So they’ll lower prices. Right?
Something a lot of people don’t understand (you obviously do) is that pricing is not based on what something costs. It’s based on the absolute maximum a consumer is willing to pay. If they cut costs somehow, they just pocket the difference. If it costs more to make than a consumer will pay they just don’t make it.
In theory, it would allow them to reduce costs to compete better with rivals and sell more.
But usually it’s the thing you said. Capitalism fundamentals are pretty broken in most markets.
In theory, it would allow them to reduce costs to compete better with rivals and sell more.
Selling more could mean lower profits over all. If you have to build out extra production capacity (new fixed costs) to create more product that you’re receiving a lower price on, then it could have been more profitable to sell fewer units but at a higher cost creating more profit.
Example: If you’re at 90% capacity on your $1 billion factory selling your product for high price/high profit, and you lower your price which increase sales by 20%, you now have to another $1 billion factory to product the 8% of product not producible at your first factory. You’ve now lost nearly $1 billon from your larger sales.
If Intel had trotted out Chip and then announced it would be creating a universal basic income scheme based on the savings the company was amassing by using Chip, then I’d be clapping along with the audience. As it stands, it just seems like bad taste during a difficult time.
I’m not sure the author of the article has a realistic understanding of Intel’s role or ability to affect change public policy.
It’s true that Intel probably shouldn’t be handing out UBI, but if companies want to promote how much they don’t need people’s labor anymore, then that should be taken into consideration in policy making.
Somewhere along the line we lost one of the basic things underpinning our current economic structure – that corporations are supposedly better at allocating, distributing, and utilizing resources than a centrally planned economy with a governmental overlord. It sure sounds to me like Intel and other companies that are handing out pink slips for every bit of thing they automate cannot find anything to do with the human resources they’ve got.
To put it more simply, corporations aren’t allowed to exist purely because they “make money”. One of their primary functions is to employ people.
It’s true that Intel probably shouldn’t be handing out UBI, but if companies want to promote how much they don’t need people’s labor anymore, then that should be taken into consideration in policy making.
Yes exactly, policy making at the government level, not at the corporate level as the author was suggesting.
To put it more simply, corporations aren’t allowed to exist purely because they “make money”.
Under capitalism, yes they are.
One of their primary functions is to employ people.
I’d argue under capitalism, that isn’t even a secondary function. Employing people may be tertiary at best.
If you look at what many consider to be the golden age of American corporations after the second world war, the notion of a “company man” was a celebrated one, and companies bragged about how they treated their employees. In that era, unlike today’s, shedding employees was not seen as an achievement but rather either a necessary evil, or a sign that the company was going down the tubes.
Over time and with complacency, we’ve ceded the territory on these things. We can say that is inevitable under capitalism that this happens if it makes you happy, but either way at one point it was a major part of the stated purpose of corporations to employ people and help them live productive lives.
Edit: I agree that what you currently have with corporations are resource devouring, profit-pursuing, psychopathic immortal monsters, but none of those things, philosophically speaking, justifies their existence as legal entities.
The platonic ideal of a corporation that owns everything, builds everything, controls everything, and employs nobody will never be fully realized, because the people it is harming will eventually rise to destroy it, or die trying.
It’s not a great place to be. Intel and other major corporations buy political influence. Politicians act in the best interests of their benefactors, and for most, that’s not the voters. I don’t think it’s practical either, but maybe there’s some use in including these kinds of political ideas when these things happen, as a reminder that they wield political influence.
Specifying “human layoffs” is weird
An AI robot to look for sensors that can be already read since decades? What is that marketing bullshit?
Yet another reason to look at non US CPUs going forward. Either RISC-V or ARM from Europe/Korea.
