Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

noemamag.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

411–420 of 1001 posts

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

#411

Post by ben_w »

RivieraKid wrote: post #340
pixelready wrote: post #251

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…

> UBI type system in place to pad the fall, people will bounce back and adapt when industries break down If you mean UBI that would allow anyone to stop working and live a modest life, that just doesn't work. UBI is essentially redistribution from those who work to those who don't work. That's not just a "safety net" because you could decide to stop working forever just because it's more comfortable than working. I w…

> If you mean UBI that would allow anyone to stop working and live a modest life, that just doesn't work. UBI is essentially redistribution from those who work to those who don't work. That's not just a "safety net" because you could decide to stop working forever just because it's more comfortable than working.

This is, IMO, why UBI has to be timed almost perfectly for when the AI is ready to be the one who does the work.

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

#412

Post by jackvalentine »

kilroy123 wrote: post #390
bojan wrote: post #312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which is why I still think that the only way forward is that the EU becomes a country of its own. I'm aware that's deeply unpopular, partially due to The forrogn influence, but thr alternative is catastrophic - stagnation and letting US, China and Russia dictate our way of life.

I, too, have come to this realization. But boy, oh boy, do Europeans get disgusted by the idea. (My partner is European)

I’ve never even thought about this - what does the EU get as a country that it can’t get with its current structure?

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

#413

Post by ben_w »

lotsofpulp wrote: post #407
RivieraKid wrote: post #340

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> UBI type system in place to pad the fall, people will bounce back and adapt when industries break down If you mean UBI that would allow anyone to stop working and live a modest life, that just doesn't work. UBI is essentially redistribution from those who work to those who don't work. That's not just a "safety net" because you could decide to stop working forever just because it's more comfortable than working. I w…

>UBI is essentially redistribution from those who work to those who don't work. That is what earned income tax, payroll taxes, and Medicare and Social Security taxes are.

Your list is the "from" part, UBI could be the "to" depending on how people choose to live when they don't need to work.

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

#414

Post by mrguyorama »

ang_cire wrote: post #331
cucumber3732842 wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Because we watched our careers go from being in service of an industry of tinkerers and designers, to being in service of the worst people attempting to maximize wealth extraction no matter the human cost? And this is different than other industries how? Everything from electricity to the railroad to trucking to finance to environmentalism has had this arc from wild west to establishment.

I agree about what happened, but I think the timescale is different. Railroads were the tools of robber-barons even in the 1800s. Electricity was captured by the major electric companies before most millennials were born. Finance was a stodgy-suit-wearing-white-guy's game when my dad got into it in the 1970s. I knew that's what "finance jobs" meant back when I was a kid building fan pages on GeoCities. But GeoCities…

>If our boomer parents had warned us about crapitalism as kids

All of American society tried to warn boomers about this their whole lives, and they consciously rejected it in favor of a movie star who promised the economy would magically be amazing if only we didn't allow the government to have any say in how business works.

"Hey, don't let industries conglomerate because they will do bad things to customers and in general it's pretty inefficient for the economy" was known when Railroads did it two hundred years ago. But that didn't stop Reagan insisting that letting businesses buy up all their competition would magically make prices fall, and it didn't stop the american public from consuming that bullshit with abandon.

Like, I don't know what more you want. My social studies textbooks were pretty clear about the times we had to break up monopolies, why we had to do it, and how it had clear benefits.

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

#415

Post by [deleted] »

follow_the_mone wrote: post #276
Animats wrote: post #224

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.

[deleted]

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

#416

Post by yulker »

ianbutler wrote: post #225
autoexec wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm sure that ignoring all of the very real problems we have and the ways we're being harmed can make some people feel better, but burying your head in the sand doesn't make any of it actually go away. You can pretty safely ignore a lot of irrelevant rage bait, but by remaining ignorant to what's going on around you you also risk losing a lot of useful, actionable, information and being blindsided by things that coul…

What are you doing to fix the issues though? Has the knowledge of the issues increased your agency in a meaningful way such that you've taken actions to improve things or are you just enjoying living in a perpetually outraged state for the sake of it? If your martyrdom isn't doing anything to help fix the problem you're just hurting yourself and stopping yourself from potentially being in a space to ever actually do…

Why does one need to be proactively doing anything to justify awareness and holding a point of view?

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

#417

Post by dom96 »

hollowturtle wrote: post #354
THX1137 wrote: post #293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> forcing me to go out every day and talk to human beings face to face, even just little things like making sure I was showered and dressed every day This part is strange to me. I've worked from home for about 10 years and I've never once had an issue with twice-daily showering, meeting people face-to-face, going out for coffee, going outdoors, going to the gym, etc. The fact I can just go sit in a park, on a hiking…

I mean in which lucky place of the planet you live in? I dunno u but where I live it's 40 degree celsius out there and all over europe. I'm a remote worker and most time of the year going outside is just not possibile, over heat or too cold or raining like it never did before(climate change you know)

Not the person you're replying to, but this is genuinely the killer feature of the UK. Yes, we get heat waves and more of them now, but it's much better than mainland Europe. Especially if you stay away from London (which I would recommend).

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

#418

Post by tjmtjmtjm »

ben_w wrote: post #394
pj_mukh wrote: post #324

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>>"optimistic and enthusiastic about the new messiah" I mean that's you agreeing with Elon Musk, I disagree, I think AI is just normal technology [1], there's a lot of us. Like tech revolutions before, it'll have huge effects on productivity alleviating major scarcities. That's boring to the algorithm, not enough conflict , but it's exciting to a lot of tech workers. No messiah's and no Jihads, just excited about goi…

"Normal tech" puts people out of careers every so often, and kinda randomly. Society has benefited as everyone who isn't put out of a job significantly outnumbers those who are. I was expecting AI to put me, a software developer, out of a job after everyone else , because I thought coders would be needed to write the AI for everyone else, one job task at a time. Right now, it's looking like LLMs can translate not onl…

> LLMs have been able to train new AI for a while now.

I admittedly am not an expert, but I don’t think this is true? At least not in the “AI is building itself” sense, which is how I interpreted it.

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

#420

Post by slashdev »

nradov wrote: post #266
MichaelZuo wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Obviously there is some latent risk in choosing a career anywhere, that the demand disappears. There can’t literally be zero risk of structural demand changes.

I'm pretty sure there's literally zero risk of structural demand changes for law enforcement. Defunding the police isn't going to happen and there's no plausible path toward automating most of the work. Security cameras and robots can only do a fraction of what will be needed.

Police robots and drones.

You say no plausible path to automating - I beg to differ.

It would get officers out of harms way.

Not imminent but not zero risk either.

Post reply on HN