321–330 of 582 posts
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You are painting this like it’s a bad thing. The workers decided that they would rather have higher working time to buy more things! A lot of people would not choose to work for half the time as they do now because they do actually like to buy things.
How can you say that when workers don't have a choice? What accessible job has professional level pay and is part time?
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You’re describing task reallocation, but the bigger second-order effect is where the firm can now source the remaining human judgment. AI reduces the penalty for weak domain context. Once the work is packaged like that, the “thinking part” becomes far easier to offshore because: - Training time drops as you’re not teaching the whole craft, you’re teaching exception-handling around an AI-driven pipeline. - Quality bec…
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I appreciate that Finland considers Internet access of a minimum of 1 Mb to be a basic human right. I am not sure if other countries follow, but I wish the USA did.
It's laughably slow given how bloated the modern Web is. In fact even 10Mbps is barely enough to stream 1080p content.
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> I was with the author on everything except one point: increasing automation will not leave us with such abundance that we never have to work again. That's because we prefer improved living standards over less work. If we only had to live by the standards of one century ago or more, we could likely accomplish that by working very little.
What is interesting is the new things are cheap while the old stuff is now expensive. Average house in Australia is $1,000,000 while a TV is $500. The internet, social media, etc are cheap. Having someone repair your shoes is expensive.
A pair of Nike jordans or air maxes is often in the ~120 range and made of far inferior materials.
Boots have never been cheaper/accessible before. The people that bring up repairable shoes don’t wear them or buy from shit brands like Thursday, doc martins, or timberland. You deserve your poor quality footwear.
Whenever I get worried about this I comb through our ticket tracker and see that ~0% of them can be implemented by AI as it exists today. Once somebody cracks the memory problem and ships an agent that progressively understands the business and the codebase, then I'll start worrying. But context limitation is fundamental to the technology in its current form and the value of SWEs is to turn the bigger picture into a…
Just keep in mind that there are many highly motivated people directly working on this problem. It's hard to predict how quickly it will be solved and by whom first, but this appears to be a software engineering problem solvable through effort and resources and time, not a fundamental physical law that must be circumvented like a physical sciences problem. Betting it won't be solved enough to have an impact on the wo…
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This is a sensible plan, given your username.
Yeah seriously. Don't people understand the fact that society is not good at mopping up messes like this—there has been a K shaped economy for several decades now and most Americans have something like $400 in their bank accounts. The bottom had already fallen out for them, and help still hasn't arrived. I think it's more likely that what really happens is that white collar workers, especially the ones on the margin,…
Unless you’re investing in guns, ammo, food, and a bunker. We’re talking worse unemployment than depression era Germany. And structurally more significant unemployment because the people losing their jobs were formally very high earners.
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As long as the owner class can leverage, "Hey, that {out group} is sitting around doing nothing and getting free money!" we'll never have anything close to UBI imo.
Seems pretty easy to work around with "UBI for citizens" only. There's not much pushback for social security, for instance, even if minorities get it.
Expect a real movement to reduce the number of citizens in this country. Specifically, if you can’t trace your lineage to a founding father (including for kids of Geman or iish immigrants), than they want you disenfranchised.
Heritage Americans vs “hyphenated Americans”
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"The steamroller is still many inches away. I'll make a plan once it actually starts crushing my toes." You are in danger . Unless you estimate the odds of a breakthrough at <5%, or you already have enough money to retire, or you expect that AI will usher in enough prosperity that your job will be irrelevant, it is straight-up irresponsible to forgo making a contingency plan.
> it is straight-up irresponsible to forgo making a contingency plan. What contingencies can you really make? Start training a physical trade, maybe. If this the end of SWE jobs, you better ride the wave. Odds are you're estimate on when AI takes over are off by half a career, anyways.
One of the things that drove the tech boom in the 2010s was cloud computing driving the cost of starting an internet company into the ground.
What happens when there’s software you think should exist, and you no longer need to hire a bunch of people at $150k-$250k per year to build it?