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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

#551

Post by aaron695 »

pj_mukh wrote: post #245
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…

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.

[dead]

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

#553

Post by Nextgrid »

entropy47 wrote: post #460
uncivilized wrote: post #449

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> I continue to produce work better, faster and more reliably than my colleagues who have outsourced their brains to Claude.

It matters little if your employer does not recognize/value that? Given the quality of most software nowadays, the output of Claude driven by a monkey appears to be perfectly acceptable for a lot of companies.

(yes, there's likely a big reckoning coming where all the slop and tech debt suddenly catches up with them, but that could be a decade off and you still need to pay rent in the meantime)

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

#554

Post by noduerme »

paulorlando wrote: post #529
Rendello wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Farewell, Etaoin Shrdlu documents the last day of hot type at The New York Times before the digital changeover. It's one of my favourite documentaries, everything feels so vivid and alive: https://www.nytimes.com/video/insider/100000004687429/farewe...

Since you mentioned Etaoin Shrdlu and hot type / linotype... There are a lot of industries (at least historically) that have organized labor. In the UK, there was the “Wapping Dispute” in 1986 when computer technology enabled journalists to type in their copy directly, doing away with the need for workers to set type using linotype printing. Linotype was a big improvement on the older letter-by-letter typesetting and…

I live in Oregon. Up until last year, you weren't allowed to pump your own gas in most parts of the state. The law required gas station attendants to do it, as a scheme to keep them employed. The most annoying part of this wasn't the tiny marginal cost, but that it sometimes took forever to get your gas if the attendant was busy. You'd just sit there looking at the pump you weren't allowed to put your credit card into.

You can create laws to keep making work for a class of workers, but it ends up unpopular. Instead of a social safety net as it was intended, it turns into a corrupt drain on society at large, and a relative disadvantage to your economy versus those that are more ... agile, let's say. Check out e.g. the underpaid but overstaffed government bureaucracies and police forces in most Latin American countries. Giving a third of your society badge and a lousy paycheck often does more harm than good.

I don't consider this observation to be right wing (per the sibling post), it's just how things work. While there's nobility in work and psychologically it's better to keep people employed, I'd just as soon give all the gas station attendants a lifelong retirement UBI so they'd get out of the way and let me pump my gas.

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

#555

Post by stalfosknight »

titanomachy wrote: post #426
cheschire wrote: post #219

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…

I understand both types of people, I think. Some of my friends are parents living outside of tech hubs whose lifestyle would be impossible without remote work, so they understandably felt attacked. But the discourse around this was unhinged. Some remote advocates were convinced that RTO was either a C-suite power trip, or a move to stop commercial real estate from imploding.

It is a C-suite power trip.

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

#556

Post by sysworld »

robotnikman wrote: post #467
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

We need a path for people effected to be able to at least cover basic needs, while also offering some kinda training into a different role that pays.

Defiantly not something most countries have setup.

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

#557

Post by bentcorner »

jleyank wrote: post #502
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…

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.

Deleting career fields in and of itself is not a problem with technology, but when it's like the eye of sauron scouring workplaces and snapping jobs away (pardon the mixed universes), it starts to become a little alarming.

University graduates are often considered min-bar for white-collar work hiring, so if it takes 4 years to train someone, how are people supposed to decide on a career path when it takes less time than that to completely alter the workplace?

My daughter is entering her first year of nursing, a career path that she is greatly looking towards. Who says in 3 years that robotics companies don't actually deliver on their promises and completely up-end the care industry? While I think that unlikely, it's not like people aren't trying to automate nurses away.

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

#558

Post by Lerc »

lovich wrote: post #521
Muromec wrote: post #300

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?

There are sizeable camps for both those opinions.

I mostly agree, except for the Messiah part.

I think the optimistic excited people are thinking more 'What a time to be alive' than 'All praise be, for they have come'

Which is not to say there won't be people deifying AI, I just don't think there are many of those yet.

The cynical side of me thinks it will happen, but right now I feel like most of those who seem susceptible to that kind of thinking are tending towards the Butlearian.

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

#559

Post by tcrenshaw »

sysworld wrote: post #556
robotnikman wrote: post #467

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

We need a path for people effected to be able to at least cover basic needs, while also offering some kinda training into a different role that pays. Defiantly not something most countries have setup.

What is the different sort of roll that pays at this point?

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

#560

Post by tbrownaw »

Foobar8568 wrote: post #385
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…

Fuck, there has been a class of workers who had faith in their careers? Beside Charlatans and Billionaires?

Probably clergy?
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