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

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

#701

Post by dan_q »

punkbit wrote: post #631
testerius wrote: post #617

Currently, I have 3 main issues with AI, LLMs and so on. Generally speaking I am happy that I can use Claude Code and Codex to help building, fixing and maintaining software in my job. To be honest it is so helpful, I am less stressed bacause most of the time I can "find out" solution without asking collegues for help or I do not have spend a lot of time struggling myself. Yeah, if you understand what feeling it is t…

Three really good points. Specially the third one. Not sure why HN readers are downvoting you…

This site aggressively suppresses any criticism of LLMs, especially LLM generated/"assisted" code.

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

#702

Post by Rumple22Stilk »

jleyank wrote: post #478
Animats wrote: post #221

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…

Look at the disappearance of pink-collar jobs due to computerization and "do it yourself" that it enabled. There's lots of examples of whole career fields disappearing. The trick has always been to see whether and how things reappear.

There is no tech created like this. This is a literal thinking machine. And it replaces other thinking machines. You.

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

#703

Post by abustamam »

tcrenshaw wrote: post #530
sysworld wrote: post #527

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We need a path for people effected to be able to at least cover basic needs, while also offering some kinda training into a different role that pays. Defiantly not something most countries have setup.

What is the different sort of roll that pays at this point?

Blue collar work, but obviously that labor market would get saturated pretty quickly.

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

#704

Post by dan_q »

crnkofe wrote: post #632

I have this nagging feeling that the depression, anxiety and pessimism is as-of-late coming from people from all the companies that risked it by adopting token maxing and AI usage enforcement. Its not representative of the whole industry though. There are still many places where engineers or knowledge workers are respected and left to lead (or not) AI adoption.

> There are still many places where engineers or knowledge workers are respected and left to lead (or not) AI adoption.

Please start naming names

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

#705

Post by appplication »

jdm2212 wrote: post #692
lp4v4n wrote: post #648

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The worst of all is that people will still argue that, in this day and age, labour has not been completely devalued and that you are wealthier than your grandfather. That kind of story was not uncommon at all in the past, today you would have to be a literal multi-millionaire to have that lifestyle.

If you're ok with 1963 living standards, you can in fact have the grandfather's same lifestyle today at a very reasonable cost.

Very curious what living standards you’re thinking of

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

#706

Post by abustamam »

robotnikman wrote: post #447
Animats wrote: post #221

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

At least here in America, our politicians lose their shit if they see someone getting money without working for it (as if politicians don't already get paid for doing almost nothing). And they use scary words and rhetoric like communism and Marxism, yknow the stuff we fought wars against.

What they (and their constituents) fail to realize though is that we're quickly approaching a post-work society and people won't just disappear or stop needing to eat.

I keep hoping that the public would wisen up and see the writing on the wall but somehow incompetent people keep getting reelected.

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

#707

Post by dan_q »

mawadev wrote: post #599
lostaccount wrote: post #32

This is basically office space but for the modern era. Peter found happiness in construction work, but when something physical like that is your job… I don’t know. A lot of those guys have back pain, inflexible schedules, working in extreme weather, and the pay isn’t even that good. Is tech so bad? Or is the world of work broken?

I have no idea why we go down the route of "us" vs "them" type of thinking. Have you considered both sides to be an abstract kind of hell?

The "us" vs "them" thought pattern is the essence of "Western" (read: white, European, colonialist) culture, dating back to Plato's Republic.

Marimba Ani's seminal work Yurugu is a sociological study of this culture from a non-western perspective. I can't recommend it strongly enough if you want to understand the nexus of social/psychological/epistemic factors that sustain the "us" vs "them" thought pattern and its corresponding cultural manifestations.

https://archive.org/details/yuruguafricancen0000anim/page/n3...

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

#708

Post by dan_q »

hdndjsbbs wrote: post #492

The bigger problem, for me, is that knowledge work has become stupid. If you want to write code by hand and do a good job, you will be ruthlessly replaced by your boss churning out "good enough" LLM code. The CEO at my company tried to PR code to my repo. It didn't make any sense but it was a whole political thing to make it go away. The industry has always been stupid and selfish and short-sighted but now the ICs at…

> The industry has always been stupid and selfish and short-sighted but now the ICs at the bottom of the pyramid are themselves being commoditized like all the workers they "disrupted".

Are you allowed to use the word "union" on this website?

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

#709

Post by kelnos »

listenallyall wrote: post #678
close04 wrote: post #626

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> he had 5 children, a house in Daly City and 3 apartments across the street from Dolores park as well as a brand new home in Terra Linda 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? Careers can evaporate just the same but what they leave behind is vastly different from 60 years ago.

How much wealth? Not really that much if you move to the middle of the country. You're thinking of San Francisco (well, Daly City) of the 2020's, which San Francisco absolutely was not in 1963. Nice place, sure, but still heavily working class, blue-collar and union. You could have 5 kids and a few apartments on a reliable, but not spectacular, income today in many cities (and suburbs of such) in the US.

That doesn't really pass the smell test for me.

How do you get this "reliable, but not spectacular" income in one of these places? What are these places?

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

#710

Post by realharo »

Animats wrote: post #221

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…

Maybe that's because back then it just didn't affect enough people at the same time.

They weren't too big to fail.

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