Not the best comic, this is very misleading albeit factual in only about 50% of its comic. Importantly, it ignores the drivers of technology in the first place, instead blaming the rich (visually), or the bourgeois (silently), and then makes a lot of suppositions that seem backed until you go and look at the credibility of the sources, or how the studies were managed; which are dismal and lack rational support in systems with islands of regularity (statistics and the three-body problem). The comic also ignores several very valid suppositions that could have been made about AI, completely ignoring them which is suspicious.<p>For example, nothing is said about inflation, or how inflationary economies based in money printing collapse to non-market socialism when the ponzi reaches the point of outflows exceeding inflows, this has happened quite a number of times beginning in the Song dynasty, albeit the effects are indirect and chaotic in the examples segmenting into hyper-inflation, or deflation with producers leaving the market when no profit can be made. This is relevant because of money printing today driving many of these companies to outcompete legitimate business (sieving the marketplace).
Anytime there are constraints on only one party, the one with less constraints at a time wins.<p>The most modern iteration of this cycle involves private entities sieving the money supply through the FED's primary dealers, stealing ever more from people holding that money, where the theft is delayed until they spend the printed money. Any company who must hold a leverage ratio greater than 1, who does so through preferential loans is state-run/state-dependent apparatus. That's non-market socialism when the participants leave and the market collapses to only state-run entities. If all competing companies cooperate like a single cartel, they aren't participating in a market, they are just shifting inventory around and no economic calculation can take place. A market participant must be operating under an independent loss function, and for exchange to occur the loss, and profit functions must overlap as well as money storing its value that is earned by people (wages), sufficient to raise the next generation to the point where one has children (3 children, 1 wife).<p>It also doesn't touch on corruption which is the natural outcome when a distribution of labor among people is not present in centralized systems. There must be an incentive for work to be done. Corruption is the slippage of a serpentine belt doing work. Eventually the belt gets so worn out you can run as much money through it and you never get any work done, this make sense because corruption is caustic.<p>It also doesn't touch on how people feed themselves when work is no longer available. It focuses on work as personal growth demonizing repetitive work, which is a secondary to that first objective, Food. The secondary objective also shouldn't be about growth, but instead ensuring that growth pipeline. Automation removes entry level jobs that people sharpen their teeth on to eventually become experts. If you cut off the supply, eventually the experts age and die and you get collapse.<p>When all is boiled down, the comic follows almost the exact same rhetoric found in chinese/marxist soft propaganda (the criteria pointing to this is in the absence of common things not mentioned, which results in making it obscure for those unaware). The problem with the entire narrative is that the solutions proposed will never come into being because it doesn't address what is driving these dynamics in the first place.<p>Luddism as portrayed is just another historic variation on socialism, which resulted in syndicalism (this fails to in more brittle ways), it wasn't the answer before because those type of systems fail in 6 intractable, impossible to solve ways (Mises), and yet that is the only bread crumb towards a solution that it pushes you towards. A known-failed solution, while trying to make it hip or critical again as a label. Ironically, capitalism at the extremes also results in socialism. If one were to graph out from the lowest wage earners to the highest, everything but the middle (the fat ends of the graph), are where socialism based systems come from among the population, and we know they fail in a number of ways (Menger, Mises).<p>If you don't know what and how the dynamics are being driven, you can't ever come up with a viable solution, rationally, and economic systems are life-critical systems, so you can't afford to play at chance. The consequences are too dire if you do. Large percentages of the population die as in Mao's Famine, The Soviet Famine of 1921, and other crises faced by the red perils.<p>Overall I found this is a waste of time to read. It doesn't accurately describe the issues. It dovetails you into false solutions, where you need to know something to recognize it, and it makes apples to oranges comparisons. Its important to push objective information to people based in fact and truth, anyone reading this and accepting it as truth, not knowing any better would be deluded, and become delusional about this subject matter. There are already too many deluded people in the world. Lets vote for rationalism.<p>Honestly, I wish I could get my reading time back. I really dislike being bombarded with propaganda that pretends to be something else deceitfully.