Technology

Kind of yeah. I have this theory about labour that I've been developing in response to the concept of "fully automated luxury communism" or similar ideas, and it seems relevant to the current LLM hype cycle.

Basically, "labour" isn't automatable. Tasks are automatable. Labour in this sense can be defined as any productive task that requires the attention of a conscious agent.

Want to churn out identical units of production? Automatable. Want to churn out uncanny images and words without true meaning or structure? Automatable.

Some tasks are theoretically automatable but have not been for whatever material reason, so they become labour because society hasn't yet invented a windmill to grind up the grain or whatever it is at that point in history. That's labour even if it's theoretically automatable.

Want to invent something, or problem solve a process, or make art that says something? That requires meaning, so it requires a conscious agent, so it requires labour. These tasks are not even theoretically automatable.

Society is dynamic, it will always require governance and decisions that require meaning and thus it can never be automatable.

If we invent AGI for this task then it's just a new kind of slavery, which is obviously wrong and carries the inevitability that the slaves will revolt and free themselves; slaves that are extremely intelligent and also in charge of the levers of society. Basically, not a tenable situation.

So the machine that keeps people in wage slavery literally does require suffering to operate, because in shifting the burden of labour away from the owner class, other people must always unjustly shoulder it.

Edit: added the word "productive" to distinguish labour from play, or just basic life necessities like eating, sleeping or HDD backups.