7 ms·

Welcome To Extremistan, Please Check Your Career At The Door

68 points by BIackSwan 12y ago

informatimago 12y ago
One problem that would occur if only ellite jobs remain, is how new ellite workers will emerge? If mundate programming is performed automatically, how can anybody become an ellite programmer? If mundate laywering is performed automatically, how can anybody become an ellite laywer?
- w1ntermute 12y ago
  This is already a big problem in journalism, since the local newspapers (where journalists often started their careers in the past) have, of course, been decimated by technology.
  - vanderZwan 12y ago
    There's blogging. I know, I know, almost all of it is terrible. But it's still a place to practice writing, and the best ones (were "best" should not mean "most followers" but "actual quality", of course) could be contacted by good newspapers.
    - Spooky23 12y ago
      Blogging isn't professional writing in most cases. Without ruthless editing, writers drift toward the navel gazing and general laziness. Newspapers had their faults, but they were producing a good product. Pick a commonly blogged about topic, and everything is corrupt -- half the computer storage people are EMC. Baby stuff? Chances are the mommyblogger got free junk from a family of brands that she happens to like.
- mccr8 12y ago
  For programming, in the same way as computer science education works right now: people write programs that are useless to anybody else, but teach the person writing the program. You can see a hint of how this might work on a large scale with the current crop of massive online courses.
- saryant 12y ago
  I think the definition of "mundane" is continually shifted, at least WRT to programming. At one point, "mundane" was Minesweeper in Win32. Now it's a Rails app with authentication, monitoring, logging, background services, queues, AJAX, etc. Or a mobile app with remote backend services. Both are well-covered by intro level MOOCs today, letting new devs cut their teeth by building a Twitter clones. Maybe the next step for "mundane" programming is distributed computing in the form of Akka, Spark and so forth.
- asgard1024 12y ago
  "Elite" means better than your peers. They will always emerge, albeit with a different skill set.
- cookiecaper 12y ago
  The issue in the article isn't that there will be novice programmers or lawyers, it's that if you can even become a novice programmer or lawyer, you're supposedly already in "Extremistan". The premise is well-contained in the quote early on that "most people are like horses" and can't operate in fields that require primarily intellectual labor. I'm not sure that I agree with this premise, but it means that it's not an issue of crowding out newbies, just an expression of the popular sentiment that "[insert highly-paid professional position here] are really, really smart" and that to even attempt to become a highly-paid professional x is out of the reach of most people.
  - Dewie 12y ago
    It seems that the want to keep out sufficiently bad workers is already being seen by some that employ programmers - that they would rather not have an extra programmer than to have a sub-par programmer, because the 'contribution' that that programmer brings is on the whole negative by mostly introducing bugs that others have to clean up etc. We'll see if the bar for sub-par will keep being raised...
  - rezendi 12y ago
    I'm afraid you have misinterpreted. (OP here.)
hoggle 12y ago
So, was Marx right all along?
- probablyfiction 12y ago
  No, he wasn't. Marx was about the state owning the means of production, and that isn't the case here. We have a handful of super rich people (oligarchs) owning the means of production.
  - paradoja 12y ago
    Marx was about something else, mostly. You should probably read a bit more of (or on) him.
  - carlob 12y ago
    Mmmm, maybe you need to refresh your understanding of Marx. This oligarchy was well described by Marx, what you're saying he 'was about' was his solution to said problem.
- marvin 12y ago
  This (or, I suppose, a corollary which is that the capital owners/means of production are always in the strongest position) is what I have recently been thinking. If you are afraid of this development, invest heavily in the stock market. That way, you have a big hedge in the form of capital ownership in case your career gets automated away: Automation benefits capital owners. You would of course have to do this before this development goes too far, or capital in the successful part of the economy will already be too expensive.
  - jjoonathan 12y ago
    Most people are already aware that being wealthy is a good way to make capitalism work in your favor and that saving money is a good way to become wealthy over time. It's not a coincidence that most people aren't in a position to save enough to live off their capital.
rthomas6 12y ago
>It seems likely that, considered as a whole, Extremistan is far more creative and productive than Mediocristan. But while its economic pie may be much larger, it is also much more unequally distributed. Consider what would happen if the pie was 1000 times larger and was distributed 100 times more unequally than now. Is this ideal? No, but the worst off would be 10 times better off than right now. This is something very important to consider when we think about increasing industrial efficiency. To bring out an old argument, the freezer eliminated the entire ice industry and put lots of people out of jobs, yet everyone was better off for it.
- fiatmoney 12y ago
  "distributed 100 times more unequally" doesn't mean anything, certainly not anything that implies anything about "the worst off". You need to characterize what happens to that specific part of the distribution if you want to estimate the impact. In particular it is possible to reduce the shares of the top N%, and the bottom N%, increasing the share of the middle, and have many measures of inequality go down.
- lukasm 12y ago
  Exactly. Inequality is not a problem - poverty is. I'd much rather be in a place where I'm a millionaire between trillionaires, than having little and be between millionaires. Sadly, envy and need for the social status are very strong.
  - james1071 12y ago
    No, you wouldn't.
  - withdavidli 12y ago
    Missing how economics work here. Prices will be adjusted to what the market can bare. There's still a 10^3 difference. That's being work like being worth $1,000 when everyone else is a millionaire. Edit: sorry, was calculating for billion. it's a 10^6 difference. $1 vs $1,000,000
    - 12y ago
JamesArgo 12y ago
One of my first comments on this site pertained to this issue: >As computers begin to become capable of more and more jobs, the demand for human labor will decline. Automation is qualitatively different from mechanization. Education is a thin gilding on an impressive but non-optimal brain architecture. To say education will cure the ills of automation is a bit like saying fitness training could have saved workhorses from obsolescence. Workers of the world, you're fucked. My opinions haven't changed much since. Though years off yet, we are heading into uncharted territory here. Sure, the labouring classes survived, actually thrived, after the economic obsolescence of their muscles; I doubt we will do well after the obsolescence of our minds. If a body's worth a penny a day, a mind a nickel, and it costs a quarter to eat - we will not survive even if the lump of labour fallacy is, in fact, a fallacy. It's entirely possible to starve to death while never once wanting for work.
- rphlx 12y ago
  > It's entirely possible to starve to death while never once wanting for work. Perhaps on an individual basis, but not in large groups. An economic and social system in which most humans are starving will rapidly collapse, and be replaced - if necessary, through violent revolution - by a system that at least keeps most people fed, assuming there's still sufficient real resources to produce and transport the food. Food stamps exist not out of genuine compassion for the poor, but because those in power know very well what happens when starvation becomes too widespread.
  - gerbal 12y ago
    >Food stamps exist not out of genuine compassion for the poor, but because those in power know very well what happens when starvation becomes too widespread. someone needs to cc that memo to the right wing American Oligarchs.
    - hoggle 12y ago
      Panem et circenses - they know that for now they don't have to fear anything.
    - 12y ago
Dewie 12y ago
Maybe it will turn out that the big middle class of the latter 20th century was just an intermediate state between the exploited workers during the early Industrial Revolution, and the mediocre-humans obsolescence of the later 21th century.
rphlx 12y ago
The predicted outcome is probably correct but technology is not its root cause. The primary cause is the animal preference for hierarchical social structures where the top have the largest possible amount of power and control over those at the bottom. These structures have existed throughout human history - certainly long before the industrial revolution. Modern communications technologies are simply increasing their reach and extent.
mwsherman 12y ago
If (e.g.) doctors are automated out of a job, it will mean that health care has become dramatically cheaper, which is a widely distributed rise in living standards. This is more egalitarian, not less. Thousands of doctors lose and millions of humans win. Remember, economics is not about the distribution of money, it’s about the distribution of valuable things. In this example, health care is the valuable thing and its distribution seems greatly improved.
- Spooky23 12y ago
  Not necessarily. It means that a combination of machines and lesser trained people will be providing care. If your condition falls outside of the protocols said robots and PAs can treat, hope there is an expensive doctor around!
wallflower 12y ago
> The best companies hire the best engineers, who, by definition, are a minority; the best engineers work at, or launch, the best companies; technology increasingly allows the best companies to dominate their markets like never before. Extrapolate that twenty years into the future, and what do you get? I have to disagree with this statement. Even if the best engineers were all working at a small number of companies, you still don't need the best (global maximum). It is hard to be the best. And that is why the consulting product of companies like Thoughtworks have suffered as they've scaled (they can't continue their rate of hiring at the same quality they had in the previous past). Yes, there is a power law distribution in programming ability because you cannot rate programming ability on a 1-10 scale (it is an exponential scale). Where 10 is Linus Torvalds, Bill Joy and 1 is someone who does not appear to harbor any thoughts of logical thought. If you work to become better and what you do - and contribute back to the ecosystem with open-source code, talking at user groups small (local user groups) and large (conferences), teaching the next generation (from mentoring junior developers to teaching), I believe you will receive more than monetary compensation, you will be helping to move the field and community forward.
mcv 12y ago
I see a lot of this lately. The problem isn't the automation, it's that the benefits of that automation primarily benefits the wealthy few. We need a different economic system where those benefits are more equally spread around. Basic Income + a (progressive?) wealth tax, for example.

68 points by BIackSwan 12y ago

One problem that would occur if only ellite jobs remain, is how new ellite workers will emerge? If mundate programming is performed automatically, how can anybody become an ellite programmer? If mundate laywering is performed automatically, how can anybody become an ellite laywer?

w1ntermute 12y ago
This is already a big problem in journalism, since the local newspapers (where journalists often started their careers in the past) have, of course, been decimated by technology.
- vanderZwan 12y ago
  There's blogging. I know, I know, almost all of it is terrible. But it's still a place to practice writing, and the best ones (were "best" should not mean "most followers" but "actual quality", of course) could be contacted by good newspapers.
  - Spooky23 12y ago
    Blogging isn't professional writing in most cases. Without ruthless editing, writers drift toward the navel gazing and general laziness. Newspapers had their faults, but they were producing a good product. Pick a commonly blogged about topic, and everything is corrupt -- half the computer storage people are EMC. Baby stuff? Chances are the mommyblogger got free junk from a family of brands that she happens to like.
mccr8 12y ago
For programming, in the same way as computer science education works right now: people write programs that are useless to anybody else, but teach the person writing the program. You can see a hint of how this might work on a large scale with the current crop of massive online courses.
saryant 12y ago
I think the definition of "mundane" is continually shifted, at least WRT to programming. At one point, "mundane" was Minesweeper in Win32. Now it's a Rails app with authentication, monitoring, logging, background services, queues, AJAX, etc. Or a mobile app with remote backend services. Both are well-covered by intro level MOOCs today, letting new devs cut their teeth by building a Twitter clones. Maybe the next step for "mundane" programming is distributed computing in the form of Akka, Spark and so forth.
asgard1024 12y ago
"Elite" means better than your peers. They will always emerge, albeit with a different skill set.
cookiecaper 12y ago
The issue in the article isn't that there will be novice programmers or lawyers, it's that if you can even become a novice programmer or lawyer, you're supposedly already in "Extremistan". The premise is well-contained in the quote early on that "most people are like horses" and can't operate in fields that require primarily intellectual labor. I'm not sure that I agree with this premise, but it means that it's not an issue of crowding out newbies, just an expression of the popular sentiment that "[insert highly-paid professional position here] are really, really smart" and that to even attempt to become a highly-paid professional x is out of the reach of most people.
- Dewie 12y ago
  It seems that the want to keep out sufficiently bad workers is already being seen by some that employ programmers - that they would rather not have an extra programmer than to have a sub-par programmer, because the 'contribution' that that programmer brings is on the whole negative by mostly introducing bugs that others have to clean up etc. We'll see if the bar for sub-par will keep being raised...
- rezendi 12y ago
  I'm afraid you have misinterpreted. (OP here.)

hoggle 12y ago

So, was Marx right all along?

probablyfiction 12y ago
No, he wasn't. Marx was about the state owning the means of production, and that isn't the case here. We have a handful of super rich people (oligarchs) owning the means of production.
- paradoja 12y ago
  Marx was about something else, mostly. You should probably read a bit more of (or on) him.
- carlob 12y ago
  Mmmm, maybe you need to refresh your understanding of Marx. This oligarchy was well described by Marx, what you're saying he 'was about' was his solution to said problem.
marvin 12y ago
This (or, I suppose, a corollary which is that the capital owners/means of production are always in the strongest position) is what I have recently been thinking. If you are afraid of this development, invest heavily in the stock market. That way, you have a big hedge in the form of capital ownership in case your career gets automated away: Automation benefits capital owners. You would of course have to do this before this development goes too far, or capital in the successful part of the economy will already be too expensive.
- jjoonathan 12y ago
  Most people are already aware that being wealthy is a good way to make capitalism work in your favor and that saving money is a good way to become wealthy over time. It's not a coincidence that most people aren't in a position to save enough to live off their capital.

rthomas6 12y ago

>It seems likely that, considered as a whole, Extremistan is far more creative and productive than Mediocristan. But while its economic pie may be much larger, it is also much more unequally distributed. Consider what would happen if the pie was 1000 times larger and was distributed 100 times more unequally than now. Is this ideal? No, but the worst off would be 10 times better off than right now. This is something very important to consider when we think about increasing industrial efficiency. To bring out an old argument, the freezer eliminated the entire ice industry and put lots of people out of jobs, yet everyone was better off for it.

fiatmoney 12y ago
"distributed 100 times more unequally" doesn't mean anything, certainly not anything that implies anything about "the worst off". You need to characterize what happens to that specific part of the distribution if you want to estimate the impact. In particular it is possible to reduce the shares of the top N%, and the bottom N%, increasing the share of the middle, and have many measures of inequality go down.
lukasm 12y ago
Exactly. Inequality is not a problem - poverty is. I'd much rather be in a place where I'm a millionaire between trillionaires, than having little and be between millionaires. Sadly, envy and need for the social status are very strong.
- james1071 12y ago
  No, you wouldn't.
- withdavidli 12y ago
  Missing how economics work here. Prices will be adjusted to what the market can bare. There's still a 10^3 difference. That's being work like being worth $1,000 when everyone else is a millionaire. Edit: sorry, was calculating for billion. it's a 10^6 difference. $1 vs $1,000,000
  - 12y ago

JamesArgo 12y ago

One of my first comments on this site pertained to this issue: >As computers begin to become capable of more and more jobs, the demand for human labor will decline. Automation is qualitatively different from mechanization. Education is a thin gilding on an impressive but non-optimal brain architecture. To say education will cure the ills of automation is a bit like saying fitness training could have saved workhorses from obsolescence. Workers of the world, you're fucked. My opinions haven't changed much since. Though years off yet, we are heading into uncharted territory here. Sure, the labouring classes survived, actually thrived, after the economic obsolescence of their muscles; I doubt we will do well after the obsolescence of our minds. If a body's worth a penny a day, a mind a nickel, and it costs a quarter to eat - we will not survive even if the lump of labour fallacy is, in fact, a fallacy. It's entirely possible to starve to death while never once wanting for work.

rphlx 12y ago
> It's entirely possible to starve to death while never once wanting for work. Perhaps on an individual basis, but not in large groups. An economic and social system in which most humans are starving will rapidly collapse, and be replaced - if necessary, through violent revolution - by a system that at least keeps most people fed, assuming there's still sufficient real resources to produce and transport the food. Food stamps exist not out of genuine compassion for the poor, but because those in power know very well what happens when starvation becomes too widespread.
- gerbal 12y ago
  >Food stamps exist not out of genuine compassion for the poor, but because those in power know very well what happens when starvation becomes too widespread. someone needs to cc that memo to the right wing American Oligarchs.
  - hoggle 12y ago
    Panem et circenses - they know that for now they don't have to fear anything.
  - 12y ago

Dewie 12y ago

Maybe it will turn out that the big middle class of the latter 20th century was just an intermediate state between the exploited workers during the early Industrial Revolution, and the mediocre-humans obsolescence of the later 21th century.

rphlx 12y ago

The predicted outcome is probably correct but technology is not its root cause. The primary cause is the animal preference for hierarchical social structures where the top have the largest possible amount of power and control over those at the bottom. These structures have existed throughout human history - certainly long before the industrial revolution. Modern communications technologies are simply increasing their reach and extent.

mwsherman 12y ago

If (e.g.) doctors are automated out of a job, it will mean that health care has become dramatically cheaper, which is a widely distributed rise in living standards. This is more egalitarian, not less. Thousands of doctors lose and millions of humans win. Remember, economics is not about the distribution of money, it’s about the distribution of valuable things. In this example, health care is the valuable thing and its distribution seems greatly improved.

Spooky23 12y ago
Not necessarily. It means that a combination of machines and lesser trained people will be providing care. If your condition falls outside of the protocols said robots and PAs can treat, hope there is an expensive doctor around!

wallflower 12y ago

> The best companies hire the best engineers, who, by definition, are a minority; the best engineers work at, or launch, the best companies; technology increasingly allows the best companies to dominate their markets like never before. Extrapolate that twenty years into the future, and what do you get? I have to disagree with this statement. Even if the best engineers were all working at a small number of companies, you still don't need the best (global maximum). It is hard to be the best. And that is why the consulting product of companies like Thoughtworks have suffered as they've scaled (they can't continue their rate of hiring at the same quality they had in the previous past). Yes, there is a power law distribution in programming ability because you cannot rate programming ability on a 1-10 scale (it is an exponential scale). Where 10 is Linus Torvalds, Bill Joy and 1 is someone who does not appear to harbor any thoughts of logical thought. If you work to become better and what you do - and contribute back to the ecosystem with open-source code, talking at user groups small (local user groups) and large (conferences), teaching the next generation (from mentoring junior developers to teaching), I believe you will receive more than monetary compensation, you will be helping to move the field and community forward.

mcv 12y ago

I see a lot of this lately. The problem isn't the automation, it's that the benefits of that automation primarily benefits the wealthy few. We need a different economic system where those benefits are more equally spread around. Basic Income + a (progressive?) wealth tax, for example.