Just because tractors are here doesn't mean you can't garden as a hobby. I'm also tired of the slop, but this is a culture and management problem. Every software job I've had there was tension between speed and maintainability.
Many (most?) adults do not have time to write an appreciable amount of software outside their jobs. Further, this doesn't address the enormous impact that losing the option of doing something you find engaging and don't hate for a job has on mental wellbeing, life satisfaction, just being happy at all, etc.
This was true of clothing, agriculture, and will also be true of SaaS. I choose affordable products and well-paid workers, but that requires embracing automation.
Are you claiming that software is unaffordable? I get the sense that it was so cheap people were unhappy with how much was shoved into places where it was unwanted.
This is a problem of misaligned incentives that echoes other waves of new technology. The arrival of the washing machine was not resisted, because it directly benefited people who could now move up to higher value and less difficult work. AI doesn't seem to be playing out that way.
Because it's even less useful than a washing machine. Unless you trust a frickin' humanoid robot doing your house chores, which is batshit insane as things stand.
I used to think being an engineer meant learning many languages. Turns out most of them solve the same problems — the returns diminish quickly. Depth across the stack (UX, CI/CD, model internals) compounds in a way that a sixth language never will.
If robotics progress starts to pick up, I'll take this more seriously. Right now, there's practically infinite demand for labor in construction, manufacturing, agriculture and many other industries. All kinds us good projects that could be happening, if you dig into why, labor intensive work is a factor. Why didn't the hydroponics project take off? Why is that still an empty lot instead of a new home? Why isn't there live theatre in this small city? Why is there a pot hole in the bike lane?
Isn’t this more a function of how the American construction market is just really messed up somehow (corruption?)? In China, actual things get built fairly cheaply and quickly. You just don’t see workers hanging around watching one guy dig a hole like you do in the states. I would guess that automation is the only way out of the mess we are in, since just throwing more money and people at the problem just seems to make it worse.
The usual answer is slave labor, like in the middle east. But some combination of an extremely poor job market with laborers that can't leave, and can't do anything else.
Trades seem to have high barriers to entry and have stringent unproductive working rules. I’m not really sure, but does to make sense that construction prices have risen so much so fast without even considering the cost of materials? The public sector is much worse, of course, where a short jaunt tram at LAX costs more than a 75 mile HSR run in China. We obviously aren’t competitive in building things anymore.
Somewhat related, but I know construction is the one of the only industries that has gotten less productive in the past 100 years. You'd think more machinery and such would make it more productive, but no.
I think part of that is safety and labor cost, but I think another part is that construction is contracted almost always.
Go to Miami, Florida, and see how virtually all public projects magically go to Cuban-American-owned companies — even huge multinationals with far greater skill, capacity, and efficiencies can't seem to land the good work.
Infinite demand, maybe, but not at wages that most people are willing to accept. Of course, if there's literally no other work, then previously-middle-class people will take what's available and become homeless because the wage doesn't pay the bills (which are, in places, extremely inflated due to decades of jaw-droppingly bad housing and transport policies). Sounds like a highly desirable future.
Um, I expressly said that high wages wouldn't stay? If the choices are either being jobless and homeless, or doing some menial cotton-harvesting job while still being homeless, we got a slight social problem. The GP said that there's a lot of demand for menial labor. That demand only exists if you don't have to actually pay for said labor. In other words, it's not demand at all.
>> If robotics progress starts to pick up, I'll take this more seriously. Right now, there's practically infinite demand for labor in construction, manufacturing, agriculture and many other industries.
Lucky not to live around small towns that were killed by the introduction of robotics?
Yes there is some demand for labour in fields like agriculture , and many rather not pick the work and survive elsewhere, because feudal lords rather pay peanuts for the hard work.
I currently work as a software engineer, but I've worked in the past in restaurants (dishwasher/prep cook), doordashing, as a musician, as moving help. If AI automates software I'll just do something else.
All of those are basically low wage garbage jobs. We have little to no respect for them as a society, too, to add insult to injury.
If it were up to me, I'd be flipping burgers right now. But I literally can't do that, it doesn't pay enough for that to be a job I can take. Id have to, like, find roommates.
Yeah I am always disappointed in how little there is automated in construction and how slow humans are in this activity. It feels like an exclave of the Dark Ages in the Information Age.
I was reading Martin Luther's wiki article the other day:
"Johann von Staupitz, his superior and frustrated confessor, concluded that Luther needed more work to distract him from excessive introspection and ordered him to pursue an academic career" [1]
Translation: the confessor was frustrated because Mr. Luther would not accept the B.S. he was being told to believe, and he thought a nice rigorous period of brainwashing in academia (controlled also by the Church) was the solution to the young man's "problem."
History of course came to a different conclusion.
Who controls Wikipedia, and why do they want people to think ill about Martin Luther?
The amount of work left to do is massive if you stack up all the unsolved problems and potential R&D, like diseases with no cure of that we don't even begin to understand. We could choose to simply stop new R&D, but as long as there continues to be suffering from those unsolved problems it's in our nature to continue to try and solve them. And it's in our nature to prevent the free rider problem, where people expect to benefit from the solutions without contributing.
This is fine. But companies seem to not have a control lever for employee wellbeing. If humanity works to solve problems, don’t you think overwork is also a problem that needs to be addressed?
Are childcare and kindergarten teachers really exposed to AI? In theory, we could put a class of 30 children in front of chatbots with one supervisor. But I doubt we would chose to do this as a society. If office work becomes more automated, early childhood education is actually one area I'd expect to take up the Slack. I can't imagine a situation where we have millions of unemployed former office workers but we leave them idle and let our children waste away in front of screens.
Childcare and education requires a specific tolerance, mindset and passion to be effective though. I'd be curious how many previously-PMs or HR drones or email jockeys would be adequate (let alone thrive) in an environment where there are next-to-nonexistent budgets, and you're servicing literal babies and tiny children lol
On second thought, client service folks might do extremely well here!
As a current parent, I assumed this was due to people having fewer kids, not AI. Additionally, with childcare centers becoming more expensive, many more families are looking to be stay at home parents or using grandparents / relatives to watch their kids during work hours.
For most working-class Americans, education is a form of job-training.
In the AI maximalist world where humans are obsolete and cannot contribute to the economy in any meaningful way, there is actually no reason for public education to exist beyond being a free day care for non-rich people. Why learn algebra/calculus at all if the AIs can do it? Why should the US invest billions of dollars into public education instead of data centers?
I hope the US and AI leaders are still "speciesist" in that they put humans first. I hope AI will cure all illnesses, unlock space travel, and lead to flourishing of humanity, not just a flourishing of datacenters. It's also possible that AI just cleave societies in half and we are all worse off for it.
I thought the same as gp, that putting teachers at high risk invalidates the whole visualization. If this is intended to be useful for future career planning, with meaningful gradations between specializations, than it should exist in the probability space where human agency still matters. And in that space, from a Riccardian and political economy perspective, high human-touch jobs with strong public unions should be among the safest.
In which theory? And if you can do anything in theory, then there is no justifiable "but" or any excuse. The only problem is your own ability to realize it or unexpected situation. A theory is a fact, a proven hypothesis, with all its parts such as formulas, laws, or a force as in the THEORY of gravitation. And no, you don't have one, and I assure you that you've never had a theory in your life.
There are a lot of education and curriculum companies pitching basically this- replace those 'expensive' teachers with aides making minimum wage as all they need to do is recite curriculum and help them log in to be evaluated.
That could work in ideal world where children behave nicely, and are eager to learn. But in reality that's not the case. Especially in high school big part of teacher's job is keeping order and being the authority figure. Good luck replacing that with LLM.
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