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Chinese Courts Rule Companies Cannot Fire Workers Simply to Replace Them With AI
(www.caixinglobal.com)
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
There are so many speech restrictions and humans rights violations in China that scare the hell out of me, but then I see rulings like this and their progress on robotics and tech and I think "Well, they are doing something right..." I hope one day there is more free speech for people in China who deserve to be able to say what they want.
It's a great ruling because companies that would normally favor efficiency and profit increases are in a better position to take these existing workers and utilize them in different ways than just have everyone fired en masse and then somehow the market will sort it out. Even under classical economic theories, governments are supposed to regulate externalities and AI displacing workers too rapidly could be considered a type of externality.
It's almost as if the speech restrictions and human rights violations are grossly exaggerated or entirely misreported by companies that are exclusively funded by the US intelligence community. . .
Don't get me wrong, some still do exist (especially on the company side of things). Since, you know, it's a country consisting of 1/7th of humanity; but equally it's pretty silly to think 1/7th of humanity is too stupid to do anything about a single supposedly hyper repressive government that allegedly doesn't let them speak against it.