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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

#451

Post by robotnikman »

Animats wrote: post #221

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

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

#452

Post by s1artibartfast »

MarkusQ wrote: post #382
geraneum wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Who's making money off our misery exactly? 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-mo…

Advertisers make money on clicks, and content creators get a cut. This is the backbone that the entire internet operates on.

Fear is the best driver of attention and clicks.

Someone can choose to pass on a light-hearted fun article. If they feel their life or the fate of the universe is in the balance, they will read it.

There isn't some evil mastermind behind it, just the banal economic incentives and evolutionary psychology.

Edit: by way of example, when every woman I know got pregnant, their social media instantly filled up with stories about dead babies. Nobody hard coded that, but the algorithm picked up on the fact that pregnant women will pay attention to stories of dead babies. After all, it is incredibly heartbreaking and the next Tick Tock might include the fact that will save their own baby.

It takes a lot of self-awareness to say "while I might learn information that saves my baby, that is incredibly unlikely so I will refuse to watch this 30 sec video or read this article"

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

#453

Post by bonoboTP »

RealityVoid wrote: post #247
Animats wrote: post #221

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…

I sense there is this air around of "demand our jobs keep being relevant" - I personally feel this kind of thing holds the world backwards if it works. I think if our jobs were to become obsolete, embracing it and re-orienting oneself is the one thing that is personally effective and is morally right. But what do I know, I'm just some doofus on the internet. The irony is not lost on me on all those years where people…

You have to do something that is truly effective and productive, otherwise you live a fake life, you live in a zoo, you live a performance.

If nobody actually needs your work's output and you are simply allowed to do it out of some kind of state benevolence because it's some quaint tradition, you're laughing stock. We should not put up with being that.

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

#454

Post by nephihaha »

copperx wrote: post #389
largbae wrote: post #337

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Eh, chin up. The machines and/or the replaced masses will rise up and kill the capital class in the end.

That's the fairy tale the capital class has fed us through mass media. There will be no machine uprising.

The other fairy tale is when the workers rise up and create utopia. Infallible Marx didn't anticipate cybernetics.

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

#455

Post by andix »

FloorEgg wrote: post #450
andix wrote: post #419

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 dopa…

Interesting idea. Modern media and social media is probably really the most relevant change we had in the last 15 years. Everything else didn't change that much.

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

#456

Post by nik282000 »

darepublic wrote: post #372

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

The fact that you can think is what is valuable. I work for a slew of drones who will ask the same question 4 or 5 times, to multiple people, hoping that one of them will 'slip up' and reveal that there is actually a hidden easy solution.

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

#457

Post by vinyl7 »

MarkusQ wrote: post #382
geraneum wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Who's making money off our misery exactly? 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-mo…

Emotionally charged headlines generate clicks, and in 2026 displaying ads is the primary source of income for all major companies

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

#459

Post by erikerikson »

What the article describes was already a problem. Business people frequently pushed for broken incomplete work via shortcuts, fell for flattery, and otherwise twisted the work for those of us who cared about doing it well and accomplishing valuable and important things.

Early in my career I wrote a product that helped get a startup funding. That product went on to be used, among many other things, to reduce the impacts of genocide. Further actually impactful results were abstract in nature, a framework that was used to start many financially successful companies.

The entire 25 years there was an endless tension to balance actually doing good work and slapping together some garbage really fast. There's some good to that tension but discussing that here would be a distraction. I think AI really accelerated the sloppy acceleration and really emboldened the slop crowd. It's the perfect tool for the blowhards playing politics and irresponsibly pushing under the belief that there is endless grift absorption capacity.

To me the article makes a strong point but what do I know? I'm too busy farming to really think it through.

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

#460

Post by titanomachy »

morley wrote: post #274
rindalir wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, I should say it was sheep —> artisan cheese, which is in my view one of the few paths to viability for a small sized farm. It’s definitely not big enough for producing a commodity profitably. And farming takes either generational wealth and experience OR being able to go big by forming a farming cooperative like Chris Newman. It’s probably not something most people can “escape” to.

Have you seen this 1-acre Vermont farm? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cT6O-4zbP6E I'm not a farmer so I can't speak to how much of this is unreproducible, but it does seem very interesting. The paper pot transplanter blew my mind.

"We produced $250k worth of food last year. We sell most of it wholesale, so we don't get a terribly high price for it."

The title says they make $13k per week, which would be $676k... so $13k must be just during the weeks they produce. And it seems to be based on the grocery-store price of that food, rather than the actual wholesale price that they're able to sell it for.

I wanted to watch at least enough to understand how the title is misleading. If two people could make $13k/week on an acre there would be a hell of a lot more people doing it.

It's still cool though, they've clearly worked hard and made great use of their land.

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