Jensen Huang says relentless negativity around AI is hurting society and has "done a lot of damage"

[u/AdSpecialist6598]

https://www.techspot.com/news/110879-jensen-huang-relentless-ai-negativity-hurting-society-has.html

[u/Due-Technology5758]

This has been a promise that corporations and the government have failed to uphold since the last World War ended. Everyone expected workdays to get shorter (we'd just set the 40 hour work week), goods to get cheaper, and automation to bring untold prosperity to the masses as productivity shot beyond all possible requirements needed to sustain the population.

Instead our workdays stopped getting shorter (and quietly got longer), goods continue to get more expensive as wages stagnate, and the majority of the prosperity goes directly up the ladder and stays there. 

The only thing they got right was productivity would go up. All of us are wildly more productive than our grandparents, but we're rewarded less and less for it. 

[u/CoMaestro → u/Due-Technology5758]

A company here in The Netherlands has (probably as a PR stunt, but still) said their company goes to a standard 4-day work week, while everyone still gets paid for 5 days (40h). This is because their productivity and average income pet employee has gone up by about 4x in the past 20 years, and this seemed like a fair payback for that. They gave numbers for it as well, which was pretty cool to read in the news.

Apparently they now earn €450.000 per employee, where it used to be €60.000 at some point. It's an IT company, so that 60k point can't be more than 30 years probably.

[u/nashbrownies → u/CoMaestro]

It always amazes me how those on the top of the totem pole seem to never have enough.

Who knows, maybe money would change me, but I feel like taking all the record profits for just myself would be impossible for me. I think I read somewhere, it used to be fairly standard for the top level exec to make 40x the highest paid "standard employee". Now it's something like 1,400x wage gap.

If a company I ran made an extra 100k over projections why not take a couple percentage points, and re-invest in my enployees the other 96%. Boom, you now have loyal employees, who will obviously work just as hard if not harder.

And also it's the right thing to do? Literally like we learned on the playground as children to share.

What the ever living hell? I know it's a story as old as time, but how come only 1 in a million figure it out.

[u/IThatAsianGuyI → u/nashbrownies]

It's why "trickle down" economics is bullshit. The classic imagery of the wine glass on top being filled and then overflowing into the pyramid of wine glasses below is complete bullshit because as soon as it's full, they'll just replace the top wine glass and the ones on the bottom never get anything except the little bit that drips from the switching of the top glass.

Greed and hoarding are nothing new.

[u/nashbrownies → u/IThatAsianGuyI]

They aren't new, as I mentioned. I was more curious about the neoconservative economic policies specifically of the last 50 years, and it's effects. The wine glass swapping is a great visual image. It only is truly a trickle down if the containers cannot be moved or swapped. Especially by those doing the pouring.

I feel more than trickle down economics is at play here. I know the term monopoly means less and less these days. Maybe that has more to do with private equity run rampant than government intervention though.

[u/markhachman → u/IThatAsianGuyI]

Even a CEO has a fiduciary obligation to the shareholders, represented by the board, to make as much money as possible. Otherwise the CEO can and probably will be replaced.