Comment by sam-cop-vimes
11 days ago
It comes down to what is "popular" culture.
When I was young, society presented mostly people with intellectual achievements as role models which spurred a generation to strive. Hard work, humility, respect for others were actively inculcated into the growing generation. Children had few external influences other than their immediate circle of family, friends, neighbours and the school community.
Now we have reality TV stars parading their frankenstein bodies and the hype generated by social media as major influences for children growing up today.
Spelling a word correctly is harder than letting our apps auto-correct it for us. Playing a video game takes less physical effort than venturing out to a playground. Heating and eating a ready-meal takes less effort than cooking something.
I read somewhere that every augmentation is also an amputation. Progress in tech means we are constantly lobotomising a majority of the population. We in the tech community are partly responsible for this.
I don't know what the solution is - but I guess what the author suggests is a good start. Start caring.
> I read somewhere that every augmentation is also an amputation. Progress in tech means we are constantly lobotomising a majority of the population.
Just thought about something:
There are a few sides to this. There is innovation that just makes things easier but doesn't amputate, like typing machines vs word (took me a while to come up with an example, essentially just evolution). Then there are things that are so old it's useless to know them. Like making butter, sure you can do it if you want to, might be fun, but in the grand scheme of things irrelevant. Then there's stuff that is in decline but needed anyway. Like being able to read a book.
Maybe you could express this as a 2D graph, where X is how much people know it and Y is how much people need to know it.
> typing machines vs word
That actually had substantial negative consequences that still go mostly unrecognized. MS Word was an improvement over typewriters - such a big improvement, in fact, that it allowed people to do things they previously wouldn't, including things they'd pay other people to do. This is actually a bigger deal than it sounds.
In short, office productivity tools allowed people to do things they'd otherwise delegate to others. You could write memos and reports yourself, instead of asking your secretary. You could manage your calendar and tasks yourself, instead of having someone else do it for you. You could design your own presentations quickly, instead of asking graphics department for help. And so on, and so on.
What happened then, all those specialized departments got downsized; you now have to write your own memos and manage your own calendar, because there are no secretaries around to do it for you. Same for graphics, same for communication, same for expense reporting, etc. Specialized roles disappeared, and along with them the salaries they commanded - but the work they did did not go away. Instead, it got spread out and distributed among everyone else, in tiny pieces - tiny enough, to not be visible in the books; also tiny enough to not benefit from specialization of labor.
Now apply this pattern to all other categories of software, especially anything that lets you do yourself the things you'd pay others to do before.
And then people are surprised why actual productivity gains didn't follow expectations at scale, despite all the computerization. That's because a chunk of expectations are just an accounting trick. Money saved on salaries gets counted; costs of the same work being less efficient and added to everyone else's workload (including non-linear effect of reducing focus) are not counted.
> but the work they did did not go away
I'm forming an opinion that this exact problem is actually THE problem that people keep ignoring because it is compensated for by the burnout of people who care.
We talk a lot about enshitiffication. But we also build tools that do the work of a human specialist at (say) 85% of the quality of a human specialist (much faster and much more cheaply, that is the point).
These tools operate with or without time and effort from another non-specialist person. In the case that another human needs to do SOME work they didn't have to previously, this is effectively the definition of overwork in the presence of the same expectations.
This other person must now be the executor of whatever that work is because hiring a specialist in that area does not make financial sense.
And so gradually we erode the quality of all the intersectional work 15% (for example) at a time, while adding a small amount of work to the remaining (fewer) people.
Now maybe we can build a tool that is 99.9% the quality of a human for negligible cost. But it still doesn't take very many multiplications of 99.9% with itself to end up with shit.
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Interesting point, I'll try and plot such a graph!
I don’t buy into this narrative.
Every generation has some form of “kids were better when I grew up” and there has been a very long history of kids not respecting others, your generation included.
Things are changing as they always do, but when it comes down to it humans have not changed that much.
I must have worded this wrong because you are the second person to interpret it this way. I am not criticising the kids of today. On the contrary I'm saying that the society we've built for them is actively harming them.
Thank you for clarifying, with that context rereading your original comment makes a lot more sense.
Yes, and in my generation, Jackass and skater culture gave us all the dream of escaping the horrors of adult life
> Hard work, humility, respect for others were actively inculcated into the growing generation.
Sure, and then, after we started getting more "external influences", we all realized that "hard work" isn't going to get us anywhere.
It's really easy to blame this on some kind of change in individual values - kids these days don't respect hard work, etc. It's harder to come to terms with the idea that maybe those values were a lie - or, perhaps a better way of putting it, a coping mechanism - in order to keep us placated with the status quo. Now we're really starting to wake up to the fact that employers do not reward things like hard work or loyalty. So why keep up the pretense?
Unfortunately this does indeed result in this issue - a lack of caring. But I don't think we're going to get people to care again by appealing to those older values.
Not sure how you got the impression that I'm blaming the kids - that wasn't what I was trying to say at all. I'm blaming the society we have created for kids who are growing up today.