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Meta's embrace of AI is making its employees miserable

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Re: Meta's embrace of AI is making its employees miserable

#82

Every big tech company's embrace of AI is making all of their employees miserable. Whereas if you're half-competent and at a startup, the AI is an incredible opportunity to try to leap ahead while the prices are subsidized (by the big tech behemoths fighting wth each other) The reason is a complete inversion of Ownership and Agency. For a decade of ZIRP, big tech convinced its employees that they're "changing the wor…

> the difference between 200k/year and 800k/year didn't feel much day to day (other than the ability to buy a house or something, and feel safe with a retirement nest egg) I can’t believe I read this sentence, lol. 800k is the ability to buy a house and support a family on a single income. Do you see so many people lamenting the days when this was possible? So many memes about the lifestyle Homer Simpson could provid…

This essentially describing the backward bending supply curve of labor:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backward_bending_supply_curve_...

Re: Meta's embrace of AI is making its employees miserable

#83

I believe that any kind of partial automation is going to make the job more soul-crushing. Ford style assembly lines made the work of the factory workers more miserable. Partially automated cashier did the same thing. I don't think there is any point in trying to resist automation, as the efficiency benefits are too important.

We’ve had partial automation in programming since the first assembler was written. I don’t think we’re more miserable than we would be if we still had to write machine code by hand.

Re: Meta's embrace of AI is making its employees miserable

#84
post #28
post #3

As someone who has spent a vast portion of life believing technology would make life better, I've come to the realisation that this idea is a fallacy. Technology amplifies power and until we collectively redefine and enforce a value system that benefits us all, the advancements in technology simply serve as a means of subjugation

Thing is, technology (particularly automation) could make life better but it not doing that is a choice. Think about it. We could live in a world where people only had to work 20 hours a week or even at some point not at all. We don't do that because we have a system that simply makes a handful of people even wealthier. We will likely see the first trillionaire minted in our lifetimes. That is an unimaginable and unj…

If it’s a choice, then who gets to make that choice? Certainly not the individual. I don’t remember getting to choose anything of the sort. If you say it’s society that makes the choice, how does that work exactly? Through democracy and governance? Well then society did make the choice. Are you then complaining that the choice society made is not the one you prefer? From the perspective of the individual, it’s not a choice at all.

Re: Meta's embrace of AI is making its employees miserable

#85
post #28
post #3

As someone who has spent a vast portion of life believing technology would make life better, I've come to the realisation that this idea is a fallacy. Technology amplifies power and until we collectively redefine and enforce a value system that benefits us all, the advancements in technology simply serve as a means of subjugation

Thing is, technology (particularly automation) could make life better but it not doing that is a choice. Think about it. We could live in a world where people only had to work 20 hours a week or even at some point not at all. We don't do that because we have a system that simply makes a handful of people even wealthier. We will likely see the first trillionaire minted in our lifetimes. That is an unimaginable and unj…

>We could live in a world where people only had to work 20 hours a week or even at some point not at all.

How would your country function, if all medical staff, construction, rail, sewage, police and firefighters suddenly worked half as long or not at all, starting tomorrow?

Because my home country tried this whole "if we seize the means of production from the wealthy elites, we won't have to work as hard anymore" ~80 years ago, and guess what happened to the workers? Were they working less hours for more money, OR, were they working just as much while also starving and being plagued by shortages?

The problem with your logic, is that it only applies to bullshit Western office corporate jobs who are anyway not actually doing much useful work for 40h. All those office jobs that don't need to be working 40h, were just subsidized by endless money printing, that's why you see so many layoffs happening, once the ZIRP era ended when they were hiring people just to raise headcounts to boost stock valuations to gullible investors they could rug-pull, but now the bubble popped and the jig is up.

And it only works in a world where you own the world reserve currency, and globalisation, free trade and international competition does not exist, because the countries who will work harder than you, will outcompete you and subjugate you in the long run so you can make their sneakers and phones for 60h/week, while they kick it back and live from printing money.

Re: Meta's embrace of AI is making its employees miserable

#86
post #65
post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The State are the people and the people want tech billionaires because they want the same chance at being that (tech) m/billionaire. Temporarily embarrassed millionaires; I cannot get around that issue toward collective action, toward myself contributing to an answer. I'm stuck. I can't unsee its truth =/. The individual will choose enrichment. We all will.

It does not seem like people want tech billionaires. It is fairly common to hate them. It is just that peoples preference dont matter as billionaires have disproportionally more power.

My example is always Bezos; everyone "hates" greedy tech Billionaire Bezos but how did he get there? We all put him there every day, every hour, every purchase.

If basically everyone transacts with Amazon, willingly, how is it possible that Bezos is the bad guy? I get that it's not black and white but the point stands: he didn't overthrow the government, the we put him there.

Re: Meta's embrace of AI is making its employees miserable

#87

Not going to lie, I have no pity for the tech employees of a company that has spent most of its existence making the world a worse place. They are finally getting a taste of the medicine Facebook has been giving to everyone in the last 2 decades.

N/a

Re: Meta's embrace of AI is making its employees miserable

#88

That's what's making its employees miserable ????!

Right, Meta's offices are awful places to work. Loud, huge open offices that sound like a cocktail party all day, every day. That would make me depressed.

Open office floor plans are most of the tech industry

Re: Meta's embrace of AI is making its employees miserable

#89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not so long ago, I have come to a rather unpleasant realization that whether a lot of that will happen, will depend heavily on whether the ones currently trying to make technology control every facet of our lives decide to allow society get dumber first ( think Idiocracy, which AI very much could allow ) or not in which case it is anyone's guess, because people will still have some basic skills and memories of what c…

The thesis of Idiocracy is that society gets dumber in the future because intelligence is mostly genetically-determined and smarter people systematically have fewer children than dumber people, i.e. literal evolutionary selection against human intelligence over many human generations. This is clear in the first several minutes of the movie. People who recognize that this is what that movie is saying often then condem…

Here is a problem, I am not arguing "Idiocracy: the process as presented in the movie"; I am arguing "Idiocracy; the resulting dumbed down populace". Admittedly, it is a mental shortcut and a bad one since it clearly did not land as I had hoped.

Re: Meta's embrace of AI is making its employees miserable

#90
post #3

As someone who has spent a vast portion of life believing technology would make life better, I've come to the realisation that this idea is a fallacy. Technology amplifies power and until we collectively redefine and enforce a value system that benefits us all, the advancements in technology simply serve as a means of subjugation

That's definitely too broad a statement. I'd argue encryption, oral contraceptives, and the printing press were all strongly decentralizing.
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