Comment by entropyneur
4 days ago
Why is it depressing? Personally, unless the alternative is literally starving, I wouldn't want to do a job that a robot could do instead just so that I could be kept busy. That sounds like an insult to human dignity tbh.
You know what is an insult? Supermarket on my street putting on display sloppy ads with ramen bowl that has 3 different thickness chopsticks and cartoon characters with scrambled faces. Now that is an insult, because there was a human being doing that job, and I am sure there was a great "productivity boost" related to that change.
I am a heavy AI user myself, and sure as hell I am not putting my foot in that place again.
I think these pictures are a perfect and accessible metaphor for the problems of vibecoding slop and asking an actual engineer to fix it.
The end results evokes a sense of unease even in laymen, and the more you know about the subject matter, the more wrong it looks..
And 'fixing' it essentially requires as much if not more effort as writing it from scratch.
Dignity has no calories, though.
Yeah but it's the job of the elected governments to build and maintain housing, education, social and welfare systems for their population that keep up with the challenges of the times, not the responsibility of the private sector to hold back progress and inefficiency just so more people can stay in employment even if they're not needed anymore.
The governments however have been and continue to be ill prepared to the rising increases of globalisation labor offshoring and automation.
There was a news article yesterday in my EU country about a 50 year old laid off CEO of a small company that continues to be unemployed after a year because nobody will hire him anymore so he lives off welfare and oddjobs and the government unemployment office has no solution.
What happens in the future when AI and offshoring culls more white collar jobs and there will be thousands or tens of thousands of unemployable 50 year old managers with outdated skills that nobody will want to hire or re-train due to various reasons, but they still need to keep working somehow till their 70s to qualify for retirement? Sure you then go to re-train yourself to become a licensed plumber or electrician, but who will want to hire you to gain experience when they can hire the 20-something fresher rather than the 50 year old with bad knees?
Governments are not prepared for this.
> but it's the job of the elected governments to build and maintain housing, education, social and welfare systems for their population that keep up with the challenges of the times
I'd say those things are the job of the population itself, via a wide range of pluralistic institutions. The job of governments, which are just specific organizations within a much larger society, is primarily to maintain public order.
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Is it an insult to human dignity? Let’s go through the thought process.
Commodities are used in an enterprise. Some of the commodities are labor. That labor commodity does work. Involving automation. Eventually (so we are told) those labor commodities manage to automate some forms of labor. Making those other labor commodities redundant.
The labor commodities are discarded. Because why (sigh) use a cart when you now have a car? And you don’t even own a horse.
All of the above is presumably not an insult to human dignity. No. The insult to human dignity is being “kept busy” instead of letting billionaires hoard automation made through human labor.
Of course the real solution is not busywork. But the part about busywork was not on the top of my mind with regards to dignity in this context.
> Personally, unless the alternative is literally starving,
To put a fine point on it, yeah? Ultimately.
That's how capitalism works. It doesn't matter if your job is useful but if you don't do anything, you don't get money.
More people without jobs will be a heavy burden on social security systems, so in the end it's literally about starving.
Assuming large-scale automation[1]: workers have in aggregate automated themselves. It takes labor to automate. And yet those former workers are now a “burden”? We’re assuming automation, so was the making of the food stuff, the transportation of the food stuff, the automation of the infrastructure maintenance... was that done or not? Where is the burden being felt?
You’re gonna call the people that built everything a burden?
Either we are talking in terms of propagandistic guilt assignment, or we’re talking realpolitics. Either:
1. we can trivially support the “burden” because of automation (no burden); or
2. billionaire resource hoarders (a burden?) do not need the vast majority of their underlings (maybe just a few for Epstein 2.0) and can let them fend for themselves or die off. (It’s literally not even a question of whether they have a big red Automation Button that would sustain the “burden” indefinitely. What incentive do they have to press it?)
[1] I notice scale is a favorite buzzword now
More jobless are a burden in a capitalism based social security system. Has nothing to do if those build something useful or not. Caputalism doesn't care.
In the end the upper 0.1% get the profit and those who still have jobs have to finance the social security systems. More jobless and less working means the jobless become a burden and in the long run the system will fail.
So you either need to tax automation or the rich. Guess if that will happen.
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