391–400 of 1001 posts
I'll never consider my time with programming to be useless. Even if we got sent back to the stone age and programmable computers no longer existed. The way of thinking to me is very valuable
You are the art.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
"It's just been spiraling in a very dark direction for a long time. You have these blackpill depression cirklejerks everywhere. Astroturfing is getting worse every year." Agreed. From TFA: "This disillusionment is infectious." I would suggest it is in part being spread by articles like this one. If you look at the press surrounding earlier advances, it was largely neutral to positive. Nowadays, as you note, it's doom…
Remember, our misery is some potential investor’s financial prospect. We read these articles with different eyes. There are people who are the real audience and salivate when they read these sentiments.
I can see it as a foreign adversary psyop (they benefit from us being demoralized) or as a side effect of the attention economy (more clicks is all that matters) or even a hyper-partisanship epiphenomenon (whichever side is currently down wants people to think everything is awful).
But "our misery is some potential investor’s financial prospect" sounds like some schlock B-movie plot. How is that supposed to work? Are they secretly feeding creatures from the 4th dimension by harvesting misery or something?
Scholars and academics have been bemoaning the pointlessness of what the article calls "knowledge work" for centuries. A few of my favorites: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_American_Scholar https://andrewmbailey.com/papers/Higher-order%20truths%20abo...
There's a well-known book that labels programmers as a specific type of pointless job. "Duct tapers" is the category. Also task masters, who would have a foot under the software development umbrella, have space in the book. "Bullshit Jobs" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit_Jobs
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…
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.
I want to address something mentioned in the article about people wishing for for grounded occupations. I have a sheep farm and I could not keep it running without my tech salary. So I kinda view these as false escapes. Unless forced to or of independent means, who is going to throw themselves into the bottom fork of the “K-shaped” economy.
Okay - but for most types of agriculture, the minimum viable farm size is rather larger than it was a century or so ago. Might we ask how large your sheep farm is, by current commercial (vs. hobby) standards?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
Counterpoint - “look at how effective AI is, it’s made everyone realise their career is for nothing!”
"The Power Mac G4 is so fast that it is classified as a supercomputer by the US government, and we are prohibited from exporting it to over 50 nations worldwide," Jobs said the Apple Expo, CNN reported in September 1999. (edit: added link)
https://www.businessinsider.com/apple-steve-jobs-us-export-c...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> look at what happened to printers… I've heard homeless former printers talking about the good days So what happens is that the capital class absorbs the capital of all those workers and then they all starve. How uplifting.
Eh, chin up. The machines and/or the replaced masses will rise up and kill the capital class in the end.