Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

noemamag.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

981–990 of 1001 posts

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

#981

Post by imhoguy »

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

There is article from the same site that the next US election will be about AI and how to compensate diminishing labour market https://www.noemamag.com/the-next-us-presidential-election-w...

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

#982

Post by johnnyanmac »

tuesdaynight wrote: post #303
jancsika wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just read this from Nokia's blog of all places[1]: > A fresh U.S. residential IP address (especially one behind carrier-grade NAT and harder to block individually) is “gold.” Customers pay up to $95 to lease a single U.S. residential IP address for 2 weeks (versus $0.30 for an Eastern European IP). That's bananas. The place I found a link to that story was jwz's blog, a site that is actively getting hammered by one…

I feel like your last paragraph could be said about any time in the last 10 years. That was my biggest wake-up call to stop following mainstream news. Whatever shows here or in my social circle are enough to be informed as much as needed (YMMV)

I don't think a Nokia blog talking about the economics of renting out area-based IP addresses is anywhere close to mainstream. we'd be in a much much better society if it was.

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

#983

Post by scott_weber »

pj_mukh wrote: post #724
danans wrote: post #686

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> How well would you need to be paid now in any career to support a family like that one while accumulating that wealth already early in life? The answer is that you don't do it by getting paid (as in exchanging labor for wages). You do it by finding a way to scale your wealth with other people's labor.

Good faith counter point >>” to scale your wealth with other people's labor” Or you can scale your labor with openly available AI?

So labour doesn't really scale. It's measured in hours, and you only get so many of those in a week.

If you're using "scale your labour" to mean "scale your output". Well, two cases: your selling your labour as an employee, or your output directly. Either way: the market won't value them above their cost of substitution, which is just the cost of substitution of your original, non AI labour, plus the cost of the AI (an ever cheaper commodity).

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

#984

Post by srveale »

victorbjorklund wrote: post #909
bushbaba wrote: post #849

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I doubt unemployment can even raise to 40% before the government and billionaire class is overthrown. The French Revolution was not an isolated event

You have way higher unemployment among young people in many countries without any revolution. What are they gonna do? Randomly kill people who are ”kulaks” and that will solve their problems how? Are they gonna get to eat if they kill a guy running a saas company?

There have been instances of mass unemployment without mass violence, sure. But are you sure you want to see how it plays out in a country with >1.2 guns per capita?

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

#985

Post by jambalaya8 »

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…

Printers had taken the place of an entire cadre of non-communicating faith workers who used to sit down and painstakingly copy things by hand while being housed and fed for "free", though the variety of reading materials were hardly as large, and it took a lot longer.

In all seriousness, our jobs are almost certainly going the way of AI coding things, the same way we sorta took over a bunch of unskilled women who merely punched a bunch of cards and ran punched cards through a machine to do basic calculations before computing became something else too.

Before digital and electronic switching systems, you most likely didn't get work in a telephone central office unless you were more of a mechanic than a programmer.

I am more worried about the fact there is nothing "next" to "strive for" or do than about the status of someone that knew the ins and outs of wax sublimation printing (though it is a cool thing).

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

#987

Post by Permik »

elmer2 wrote: post #277
pixelready wrote: post #249

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…

I'm probably an outlier, but as someone working a non-physical job, I have been talking about how I personally would still keep working and doing jobs even if all of my basic needs are met.

I do work purely because of idealistic reasons. I'm not actually owed anything, I'm working because of us, humanity. Yeah, people are going to slack, and that's just life. It's just statistics, optimize society to such a configuration that people acts have a place and get the support they need. Most of the "slackers" who represent the people just living on the UBI type system you described, probably don't do it as a direct choice. Most likely they feel like they can't contribute to society, but that's something that's solvable. It's a matter of education and culture.

About your quote:

  "have nothing to lose and decide to attack the source of their misery. Bread and circuses will only distract so much."
There's a theory directly relating to this that I have about the modern golden age of punk and rock in the nordics. When people had all of their basic needs met, they finally had the time to take a breath, take a look inwards and face their own inner demons. I suggest that this was one of the big things that created the conditions which made the nordics the rock/punk powerhouse that they were.

Of course, the good times also had their downsides, lots of complacency in politics and not feeling the need to fight for better, because things were already better than they've ever been!

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

#988

Post by zmmmmm »

Dusseldorf wrote: post #360
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 think the reason people get angry about it is that it feels like an asymmetric ask. It feels a bit like saying "everyone needs to come I to the office because I like there to be people in the office, regardless of whether that's what they want." (not saying that's what you're saying here, just trying to shine some light on how it may be perceived)

On top of that, it seems the WFO crowd simply can't help exploiting it to their advantage once they are there. They get less work done, but they hoard higher level decisions about what work should be done. They will say "oh we had this corridor conversation and decided X and Y", and then they will even present the fact that happened as compelling evidence that everyone should work in the office. Whereas I see it as evidence of dysfunction - you want to make a decision you get all the stakeholders in the room and you ensure it's transcribed / recorded. Basically an online meeting is the ideal form of it.

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

#989

Post by zmmmmm »

I will say here that there are meaningful jobs that especially tech people can engage with. There are gigantic unsolved problems. Climate change, cancer, thousands of rare disorders with no therapy or even good diagnostics. And many of these fields have actual roles for technical people to fill and usually can't find highly qualified people to do them because a software eng salary is far out of reach of the average research funding.

Before burning out, retiring or checking out altogether, I really recommend people look at the concept of halving your salary and taking a job that still employs your skills but is directly attached to actual meaning.

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

#990

Post by Exoristos »

estearum wrote: post #788
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…

Surprised no one has made the extremely obvious observation that it took literal centuries for printing technology to eliminate the trade of printers, which could not have possibly have employed more than 0.01% of people at its peak. Compared to the potential obsolescence of 40% to 60% of the US workforce over the course of 10 - 20 years? You can argue about whether the obsolescence is real or not, but if it is , the…

Most of it actually took about five years, as the manufacturing side of it was outsourced to China and the computer side to India. I was there. Management told us it was "because of 9/11." R.R. Donnelley was one of the world's largest manufacturing companies, a Fortune 50 company -- became a penny stock in a decade or so.

The technologies GP mentions didn't end commercial print -- they were all heavily in use _by_ commercial print.

Post reply on HN