This was not the spirit of the article. It made clear that a problem that has faced tech all along is unclear leverage. A factory worker stops working and nothing gets built so no profit. A R&D tech worker stops working and that just means some potential future technology that may or may not exist doesn’t get built which doesn’t immediately hit profits and may not at all.

They were trying to explain the struggles of union drives in tech that have been here all along. The “worse deals” it attributes to the increased interest rates of 2022 and cracking down on “woke” workers.

On AI they were saying that tech workers may now see themselves more like traditional workers rather than artisinal coding masters with low unemployment. This shift could cause a greater incentive to tech workers to discover their specific leverage to push for more security.

It also highlighted how campaigns about specific demands (ie not working with military) are much easier to push than pushing for unionization which is more abstract and controversial.

Very good read, lots of nuance.

Stocks cannot be negative. I get the hate surrounding AI companies, but the resistance to this idea makes no sense to me.

In my opinion the number should be closer to 50% instead of 5% - but in both cases if AI companies are the biggest bubble in the world and go bankrupt then the government is left with a $0 value stock they didn’t give any money for…

If ai companies don’t go bankrupt then any returns they do generate go to the government which can be used to provide public services and offset the average Americans tax bill, thus passing any potential gains from ai to the people who generated the training data for them in the first place.