5 ms·

The Chauffeur Problem (1999)

61 points by leowoo91 2mo ago

tom_ 1mo ago
Where's the rest of the article? Is there a rest of it? It gets to the end of what feels like the introduction, and then just... stops.
- Caracas288 1mo ago
  It’s formatted strangely… an excerpt from the book at the bottom of the page? The authors don’t match. Or maybe that footnote’s for the images… It doesn’t need to be any longer; one of the ironic byproducts of our newest computer companions is that, even in the age of short-form content, they produce reams of rubbish, very rarely containing anything of consequence. This, in contrast, is refreshing. [Edit] doh, the reference is explained in the first line of the thing.
  - suddenlybananas 1mo ago
    I also can't tell when it was written exactly, given the reference to typists and file clerks being replaced "during the past twenty years".
    - Caracas288 1mo ago
      Definitely seems 20th century given the novelty around computers. The audio inclusion is beautiful, hardly see anything like that anywhere else, with music too.
      - malfist 1mo ago
        20 years ago would have been 2006. Hardly a bunch of secretaries banging on typewriters back then. Hell that was when MySpace started to fall apart
    - pahbloo 1mo ago
      https://engines.egr.uh.edu/ https://engines.egr.uh.edu/ > The Engines of Our Ingenuity tells how human creativity forms our culture, using radio and podcasts. > This site holds transcripts of all episodes since the show's inception in 1988, and many other features.
      - Caracas288 1mo ago
        Ha! it pays to do a little research, I should have done so. So it's something like 'Thought for the Day' on the radio...
    - dredmorbius 1mo ago
      1999, from some digging. Now noted in the title.
- throw0101d 1mo ago
  > Where's the rest of the article? Is there a rest of it? The "article" is the transcript of a radio segment/story (the audio clip at the top).
- dredmorbius 1mo ago
  The podcast the article is based on runs only 3m38s, so the text length seems about right. Public radio used to have spots for short features at the end of flagship programming, slots that are now almost universally filled by sponsorship slots. (That's one of the things which has made listening to radio, even public radio, in the US, far more tedious to me.)
oliculipolicula 1mo ago
Sorry for not trying to be inventive but merely maybe contrarian I've come to think that one unequivocal upside of "affordable ASI" would be to bring about a world of discourse where discursers would hesitate to think of (not to mention carry) themselves as experts. [Perhaps it reminds me of Le Guin's thoughts on tech X power, especially as represented in The Dispossessed] it would seem not just rude, but even snide, to bias your interlocutor towards not carefully verifying the dependencies of your arguments Widely dispersed and affordable AI would help because it (certainly, imho) makes the alternative, "trust but verify", so easy And it would be strictly easier than using cloud chatGPT to sow misinformation because there are extra steps in that (--- nonsockpuppets would be inclined to verify the gist of what they are about to say as indeed misleading) [As a bonus, this seems compatible with TFA, non-ideological anti-anti-intellectualism, and https://schipper.ai/posts/technical-leaders-should-have-the-largest-ai-exhaust/ https://schipper.ai/posts/technical-leaders-should-have-the-... if we default to assuming that technical leaders should be different (not more, not less) than expert engineers ]
ezekiel68 1mo ago
> (Theme music) I like this guy already.
aaron695 1mo ago
[dead]
roenxi 1mo ago
This article just seems a little bit unbelievable > They ran roughshod over their new bosses. They went joyriding in the expensive cars in their care. Of course, they too skimmed their operations money, but they did so without the veneer of social decorum. The word "roughshod" seems wholly unjustified unless it is some sort of pun on horses that I'm missing. I can imagine a chauffeur joyriding and skimming money, but to say that represents "run[ning] roughshod" seems a bit much. The employer obviously wasn't showing that much care to the money and how big a deal is it if the guy drives the car occasionally? The coachman was skimming money and could ride the horse around if he put his mind to it. The horse isn't going to dob him in. > I spent years at the mercy of technical typists. They were underpaid, but they were in control. Again, I don't see how "in control" can be used to describe an underpaid technical typist. It doesn't sound that hard to check what they typed and replace them with someone else. If they're underpaid then they're easy enough to replace. I wouldn't usually jump at two word choices, but the article seems to hinge on some sort of power imbalance favouring employees that is not demonstrated.
- waisbrot 1mo ago
  It's written from the perspective of one of the masters. > The role of the head coachman was well defined. Toward his superiors, he was deferential and obedient. So the chauffeurs and typists are not as deferential and obedient as the author would like.
  - IAmBroom 1mo ago
    The author never lived in that era, and is making some of that shit up. "Ran roughshod" is overkill, I suspect, for the fact that the mechanic/chauffeurs did not come from a servant background, where the slightest failure to observe decorum could result in dismissal (or worse, being made an indentured servant for several years - in slightly earlier years).
    - qarl2 1mo ago
      Kind of like how programmers today refuse to wear suits: roughshod in the minds of the elite.
tarkin2 1mo ago
If the chauffeurs' power came from the inability for the driven to maintain and drive their cars, and that power was reduced when cars become more reliable and understandable, then I'm not sure how that is applied to modern developments: computer and software are as complex as ever, and we're understanding them less and less in favour of letting the computers themselves understand themselves. Are we not then creating a new chauffeur problem, and this time those who control the LLMs and the infrastructure for the LLMs hold the power after we intentionally cede it?
- Tangurena2 1mo ago
  Many early cars used a hand crank to start the motor. If you don't do it correctly, it was possible to break your arm. My grandmother was impressed by the (female) movie stars who had chauffeurs. As a consequence she refused to drive (or even have a driving license) for the remainder of her life. She was focused on "status" and "class". She lived to age 98.
  - srean 1mo ago
    > If you don't do it correctly, it was possible to break your arm. Yup if you did not anticipate correctly where the spark plug would fire.
  - TacticalCoder 1mo ago
    > Many early cars used a hand crank to start the motor. If you don't do it correctly, it was possible to break your arm. I daily drove for years a motorbike with a kickstart (and also rode MX bike with a kickstart but these were 2-strokes and the kickstart on 2-strokes wasn't that violent). Still have a scar from one kickstart gone wrong on a rainy day (my foot slipped and the crank violently went back up and damaged my leg).
  - Finnucane 1mo ago
    Now we have Uber and Lyft. You can have a chaffeur on call.
- brookst 1mo ago
tantalor 1mo ago
Is there a date on this? It's so vague, it could have been written in the 1970s, but it has a reference to 1999. Edit: Found it here, https://engines.egr.uh.edu/episodedates https://engines.egr.uh.edu/episodedates > 1999 — Episodes 1386-1505 (this was #1495) That link is on the homepage.
- dredmorbius 1mo ago
  Right, 1999 per episode dates.
chr15m 1mo ago
We are the chauffeurs. They're going to drive their own computers now.
deleted 1mo ago
[deleted]
dredmorbius 1mo ago
Another substitution that passes almost unnoticed today was elevator operators. Elevators were complicated equipment which could kill people (and still occasionally do). Otis's Safety Brake (1850) made elevators possible, but it was automated controls (and scheduling systems) which made self-service elevators possible. Apparently stimulated by an elevator operators strike in 1945: <https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/historical-event-pushed-elevators-become-fully-automated-uptime-ac https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/historical-event-pushed-eleva...> Fully-automated self-service elevators still took about a decade to appear, but would have been fairly common by the late 1950s / 1960s.
- pjc50 1mo ago
  Elevator operators are my favorite example of "job displaced by technology that nobody would even think of bringing back today".
pragmatic 1mo ago
“ replaced with computers and with people who know how to use them” One of those things is true…

61 points by leowoo91 2mo ago

tom_ 1mo ago

Where's the rest of the article? Is there a rest of it? It gets to the end of what feels like the introduction, and then just... stops.

Caracas288 1mo ago
It’s formatted strangely… an excerpt from the book at the bottom of the page? The authors don’t match. Or maybe that footnote’s for the images… It doesn’t need to be any longer; one of the ironic byproducts of our newest computer companions is that, even in the age of short-form content, they produce reams of rubbish, very rarely containing anything of consequence. This, in contrast, is refreshing. [Edit] doh, the reference is explained in the first line of the thing.
- suddenlybananas 1mo ago
  I also can't tell when it was written exactly, given the reference to typists and file clerks being replaced "during the past twenty years".
  - Caracas288 1mo ago
    Definitely seems 20th century given the novelty around computers. The audio inclusion is beautiful, hardly see anything like that anywhere else, with music too.
    - malfist 1mo ago
      20 years ago would have been 2006. Hardly a bunch of secretaries banging on typewriters back then. Hell that was when MySpace started to fall apart
  - pahbloo 1mo ago
    https://engines.egr.uh.edu/ https://engines.egr.uh.edu/ > The Engines of Our Ingenuity tells how human creativity forms our culture, using radio and podcasts. > This site holds transcripts of all episodes since the show's inception in 1988, and many other features.
    - Caracas288 1mo ago
      Ha! it pays to do a little research, I should have done so. So it's something like 'Thought for the Day' on the radio...
  - dredmorbius 1mo ago
    1999, from some digging. Now noted in the title.
throw0101d 1mo ago
> Where's the rest of the article? Is there a rest of it? The "article" is the transcript of a radio segment/story (the audio clip at the top).
dredmorbius 1mo ago
The podcast the article is based on runs only 3m38s, so the text length seems about right. Public radio used to have spots for short features at the end of flagship programming, slots that are now almost universally filled by sponsorship slots. (That's one of the things which has made listening to radio, even public radio, in the US, far more tedious to me.)

oliculipolicula 1mo ago

Sorry for not trying to be inventive but merely maybe contrarian I've come to think that one unequivocal upside of "affordable ASI" would be to bring about a world of discourse where discursers would hesitate to think of (not to mention carry) themselves as experts. [Perhaps it reminds me of Le Guin's thoughts on tech X power, especially as represented in The Dispossessed] it would seem not just rude, but even snide, to bias your interlocutor towards not carefully verifying the dependencies of your arguments Widely dispersed and affordable AI would help because it (certainly, imho) makes the alternative, "trust but verify", so easy And it would be strictly easier than using cloud chatGPT to sow misinformation because there are extra steps in that (--- nonsockpuppets would be inclined to verify the gist of what they are about to say as indeed misleading) [As a bonus, this seems compatible with TFA, non-ideological anti-anti-intellectualism, and https://schipper.ai/posts/technical-leaders-should-have-the-largest-ai-exhaust/ https://schipper.ai/posts/technical-leaders-should-have-the-... if we default to assuming that technical leaders should be different (not more, not less) than expert engineers ]

ezekiel68 1mo ago

> (Theme music) I like this guy already.

aaron695 1mo ago

[dead]

roenxi 1mo ago

This article just seems a little bit unbelievable > They ran roughshod over their new bosses. They went joyriding in the expensive cars in their care. Of course, they too skimmed their operations money, but they did so without the veneer of social decorum. The word "roughshod" seems wholly unjustified unless it is some sort of pun on horses that I'm missing. I can imagine a chauffeur joyriding and skimming money, but to say that represents "run[ning] roughshod" seems a bit much. The employer obviously wasn't showing that much care to the money and how big a deal is it if the guy drives the car occasionally? The coachman was skimming money and could ride the horse around if he put his mind to it. The horse isn't going to dob him in. > I spent years at the mercy of technical typists. They were underpaid, but they were in control. Again, I don't see how "in control" can be used to describe an underpaid technical typist. It doesn't sound that hard to check what they typed and replace them with someone else. If they're underpaid then they're easy enough to replace. I wouldn't usually jump at two word choices, but the article seems to hinge on some sort of power imbalance favouring employees that is not demonstrated.

waisbrot 1mo ago
It's written from the perspective of one of the masters. > The role of the head coachman was well defined. Toward his superiors, he was deferential and obedient. So the chauffeurs and typists are not as deferential and obedient as the author would like.
- IAmBroom 1mo ago
  The author never lived in that era, and is making some of that shit up. "Ran roughshod" is overkill, I suspect, for the fact that the mechanic/chauffeurs did not come from a servant background, where the slightest failure to observe decorum could result in dismissal (or worse, being made an indentured servant for several years - in slightly earlier years).
  - qarl2 1mo ago
    Kind of like how programmers today refuse to wear suits: roughshod in the minds of the elite.

tarkin2 1mo ago

If the chauffeurs' power came from the inability for the driven to maintain and drive their cars, and that power was reduced when cars become more reliable and understandable, then I'm not sure how that is applied to modern developments: computer and software are as complex as ever, and we're understanding them less and less in favour of letting the computers themselves understand themselves. Are we not then creating a new chauffeur problem, and this time those who control the LLMs and the infrastructure for the LLMs hold the power after we intentionally cede it?

Tangurena2 1mo ago
Many early cars used a hand crank to start the motor. If you don't do it correctly, it was possible to break your arm. My grandmother was impressed by the (female) movie stars who had chauffeurs. As a consequence she refused to drive (or even have a driving license) for the remainder of her life. She was focused on "status" and "class". She lived to age 98.
- srean 1mo ago
  > If you don't do it correctly, it was possible to break your arm. Yup if you did not anticipate correctly where the spark plug would fire.
- TacticalCoder 1mo ago
  > Many early cars used a hand crank to start the motor. If you don't do it correctly, it was possible to break your arm. I daily drove for years a motorbike with a kickstart (and also rode MX bike with a kickstart but these were 2-strokes and the kickstart on 2-strokes wasn't that violent). Still have a scar from one kickstart gone wrong on a rainy day (my foot slipped and the crank violently went back up and damaged my leg).
- Finnucane 1mo ago
  Now we have Uber and Lyft. You can have a chaffeur on call.
brookst 1mo ago

tantalor 1mo ago

Is there a date on this? It's so vague, it could have been written in the 1970s, but it has a reference to 1999. Edit: Found it here, https://engines.egr.uh.edu/episodedates https://engines.egr.uh.edu/episodedates > 1999 — Episodes 1386-1505 (this was #1495) That link is on the homepage.

dredmorbius 1mo ago
Right, 1999 per episode dates.

chr15m 1mo ago

We are the chauffeurs. They're going to drive their own computers now.

deleted 1mo ago

[deleted]

dredmorbius 1mo ago

Another substitution that passes almost unnoticed today was elevator operators. Elevators were complicated equipment which could kill people (and still occasionally do). Otis's Safety Brake (1850) made elevators possible, but it was automated controls (and scheduling systems) which made self-service elevators possible. Apparently stimulated by an elevator operators strike in 1945: <https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/historical-event-pushed-elevators-become-fully-automated-uptime-ac https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/historical-event-pushed-eleva...> Fully-automated self-service elevators still took about a decade to appear, but would have been fairly common by the late 1950s / 1960s.

pjc50 1mo ago
Elevator operators are my favorite example of "job displaced by technology that nobody would even think of bringing back today".

pragmatic 1mo ago

“ replaced with computers and with people who know how to use them” One of those things is true…