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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

#501

Post by [deleted] »

Aurornis wrote: post #456
Grombobulous wrote: post #376

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 suppo…

[deleted]

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

#502

Post by analog31 »

bonoboTP wrote: post #476
analog31 wrote: post #438

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. I'm a musician. Talking pictures. Then piracy, and a few things in between. Now music is either a spectacle, is carried out in private, or as a labor of love by people like myself who have some other means of support. Support that AI is now threatening.

Do concerts. It's the old way. It's human and personal. It's effort though, not passive income like album sales used to be.

Indeed, all I do is live performance.

Recording is too much work. ;-)

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

#503

Post by Karrot_Kream »

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…

Many folks have talked about optimizing for engagement and while I do think this is a factor, I don't think this is the cause. HN has a pretty simple set of algorithms and yet it's largely followed the same trend of negativity and despair.

I'm partial to what I call the "doomer effect". If you feel sad or disenfranchised you're just much more likely to spend time online talking. A person with a fulfilling social life and a job they feel satisfied with is going to spend time socializing with friends and working on their job. They may read online feeds, they may write very occasionally, but that will be the extent of most interactions. On the other hand the folks that feel the most negative tend to spend inordinate amounts of time online posting about how sad and angry they are.

In a real life conversation when a depressed friend gets on their soapbox most folks give the friend a subtle clue that it's time to move on. If that clue isn't heeded the friend often gets targeted 1:1 offers for help and can eventually just be shut out of the group altogether for being too negative. Nothing like this happens offline. If you're in a bad place, as long as a forum will have your posts you can post to your heart's content. And oh boy is it finally the time to let your hair down and tell everyone how f-ed everything is on the inside. Constantly.

This makes a flywheel. People who want to avoid negativity start avoiding negative online spaces. People who are fine with it or feel similarly keep reading. Eventually negativity becomes the default.

"Misery loves company" is much older than the Internet. There's no doubt to me that the net makes it that much worse.

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

#505

Post by rayiner »

RealityVoid wrote: post #249
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…

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…

> The irony is not lost on me on all those years where people were advised to "just learn to code, bro" in order to escape the personally threatening situation of obsolete jobs. Well, now people feel it's our turn so, "just learn to _something_ dudes"?

Yeah, I imagine that there won’t be much sympathy for the cognitive elite when the benefits of being smarter disappear. Even if we get AI-powered communism, they’ll get the same UBI check as everyone else.

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

#507

Post by luqtas »

zuzululu wrote: post #435
KaiserPro wrote: post #404

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the UK as weaving was mechanised it lead to huge upheavals and only narrowly avoided civil war. It changed the face of the country completely.

[flagged]

> impossible task in the present. lot of gen z can't even read or concentrate for more than 5 minutes

so the old timers not even being able to open Settings of a Windows desktop /j

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

#508

Post by equality_1138 »

leptons wrote: post #463
equality_1138 wrote: post #295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I thought my previous comment made that obvious. And unlike in the private sector, mismanagement in government is a given.

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

#509

Post by entropy47 »

uncivilized wrote: post #477
entropy47 wrote: post #458

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That has nothing to do with your work being pointless or not (it is), but more you showcasing your insecurity of having to be smarter than your peers because they use LLMs.

Oh, I hadn't even considered the interpretation here where you're saying knowledge work is pointless and always has been. I'm not even going to engage with that one because I see the value and real world impact of my work every single week.

I don't think I'm smarter than my colleagues who use LLMs, for what it's worth. I just have the advantage of continuing to think, try, improve etc.

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