Comment by DrewADesign
1 month ago
Your glib dismissal of the real effects of those technological upheavals shows you haven’t actually looked into this. You should probably tamp down that smugness until you find out.
1 month ago
Your glib dismissal of the real effects of those technological upheavals shows you haven’t actually looked into this. You should probably tamp down that smugness until you find out.
Did you think about it before you got into the tech industry? You should have, technology has been wiping out jobs since forever but you got into tech anyway. Live by the sword, die by the sword. Except you needn't actually die, just walk into a staffing agency and ask for a new job. I have done so before, and will do so again. I have prepared for what is to come, saw it coming 20 years ago and saw the imminence of it when GPT-2 was released. I have sympathy for other kinds of white collar professionals who never could have anticipated these kind of developments, but technologists? Give me a break. You knew, or should have known, that technological developments in this domain were likely.
Please stop pretending that this is only going to replace "tech workers". Do accountants "live by the sword"? Whose jobs did they replace? What about analysts, journalists, radiologists (one day, if not quite yet)?
And even within the realm of "tech", it's kinda bonkers to expect e.g. a firmware engineer to have some deep understanding of trends in ML/AI.
Altogether your #1 priority seems to be "bashing workers", the justification just being a matter of convenience.
Please stop pretending to read comments before replying to them:
> I have sympathy for other kinds of white collar professionals who never could have anticipated these kind of developments, but technologists? Give me a break.
That’s one big edgelord cop out.
I’m not in the tech industry anymore because in the battle of people who wanted to solve problems with software and money grubbing MBAs, the money grubbing MBAs have won. Now I’m a union machinist, and believe it or not, I’m concerned about the wellbeing of others. In manufacturing, companies are starting to face the consequences of shortsightedly selling out their workforce and are frantically clamoring to use the agonal breaths of its existing manufacturing industry knowledge base to breathe life into a new generation of workers. China becoming a manufacturing powerhouse wasn’t a foregone conclusion: we gave it to them in exchange for short-term profits. Our economy, national security, and the financial viability of a robust middle class is paying the price for their greed and arrogance.
The people running the tech industry can’t see the world past the end of this quarter, so they’ll never learn the lessons our society has learned many times over. Good luck. Unless you’re running a company, you’re going to need it. The soft, arrogant, whiny, maladroit white collar workers coming into the trades are pathetically ill-equipped to do actual work.
You've already done all that I can advise others here do, so congrats, I have nothing to criticize there. You've done it better than me actually, since you're unionized. As for soft white collar wimps washing out, people at the first job I had out of tech were taking bets if I'd show up for the second day, so don't think I don't know what you're talking about. I know it, I did it, and other people can do it too.
The problem with exporting manufacturing to China was this country lost the ability to make shit. I don't think this maps at all to white collar jobs getting gutted by AI; the people who actually make things aren't the white collar workers who should be sweating. Societies paper pushers would effectively be a parasite class leeching off the hard labor of people who actually work, if not for the part where white collar workers are (or have been) necessary to organize the logistics of everything that allows the people who actually do the work to actually do the work. We are on the precipice of dramatic change, and I think we're going to see a radical revaluing across society.
None of this is even new. Computers and other business machines already came for the clerks and secretary pools before most people ITT were born. The loss of these careers was not even remotely a problem for society at large, completely unlike offshoring manufacturing.
Your argument boils down to good'ol trusty Inquisition trick called Guilt-tripping Over The Original Sin