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What happens if an entire class of workers loses faith in their careers

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Re: What happens if an entire class of workers loses faith in their careers

#311

Post by epistasis »

follow_the_mone wrote: post #274
Animats wrote: post #222

Addressing the question in the title, "What happens if an entire class of workers loses faith in their careers", look at what happened to printers. That was a good skilled trade for centuries. Then it just went away. Phototypesetting took the high volume end. Desktop publishing took the low end. Computer-controlled presses took press operators. And then the newspaper business died. I've heard homeless former printers…

We remind people that Noema Magazine is owned by Berggruen Institute: https://berggruen.org/ Which is an AI booster: https://berggruen.org/projects/ai-visionaries You cannot read these articles posing as human interest without following the money.

Ah yes, any funding source invalidates all the arguments....

Does this article seem like an AI boosting article? Perhaps exactly the opposite?

I dislike this article intensely, and disagree with it, but its lot because somehow the Berggruen Institute is shadow pushing AI here

Re: What happens if an entire class of workers loses faith in their careers

#312

Post by hingler36 »

npilk wrote: post #290

So the author tells us there is a crisis of meaning in the workplace, and their proposed solution is… to remember none of the work matters? The start of the piece: “These conversations inevitably turn to fundamental questions about careers: What the fuck are we actually doing? What the fuck is the point of all of this?” The end: “For most employees, we owe it to each other to remind one another that this work is not,…

Yeah, this take is wildly out of touch. Sure, it's great when you're able to derive philosophical meaning from your work, but at the end of the day the vast majority of people are here for the paycheck.

Re: What happens if an entire class of workers loses faith in their careers

#313

Post by tuesdaynight »

tavavex wrote: post #207
marginalia_nu wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As an experiment, completely stop consuming news and social media for a few weeks. People have lived their entire lives without these information streams, you'll survive unplugging a bit. Now I can't tell you what you will experience if you go through with this, but I can promise it's very enlightening.

Of course, not being exposed to negativity will make you more positive. But this advice strikes me as a request to plug my ears and close my eyes. Doing these things will not stop the negative things that are happening in the world, and having the information about it at least makes me more knowledgeable about the world and hopefully prepared for when something snaps and there is a crisis that affects me in the most…

Why do you believe that you will better prepared? How do you differentiate between "preparation" and doomscrolling?

Re: What happens if an entire class of workers loses faith in their careers

#315

Post by shimman »

notsmarthuh2 wrote: post #292
soperj wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

what were you doing in 2012?

[flagged]

Community college programs are extremely cheap, and state schools are a thing. It's also not unheard of for any state workers to get lower tuition costs as a benefit.

You're 40+, you have like potentially another 40+ years to live a life you want. If all it takes is a degree from a public university and some white knuckling for 4-6 years to then get the life you want to work in, is that such a burden to bare?

Wouldn't you want to at least try to achieve your dreams before giving up? You have the experience and smarts to know how to succeed if you want, so why give up 4 decades before the game is over?

Re: What happens if an entire class of workers loses faith in their careers

#316

Post by exogenousdata »

elmer2 wrote: post #277
pixelready wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The answer to this is always the one we don’t want to talk about: a robust public safety net. This is the balance to “move fast and break shit” technological disruption. It’s great to have an adaptive overall system, but disruption has a human cost. If there’s a robust public healthcare and UBI type system in place to pad the fall, people will bounce back and adapt when industries break down. If instead we stick our…

"If there’s a robust public healthcare and UBI type system in place to pad the fall, people will bounce back and adapt when industries break down." This would be great, in theory. The reality is that people would live on it and never work, have kids, and the same thing would happen with a new generation. As it expands, you run out of tax payers and the system collapses. A 'robust' healthcare system that the governmen…

“This would be great, in theory. The reality is that people would live on it and never work, have kids, and the same thing would happen with a new generation. As it expands, you run out of tax payers and the system collapses.”

Are there historical or contemporary examples of this? I googled but couldn’t find any specifics.

The reason I ask is that I in the US, employer-provided health insurance is a large expense for businesses. And anecdotally, I’ve never spoken to any US small business owner that feels that choosing employee insurance plans is a real competitive advantage. But perhaps the historical/contemporary alternatives are worse?

Re: What happens if an entire class of workers loses faith in their careers

#317

Post by kstenerud »

pavel_lishin wrote: post #271
kstenerud wrote: post #253

The author talks as if this were a new phenomenon; it is not. I actually did go buy a farm in the 2010s, grew alfalfa, managed cattle, cared for horses, etc. Except I did it while working remote as a software engineer. Very fun life, and I may return to it again. But it's not an AI thing, and it's not a disappearing job thing. It's just that office work keeps you so separated from the real world that you yearn for so…

How much time did the farming take, compared to the software engineering aspect? My very limited understanding of farming is that it takes a huge amount of time, and you're usually up and working before sunrise, even with automation.

Yes, I was up at 4 am every day. It's hard work.

Re: What happens if an entire class of workers loses faith in their careers

#318

Post by Lammy »

rob74 wrote: post #90
marginalia_nu wrote: post #54

Saw a meme on mastodon the other day contrasting people of the '90s going online to escape from offline reality, and people of the '20s going offline to escape from online reality. There's something to that. I think a big part of it is just how incredibly toxic the web has become. If you spend any time online, as most tech workers do, you have exceptional resiliency if you're able to stay sane and level headed. Going…

If you also consider that many of us, via the companies we work for, actively contribute to making the Internet (and by extension, the world) a worse place, the question in the article's title kind of answers itself. It also makes "quiet quitting" seem almost the right thing to do: doing only the least possible to advance your company's goals while keeping both your job and your sanity, hoping that you will one day b…

> If you also consider that many of us, via the companies we work for, actively contribute to making the Internet (and by extension, the world) a worse place

“Night must fall, now! Darker! — darker!”

Re: What happens if an entire class of workers loses faith in their careers

#319

Post by marginalia_nu »

arjie wrote: post #299
marginalia_nu wrote: post #54

Saw a meme on mastodon the other day contrasting people of the '90s going online to escape from offline reality, and people of the '20s going offline to escape from online reality. There's something to that. I think a big part of it is just how incredibly toxic the web has become. If you spend any time online, as most tech workers do, you have exceptional resiliency if you're able to stay sane and level headed. Going…

I live in San Francisco and life is quite nice. There are many obvious ways that this city is shitty that I’ve noticed other civilizations don’t have a problem with but also I’d say the overall experience is positive. Neither offline nor online reality is defacto unpleasant. As far as the disillusionment sense, I think that’s an active selection bias. I think people (including me) like to feel angry and so we go out…

> By the way, I know you from your search engine. This might be an out there question but do you offer your search index as a downloadable structure? If so, how much does that cost?

Shoot me an email and we can discuss, but the index is somewhere in the ballpark of 20 TB, so there are some quite significant logistical obstacles.

Re: What happens if an entire class of workers loses faith in their careers

#320

Post by andai »

marginalia_nu wrote: post #54

Saw a meme on mastodon the other day contrasting people of the '90s going online to escape from offline reality, and people of the '20s going offline to escape from online reality. There's something to that. I think a big part of it is just how incredibly toxic the web has become. If you spend any time online, as most tech workers do, you have exceptional resiliency if you're able to stay sane and level headed. Going…

Well it used to be that the government's job was to keep morale high. At some point that seems to have inverted.

The coalition-of-Molochs appears to be finding it much more profitable to make everyone want to kill themselves. (Not sure if that's a great long-term strategy, but they seem to have thought this through.)

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