Every single action can be mastered to perfection, then relearned from the basics. There’s endless depth to everything
Fruit picking can be grabbing, twisting/pulling, then putting a thing into a basket. You can do it faster and more precisely to use less energy, you can stack fruits so more fit without bruising, you can change how you walk and hold the basket to strain yourself less. You could relearn it so you toss it all in a basket still on your back, perfectly so they don’t bruise or bounce out of place. You could learn to identify how long until a fruit ripens and chart an optimal path day by day, or even learn to smell them out.
An “unskilled job” is a job where you can get someone up to basic competence quickly. It’s an effort to use people like a fungible unit of man-hours, and to make up the difference by essentially being strategically wasteful.
A better fruit picker will have more and better fruit in less time, a better fast food cook will make a better burger. By standardizing it, you can reduce the floor - you can throw out bruised, under ripe, or overripe fruits. Maybe you can even process the rejects make juice or fruit snacks from them… You can use machines to minimize the cost and chemicals to cover for inferior ingredients
But you also cap the ceiling. An amateur fruit picker or chef can make better food than McDonald’s or Dole, because capitalism doesn’t care about “better”, it incentivizes everything to be “good enough” and punishes quality control beyond that… It’s far more profitable to put more effort into marketing an inferior product than to produce something of higher quality.
And that’s why everything sucks - because it’s more profitable to lower standards than to produce better goods.
We worry about AI alignment with little reason, but we’re blind to the fact corporations are not aligned with human values
Every single action can be mastered to perfection, then relearned from the basics. There’s endless depth to everything
Fruit picking can be grabbing, twisting/pulling, then putting a thing into a basket. You can do it faster and more precisely to use less energy, you can stack fruits so more fit without bruising, you can change how you walk and hold the basket to strain yourself less. You could relearn it so you toss it all in a basket still on your back, perfectly so they don’t bruise or bounce out of place. You could learn to identify how long until a fruit ripens and chart an optimal path day by day, or even learn to smell them out.
An “unskilled job” is a job where you can get someone up to basic competence quickly. It’s an effort to use people like a fungible unit of man-hours, and to make up the difference by essentially being strategically wasteful.
A better fruit picker will have more and better fruit in less time, a better fast food cook will make a better burger. By standardizing it, you can reduce the floor - you can throw out bruised, under ripe, or overripe fruits. Maybe you can even process the rejects make juice or fruit snacks from them… You can use machines to minimize the cost and chemicals to cover for inferior ingredients
But you also cap the ceiling. An amateur fruit picker or chef can make better food than McDonald’s or Dole, because capitalism doesn’t care about “better”, it incentivizes everything to be “good enough” and punishes quality control beyond that… It’s far more profitable to put more effort into marketing an inferior product than to produce something of higher quality.
And that’s why everything sucks - because it’s more profitable to lower standards than to produce better goods.
We worry about AI alignment with little reason, but we’re blind to the fact corporations are not aligned with human values