on staff as paid employees--often very poorly paid employees. The content, digitized and sold over the web, can earn money over and over again for as long as anyone wants to pay for it, but that money goes to the companies, not the creators.
That's what's at the heart of the Writers Guild of America strike. They write scripts for shows, get paid once, and then those shows get streamed by companies like Netflix and become passive income in perpetuity for their employers, but the writers never see another dime. The writers want to change that. They're demanding royalties. Unfortunately for them, they're doing it just as AI is becoming advanced enough to possibly replace some of them.
That's something we need to talk about. AI is poised to cause a leap in productivity comparable to the Industrial Revolution. It will also lead to the displacement of a lot of labor, or at the very least, the cheapening of labor. Those screenwriters may soon find themselves in the same position as workers in Asia who stitch shoes together for thirty cents a day. This leap in productivity, and the free time it will produce, would be a boon to our civilization if everyone shared in the spoils. But, capitalism being what it is, the predators will claim all the profit for themselves, and the once-exploited workers will become just surplus mouths to feed, unemployed and considered a nuisance by governments that will use them as cannon fodder or worse. The problem of AI displacing workers isn't a problem of the technology itself, but of who owns it and who owns what it produces. Any attempt to correct the imbalance will be decried as socialism, but it may be that socialism is the only ethical solution.
It pains me to say that, because as a distributist, I don't want to see people become slaves to the state any more than I want them to be exploited by businesses. I want a nation of self-employed people running mom-and-pop businesses and joining together in worker-owned syndicates to run factories and other large, collaborative projects. I don't see a way to get there from here, though, not with AI being privately owned and about to push most of society into poverty. Ideally, Mom and Pop wouldn't have to work anymore if they had robots waiting on them hand and foot--growing and cooking their food, making and washing their clothes, managing their financial affairs for them automatically. That's where I'd like to see us arrive, but I really don't see how we get there short of the government stepping in and either directly expropriating the technology, or taxing the bejeezus out of its owners and establishing a universal basic income. If you know another way, I'd love to hear it.
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