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> AI didn't take our jobs. Greed did. Same greed that moved factories to Bangladesh and keeps slaves in cobalt mines in the Congo, wearing a new mask. Tell the
by fooqux 5mo ago
> AI didn't take our jobs. Greed did. Same greed that moved factories to Bangladesh and keeps slaves in cobalt mines in the Congo, wearing a new mask. Tell the nephew to do something else. Anything. It won't save him either, but at least he won't have to pretend the thing destroying his life is a robot.
This hit me hard. This article is art. I think I need to sleep on this and read it again in the morning.
- hsuduebc2 5mo agoAutor surely always could be journalist. He can write a exceptional story.
- stackghost 5mo agoYeah, I fancy myself a decent writer but I am not anywhere close to this good. Very engaging, you can tell they're writing from the heart.
- stevenlangbroek 5mo agoKeep writing please! Where can I find your writing?
- bluegatty 5mo agoDon't like to go against everyone but this not particularly well written. It's a long winding absurdist metaphorical tale, that is really more or less a rant. It's not particularly well grounded. It's a nice piece of personalized fiction, but it's not particularly good writing and nothing approaching what we'd think of as 'journalism'.
- Brian_K_White 5mo agoIt's not absurdist. It's shining a light on something that actually exists and is absurd.
- bluegatty 5mo agoIt only 'shines light' on the mental disposition of the author.
- stevenlangbroek 5mo agohi, author here. what mental disposition would that be?
- bluegatty 5mo agoWhatever your mental disposition is. The writing is an expression of a state of mind through an absurdist voice, not any kind of reasonable articulation of reality. It's at least a much about the lens as it is the subject. Which is fine, if we ingest it roughly from that purview.
- stevenlangbroek 5mo agothe writing is a tribute to a 2014 similar article, based on my experiences since. it is absolutely a reasonable articulation of reality, although through a sarcastic or satirical lens. you might have different experiences, that doesn't invalidate mine.
- bluegatty 5mo agoyour experiences (and probably mine as well) are not a reflection of the general reality of the industry - that's the root of the problem; the writing is a projection, not a reality. The writing is fine (even good) as a personal story, not in the manner in which people here seem to be interpreting it.
- stevenlangbroek 5mo agoi dunno. i'm happy to read in the comments here (and elsewhere) that my experience is not unique, many others have similar experiences and are going through the same feelings: grief. i think we're allowed to grieve, don't you?
- cube00 5mo agoI could have done without the five paragraphs of the ship analogy.
- nchagnet 5mo agoMaybe 'journalism' wasn't the best suggestion by the OP but I have to disagree with the rest of your message. It may be a rant, or less pejoratively it may be a cry for help of someone seeing their industry's future, but I can't accept that it's not well written. When is the last time you opened an HN comment section and the main comment was that people enjoyed the writing quality? Maybe it says more about what we usually read as a crowd, but to me this was a breath of fresh air, it was engaging but also quite deep at times. I think the mark of great writing is that it makes an impression on you, on others, in a way casual writing doesn't. At least that's my take on this.
- bluegatty 5mo agoI commented only because I didn't think it was particularly well written, and I found the threaD to be full of people commenting on how well written it was. It's highly personalized and interesting, but I wouldn't call it well written. As a personal bit of art - 'thumbs up', but anything else is overstated. But more appropriately, the nihilism on this thread is unhinged. "seeing their industry's future" ??? I'm seeing people empowered to do the most spectacular things that they have ever done in their lives. Software hiring on the aggregate is up, job postings are up, people are doing more, non-developers get to tinker. Speculative money is coming into the industry for people to try wild new things. The implied reality in the story is totally detached from reality. Surely - there is a movement of people who lament a sense of loss of control, but that's normal with change. There are also people in crappy jobs with crappy bosses in crappy companies doing crappy things - but that's not a feature of AI or the industry, in fact, software is a pretty good place, relatively speaking. As I said, this is a reflection of someone's state of mind, mood, being interpreted as some kind of metaphor, but it just doesn't line up with reality in general. A personal reality sure, but that's not a reflection of the community.
- lelanthran 5mo ago> I commented only because I didn't think it was particularly well written, and I found the threaD to be full of people commenting on how well written it was. While "well-written" is subjective, the bar for "well-written" is whether people enjoyed reading it and the author managed to deliver his message. I'm now very curious what bar you personally use for well-written, because it obviously differs from the majority of the people in this thread.
- rdslw 5mo agoThank you for writing this and your below longer comment. I printed them with OP to remind me any time i’m afraid somebody can criticize my work and that it’s not worth to produce/write/publish. no matter how good, there will always be people like you here, so no need to worry.
- torginus 5mo agoI mean he could be, though nowadays that's not really a recongition of skill some seem to think it is nowadays. Besides this is an opinion piece, which contains passages comparing programmers who despite AI, make hundreds of thousands of dollars sitting at home or air conditioned offices, to bangladeshi indentured workers. Even if we do away with hyperbole and take the 'Sara' example, programming are still one of the least physically demanding and best paid jobs out there, especially in the US, even compared to jobs needing hard qualifications. Compared to your hypothetical 'Sarah' keeping the payroll system alive, almost everyone in every profession does more work for less pay. He also sells (I imagine not cheap) consulting on the side.
- stevenlangbroek 5mo agoYou're giving "yet you participate in society" vibes that I don't love, but let me address a few things: - We're not indentured workers yet. We should always have been fighting for their dignity & rights, because they're ours too. - Might I invite you to read the original, it's linked at the top of the article. Sure, programming isn't physically demanding, but that doesn't mean we should just accept the bad parts. - All of that being said, yes I agree, other jobs are more valuable and it's insane that we get paid what we do. That's why I'm a socialist. Your value shouldn't depend on a grabbag of accidental circumstances outside of your control. As to selling consulting on the side: I've been an employee for 2 decades, and am striking out on my own to build a better life for my newborn son & fiance. Sorry for wanting to be a more present father.
- yoyohello13 5mo agoHe really put in to words what I’ve been feeling lately. I love programming and I’m quite good at it, but this industry is a cesspit. I’ve already decided to go back to school to get one of those ‘real’ jobs. I’m tired of working in an industry hell bent on the destruction of society.
- bluegatty 5mo ago'The industry' is not hellbent on destroying society - this is just so unhinged it's hard to know how to make of it.
- yoyohello13 5mo agoTrue, I should have said an industry that will trample on anything that stands in the way of its pursuit of money.
- bluegatty 5mo agoIt's not doing those things.
- kiba 5mo agoThe industry optimize toward whatever metric is legible. A company that optimize toward an illegible metric will endure.
- jordwest 5mo agoUnfortunately there are plenty of highly legible metrics that make the world a worse place ("engagement" might be among the worst)
- sfn42 5mo agoWelcome to literally all industry.
- devonkim 5mo agoThis is what amorality means to me in the context of socioeconomics. It operates in an area of reduced dimensionality to economic value because no other value can be agreed upon in trade between cultures. It doesn’t care if a piece of art, nature or human invention is genuinely novel, rare, irreplaceable, invaluable, etc. unless it can be converted into materializable economic value that is itself subjective and present oriented so that we can plan for our future selves about resources as a proxy.
- socalgal2 5mo agoGreed does not take your jobs, progress does. People don’t hand wash clothing for money because we have machines to do that now. We don’t need people delivering news papers because the news is delivered digitally. AI is no different. “IF” your job can be automated away or made more efficient it will. That might not be a benefit for your but it’s a benefit to society at large Note: the above is not claiming AI or LLM can do these jobs. it’s claiming “IF” they can then they will. No greed required
- kiba 5mo agoThis is ignoring the people who capture the rent. If technological innovation is to liberate us from poverty then it should be a celebration that everytime that a job is automated. Since that is not happening, it implies something deeply wrong about how we structure our society.
- endanke 5mo agoThese two things can be true at the same time.
- amelius 5mo agoThe entire comment is true.
- zozbot234 5mo ago> If technological innovation is to liberate us from poverty then it should be a celebration that everytime that a job is automated. It depends. Sometimes automating a job just means wiping out the institutional knowledge that came with the job - which I take to be the OP's broader point. It's not clear that AI agents will be able to replace that role to any useful extent, even though it's nice that we can read their accumulated knowledge as a set of .md files written in plain English.
- nickpp 5mo ago> This is ignoring the people who capture the rent. So my grandma shouldn't have been be deliriously happy with the new washing machine that saved her hands from bleeding weekly because the evil capitalist laundromat owners charged a few quarters per load?!
- 01100011 5mo agoSociety doesn't owe me over $500k/year for writing some instructions in a cryptic specification language. It's cool that I've been getting that, but I consider that luck and circumstance. When robots take my job I'll go find something else to do. I'm not going to blame evil rich people or some other boogieman.
- 113 5mo agoYou are the rich people.
- stevenlangbroek 5mo agoNo, there's a difference between doing well for yourself and exploiting the labor of others to capture stupendous amounts of excess capital, then reinvesting part of that to make even more.
- 113 5mo agoOf course there is. The person I'm responding to is still rich though.
- ramon156 5mo agoIm a medior and I earn 42k/yr. It would be a privilege for me to earn this much, as I cannot afford a home.
- lproven 5mo ago> Im a medior I do not know that word. I looked it up and found nothing helpful. What does it mean, and what do you mean? Also, may I ask you to use more punctuation and things like currency symbols, because your message lacks so much context I can't even guess.
- kaashif 5mo agoSomething interesting: for me, that comment was the 6th Google result for "medior". Interesting term.
- keybored 5mo agoImagine you start on a trek to find the sage with the answer to why idiot sociopaths rule everything, why wars that don’t even benefit the aggressor are started, why there is enough food for everyone twice over but people are still starving... and much more. You’ve been pondering this question for years. You’ve read comments. Wikipedia. You already have a good idea. But you seek the wisdom of the sage. You cross mountains. Marshes. You evade pirates, bandits. Help some fellow travelers. Finally, after scouring the land and asking hundreds for clues and direction, you find his location; a small plateau beyond the swamp and rainforest which hugs the southern shore of the great lake. You notice immediately that the wind dies down. It is now completely calm. Weirdly serene, as if the sudden silence made you notice all the ambient noise, now absent. The sage sits between (edit: beneath) a cherry blossom tree, said to always bloom; the sage is an old man but his wisdom is the most permanent thing on the plateau. You approach the old man. His eyes are closed. You make sure to exaggerate your approach, make some noise, so as to not startle this frail old man that surely must have seen more than ninety winters. You prostrate yourself, calmly introduce yourself, and sit down beside him. You calmly breathe in and out. This is it. Don’t rush it. Any erratic movement, any slight irritation could prove fatal to his old shell. “Venerable Opakaku”, you start. “I know some things about how the world works. Why the cruel rule us. Why the meek suffer. Why the brave die for nothing. Why those of brilliant mind mostly seem to serve the cruel. But my opinions are unimportant. Can you please tell me, Venerable Opakaku, why is the world in this state? And how do we solve it?” The sage’s parched lips move. He has to wet his throat, it is difficult for him—such is the state of his shell—but he composes himself and opens his white eyes, staring just to the left of your head. His blind eyes widen as he is about to reveal the answer. “Greed!”
- torginus 5mo agoDoes it? Why do those slaves work in the Congo? It's to produce materials that go into premium EVs in order to satiate demand in rich Western countries. If said demand never existed, or people would say 'yeah, but not at this cost', like you seem to imply the moral responsibility lies solely with industrialists, these mines would never exist.
- stevenlangbroek 5mo agoIs all demand equal? How is demand induced, by who and for what benefit?
- tim333 5mo agoI've only done a bit of helping with computer systems but the gripes he lists - people not understanding the system, leaving, management trying trendy software and the like happen even without greedy capitalism.
- emmelaich 5mo agoAnd yet I'm sure that greed is pretty much a constant. The opportunities to exploit that greed may change.