9 ms·

I sense there is this air around of "demand our jobs keep being relevant" - I personally feel this kind of thing holds the world backwards if it works. I think

I sense there is this air around of "demand our jobs keep being relevant" - I personally feel this kind of thing holds the world backwards if it works. I think if our jobs were to become obsolete, embracing it and re-orienting oneself is the one thing that is personally effective and is morally right. But what do I know, I'm just some doofus on the internet. The irony is not lost on me on all those years where people were advised to "just learn to code, bro" in order to escape the personally threatening situation of obsolete jobs. Well, now people feel it's our turn so, "just learn to _something_ dudes"? This is all, assuming of course, that the end is nigh and our profession really is close to extinction. I personally don't buy it, but if it is, so be it.

Tarq0n 1mo ago
That's a fine philosophy on a personal level, but if the labor market is shocked for entire sectors there's not enough slack in the system for all of those people to adapt at once. That's how you end up with lost generations.
- chasd00 1mo ago
  i go back to what happened to Journalism when the Internet and especially "web2.0" took off. It was hard on the industry but I don't think we have lost generations of journalists. The software biz has always expected everyone else to adapt to technological shifts at a rapid pace. I'm a dev (more of a lead/mgr these days) so my neck is on the line too but even i have to chuckle at the irony.
  - mrguyorama 1mo ago
    >It was hard on the industry but I don't think we have lost generations of journalists. We literally did. There are dramatically fewer journalists now than just a few decades ago, and everyone is constantly complaining about how bad "journalism" is now. It was definitely bad a long time ago, in the era of yellow journalism, but now "Journalists" don't even ask basic questions, don't push back in interviews at all, don't do basic "Journalism" things, so it's just another arm of the PR industry. Journalism is a great example of how bad this will go. It might look superficially like we still have some journalism right now, but we don't at all. We have a couple media orgs producing content, and they are all owned by the capitalist class explicitly, which is putting it's thumb on the scale every single day. The death of the local newsroom is part of the reason local politics have gotten so corrupt. There used to be people who's job was to go sit in local town meetings, for your local town paper, so that everybody could see when the local town council did shitty things. Another great example is how bad ESPN has become. They found that having a guy who's job it is to make wild statements to drive controversy is more profitable than just talking about basketball, so now the network is basically satire of its former self, and is made up of people who literally don't even watch sports, or care at all about it. The network spends millions of dollars on one big name who plays solitaire during games he is supposed to pay attention to. Basically all of their sports journalists are gone. Youtube of all places had to pick up the sports journalism slack, but youtube is not a good platform for real journalism either.
    - worik 1mo ago
      Yes, mostly true But there is still journalism. * Propublica * The Economist * The Guardian * 404 Media Life is much harder for journalist now, and joining g the "darkside" of PR is the best/lucrative career path, but it exists
      - deleted 1mo ago
        [deleted]
      - nephihaha 1mo ago
        The Guardian and the Economist both have their issues. For one they represent insulated groups of people, who focus on some talking points but not others.
        paulryanrogers 1mo ago
        Associated Press
        nephihaha 1mo ago
        The British papers tend to feed off AP, AFP and Reuters. The Guardian tends to specialise in opinion pieces rather than its own investigative journalism. But to be fair the Guardian's sister paper, the Observer did score an impressive scoop last year with Chloe Hadjimatheou's investigation of the "Salt Path" scandal
    - bonoboTP 1mo ago
      It has always been a type of propaganda. Always. Journalism was always low status among actual authors, novelists and poets. It was considered selling out already in the 19th century. The sort of thing that pays bills but requires compromise.
    - Earw0rm 1mo ago
      Yep. Most "journalism" now is opinion columns. Local journalism is dead, with unfortunate consequences for local politics that bleeds into national and international stuff. National investigative journalism is hanging by a thread, with a TON of stuff (mostly corruption of various kinds) going uninvestigated which should be. Some of the slack has been picked up by academics of one kind or another making their work more accessible, but now they're in the firing line too.
- georgeburdell 1mo ago
  You’re too kind. That’s how you end up with civil unrest. See: early Covid
- anovikov 1mo ago
  If law enforcement still does a good job, what are the downsides? I can't see crime climbing really high, after all, population ageing, and crime was on the decline for decades.
pydry 1mo ago
>I sense there is this air around of "demand our jobs keep being relevant" I sense the inverse: a demand that we make ourselves irrelevant to satisfy interest rate inspired demand for cost savings. Executives have developed a religion around AI and it is inspiring an orgy of value destruction in software orgs as they try to slash costs and increase efficiency. But theyve done it rather stupidly with this new religion rather than with more prosaic and altogether more boring improvements. Quality has plummeted everywhere and there aren't even any meaningful cost savings to show for it, just empty promises and more hype.
harimau777 1mo ago
Sure, as long as the new jobs pay at least as much as the old jobs and society is willing to pay for the retraining. In that case I imagine there would be lots of people willing to reskill.
bonoboTP 1mo ago
You have to do something that is truly effective and productive, otherwise you live a fake life, you live in a zoo, you live a performance. If nobody actually needs your work's output and you are simply allowed to do it out of some kind of state benevolence because it's some quaint tradition, you're laughing stock. We should not put up with being that.
- tjr225 1mo ago
  [dead]
rayiner 1mo ago
> The irony is not lost on me on all those years where people were advised to "just learn to code, bro" in order to escape the personally threatening situation of obsolete jobs. Well, now people feel it's our turn so, "just learn to _something_ dudes"? Yeah, I imagine that there won’t be much sympathy for the cognitive elite when the benefits of being smarter disappear. Even if we get AI-powered communism, they’ll get the same UBI check as everyone else.
prmoustache 1mo ago
It really depends about the income and debt. If a $20000/y a job is deemed unrelevant, chances is that one might easily find similar or better in a totally different area. If a $200000/y job is deemed unrelevant and is lost, and one has mortgage payments they can't pay with a $50000 or $100000 job, they have a big problem because selling that house might become difficult when all other $200000/y workers will try to sell their house and move within the same period and the housing market crashes. So you can ruin the economy of a large area quite quickly. So a bit of anticipation is useful.

Tarq0n 1mo ago

That's a fine philosophy on a personal level, but if the labor market is shocked for entire sectors there's not enough slack in the system for all of those people to adapt at once. That's how you end up with lost generations.

chasd00 1mo ago
i go back to what happened to Journalism when the Internet and especially "web2.0" took off. It was hard on the industry but I don't think we have lost generations of journalists. The software biz has always expected everyone else to adapt to technological shifts at a rapid pace. I'm a dev (more of a lead/mgr these days) so my neck is on the line too but even i have to chuckle at the irony.
- mrguyorama 1mo ago
  >It was hard on the industry but I don't think we have lost generations of journalists. We literally did. There are dramatically fewer journalists now than just a few decades ago, and everyone is constantly complaining about how bad "journalism" is now. It was definitely bad a long time ago, in the era of yellow journalism, but now "Journalists" don't even ask basic questions, don't push back in interviews at all, don't do basic "Journalism" things, so it's just another arm of the PR industry. Journalism is a great example of how bad this will go. It might look superficially like we still have some journalism right now, but we don't at all. We have a couple media orgs producing content, and they are all owned by the capitalist class explicitly, which is putting it's thumb on the scale every single day. The death of the local newsroom is part of the reason local politics have gotten so corrupt. There used to be people who's job was to go sit in local town meetings, for your local town paper, so that everybody could see when the local town council did shitty things. Another great example is how bad ESPN has become. They found that having a guy who's job it is to make wild statements to drive controversy is more profitable than just talking about basketball, so now the network is basically satire of its former self, and is made up of people who literally don't even watch sports, or care at all about it. The network spends millions of dollars on one big name who plays solitaire during games he is supposed to pay attention to. Basically all of their sports journalists are gone. Youtube of all places had to pick up the sports journalism slack, but youtube is not a good platform for real journalism either.
  - worik 1mo ago
    Yes, mostly true But there is still journalism. * Propublica * The Economist * The Guardian * 404 Media Life is much harder for journalist now, and joining g the "darkside" of PR is the best/lucrative career path, but it exists
    - deleted 1mo ago
      [deleted]
    - nephihaha 1mo ago
      The Guardian and the Economist both have their issues. For one they represent insulated groups of people, who focus on some talking points but not others.
      - paulryanrogers 1mo ago
        Associated Press
        nephihaha 1mo ago
        The British papers tend to feed off AP, AFP and Reuters. The Guardian tends to specialise in opinion pieces rather than its own investigative journalism. But to be fair the Guardian's sister paper, the Observer did score an impressive scoop last year with Chloe Hadjimatheou's investigation of the "Salt Path" scandal
  - bonoboTP 1mo ago
    It has always been a type of propaganda. Always. Journalism was always low status among actual authors, novelists and poets. It was considered selling out already in the 19th century. The sort of thing that pays bills but requires compromise.
  - Earw0rm 1mo ago
    Yep. Most "journalism" now is opinion columns. Local journalism is dead, with unfortunate consequences for local politics that bleeds into national and international stuff. National investigative journalism is hanging by a thread, with a TON of stuff (mostly corruption of various kinds) going uninvestigated which should be. Some of the slack has been picked up by academics of one kind or another making their work more accessible, but now they're in the firing line too.
georgeburdell 1mo ago
You’re too kind. That’s how you end up with civil unrest. See: early Covid
anovikov 1mo ago
If law enforcement still does a good job, what are the downsides? I can't see crime climbing really high, after all, population ageing, and crime was on the decline for decades.

pydry 1mo ago

>I sense there is this air around of "demand our jobs keep being relevant" I sense the inverse: a demand that we make ourselves irrelevant to satisfy interest rate inspired demand for cost savings. Executives have developed a religion around AI and it is inspiring an orgy of value destruction in software orgs as they try to slash costs and increase efficiency. But theyve done it rather stupidly with this new religion rather than with more prosaic and altogether more boring improvements. Quality has plummeted everywhere and there aren't even any meaningful cost savings to show for it, just empty promises and more hype.

harimau777 1mo ago

Sure, as long as the new jobs pay at least as much as the old jobs and society is willing to pay for the retraining. In that case I imagine there would be lots of people willing to reskill.

bonoboTP 1mo ago

You have to do something that is truly effective and productive, otherwise you live a fake life, you live in a zoo, you live a performance. If nobody actually needs your work's output and you are simply allowed to do it out of some kind of state benevolence because it's some quaint tradition, you're laughing stock. We should not put up with being that.

tjr225 1mo ago
[dead]

rayiner 1mo ago

> The irony is not lost on me on all those years where people were advised to "just learn to code, bro" in order to escape the personally threatening situation of obsolete jobs. Well, now people feel it's our turn so, "just learn to _something_ dudes"? Yeah, I imagine that there won’t be much sympathy for the cognitive elite when the benefits of being smarter disappear. Even if we get AI-powered communism, they’ll get the same UBI check as everyone else.

prmoustache 1mo ago

It really depends about the income and debt. If a $20000/y a job is deemed unrelevant, chances is that one might easily find similar or better in a totally different area. If a $200000/y job is deemed unrelevant and is lost, and one has mortgage payments they can't pay with a $50000 or $100000 job, they have a big problem because selling that house might become difficult when all other $200000/y workers will try to sell their house and move within the same period and the housing market crashes. So you can ruin the economy of a large area quite quickly. So a bit of anticipation is useful.