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

Anger, Anxiety and Agency

lucumr.pocoo.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 143 posts

Re: Anger, Anxiety and Agency

#81

Post by keybored »

There is this obvious disconnect. Productivity will go up, they promise, but you might be out of a way to support yourself. So that revolutionary productivity is going somewhere. Just not to knowledge workers. And not to farmers or carpenters. They are going to the owners of the means of production. So this is a very straightforward anger-direction.

Right-wing minded people are often fine with you being angry at people. As long as you don’t look up.

> We have access to magic machines, and we can poke at them and see what happens. The second way is to feel genuine excitement. Once you move beyond curiosity, you can come away with a newfound feeling of power and freedom.

Brother, these self-improvement speeches where you shift your frame of mind from half-empty to half-full to thinking of the aswesome potential of the negative space of the cup are supposed to be held on a weekend on some retreat in front of people who have their basal needs met and have the psychological constitution of someone who knows that they have decades left in them for their job or career unless they get hit and disfigured by a car. They are not fit for people who have been told, oh maybe you will never have a job again ever after six months, two years,—who knows?

> A lot of the gains from AI aren’t turning into productivity gains that are reflected in company profits but they’re showing up instead in the number of side projects shipped by everybody not on their company’s time.

You might be out of that thing that put food on the table in the long run. But right now you can use the mAgiC mAchIne to make side projects, ya know? What?

What kind of a GitHub-star poisoned response is that? Log off the green checkmarks for a few days, please.

Re: Anger, Anxiety and Agency

#82

Post by draw_down »

aenima4six2 wrote: post #77

I’m not the arbiter of emotions but being angry is valid and it doesn’t have to be directed. It’s not necessarily a vector. If I worked very hard to transplant a tree, and at no fault of anyone, it dies in the process, I can be angry I invested my time, money and energy into the failed effort. No one has the right to say that’s the wrong emotion to feel.

[dead]

Re: Anger, Anxiety and Agency

#83

Post by janpeuker »

tptacek wrote: post #18

The record scratch for me here was the idea that people can choose to be unsure instead of angry. People hate being unsure. Neurochemistry prefers anger to uncertainty. People get angry about being unsure. We feel anger in large part as our brain's natural salve for the discomfort of uncertainty. The suggestion he's making sort of defines away human nature. (There's a lot of practical benefit to be gained from unders…

Big +1. Uncertainty is where we learn, and where non-zero-sum games are, but most western AI labs right now operate firmly in zero-sum game territory.

Re: Anger, Anxiety and Agency

#84

Post by Aeolun »

dgellow wrote: post #37
Aeolun wrote: post #4

I think right now I love my job. I can work 5 times faster and explore all the little things that I never had time for. All my side projects suddenly come to fruition! But I have never been more anxious. I have a hard time sleeping, I constantly feel the need to keep up or fall behind. It didn’t use to be like this.

What does falling behind mean for you? What happens if you’re not keeping up? In my personal experience, nothing actually bad happen when you take your time to do your work without feeling the need to always follow the latest trends

> In my personal experience, nothing actually bad happen when you take your time to do your work

Historically, no. But historically we didn’t have computers that could do my ostensible job 50x faster than I can.

Re: Anger, Anxiety and Agency

#85

Post by zoltrix303 »

aenima4six2 wrote: post #77

I’m not the arbiter of emotions but being angry is valid and it doesn’t have to be directed. It’s not necessarily a vector. If I worked very hard to transplant a tree, and at no fault of anyone, it dies in the process, I can be angry I invested my time, money and energy into the failed effort. No one has the right to say that’s the wrong emotion to feel.

I'd argue feeling the emotion is perfectly fine, but it's how one expresses this emotion and how it impacts others that has larger implications.

Re: Anger, Anxiety and Agency

#86

Post by stronglikedan »

lazyasciiart wrote: post #69
jjulius wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps it doesn't come naturally for others and is therefore a bit of a struggle to shift into, but I love being unsure. It's great. It's a thing that's totally okay to be . The reality of life is that we're all unsure about a great deal, and it's quite a nice feeling to acknowledge uncertainty, sit within it and feel okay.

It is flat out not a nice feeling to experience uncertainty about things like "can I pay for someone to look after my child so I can go to work?" and "will I have food to eat this weekend?". For some people, "will AI mean my job goes away next year?" leads directly to those concrete uncertainties, and they understand that, and that is why they don't enjoy the uncertainty they are currently feeling. I'm guessing that…

Okay, but why get angry about it? Getting angry at things you can't do anything about is just silly, and if you can do something about it, get motivated instead of angry.

Re: Anger, Anxiety and Agency

#87

Post by arbirk »

Anger is not productive. But we need to be more accepting to "the mood of the day". Winter grumpiness, being annoyed over having to bike in the rain, being able to show that you are stressed, weak, feel weird should all be emotions that we accept in the social space that is the workplace.

Re: Anger, Anxiety and Agency

#88

Post by mlsu »

This article falls flat for me. Maybe because I'm angry?

>Anxiety as an emotion does not require someone to blame.

I know this isn't the "hacker mindset" or whatever. But my anger is well placed and justified. It is pointed at a very specific set of people who are actively doing everything in their power to turn the world into a surveillance spam slop hellscape while massively enriching themselves and destroying the biosphere.

They are using this technology TODAY to build a surveillance state. They are using this technology TODAY to spam the ever loving shit out of every place on the internet with a comment box. They are using this technology TODAY to fool people and to distance people from one another. They are using this technology TODAY to bomb schools and designate people terrorists and fly drones into gas stations. And they are doing all of this TODAY, right now, while literally stealing and burning books, cooking the biosphere, and making everyone's electricity more expensive. It is not a "bet" or something they are unsure of. It is something that they are doing, today.

Sorry, I am going to be unsure, curious, and anxious about this technology when the people in charge of it cease using their basically unchecked authoritarian power to immiserate myself and everyone else, literally billions of people, who are in my social class.

I am not curious or uncertain about any of this, I know exactly what is happening and I hate it and I hate the people who are responsible for it. They have names and I'm confident that when this is all over, they will burn in hell.

Re: Anger, Anxiety and Agency

#89

Post by dimbletimbers »

tptacek wrote: post #18

The record scratch for me here was the idea that people can choose to be unsure instead of angry. People hate being unsure. Neurochemistry prefers anger to uncertainty. People get angry about being unsure. We feel anger in large part as our brain's natural salve for the discomfort of uncertainty. The suggestion he's making sort of defines away human nature. (There's a lot of practical benefit to be gained from unders…

I think I’m angry b/c I’m unsure but so many people are claiming to be sure without sufficient evidence.

Re: Anger, Anxiety and Agency

#90

Post by [deleted] »

blfr wrote: post #8
harimau777 wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Personally, I don't have any electronic drudgery to outsource. However, I do have to deal with all the ways that AI has made my life worse.

Really? You don't write dockerfiles, ansible playbooks, never wanted something rewritten into typescript so that it also works client-side, or get stuck in some cloud console?

[deleted]
Post reply on HN