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How AI is affecting productivity and jobs in Europe

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Re: How AI is affecting productivity and jobs in Europe

#121

Post by joe_mamba »

Gormo wrote: post #119
joe_mamba wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah but it's the job of the elected governments to build and maintain housing, education, social and welfare systems for their population that keep up with the challenges of the times, not the responsibility of the private sector to hold back progress and inefficiency just so more people can stay in employment even if they're not needed anymore. The governments however have been and continue to be ill prepared to th…

> but it's the job of the elected governments to build and maintain housing, education, social and welfare systems for their population that keep up with the challenges of the times I'd say those things are the job of the population itself, via a wide range of pluralistic institutions. The job of governments, which are just specific organizations within a much larger society, is primarily to maintain public order.

>I'd say those things are the job of the population itself, via a wide range of pluralistic institutions.

I'd agree ONLY IF I'd pay no taxes to the government. But since most middle class people pay 40%+ of their income to the state, then the state now has the responsibility to handle those challenges for us.

But if the state wants me to handle it, then sure I'd do it gladly, they just need to reimburse 90% of my tax payments so I'd have the financial resources to proactively invest in my future security.

But right now we have the worst of both worlds in the west: a huge tax burden on the middle class funding an incompetent state that takes your money, spends it like drunken sailors on bullshit, and when the shit hits the fan, just tells you it's your fault when you fall down, instead of having used your money for societal wide preemptive solutions.

Re: How AI is affecting productivity and jobs in Europe

#122

Post by Gormo »

joe_mamba wrote: post #121
Gormo wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but it's the job of the elected governments to build and maintain housing, education, social and welfare systems for their population that keep up with the challenges of the times I'd say those things are the job of the population itself, via a wide range of pluralistic institutions. The job of governments, which are just specific organizations within a much larger society, is primarily to maintain public order.

>I'd say those things are the job of the population itself, via a wide range of pluralistic institutions. I'd agree ONLY IF I'd pay no taxes to the government. But since most middle class people pay 40%+ of their income to the state, then the state now has the responsibility to handle those challenges for us. But if the state wants me to handle it, then sure I'd do it gladly, they just need to reimburse 90% of my tax…

> I'd agree ONLY IF I'd pay no taxes to the government. But since most middle class people pay 40%+ of their income to the state, then the state now has the responsibility to handle those challenges.

Well, no, we pay taxes for the government to fund the things government is supposed to do and is competent at. Paying the government doesn't make them responsible for or competent to handle anything every problem arising anywhere in society, any more than paying for a Netflix subscription makes Netflix responsible for or capable of handling those problems.

This is really important, because political institutions aren't just bad at handling complex social problems, but when made responsible for them, often get in the way of other individuals, communities, and institutions trying to solve those problems with much better approaches.

> But if the state wants me to handle it, then sure I'd do it gladly, they just need to reimburse all my tax payments so I'd have the financial resources to invest in my future.

Agreed. We should drastically lower taxes, and ensure that most of the resources necessary to improve society are left in the hands of society itself, and not monopolized by a single institution that's subject to perverse incentives.

But if we assume that we're stuck paying the same level of taxes for the time being, and treat those taxes merely as losses, the question reduces to whether we want a monopolistic organization run by people with ulterior motives exercising a controlling influence over our lives and livelihoods -- and often failing to solve those complex problems in the first place -- or whether we would still prefer to solve those problems for ourselves with the resources we have left. And to my mind, the latter is still preferable, even if unhelpful strangers are stealing a good chunk of my resources.

> But right now we have the worst of both worlds: a huge tax burden on the middle class funding an incompetent state that takes your money, spends it like drunken sailors on bullshit, and when the shit hits the fan just tells you it's your fault when you fall down, instead of having used your money for societal wide preemptive solutions.

Yes, that's all true. But to my point above, the only way out of this is not to expect that the incompetent grifters will somehow start behaving like competent philanthropists, but rather to contain them and minimize the grift -- either way, it's still on us to solve our own problems.

Re: How AI is affecting productivity and jobs in Europe

#123

Post by joe_mamba »

Gormo wrote: post #122
joe_mamba wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I'd say those things are the job of the population itself, via a wide range of pluralistic institutions. I'd agree ONLY IF I'd pay no taxes to the government. But since most middle class people pay 40%+ of their income to the state, then the state now has the responsibility to handle those challenges for us. But if the state wants me to handle it, then sure I'd do it gladly, they just need to reimburse 90% of my tax…

> I'd agree ONLY IF I'd pay no taxes to the government. But since most middle class people pay 40%+ of their income to the state, then the state now has the responsibility to handle those challenges. Well, no, we pay taxes for the government to fund the things government is supposed to do and is competent at. Paying the government doesn't make them responsible for or competent to handle anything every problem arising…

>Well, no, we pay taxes for the government to fund the things government is supposed to do and is competent at.

Which also includes the education system training you for the labor market. How is the state good at that if what they're training you for is now useless? Also includes the welfare safety net which is now failing to catch everyone falling.

>This is really important, because political institutions aren't just bad at handling complex social problems, but when made responsible for them, often get in the way of other individuals, communities, and institutions trying to solve those problems with much better approaches.

If we know they're bad at this and often responsible for the issues we have, why are we funding them so much?

Norway has their sovereign fund as a premprive solution in case the country hits a rough path in the future.

>but rather to contain them and minimize the grift

And this can only be done peacefully by defunding the incompetent state apparatus.

>either way, it's still on us to solve our own problems

Yeah but you need money for that. And we don't have money because the state is taking half of it.

Re: How AI is affecting productivity and jobs in Europe

#124

Post by torginus »

movedx01 wrote: post #82
entropyneur wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is it depressing? Personally, unless the alternative is literally starving, I wouldn't want to do a job that a robot could do instead just so that I could be kept busy. That sounds like an insult to human dignity tbh.

You know what is an insult? Supermarket on my street putting on display sloppy ads with ramen bowl that has 3 different thickness chopsticks and cartoon characters with scrambled faces. Now that is an insult, because there was a human being doing that job, and I am sure there was a great "productivity boost" related to that change. I am a heavy AI user myself, and sure as hell I am not putting my foot in that place a…

I think these pictures are a perfect and accessible metaphor for the problems of vibecoding slop and asking an actual engineer to fix it.

The end results evokes a sense of unease even in laymen, and the more you know about the subject matter, the more wrong it looks..

And 'fixing' it essentially requires as much if not more effort as writing it from scratch.

Re: How AI is affecting productivity and jobs in Europe

#125

Post by xtracto »

monkpit wrote: post #15
m463 wrote: post #2

I wonder if web searches used to be pretty productive, then declined as sponsored results and SEO degraded things. Nowadays an ai assist with a web search usually eliminates the search altogether and gives you a clear answer right away. for example, "how much does a ford f-150 cost" will give you something ballpark in a second, compared to annoying "research" to find the answer shrouded in corporate obfuscation.

The turning point was around when google stopped honoring Boolean ops and quotation marks

The turning point for me was when they changed the + sign first the "" because of their Google+ thing.

Re: How AI is affecting productivity and jobs in Europe

#126

Post by Gormo »

joe_mamba wrote: post #123
Gormo wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'd agree ONLY IF I'd pay no taxes to the government. But since most middle class people pay 40%+ of their income to the state, then the state now has the responsibility to handle those challenges. Well, no, we pay taxes for the government to fund the things government is supposed to do and is competent at. Paying the government doesn't make them responsible for or competent to handle anything every problem arising…

>Well, no, we pay taxes for the government to fund the things government is supposed to do and is competent at. Which also includes the education system training you for the labor market. How is the state good at that if what they're training you for is now useless? Also includes the welfare safety net which is now failing to catch everyone falling. >This is really important, because political institutions aren't jus…

> Which also includes the education system training you for the labor market.

Does it? That's an assumption many people make, but I'm not sure that this was either the original intent -- public schooling was driven largely as a tool for "liberal arts" and to assimilate immigrants -- nor something that public schooling has ever proven to be particularly good at.

> If we know they're bad at this and often responsible for the issues we have, why are we funding them so much?

Well, most people's main incentive for paying taxes is the threat of being punished for failing to do so.

> And this can only be done peacefully by defunding the incompetent state apparatus.

Agreed entirely.

> Yeah but you need money for that. And we don't have money because the state is taking half of it.

Agreed entirely, and doing away with confiscatory taxation is an important goal. But whether or not the state takes our money is not directly relevant to the question of whether the state is sufficiently trustworthy and competent to assign monopolistic control of critical aspects of our lives to.

And my position on that is that even if we can't roll back taxation, we still shouldn't trust the state with unilateral control over key aspects of our lives and livelihoods, and we'd be better off making do with the resources we retain despite taxation to provide those things for ourselves via other forms of organization or community.

Re: How AI is affecting productivity and jobs in Europe

#127

Post by thorin »

sajithdilshan wrote: post #107
galacticdessert wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Workers' councils...

care to elaborate?

It's the German / European version of unions. For instance when I joined an ex-public company 25 years ago unions were very active in the UK still, but they are even more active in Germany etc.

Re: How AI is affecting productivity and jobs in Europe

#128

Post by monkpit »

Antibabelic wrote: post #38
monkpit wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The turning point was around when google stopped honoring Boolean ops and quotation marks

When did this happen? I do exact searches on Google almost every day and it seems to honor the quotation marks just fine for me.

2012-2014 ish. I had a job which often involved searching for specific part numbers, and at some point during that job quotes stopped giving me exact results. They’d give me something close but incorrect. Like “ABC123” would show me “ABC456”. The real part numbers in question were much longer, in the range of 20-30 chars, so sometimes it was hard to notice that the search had ignored my quotes at first.

They might have fixed it in more recent years, but to me that was when the tide started shifting in the mentality behind google search as a product/service

Re: How AI is affecting productivity and jobs in Europe

#129

Post by badc0ffee »

aurareturn wrote: post #35
m463 wrote: post #2

I wonder if web searches used to be pretty productive, then declined as sponsored results and SEO degraded things. Nowadays an ai assist with a web search usually eliminates the search altogether and gives you a clear answer right away. for example, "how much does a ford f-150 cost" will give you something ballpark in a second, compared to annoying "research" to find the answer shrouded in corporate obfuscation.

then declined as sponsored results and SEO degraded things It didn't decline because of this. It declined because of a general decade long trend of websites becoming paywalled and hidden behind a login. The best and most useful data is often inaccessible to crawlers. In the 2000s, everything was open because of the ad driven model. Then ad blockers, mobile subscription model, and the dominance of a few apps such as I…

You can still use Reddit without logging in. In fact it's completely unlike Discord. Lots of Reddit discussions still show up in web search results.

Re: How AI is affecting productivity and jobs in Europe

#130

Post by plagiarist »

cons0le wrote: post #108
kdheiwns wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used to be able to google a question like that and get an accurate answer within the top 3 results nearly every time about 20 years ago. Then it got worse and worse and became pretty much completely useless about 10 years ago. Now AI will give me a confident answer that is outright wrong 20% of the time or kind of right but not really 30% of the time. So now I ask something using an AI chatbot and carefully word it…

Web scraping for LLMs has almost completely ruined the search experience. In the past I could search for simple questions, and quickly get an answer without even having to click through to the links. This was horrible for web traffic, but the utility level was off the charts. It was possible to get accurate results in milliseconds. It was faster than using an LLM. Now sites put almost no info in the search result hea…

Is SearXNG a nice experience? I need something that specifically excludes AI slop affiliate marketing listicles.

I don't know if content other than that exists out there any more. Still, I'd rather have no answer than a "top ten $item" list just describing the first page of Amazon results.

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