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You are not your job

jry.io

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Re: You are not your job

#251

Post by Noumenon72 »

thn-gap wrote: post #183
logicchains wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>People don't need self-help advise, they need a fair redistribution of increased productivity. The increased productivity is pretty much entirely coming from AI researchers and the companies investing in huge amounts of GPUs, and they are the ones receiving most of the windfalls, how's that not fair?

The biggest contribution is still from the training set, whose original authors get 0 because of "fair use" in the copyright.

This presumes that the value was created by the authors and not the people who found a way to use the structure in the training set to create intelligence. Like crediting wi-fi router owners with creating Wi-Fi Positioning System instead of the people who realized they could wardrive around to create maps and extract a new kind of value that would never have existed without them. Or Egyptians for deciphering hieroglyphics instead of the Frenchman who realized the Rosetta Stone they were using to hold up a wall could actually be used to do much more.

My thinking here is coming from the paper "From Entropy to Epiplexity"[1] which partly discussed why you can train on synthetic data: it's the structure of the data that enables learning, not just the amount of "information". Authors of images and videos may have worked just as hard as authors of text training sets, but they didn't contribute to AI as much because there just wasn't the same kind of structure to discover there. It's the people who found the usable structure, not the people who accidentally generated it, who created the value.

1. https://arxiv.org/html/2601.03220v2

Re: You are not your job

#252

Post by bigDinosaur »

sph wrote: post #218
ThrowawayR2 wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reminds me of a very old essay on Cracked that says something very similar: https://www.cracked.com/blog/6-harsh-truths-that-will-make-y...

Good god, serious life advice targeted at young men (but applicable to anybody) before the manosphere, incels and culture wars took over. Unimaginable stuff today. What a relic.

This article seems to hinge on a rhetorical flourish whereby the literal meaning of 'you are not your job' is substituted with a criticism of 'you are not what you do'. Well, of course it doesn't make sense and isn't true if you redefine it like that - the original aphorism is instead more literal: your identity should not be conflated with the identity of your employer. The substituted argument leads to some fascinating philosophy, but doesn't deal with the more literal fact that plenty of things you can do for value to the world are still negatives, either net negative for the world or to the individual. Conflating one's identity with an employer is the latter, since the employer and the employee almost always have different requirements for well-being (in the case of a corporation then of course the employer in that sense has no requirement for well-being at all).

Re: You are not your job

#253

Post by giantg2 »

sph wrote: post #224
abcde666777 wrote: post #122

Being able to see ourselves as something beyond our job (our means of survival) is a luxury. If a person can't provide for themselves the rest goes out the window fast. The only way to ease the anxiety in people isn't with fluff about their 'human worth', but rather to help them envision other tangible and plausible ways in which they can provide for themselves. The cold reality, in my opinion, is that the things we…

> The cold reality, in my opinion, is that the things we value about ourselves are generally not that valuable to others. I love my own personality and humanity, my soul if you will, but nobody's paying me for it, and so I have to value it accordingly. A good example of what tribes did better vs civilization: if you can do anything to help the tribe survive (I am a good hunter, you can create good bows), you are a pr…

It seems like most people in the first world either couldn't do physical tasks or would tell themselves they can't. Things like bow making and hunting (including processing) require specialized knowledge and a lot of physical work. Same goes for farming.

But the real thing that makes the comparison fall apart is that with machines people have less utility and people today "require" more resources- can an individual today do anything meaningful to help the tribe survive? And by meaningful, we necessarily tie it to positive economic impact, which is very hard to achieve at lower paying jobs or jobless when we look at things that get paid for by the tribe such as like healthcare cost.

Re: You are not your job

#254

Post by ajb »

BobbyJo wrote: post #135
throwaway-11-1 wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They aren’t valuable to markets, but like I have neighbors who are treasured by the community and genuinely bring joy to everyone. But no, I guess they aren’t economically important. I actually don’t like how every soul has been reduced to an efficiency metric, surprised how much I find forums like this accept that framing.

> But no, I guess they aren’t economically important. I actually don’t like how every soul has been reduced to an efficiency metric, surprised how much I find forums like this accept that framing. Efficiency is the metric of nature. Thinking about human life in any other terms than input and output is objectively a luxury, afforded only to societies with surplus resources. Calling it "framing" feels a little disingen…

Okay, so when you, BobbyJo, become too old or unwell to work; other people should just shoot you in the head and take your stuff, right? It would only be efficient. Or does this 'harsh reality" only apply to other people?

Re: You are not your job

#255

Post by windward »

I went through this reckoning when a company I worked for underwent layoffs for poor financial performance. Nothing I could have done since I started the job would have made it avoidable. I had the epiphany that I'd tied up my sense of self, and self-worth, with a status that I actually had very little control over.

Not being a software developer. That's actually generally a net negative, socially. It was all about class.

I've been fairly upwardly mobile. That alone gave me a feeling of success that glossed over any other inadequacies. Being comfortably financially also means - or meant - that I had the luxury of ignoring the reality of daily life for most people I met, however much I thought I hadn't lost touch.

Confronting the idea of how I'd feel about my life without it, and how the people in my life would feel about me, and how I feel about people who don't have the same comfort, is an instrumental part of me developing into a better, happier person.

Re: You are not your job

#256

Post by dudefeliciano »

abcde666777 wrote: post #122

Being able to see ourselves as something beyond our job (our means of survival) is a luxury. If a person can't provide for themselves the rest goes out the window fast. The only way to ease the anxiety in people isn't with fluff about their 'human worth', but rather to help them envision other tangible and plausible ways in which they can provide for themselves. The cold reality, in my opinion, is that the things we…

and then they said it's socialism that kills the individual identity of people...

Re: You are not your job

#257

Post by krapp »

komali2 wrote: post #242

> Whether you do well through an economic transition or not has little to do with the cause (AI, digital technology, industrialization, coal), and more to do with the social and political structures which exist around you (which is a blog post for another day). I keep hearing "AI will free us to do things we love," and all I can think is, in what world? Because in this one, if you don't have labor worth buying or any…

>I keep hearing "AI will free us to do things we love," and all I can think is, in what world?

You're likely to hear this sentiment from rich and privileged SV entrepreneurs and people who were handed six-figure salaries right out of school, and who have never had a realistic view of how most people live. People who only continue to work to satisfy their intellect and lifestyle.

You don't hear this sentiment from normal people.

Re: You are not your job

#258

Post by graemep »

giantg2 wrote: post #248
xdertz wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are many instances of braces and artificial limbs or that were found or fossilised bones that showed crippled people that grew into old-age, which provides evidence that people cared for 'non-productive' members.

Finding evidence that disable people existed does not provide evidence that they were not able to contribute in some way. It's incredibly ableist to assume they couldn't.

In the context of a pre-industrial society? I doubt it. In a hunter gatherer-society? I doubt it even more. people with certain skills (e.g. tool making, music, cooking maybe..) certainly, but not for a lot of people.

However, decent human beings do not value other human beings purely on the basis of their economic contribution. Someone might be a net cost, but a decent society still looks after them.

Re: You are not your job

#259

Post by carlosjobim »

throw-the-towel wrote: post #245
carlosjobim wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you heard about the last century? A few governments did that. You had to stand in line for food and your basic goods.

No they didn't. In the USSR, for example, not working without a valid reason was literally a crime (look up tuneyadstvo ).

Great point! But for how many weeks will you enjoy your UBI before the rulers say "Okay, now that we're paying all of your salaries, it's time for you to do the work we need. Off you go to build the railroad or the giant dam! Here's a pick-axe."
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