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

noemamag.com

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

#451

Post by Aurornis »

Grombobulous wrote: post #371
epistasis wrote: post #306

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

The funding source is incredibly important when it is relevant to the content of the article. This is why reputable journalistic outlets disclose financial ties to entities they report on, even if the connection is barely relevant. NPR will tell you about every ad buy that relates to their reporting. This source could have and should have mentioned this connection in a disclosure, and it would not have detracted from…

> This is why reputable journalistic outlets disclose financial ties to entities they report on

Where is the financial tie between this organization and the AI companies?

The throwaway account's comment above implied some financial connection, but when I clicked the links all I saw was a couple videos where one of their other journalistic outlets had interviewed some filmmakers about AI.

I don't see anything to support this accusation that they failed to disclose reporting about some financial investment in AI companies.

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

#452

Post by nephihaha »

follow_the_mone wrote: post #271
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.

> You cannot read these articles posing as human interest without following the money.

Thank you for that, and look who one of their speakers is? Hardcore technocrat and transhumanist Mr. Harari! You can read his opinions about transhumanism and the Fourth Industrial Revolution in "Homo Deus" and on the WEF website.

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

#453

Post by entropy47 »

uncivilized wrote: post #442
brushfoot wrote: post #377

"Knowledge work is mostly pointless" is the author's view, so his article (the fruit of knowledge work) should be measured by it. Amd that sentiment is hardly surprising, coming as it does from a Director of AI Operations (his title on LinkedIn).

Do you disagree that your work is pointless?

I certainly do. As usual the revolution is weeks away, but I continue to produce work better, faster and more reliably than my colleagues who have outsourced their brains to Claude.

You can tell me I'm not gonna make it and the last 5% is going to topple on the next model release, but the work I enjoy doesn't have precedents and it seems the plagiarism machine is quite bad at that specific flavour of knowledge work.

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

#454

Post by treszkai »

jgerrish wrote: post #360

I'd like to congratulate Aaron Horwath on publishing this article. As a creative professional, he must feel pride in bringing his ideas to light. Unfortunately, this isn't the movie industry. We don't see a list of credits at the end of his commentary recognizing the thousands of others involved in helping him publish his thoughts. Perhaps we can all chip in and name some of the many people involved in building the t…

To roll with this idea: soon the credits will include more names like Sol and Opus 5 and various pointy-haired bosses than names like Mike Little. That's not very encouraging either.

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

#455

Post by bonoboTP »

ben_w wrote: post #384
pj_mukh wrote: post #317

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…

> I hear similar from professional clothing photographers who find that even if they want to support the human models

Nobody bans them from paying those models some kind of aid. Oh, they mean they want to support them with other people's money. Yeah that's not so easy.

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

#456

Post by kayamon »

dec0dedab0de wrote: post #166
xlii wrote: post #85

Long long time ago people in tech were in tech because of the tech. Then, at some point, being in tech became a gilded profession and everyone: salesmen, artists, clerks etc. joined in. Not because they wanted to be in tech. They wanted gold. For years it was working, but right now things shifted. You can no longer just do the thing you learned for a job and continue doing so, because landscape shifted. So they're mi…

I have been in tech for the tech for over 20 years now, heck over 30 years as a hobbyist. I have lost almost all interest in it these days. It feels increasingly meaningless, and actively harmful. I know it is my own fault for neglecting my health and relationships, but I can't help but feel this career makes the most important things more difficult.

We still live in the eternal september.

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

#457

Post by Havoc »

I'm not even a programmer (by profession, though hobby) and I must say I find the gleefulness in the article off-putting.

That said I do think it is useful from a societal perspective that programmers are both doing this and getting hit. I'm not going to celebrate someone's job being threatened but in this particular case I think that symmetry is a major societal win for surfacing the question as to how are we collectively as humanity going to figure this whole AI situation out.

See translator jobs getting wiped out. Nobody even blinked an eye, it didn't spark any discussion, no deep thoughts were had. It did wiped out a bunch of people's lives and did NOTHING to trigger discussions around what are we going to do here.

Twitter connected programmers feeling the heat with a large audience may prove better to spark discussion

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

#458

Post by leptons »

equality_1138 wrote: post #292
pixelready wrote: post #247

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…

We never talk about social welfare programs? Odd, I hear chatter all the time. How about we never talk about rewarding management-by-breaking-things?

> How about we never talk about rewarding management-by-breaking-things?

Have you seen who we elect to run our countries?

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

#459

Post by FloorEgg »

andix wrote: post #427

I have the feeling this goes much deeper than knowledge work and AI. I see it in many places that people seem to not take their job serious anymore. The incentive seems to be gone. Also their managers don't seem to care anymore, as they are also taking their job less seriously. I can't put a finger on it, but it's not about younger people or Gen Z, it also applies to older people. It just feels like good work doesn't…

Sometimes in an effort to understand things I'll try and take them to their limit. One limit, framed as a path to a kind of dystopia is "wire heading". Another more tangible limit is opium addiction. These are basically collapsing of values. Trading a rich and robust value system for pure dopamine.

Modern media is on this spectrum (infinite scroll, algorithmically tailored, short form video).

When people can get dopamine by pressing a button it's easy for them to trade a rich and diverse set of values for that button. When people can get dopamine by pressing a button, it's hard to maintain a rich and diverse set of values.

Values are genuine interest (want) in taking actions and patterns of actions.

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

#460

Post by robotnikman »

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…

This time its the entire white collar industry though. The scale of job displacement will be at a scale never seen before. If there are no societal safety nets in place for this then I can see things going south quickly
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