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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

#471

Post by strken »

ang_cire wrote: post #280
cheschire wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I did the remote thing before Covid and rejected it for many of the same reasons. Then Covid happened and so many people got to experience it and loved it. But I still hated it while I was forced to. Every time I told anyone that I personally didn’t like working from home, and was excited about the return to office that would inevitably come, I got SHOUTED at. Absolutely flayed for not being 110% in support of this t…

The problem isn't that WFO-preferenced people don't exist, it's that it aligns with the narratives of the extroverted management (who approve their own PTO) that it's better, and people who aren't extroverts dread being forced back. No one who prefers WFH is actually against people who prefer offices being allowed to go there, they're opposed to people publicly claiming they prefer that- unqualified- because they see…

I'm not an extrovert, I'm more or less on the line between the two extremes, and I prefer WFO or hybrid.

Teams should really be choosing their model of work themselves, and anyone who doesn't like it should shuffle off to a different team within the company. Top down RTO is nuts.

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

#472

Post by senordevnyc »

nephihaha wrote: post #440
follow_the_mone wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Oh excellent, I appreciate you pointing that out. I love Harari’s work.

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

#473

Post by carlosjobim »

IshKebab wrote: post #349
modeless wrote: post #343

Many occupations have been made obsolete throughout history, and this article examines none of them. I'm not sympathetic to "this time it's different", I think people are just too lazy to try to find out what actually happened in the past.

This time it has the potential to be different because it might basically obsolete all white collar jobs, which is waaaay more jobs than even the industrial revolution, and in a much shorter time. Maybe anyway. I think that probably depends on at least a couple of more breakthroughs - at least a solution to the hallucination problem, and probably some kind of true on-line learning, not just writing stuff down and rea…

Information Technology has always had the purpose of obsoleting white collar jobs. Creating some new jobs along the way, but obsoleting more than it creates. "Computer" used to be a job title for a human being.

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

#474

Post by api »

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 used to be a libertarian-capitalist type. The big thing that disabused me of this idea is that I also love technology and progress, and I'm not a sociopath.

I increasingly believe that if we really do want to keep moving forward faster and faster, we will be forced to take one of two paths:

(1) Some kind of socialism with a much bigger social safety net, probably basic income, retraining, and universal health coverage.

(2) Absolute totalitarian surveillance state with drones and cameras everywhere and an iron-fist police force to suppress the constant threat of violent revolt as millions upon millions of people constantly lose their careers. This looks like dark cyberpunk, basically, and it's even kind of miserable for those at the very top. You can be rich and powerful, sure, but if you get on the wrong side of it you will be crushed. Look at what happens to oligarchs in Russia.

The path to (2) is unfortunately an idea that was just, even noble in the past: the puritan work ethic and its corollaries. It's a great idea when you have a society that doesn't change much where a person can pick a vocation and make a living. It doesn't work in a society that reinvents itself completely every 10-20 years, rendering entire employment verticals totally obsolete.

I think we've been able to ignore it until now. The change was still slow enough to tolerate.

AI is the end of that. It's going to be the end of stable careers.

Edit: I can think of a third option:

(3) Tax anything that is labor-replacing for a period of time equal to the time it usually takes people to retrain. e.g. AI would be taxed for the next 10-20 years in this scenario with the tax rate decreasing each year.

I greatly prefer (1) since the third option is likely to just freeze progress.

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

#475

Post by smath »

This is a common source of confusion. The knitting / pottery making is not rewarding because its made by hands or is not knowledge work, but because it is done in the direct service of someone. Modern organizations are complex and can put several layers between the knowledge worker and the customer it ultimately serves. This produces the feeling of 'cog in a machine'. It is possible to work such jobs and serve others directly on the side (e.g. friday evening soup kitchen)

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

#476

Post by dalyons »

dec0dedab0de wrote: post #162

This dropped off the front page in the time I read it, I assume because of the controversial gate that favors upvotes to comments (which I am making worse by replying to others). It is a shame, because this really resonated with me. I've been working in tech for over 20 years now in various roles, and this is the least I have cared about it. I used to want to get better, and was constantly excited about learning new…

i dont really understand, if you hate working from home now (and it sounds like you have for a long time) why dont you switch to an in person role? there are certainly plenty of those.

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

#477

Post by Muromec »

pj_mukh wrote: post #315
Muromec wrote: post #295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(not a native speaker) fired up as in "optimistic and enthusiastic about the new messiah" or as in "Butlearian jihadi, all AI is haram" way?

>>"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…

I think it gets lost in a translation somewhere. If it's boring technology, why be excited about it? I respect boring technologies and don't believe in the end of the world christian scams, either, so I'm really confused here.

It's also not like I would do more work for less effort and be home by lunch. It will still be same 8 hours of doing something and be compensated to have the same general level of lifestyle with or without AI.

I'm certainly not excited to have a new office chair or a coffee machine.

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

#478

Post by jleyank »

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…

Look at the disappearance of pink-collar jobs due to computerization and "do it yourself" that it enabled. There's lots of examples of whole career fields disappearing. The trick has always been to see whether and how things reappear.

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

#479

Post by leptons »

m463 wrote: post #205
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…

> '90s going online ... '20s going offline It feels to me like the change from: - old: going downtown to the restaurants and shops of your small village to enjoy a relaxing evening. - new: downtown is a crowded confusing mishmash of unregulated blaring music, over-the-top blinking flashing signs, intrusive people accosting you and dangerous thieves lurking everywhere. don't go. there's no "regulated" that makes thing…

There have been many times throughout the past when going "downtown" elicited a "don't go" response. And yet there were times when going "downtown" was a fun thing to do. Somehow we got from past "don't go" to future "downtown is fun" back to what we have now. Things will change if people stop going. And then they'll change again.

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

#480

Post by Loughla »

gboss wrote: post #265
DeluluDon wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used to daydream about homelessness until I did it for 6 years. You're surrounded by threats and your limbic system is in overdrive, deindividuation kicks in and takes a year of being rehoused before you're back to being the same person. Those daydreams generally stop after taking a hike or twenty over the weekends.

I'm really impressed you got out of that! Thanks for sharing, the best thing to help homeless people must be prevent them from being homeless in the first place.

I was homeless for a year. My experience is that the best way to help homeless people is in giving them housing while mandating extensive drug/alcohol counseling and/or extremely invasive mental health treatments. There are some people who have just fallen on bad times (I was that), but a WIDE majority of the people I was around that year needed extreme help. When I say extreme, I mean borderline removing their agency to make decisions for themselves.

It's not popular, but the reality is that many don't want help ----- but only because they don't understand they're making terrible decisions due to chemical imbalances or chemical dependencies.

It's never popular, but it's the truth. It's also super, super hard because these people are already at risk of being taken advantage of, and I'm literally talking about letting someone else take control of their lives. It would require an insane amount of oversight, audits, and checks and balances. I don't know of anywhere equipped for this

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