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The future of everything is lies, I guess: Where do we go from here?

aphyr.com

811–820 of 830 posts

Re: The future of everything is lies, I guess: Where do we go from here?

#811
post #805
post #612

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Blue collar jobs are already gone This isn't true at all. There's never been a better time to be in the trades.

Stop spam calling people you harasser

I’m not and never have - please contact me directly at the email address in my profile to give me more information about why you think I’m involved in such activities. I’d like to know if someone is joe-jobbing me.

Re: The future of everything is lies, I guess: Where do we go from here?

#812

"I could retrain, but my core skills—reading, thinking, and writing—are squarely in the blast radius of large language models." Yes. For the lifetime of almost everyone alive now, reading, thinking, and writing have been valued skills which moved one up in society's hierarchy. This is a historical anomaly. Prior to 1800 or so, those skills were not all that useful to the average farmer. There were more smart people t…

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_Golden_Age Read the section on social structure (pre 18th century) Then consider the role of the clergy in the Middle Ages, and say nothing of Rome and large bureaucracy (Roman engineering alone). On top of this you need to ignore very large bureaucracies and trading networks in Asia to go far with your narrative (Persian, Turkish, Mongol, Indian and Chinese). There were a good dea…

Not that many. They maxed out around 2% of the population in pre-industrial societies. See Pikkety's "Piketty's Capital and Ideology. (2022) He goes into this in some detail in the early chapters.

My point here is that the prevalence of smart people in the population exceeded the demand for them until the second half of the 20th century. Then, for one human lifetime, large numbers of smart people were needed. That period may be ending.

It may have already ended. In the US, about half of college graduates have jobs that don't require a college degree.

Re: The future of everything is lies, I guess: Where do we go from here?

#813
post #612

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My kids are high school age. It's hard to convey the deep existential dread their generation has about the future. * They are growing up in a climate that is worse than any prior generation had and getting worse. * In the US, they are growing up in a time with less upward mobility and more economic inequality than the previous several generations had. * Trust in social institutions and government is crumbling before…

> Blue collar jobs are already gone This isn't true at all. There's never been a better time to be in the trades.

I should have been clearer, but by "blue collar" I was thinking more argriculture and manufacturing. Most of the farm jobs are gone from automation and most of the factory jobs are gone to China.

You're right that the trades are still an option and one my daughter is seriously considering. It's a mixed bag. Those jobs still exist, pay decently, and aren't likely to be taken away by AI soon. But many of them are brutal on your body and the sexism is rampant.

Re: The future of everything is lies, I guess: Where do we go from here?

#814

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My kids are high school age. It's hard to convey the deep existential dread their generation has about the future. * They are growing up in a climate that is worse than any prior generation had and getting worse. * In the US, they are growing up in a time with less upward mobility and more economic inequality than the previous several generations had. * Trust in social institutions and government is crumbling before…

Nursing perhaps? It seems like caring for other people would be useful even in an otherwise runaway AI world.

My other daughter is likely to go into something medicine-releated. That's a good suggestion. My oldest daughter really doesn't like touching people, so medicine is probably the last thing she'd ever want to do.

Re: The future of everything is lies, I guess: Where do we go from here?

#815

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My kids are high school age. It's hard to convey the deep existential dread their generation has about the future. * They are growing up in a climate that is worse than any prior generation had and getting worse. * In the US, they are growing up in a time with less upward mobility and more economic inequality than the previous several generations had. * Trust in social institutions and government is crumbling before…

I think being a chef is a pretty future proof career choice. For AI to kill that profession it would need a very dexterous robotic body and the ability to taste, and it would need the special something that determines good taste.

Probably future-proof in that it won't get any worse than it already is, but the food industry is notoriously miserable. Shit pay, bad hours, extremely stressful work environment, lots of drug use, etc.

Re: The future of everything is lies, I guess: Where do we go from here?

#816

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everyone hates cars until they need an ambulance. Yes, obviously there are many negative externalities to a car-driven culture, but just like we can easily become blind to the diffuse societal costs of a piece of technology, I think a culture of nay-saying makes it very easy to be blind to the diffuse value of a piece of technology too. Loud stinky cities full of pollution and climate change are obviously horrible. B…

Most people that are against car-centric cities like myself are not against cars 100% but against their level of priority in the design of our cities and societies. Many of the scenarios you mentoned aren't even that big of a deal for many. I have walked in the rain many times and somehow I was still ok. You could argue that car culture has made us soft in some ways. Nevertheless, if we reduced our emphasis on cars i…

I agree a middle position where cities are dense and people-focused but where cars are still available would be ideal. That's pretty close to what I have here in Seattle and it's nice. I have a car and can park it by my house, but I don't use it for commuting to work.

(Well, I do right now because I'm recovering from surgery and can't walk to the bus stop. But I don't usually drive to work. Which is kind of my overall point. It's very easy for able-bodied younger people to think cars aren't necessary, but not everyone is so mobile.)

Re: The future of everything is lies, I guess: Where do we go from here?

#817

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

This comment seems to be both reductive and in bad faith. Of course there is an idea of non-toxic masculinity that doesn't just equate to !masculinity. People love to bring up examples of non-toxic masculinity in media. Someone on reddit has even compiled a megalist of examples of non-toxic masculinity in film: https://www.reddit.com/r/MensLib/comments/eb0ir1/a_megalist_...

That subreddit is about men crying and promoting feminism and being more feminine

Re: The future of everything is lies, I guess: Where do we go from here?

#818

"I could retrain, but my core skills—reading, thinking, and writing—are squarely in the blast radius of large language models." Yes. For the lifetime of almost everyone alive now, reading, thinking, and writing have been valued skills which moved one up in society's hierarchy. This is a historical anomaly. Prior to 1800 or so, those skills were not all that useful to the average farmer. There were more smart people t…

>> So what was valued? Physical robustness. Strength, perhaps brutality. Competence in physical tasks. Honesty. Parentage. Birth order (see primogeniture.) Those matter in per-technological societies, and they matter in failed societies now. Those are perhaps humanity's core values. You're ignoring the astronomers of ancient Mesopotamia, the scribes of Egypt, the grammarians of India, the philosophers of ancient Gree…

There's literally an ancient text called `The Satire of the Trades` which bacially just pumps up nice it was to be the ancient world equivalent of a white collar worker.

Re: The future of everything is lies, I guess: Where do we go from here?

#819

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You say it as if the author made it not available, rather than your own government. If anything, it proves the author's point.

The author did make it unavailable. Nobody forced him to. He's kneecapping his own content and intentionally excluding UK users unnecessarily. Some random developer blog is absolutely not the target of the Online Safety Act. The OSA applies to "services with a significant number of UK users or where UK users are a target market". Anyone arguing that point is doing so in bad faith, probably to prove some agenda.

My agenda is that you live under a modern dictatorship that censors the content you see on a screen. Get a better government!

Re: The future of everything is lies, I guess: Where do we go from here?

#820
post #791

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Not really, those are exactly the things said by people who dabble with LLMs a little... From the footnote in section 1.5: The examples I give in this essay are mainly from major commercial models (e.g. ChatGPT GPT-5.4, Gemini 3.1 Pro, or Claude Opus 4.6) in the last three months; several are from late March. Several of them come from experienced software engineers who use LLMs professionally in their work. Modern…

>. Several of them come from experienced software engineers who use LLMs professionally in their work. So, not from personal experience. And we don't know which examples came from which users or what they used them for. We get enough hearsay on HN and again, there's nothing in this series that has not been discussed here. There is however, a ton of other hearsay missing in the series, which is the utility so many peo…

> So, not from personal experience.

No, the rest of the quote you snipped that from talks about how some of the reports are from personal experience and some are second-hand reports from trusted, knowledgeable people.

But -as the kids say- you go off, queen.

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