This feels like a heavily political/ideological narrative designed to say both: see the economy isn’t terrible, you’re just doing it wrong, and, we could solve the rural-urban red-blue political divide with this one simple trick of realizing that the rural elite college people are wrong and real America gets it.
I would love this to be true! Really! It just seems like wishful thinking.
The subject of the article, and fellow social media participants, are hedging a bet that manual trade jobs will be safe forever, at the cost of a salary cut and inflicting physical damage to the body. All to do a trade that perhaps doesn't even interest them that much. Insecurity, maybe even arrogance, is driving these people outside of the white collar workforce and I think they will get burned for their decision in the long run. Because there really is no guarantee that these physical jobs will be safe.
The other subtext is that white collars should take a salary cut to work in a different field. And who absorbs the difference in salary that is no longer being paid out? No one that is the subject of this article.
Trades aren't safe. Even if nobody figures out how to automate trades, the amount of people that will go into trades when white collar jobs are automated away will drive wages down.
AI will be the worst thing to happen to society in a very long time.
Maybe. Keep going back and forth.
On one hand I might loose my job. On then other hand everybody might loose their job.
Ai is tricky. If we have a singularity event maybe one or two combines might take all the jobs overnight. Fine. But economies are weird. Once those jobs are automated and nobody has a job we probably won’t even need the jobs that were replaced.
Like today. We have jobs because some other thing came along and “made something easy”. Think about how many jobs we have simply because we as humans write bad software. If this goes away it’s not even about automation taking jobs, it’s about simply not needing huge swaths of jobs at all.
So I think about this and ponder. I’d all Job are basically worthless, then the “rich” people like to complain about, won’t be rich. They won’t have anything either. Simply put, nobody will have any money to buy things and thus the “rich” won’t have anybody to buy things to keep them rich.
So I think more. It’s really not an advantage for the rich and powerful to basically destroy what makes them rich.
For people to be rich they have to have a bunch of people to extract small amounts of money from. A starving and angry population is not going to be a fun place to live for anybody.
Kinda the point being, a small number of companies could control all the resources and a few of the people and be rich that way. Yes you’re right, maybe the Walton’s and the other families who made their money on people having money won’t go away, but in theory you could have a group of super rich people just giving money to each other to build space ships and nuclear power plants and the like.
If the guy isn't making good money, he won't be hiring you either.
AndrewKemendo•3mo ago
The perennial, monotonous discussion about “what gives us meaning” has been so exhausted at this point as to be rendered meaningless.
You can safely ignore anyone that has philosophical musings that are temporal in context.
datameta•3mo ago
AndrewKemendo•3mo ago
Basically if someone is using the “current” state of the world as the comparative model for existential fulfillment then it’s not even a model, it’s a conclusion based on a point sample
In the case of this article, “Everyone should learn to code” was never correct and nor is “everyone should learn a craft”
It fundamentally overfits a narrow, highly available novel concept, rooted in the epistemology of “individual fulfillment” in the context of the current state of the world
Therefore in the implied context of the existential question “what should I do with my life?” , which is something that has been asked in every period that humans and proto-humans have lived, it’s totally ignorant to think that we can reduce it to the intersection of global transactions and individual contributions to such.
datameta•3mo ago