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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

#651

Post by ricardobayes »

ben_w wrote: post #389
pj_mukh wrote: post #321

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>>"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…

"Normal tech" puts people out of careers every so often, and kinda randomly. Society has benefited as everyone who isn't put out of a job significantly outnumbers those who are. I was expecting AI to put me, a software developer, out of a job after everyone else , because I thought coders would be needed to write the AI for everyone else, one job task at a time. Right now, it's looking like LLMs can translate not onl…

We haven't really been able to figure out the responsibility thing properly yet. I'm ok with AI/LLMs but not so much on agentic stuff, a human always needs to be in the loop. If there's anything we learned from Robocop, is the need of a human decision maker. I'm not okay with a fully agentic radiology AI or a fully autonomous surgery robot, without a surgeon supervising.

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

#652

Post by sph »

mac-mc wrote: post #638
lelanthran wrote: post #611

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I know a class of tech workers absolutely fired up about the new Industrial Revolution, That's because they're thinking that they're still going to get paid $200k/y for typing in "Duh, Claude, make me an app, here the specs from the client, doh!" They aren't seeing that there is very little value to add when all they are, is an interface to a magic software-making machine.

It's very similar to being an EM, and if you think EMs are useless, the vast majority EMs have decided it's not worth their time to educate you, and the few who have tried to gently probably went over your head.

WTF is an EM? Please expand your acronyms.

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

#653

Post by anovikov »

tossandthrow wrote: post #639
bjt12345 wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Serious question though - how are they going with that? In reality, I see a lot of the current unhappiness in the Tech industry is being triggered by their pointy haired bosses wasting millions on their failed AI strategies only to embark on more failing AI strategies.

We are too early to deem it failed ai strategies. I am advising small startups. One of them went entirely to agentic developed software by a team of non technical founders. They had their sec audit done with considerably fewer errors than had a software developer build the same (which would have taken upwards of 4 times as long). I am sorry, the technical capabilities of the agentic systems for software development i…

I agree. There is no point in hiring anyone into a technical-only role anymore. It's very valuable (and probably always will be) to be something-and-technical: a specialist in the target field who also understands how computers and software work. But not "just" technical, these are already completely obsolete and all of them who still have jobs, do so simply because of institutional inertia, connections, and companies being awash with money. Which is not to say that this is not a sustainable state of affairs - it may very well be so forever.

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

#654

Post by foobiekr »

david927 wrote: post #44
zitterbewegung wrote: post #29

When have people in Tech been happy? (Serious question).

The 1990's

Othr than bubble $, not really. The true "golden time" was the 1980s. Creation of Cisco, Sun and SGI, and so many other things (like the personal computer), all new, incredible energy, mostly positive.

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

#655

Post by tomhow »

zuzululu wrote: post #436
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.

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

#656

Post by Toutouxc »

hollowturtle wrote: post #351
THX1137 wrote: post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> forcing me to go out every day and talk to human beings face to face, even just little things like making sure I was showered and dressed every day This part is strange to me. I've worked from home for about 10 years and I've never once had an issue with twice-daily showering, meeting people face-to-face, going out for coffee, going outdoors, going to the gym, etc. The fact I can just go sit in a park, on a hiking…

I mean in which lucky place of the planet you live in? I dunno u but where I live it's 40 degree celsius out there and all over europe. I'm a remote worker and most time of the year going outside is just not possibile, over heat or too cold or raining like it never did before(climate change you know)

I’m don’t know how to say this, but if you’re claiming that there’s a place anywhere in Europe where going outside is “not possible” for more than a handful of days of the year (like extreme heatwaves), you definitely have some kind of problem that other people don’t have. And I mean it, it isn’t normal to be this scared of going outside.

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

#657

Post by win311fwg »

pseudalopex wrote: post #226
win311fwg wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The glaring flaw in the theory is that it hypothesizes that jobs are pointless, but in fact they do have a point: Companionship. There are always exceptions, but overwhelmingly those with resources don't like being alone and without social standing and so they use their resources to buy friends, so to speak.

Graeber's test of a bullshit job was it could be eliminated without harm to society. Jobs to make people above feel important was 1 type he identified.

We're talking about the link. It refers to pointless work.

- "over half of societal work is pointless"

- "workers are required to pretend their role is not as pointless or harmful as they know it to be"

Companionship isn't pointless. Nobody in a companionship role is pretending that they are at work for any other reason unless they are so out to lunch as to not notice what the job is. And if one is that far out to lunch, why would they see their job as being pointless rather than believing it useful in some other way?

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

#658

Post by thaumasiotes »

Lerc wrote: post #555
lovich wrote: post #518

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 towar…

> I mostly agree, except for the Messiah part.

What do you think people are talking about when they refer to "the singularity"?

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

#659

Post by testerius »

Currently, I have 3 main issues with AI, LLMs and so on. Generally speaking I am happy that I can use Claude Code and Codex to help building, fixing and maintaining software in my job. To be honest it is so helpful, I am less stressed bacause most of the time I can "find out" solution without asking collegues for help or I do not have spend a lot of time struggling myself. Yeah, if you understand what feeling it is that you know you can't solve problem then you will know what I am writing about.

But...

There are exceptions which make me bad feeling about AI, LLMs and so on:

1. Paid, subscribtion based payment model - you have to pay for tokens.

2. Local models are not "ready yet". You still have to own decent hardware and it will not be the same level of frontier models. I am big fan of local first, offline and "unlimited usage" compared to paid solutions. But probably I have to wait few or several years to get to that point.

3. Feeling "I did not do it myself". This is the most what could make bad feel. You "cheated". You did not write this great app or solve problem alone. You just did modern "copy and paste". You did not write or design this class, function alone by hand. And you know you probably could not do it without help of AI, LLM.

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

#660

Post by CodeCompost »

testerius wrote: post #659

Currently, I have 3 main issues with AI, LLMs and so on. Generally speaking I am happy that I can use Claude Code and Codex to help building, fixing and maintaining software in my job. To be honest it is so helpful, I am less stressed bacause most of the time I can "find out" solution without asking collegues for help or I do not have spend a lot of time struggling myself. Yeah, if you understand what feeling it is t…

  2. Local models are not "ready yet". You still have to own decent hardware and it will not be the same level of frontier models. I am big fan of local first, offline and "unlimited usage" compared to paid solutions. But probably I have to wait few or several years to get to that point.
This is why tech companies are working hard to make sure you can never build your own computer again.
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