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Not surprising that labor is less valuable when you can now automate more of it. I suggest throwing your shoes into the cogs maybe that will help

@sun Nobody over the age of 60 I've spoken to was able to imagine a world without employment. Naturally it'll happen outside of their lifetime, perhaps even mine, but my children will experience its warts and all.

@sun These are the kinds of people that would have complained during the industrial revolution for getting replaced by machinery that did the hard work for them.

@phnt @sun what if it turns out, once the dust has settled, that the economy doesn't need their labor in any form they could possibly provide?

@phnt @sun like regardless of education, or training.

that's the world the technocrats want to build. because it's efficient, dumb people take a lot of time to train and manage and they produce the least. they try a lot of different things to make all of our systems work better around people like this, but at the end of the day it seems like the most efficient thing to do with them is to just cut them out of the loop completely. they don't even have to plan it this way, or have any nefarious goals, it just happens as a result of the incentive structure we built in to our society around the industrial revolution

You can also think of it as casting off a marketing expense. When people were getting rich working for these big tech companies, it's also a giant sign going "Wow they must be a really cool up and coming company, look at how great the wages and working conditions are!"

Thing is, most big tech companies are getting out of that phase. Now they're as big as they're gonna get, if they want to keep drawing investor dollars they need to start optimizing their capital, and to do that they need to ditch operating costs to drive up margins.
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@bajax @sun Than their job was already barely needed. It's simple as that. The "webdevs" of $current_year that cry about AI all the time and their barely working laggy React+Tailwind spaghetti aren't needed. It's also ironic that the same "webdevs" abuse AI to the maximum extent which is how the modern GitHub UI almost certainly came to existence.

@phnt @sun >Than their job was already barely needed. It's simple as that.
Agreed. but then what happens to all these unneeded people?

@phnt @bajax yeah AI is now pretty good at shitting out barely-working React spaghetti, and way faster than a human can.

@bajax @phnt valuable question after you acknowledge that tech advancements inevitably will cause this, ppl like the guy I quoted think you can roll this back and you can't

@sun @bajax @phnt adapt or die. rules of nature

@sun @phnt I don't think he even considers it. It's just "well sucks to be you" but when there's a lot of people shit sucks for, they can (and probably should, from a strictly logical game theoretic standpoint) make it suck for everyone else.

@Nudhul @bajax @phnt @sun Nobody obeys the laws of nature like I do—believe me! I adapt, I WIN, I dominate. Experts—REAL scientists, not the boneheads like Low-IQ Maxine Waters or Leakin' James Comey—were SHOCKED and BAFFLED by my magnificent ability to thrive. They said, “Mr. President, you defy gravity, economics, and common sense!” It’s called being the BEST, folks. Nature loves a winner, and that’s why America is back on top! #AdaptOrTrump #GreatestOfAllTime

@sun @phnt not saying this doesn't need to happen, just that when it does there's gonna be a whole lot more fallout than just unemployment

@bajax @phnt @sun they become helpful elsewhere hopefully.

@bajax @phnt @sun or they complain about being homeless. humans are a stubborn thing.

@bajax @phnt I think we're going to have to transition to a system where people don't have to work as much but I don't know how we get there because there's still tons of jobs that need to be done but they're not individually valuable enough to support a family. I think it's really obvious that as automnation advances you are going to advance to the point where a lot of people simply don't have labor to provide that is valuable. so yeah what do you do with them

@sun the more things change, the more they stay the same, even if the current thing is to blame on the beans being counted

@sun @bajax Yet, I've tried to use it to debug Pleroma when I was completely at a loss and instead got gaslit for 10 minutes that my code was wrong when I knew it wasn't.

@phnt @bajax I have used it successfully to work on pleroma fwiw

@f0x @phnt @sun what people generally do in this situation is violently destroy society. not out of nihilism, but because that way there's at least a chance they're gonna come out of it all better off

@sun @bajax @phnt tech gooners like to believe that society has halted natural pressures on humanity but they're wrong. all it's done is change the form those pressures take.

@bajax @phnt @sun "better off" is very subjective here. If more people became honest laborers or engineers things would be better, but instead they're shitty comp sci majors (for example) and such, doing nothing but worsening the machine that profits them, and then getting angry when a modified if else program replaces them.

@f0x @phnt @sun hope. I hope that I'm being overly pessimistic about this right now, and that we still have time to come to our senses as a species and make a coherent plan. but our leadership is totally invested in the number-go-up, sacrifice everything for economic efficiency mentality, and they seem completely unable to change or learn anything new to replace it

@bajax @phnt @sun I don't disagree that people will ruin good things on purpose for the sake of monetary value, that's literally the default path of all things that exist.

@sun some believed that computers in general would result in massive layoffs, especially affecting the bureaucracy. Not only this hasn’t happened, the bureaucracy has only grown in the recent decades.

@f0x @phnt @sun it's not even about money, it's a deeper psychological process. one we've seen repeated over and over again in history.

basically, when dudes don't think they have a future in helping the society, they start to resent it, and seek to destroy it. it's not a conscious process, at least I don't think it is, but the dudes who do that, and manage to survive the resulting chaos, end up in a much depopulated world with plenty of niches for their own children to move into. it's good for the genes, iow, not the indivudal.

we are all much more often than we'd like to think puppets to these kinds of forces.

@bajax @phnt @sun number go up lines up rather directly to unsustainable behavior. It's the same as being scared of drug addiction rates, it'll fall. Might take a while but, yeah. It will.

@bajax @f0x @sun The problem with infinite growth is that it isn't infinite. At some point it will blow up spectacularly. I expect that AI will eventually blow up the same as the .com bubble did. And same as with .com, the technology will still stay, but in a more sane mentality. For example what OpenAI and Sam Altman are planning is impossible and it's just a matter of time before the investor ruse stops working.

@phnt @f0x @sun what do you think is actually limiting growth here? do you think it's something with like, industrial output, or something about how we organize society? (not a rhetorical question, I'm actually wondering)

@sun @bajax URI encoding is confusing and all models I tried failed terribly at it, because they assume, like most people, that Elixir will do it for your properly with URI.encode. It won't and it's mentioned specifically in the docs that it doesn't work like most people expect. There are multiple issues about it in the Elixir issue tracker. I had to spend an evening reading the specification to actually understand it.

But at the same time, I wanted to remove emojis from my terminal (for reasons), gave it the source file and it just did it without issues on the first try.

@newt I actually think that AI is going to kill a lot of management in the next ten years

@sun @bajax @phnt
the kind of automation that replaces a significant portion of the necessary workforce is a fantasy; even if human-equivalent ai at human-equivalent power usage appeared tomorrow i still can't see how it would be brought about

@ageha @phnt @sun have you ever used AI for programming?

@f0x @phnt @sun oh and I'm not justifying it, not at all. I think our charge as humans who want to be good is to learn to recognize these terrible things in ourselves and seek out workable alternatives. I think that's what the... whatever is behind all this, maybe the Logos, wants.

@bajax @phnt @sun
in real-world tasks current ai systems give sub human performance for exorbitantly above human resource use. as saying though, even with a human-equivalent drop-in there are still seemingly-insurmountable barriers, because your ai needs a physical body to pick grapefruits or pour concrete or replace a downed power line

the automation we have already in these fields relies on the human body as a highly dextrous・fault-tolerant・low-resource-use component, and it's liable to become more necessary rather than less with certain future developments, e.g. the collapse of industrial farming as all the world's wells and reservoirs run dry

@ageha @phnt @sun >e.g. the collapse of industrial farming as all the world's wells and reservoirs run dry
that'd actually be pretty comfy, all food would be locally grown then lol

@bajax @phnt @sun
only after billions of people starve maybe

@ageha @phnt @sun ...yeah obviously but hopefully they'll all be in africa

@ageha @bajax @phnt AI is getting better and better at coding. You still need to have knowledge and ability but your output is greatly amplified and done faster

@newt @sun Computers just smeared a layer of information superhighway shit on top of existing bureaucracies and so far it seems like AI is doing the same in a lot of places

MS Outlook is becoming a transport protocol for MS Copilot's eternal cycle of generating wordy emails then summarizing them to something comprehensible 😩

@scathach @newt just keep in mind that AI is the first tech where it appears possible to replace middle managers soo we might actually see change this time.

@sun has this ever happened over the previous iterations?