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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

#541

Post by MarkusQ »

s1artibartfast wrote: post #472
MarkusQ wrote: post #396

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 p…

That was my point exactly.

There isn't some evil mastermind behind it--at least, in the click-case; in the psyops or vote-for-us! cases there might sort of be, but even there they aren't profiting from the misery per se.

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

#542

Post by dogomatic »

mangoman wrote: post #519

> The world does not wait with bated breath for product launches. A marketing campaign will not change the world. Almost no one will remember all the work we do. It did at one time! I think that’s what’s so alluring initially about Workism. People waited with bated breath for the iPhone and iPad and its new versions. Those iPod commercials and the marketing campaigns for “rip. Mix. Burn.” did change the music world.…

for what it’s worth I still get that excited feeling every time there’s a smaller, distilled LLM that I can run locally. I think it unlocks so many use cases that are pro consumer. Probably an edge case though!

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

#543

Post by xlayn »

People who argue against AI are the same people arguing against the car because of horses... This is going to open a whole field of jobs for... ... ...... someone... but let's not go into those details...

Remember that this is going to supercharge economy, sure, in the beginning it'll not be obvious, but then you are going to see how it'll enable people to stop working, just like trickle down economy has redistribut....ed...

Ok maybe that's a bad example, sure it's going to take a lot of people out of business, and yes there will be a lot of pain for a "small" part of society, but in general it will be pure gain as a whole... it's not like all that people being laid off means something like stop paying house mortgages, and then a lot of evictions and suddenly a lot of houses going of market... ... I mean even then that's not like it's going to cause all the house market to go down right?

Ok maybe a bit... but don't worry if you are near underwater with your loan someone will buy all those houses to keep your loans on check... it's not like it's going to be some private investors with all the money that will go to the top 1% and take them out of the market and make impossible for the rest of us to buy something...

I mean, my point is don't be negative, stop fighting progress, if more people can buy super yatches there will be more openings for building them!

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

#546

Post by cleandreams »

I am not excited about tech anymore. I dread it to be honest. I was an early engineer at a AI company that got acquired. From that and related stock (golden handcuffs) was able to retire a couple of years ago. There were some tech problems that I wanted to investigate and I took a bunch of classes. Fun.

I loved my career.

Wow have my feelings changed. I'm disgusted. It's a moral disgust. The scene turns me off SO MUCH. Just a recent tidbit: I think it is Anthropic that is buying old (some antique, vintage) books, scanning them, then pulping them.

There is no restraint at this point. Whether it's Meta and their pervert glasses and child exploitation. Or google trashing their own search.

One thing that has turned my stomach is how management has acted after discovering they could trash their skilled workers in the way that so many other industries have been able to do. If you want to know management's true character, remove the moat (that skill used to be) from the workers and watch what happens.

...Okay, I'm editing. There is a bright spot. The other day I was sitting around doing nothing and suddenly out of the blue dreamed up an app that could help build community regarding an activity I care a lot about. With an LLM I could do the whole thing myself. I'm excited about this. I might fit this in among my other projects. It's kind of like taking a hammer and chisel and cutting a piece off of Big Tech. If all of us skilled folks do this we could have an impact and serve community at the same time.

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

#547

Post by jjav »

elmer2 wrote: post #279
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…

"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." This would be great, in theory. The reality is that people would live on it and never work, have kids, and the same thing would happen with a new generation. As it expands, you run out of tax payers and the system collapses. A 'robust' healthcare system that the governmen…

> A 'robust' healthcare system that the government runs is a pipe dream.

Oh yes, the usual argument of how what most industrializes nations (and many poor nations as well) have achieved, is somehow seen as impossible just because the US can't manage to do it (because it doesn't profit the oligarchs).

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

#548

Post by mahogany »

carlosjobim wrote: post #501
IshKebab wrote: post #361

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The difference now is about the scale. What percentage of the labor force do you think were “computers”? It is not comparable to a potential disruption of huge swathes of the workforce in a short time span. That’s what people are worried about.

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

#549

Post by fragmede »

jleyank wrote: post #506
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…

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.

Travel agents come to mind for that. Bill Gates saw the future with and funded Expedia.com

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

#550

Post by fragmede »

Muromec wrote: post #302
pj_mukh wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also the headline is about tech workers but the article is about Knowledge workers. I know a class of tech workers absolutely fired up about the new Industrial Revolution, they're just not on this forum or featured in lengthy navel-gazing articles like this one.

(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?

"Fired up" as in optimistic about the future and using it to build cool new things with it.

...is my read, but the wonderful thing about text communication is if I'm in a grumpy mood because I didn't sleep well, the other reading is also entirely possible.

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