An interesting thing about one facet of how society as developed over the past decade and a half, I think, is that a byproduct of more people being conscious of the quest to monetise almost anything is that it has also raised the level of general scepticism on whether something is marketing or real. So you have increasingly more scenarios where an objectively bad thing can happen to someone but any public response is scrutinised and questioned within a hint of its life sometimes rightly sometimes not. I don’t particularly like it but that’s where we are at guess
> any public response is scrutinised and questioned within a hint of its life sometimes rightly sometimes not.
This is a fairly healthy response from the public - better than accepting everything at face-value. Plato's Allegory of the Cave is a warning against accepting random information in a vacuum to assess your surroundings. Observation and response is not enough to be a critical thinker, even back in the ancient ages.
From where I'm standing, the public at-large is traumatized from flubbed coverups like the Snowden leak, Epstein files, and Abu Ghraib. The myth of American exceptionalism has been threatened for a long time, and people rightfully question whether or not executive leadership can write-off their involvement in politics. Sam Altman has put on an extremely dangerous pair of boots, and while it doesn't justify attacks on his person, we all know that speculation will continue as new events come to light. Right or wrong, this is what the public is conditioned for now.
exactly. frankly its just a bunch of pissy holier than thou engineer thing. He seems to be pretty good at raising capital and selling dreams which his predominantly what Openai seemingly wants to be right now.
New Yorker article less so because its just a standard ceo profile piece that digs out pretty pertinent things for a ceo role
Sort of agree with this but I do find it amusing that this sort of take on it implicitly discounts that the capital still has to live with all these “useless” people on the same rock, whose numbers will grow to an unignorable amount...The idea that anything will be insulated is for the fairies and seems just as asinine to me
Agreed, and I'm sure at one time the UK was seen as an industrial and mining powerhouse and people raised with that image would be sad at the change. But by the time Thatcher trashed the North that wasn't really true any more. I don't think the UK went from an industrial giant to a desolate wasteland in a single generation like Detroit did. I could be wrong, though.
> I don't think the UK went from an industrial giant to a desolate wasteland in a single generation like Detroit did. I could be wrong, though.
Glasgow went from a prosperous shipbuilding town to the heroin capital of Europe. Sheffield also collapsed fairly dramatically with the loss of the steel industry, though maybe it didn't quite fall so far.
Yeah that's fair point. The closest from that perspective would be the collapse of shipbuilding in places like Sunderland or Hull or maybe textile mills in burnley. But not as significant in terms of global cultural importance i guess
This is an interesting post (and also a very well written one!). It touches on something that does slightly irk me about the wider friendship/loneliness conversation that it feels we've been having for a decades now.
Its the "we" in "how on earth we get ourselves out of this." The bluntness of the "we" conflates it into a bigger problem than it is. If you walk past many parks & gardens across cities you'll find that same picture of families socialising in the old way without a blackout, but also people glued to their phones too.
People who are intentional of having classic socialising are still doing it, people who choose not to either through their own intention or, i suspect and hope, in a very ambient non-intentional way are the ones who may need to get out of it. Yes there are more of the latter now than before but the former groups are still a huge part of society. And if they can do it even with the same distractions and phones and access to social media etc. why can't others?
I agree with where you're coming from. I think its the continuing rise of individualism to a degree; sports team mentality politics/the internet/phones/social media have likely accelerated it but feels to me we'd been moving that way even prior to that. There's probably something there, too, about how more wealth gives people an out to not have to engage with broader society in a way where lower wealth or less unequal distribution of wealth doesn't.
Margaret Thatcher got quite a lot of stick for her quote about how there is no society and its just individual people that look out for themselves first and foremost before anything. But I'd say there's more truth to that than I'd want to believe. What stops that from being true to my mind is people being very intentional about creating a society by engaging with others.
I'm always interested in people's stories about adult friendships or loneliness crisis etc. and what I tend to see is that when people start being intentional about engaging, it usually ends up with them finding new friends. It's just easy to sleepwalk, with everything going on, into not engaging. Newish parents are very apt example of this
Until housing is solved the wealth divide will continue to grow whether ai lives up to expectations or not. Higher wealth taxing funding UBI etc. will be largely ineffective without solving housing.
All this new fangled talk about ABUNDANCE yadda yadda I find quite silly. We already live in abundance, most jobs for instance already pay very livable wages for example. It's just not livable because of mainly housing (& more broadly renting & land prices)
Housing is causing a wealth gap. A private company or three being able to rent virtual employees for $100,000 a year and absorbing all white collar work would cause far more of a wealth gap.
The abundance idea is quite interesting in that in the near future we may have an abundance of most stuff people want including healthcare, nice food cars etc. produced partly with AI and robots. At the moment we still need people to make stuff hence the capitalist system continues.
I agree housing is an issue but we are not at the stage where they can say everyone have a house and take a holiday.
My thoughts exactly. I do think people tend to frame things in a developed economies sort of way when the worst fears of ai is actually more akin to a developing/emerging economy framework. And that says when where there's lump of labour available, most aren't earning that within trades.
I still don't understand the logic that any job is safe from ai (if it lives up to expectations). Sure, it might not be directly impacted by ai but why is there this expectation that the excess labour from those directly impacted doesnt act to suppress the earning power of other jobs?
Especially considering that the implication is that humans just become a pair of hands with opposable thumbs?. Take the electrician in the article, sure its a skilled job but the barrier into it drops massively imo if you can just take a picture of whatever issue is at hand and ai spits out what is needed, no?
> I still don't understand the logic that any job is safe from ai (if it lives up to expectations). Sure, it might not be directly impacted by ai but why is there this expectation that the excess labour from those directly impacted doesnt act to suppress the earning power of other jobs?
I don't get what's illogical in this statement. If people are displaced, everyone will know that the value of other work will go down too, but they'll still try to get into those other fields because they may still offer better prospects and a paid job (even at a low wage). That doesn't sound bad compared to a situation where you can't get a job in your field regardless of your demands. Besides, if we get to that situation, basically every job will be impacted, so it's not like keeping the tight grip on your current career will be more likely to save you.
> Take the electrician in the article, sure its a skilled job but the barrier into it drops massively imo if you can just take a picture of whatever issue is at hand and ai spits out what is needed, no?
That works well until an electrician who follows LLM instructions starts a fire or fries themselves. It's true that automation can still make their work faster, but the value of electricians isn't going to zero any time soon because there's a reason why governments still want them to know what they're doing. As soon as you touch jobs that could result in you directly killing others or yourself, there's usually licensing and regulations all over the place. All of that is additional barriers to being fully replaced on a whim. If this automation gets to you, at least you're all the way back in the line, and it won't be as bad as the others.
I don’t think we have any way of knowing what will happen. We’re in such an age of abundance now that it’s possible to make a living fighting with your girlfriends in Salt Lake City. Graphite block warehouse owners in China can be celebrities in the US. The influencer economy would have seems unthinkable and absurd in the 90s. What will be normal 30 years from now will probably seem just as bizarre. I’d like to think we will be colonizing other worlds, but it will probably be just more service economy excess like pet therapy and Uber-for-friendship.
Agreed, there would definitely be knock-on effects. If a bunch of people who were otherwise going to be software developers decide to focus their career on the trades, then the wages for trades jobs will drop.
This does not seem like a straightforward conclusion. It could instead result in more physical projects being able to be done as it removes bottlenecks due to limitations of laborers. There is not a fixed amount of work that needs to be done in the world, humans can make up new work they want done.
I agree. Even in knowledge work this is true. Hell, I'd argue that white(ish) collar work is already the biggest area of bullshit jobs that exists today.
Some of the trades are non-negotiables that have to be done regardless of the current economic situation. They'll be hurt too by the overall cheapening of labor, but those have the best odds of making it through.
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