211–220 of 240 posts
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Does she find that task enjoyable and fulfilling? If not, it's bullshit. And if bet money on it NOT being enjoyable and fulfilling. Humans almost universally hate being cogs doing the same repetitive trivial action over and over.
Do janitors find their job enjoyable and fulfilling? Probably not. Their job is still important for the functioning of society, so I wouldn't call it bullshit.
I understand this is ACM, but I would say the decline has strictly been a failure of software . Specifically, corporate IT's failure to deliver general purpose development tools usable by anyone in a company to make computers do work for them (aka programming). There's still a ton of general value that could be delivered by general purpose processors/computers. But instead, most non-programmers live in a Kafkaesque r…
A large amount of inefficiency is actually a chain of accountability. Trust, and failing that assigning blame, and trusting those assignments, is the root of so. much.
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Our society is geared -- at all levels -- towards minimizing expense regardless of the impact on quality or even on society in general. We're all racing to the bottom.
Giving people raises for automating things is minimizing expense. Suppose Alice is making $40,000/year and comes up with a way to automate a third of her job. So you start paying her $50,000/year and give her some other work to do. Then Bob and Carol each find a way to automate a third of their own jobs, so now they all make $50,000 and have made Don redundant. The company is now paying $150,000 in total salary inste…
This can be for purely empathetic reasons, but also because they realize they’re all potential future Dons if these automations continue.
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> In fact, when you are rich enough that money doesn't mean anything any more, you may as well have a bunch of people employed to do nothing but make you feel important and powerful. I’d just like to proactively coin the term “Ego Engineer” for the post-AGI world.
Traditionally they'd be called "elevator operator" or "doorman" or some equally mundane/superfluous job.
Practicality of having someone able to adapt to novel situations aside, there's something to be said for just having a human interaction.
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> so instead we basically do UBI through inefficient, unnecessary jobs. Your first 3 bullet points make sense, but this last one is where I think the normal theory behind "bullshit jobs" really falls apart. Every individual business has a large, strong economic incentive to not hire these bullshit jobs if they don't need to, so why should we think they would be so generous to engage in this "bullshit jobs charity"? I…
Yes, that's how it is. For every reform that would benefit society as a whole, there is now a tiny minority of certain losers with a deeply entrenched lobby against the new and for the old. Be it fossil fuels, health care, banking, peace in the Middle East, nuclear technology, the use of genetic engineering in plant breeding, electric vehicles, and so on. I don't think UBI would change that, but UBI might have a chan…
Excellent point and phrasing! And it suggests what needs to be done to move things along: (a) make them not losers & (b) decrease the ability to entrench lobbying.
To (a), I don't think we do enough of directly buying out stakeholders. E.g. if we know moving to single-payer insurance would be beneficial to the system as a whole (we probably don't, but just an example), why not explicitly pay off private insurance companies, phased out over 10 years? Everyone would still win!
To (b), the key is the corruption of should-be-objective decisions. To me, regulatory-industry revolving doors are the most important, because they're the greatest source of invisible-at-the-time corruption (e.g. you sway a decision... 15 years later you get a cushy "retirement job" in industry). Fundamentally, I don't think there's a way you get around that, absent banning it (above a certain level of regulatory authority) and substituting equivalent economic compensation. Continuously finding selfless, competent people to staff regulatory services is not a sustainable model. So pay them so the "selfless" isn't a requirement (even if you have to tax industry more heavily to do so).
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Do janitors find their job enjoyable and fulfilling? Probably not. Their job is still important for the functioning of society, so I wouldn't call it bullshit.
I was a janitor for a long time in my younger years, and I actually did find it enjoyable and fulfilling. Just sayin'.
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Who said anything about her becoming a programmer? An interior decorator, or a gardener, or a nurse aide, or a yoga instructor, or a nail technician: they all add more to human welfare than this task. If she wants to become an architect, or a water system engineer, more power to her!
Whatever you list here, she'll be competing for an entry-level position with much younger people, who have more time, more energy, lower expenses and no obligations. The older one is, the more time one spent in one line of work before being forced to find something else to do, the harder it hits. So sure, maybe you can switch to landscaping in your 50s, but that also means you and your family suddenly being kicked do…
Usually, switching industries past a certain point of tenure wipes out (2), as so much of the expert knowledge is specific.
In this case, she obviously wasn't only a spreadsheet-reconciler: this lady knows thousands of things about banking that I don't. And probably that new, entry-level people at her company have no idea about.
Ergo, the company would get the most benefit from assigning her new responsibilities where that information is valuable. Specifically, something in middle management where her intuition of "... that doesn't sound quite right, tell me more about..." would help prevent bad decisions.
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Not there yet, but slowly getting there. Of course you can train for a different career after you are 50, but you will also have a good idea what kind of career is not a good fit for you (anymore). So just because certain careers are now looking for people, doesn't mean that these are a good fit for you.
Yes indeed! Our youth is when the majority of what we do is try things out to see what fits and what doesn't. In our older years, most of that experimentation is behind us and we have a pretty solid idea of what fits us and what doesn't. The trick is that the amount of experimentation should never be reduced to zero.
By X, in a single career, you've generally got a pretty good handle on things (and life).
In contrast to 20/30, when everything is constantly new and you are constantly uncomfortable.
Thus, big difference in how well the uncomfortable muscle is exercised. 20/30 -> novel situation you suck at -> business as usual. Over X -> " -> WTF.
And, as you say, the key to retaining that capability is... make sure you continue exercising that muscle!
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If the average human were allowed to achieve its most base preferences, we'd all be a half ton in weight, floating around in chairs, stupefied at some screen, just as depicted in Wall-e .
I actually don't think this is true at all. While there will always be a percentage of people who would prefer that, my observations are that most people don't. They tend to have interests that drive them to put time and effort into doing things, instead.
Advertise a job, with midling-but-not-exceptional pay, and try the following with a few hundred people.
- They report at exactly 9:00 am
- They bring nothing with them
- They enter a featureless room
- They sit at a featureless desk
- They sit there for 8 hours
- They have 30 minutes for lunch
- They have access to a featureless bathroom
- They leave at the end of the day
- They get paid weekly
My hypothesis is that it's a bimodal distribution. Some set of people would be perfectly fine with it, indefinitely. Some people would go batshit insane and quit quickly.
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She will not be unemployed in this situation, nor will her peers in similar situations. Available labor is always gobbled up and not left idle for long. Case in point: we've obviated jobs like the horseshoe maker and the stable boy and yet unemployment rate today at 3.8% or so is half of what it was in the 1900s when we had all these horse and stable jobs.
In the long term, yes. But shouldn't we have some compassion for those who get screwed in the short term? The horseshoe makers who were thrown out of work at the time may not have been able to find decent new employment. We have copious modern-day examples of jobs that have been obsoleted and those who were immediately affected still haven't been able to recover. These sorts of labor shifts can't avoid harming those…
By the time you mint a professional in medical something, they've put a decade+ into training for it. And in the US model, incurred substantial debt doing so.
One reason I'm more sympathetic to the artificial medical supply/demand management shenanigans.