It's not like that everywhere. I live in a midwest metropolitan area (~230k people), when I walk passerbyers always say hi or wave. People are relatively friendly by default. Yesterday an older lady I'd never met before told me about the pace maker she had put in the Friday before.
I'm rambling, but if you desire a sense of community or whatever there are parts of the US where this is very much a thing.
Anyways, I'm also rambling, but just wanted to add another piece of anecdotal evidence to yours. It's almost enough to make me want to try living in one of these towns for a while, which never really occurred to me before (at 25 it seems like everyone I know wants to be as urban as possible).
I wish i could dress up in some delusional ideology, like others can, that this is for some greater good and 72 virgins after the singularity hits, but logic, that cruel mistress wont allow those too last.
That is at least if everything (or almost) goes as planned and things like universal income become a reality.
Also, i thought everyone from hackernews thought this.
> I can't wait to live in a world where we all acknowledge...
If anything, the current trajectory of automation is leading to an intensification of the difference between have's vs have-not's. Many powerful people in the "have's" group WANT this, they want another gilded age where you have fantastically wealthy people and serfs.
UBI isn't a given and making it a reality is going to get ugly even if it succeeds.
Thus, working to increase automation is still useful, because it is likely that we will soon either tax the owners of automated capital more, or economically disenfranchised people will have a bloody revolution, and the new owners of the automated capital will be slightly more inclined to voluntarily share for the next 70 years or so.
The end result is that mopping floors and cleaning toilets becomes a robot job, and no human anywhere does it, freeing them up for tasks that actually require human brainpower. I think everyone needs to work, but the BS jobs we have been inventing are not fit for that purpose. Everyone needs to do a thing that is productive by the loosest definition and makes them happy. Like jarring your own pickles. Or making an online comic with stick figures. Or domesticating foxes. When freed of the requirement that people have to do work to perform certain critical functions that keep civilization running, like growing food and paving roads, people can instead put more effort into things that are niche interests.
It might be playing video games for 12 hours a day. That's okay. You don't need that guy to raise chickens for your dinner. But you might need him later, when you decide to spend 4 hours every week to play a video game, and you don't want to waste your time on one that is not fun, or too deep for that level of time commitment. That guy will soon become an subject matter expert on video games, and you can trust him to blow away the chaff, because he loves video games.
Some people still do the niche stuff even after working 40 hours or more in a week. If you think about what they can do in their leisure time, just imagine what they would accomplish if their hobby was their full time job.
> I wish i could dress up in some delusional ideology
Sounds a little like Accelerationism[0]
Not to say that it doesn't bear risks but there's currently no indication that this time jobs wouldn't be replaced by something better. Just because many think so doesn't make it true, Keynes also firmly believed in the 1930s that we would run out of work and yet I cannot see that anywhere.
So, I suspect they have been costing jobs. Society has simply shifted to use a lower percentage of peoples time vs. having large numbers of people never work.
However, unless we start reducing the retirement age down to late 40's or other very large scale changes that's only going to keep working for so long.
But still, we don't see joblessness or masses of people unqualified for the market. Faster developments will lead to many having 3-5 careers over their life time but I don't think that's necessarily a bad thing.
It's true we are creating more jobs, but mostly by having people do things that are low priority and thus low paying. There might be unlimited demand for service jobs like raft guides, but they pay crap because they compete with things like video games.
What disappears is the middle. This means we have to ensure that as many people as possible can get an education preparing them for higher value-added jobs. More diverse university courses and free education could help with that, vocational training can do the same.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13696161
Maybe you are moving society to an cyberpunk dystopia, but who knows what you come after that? Maybe after some time this 'new society' stabilize and the world(s) will be a better place.
My answer right now would be a timid yes. But in no way in an impactful way, even to very few, so I still feel I need to work on this regard.
Now, I want to merge this topic with one that comes naturally to HN: startups. I keep feeling like the projects that are for the good make no money, and that the easy money is to be found in negative or maybe irrelevant solutions. I know this is not 100% accurate, and that's why I keep trying to think of projects I can pursue, make a living on, that feel just RIGHT. But hell is this hard.
I work for a company which is owned by a big health insurance company and we make consumer-facing applications. Our products have a varying degree of public benefit from online insurance open enrollment (turbotax for benefits) to provider transparency (find doctors and see how much common services cost).
In general, I'm glad I'm working on improving consumer experience in one of the more stressful human experiences, but I know at the end of the day, I'm still improving the bottom line of a huge company and enabling the propagation of a broken system.
Having things like Juicero exist gives me a little bit of relative ethical reprieve: "at least I'm not wasting a ton of money to make an elitist, wasteful food fad product".
Not implying it should of course, many of us don't have the option to choose our jobs too easily. But some of us certainly are in a position to choose a job which pays higher but has less moral standing.
My next door neighbour works for a pay-day loan company, and seems to be well rewarded. I don't know if he considers this question. Another friend of mine moved from accounting into private equity, with much higher pay. Similar to the high-achieving doctors who go into cosmetic plastic surgery.
Is there any incentive to consider your contribution to society?
I felt that way for dozen or so years I was in our Airforce, less about fighting down under, more about helping out.
But then...
I left for money, now I have a fancy business card, a house, more cars than I can drive at once and habits I couldn't have sustained in uniform, now if I'm contributing, it's not positive, and sleep, it was easier before.
Don't apologize for it. Every idea about society has been tried a dozen times over. Capitalism has the best track record. Some of the worst hell holes on earth had great intentions in the minds of their leaders.
I remember being told it would bring forward the 'outside world' to people otherwise glued to their phones. But then, I drove past a pokemon go party the other day and the only difference was they were all stood outside...
Ex. I work on on a social music app[1] in my spare time. From my perspective I'm just making it easy for devs to share music while they work: marginal contribution to society at best. But a little while ago I got an email from a father who thanked me for the building something which gave him the opportunity to reconnect with his daughter across the world. Remembering nice stories like that help keep me motivated and hopefully you can find some nice stories in your line of work as well :).
And yet, I've found it hard to actually contribute positive tangible things. The only thing that philosophy has brought me is a kind of smugness about my unnecessary poverty.
Honestly, the whole experience has given me quite a reverence for capitalism. At it's best, it helps direct a human being toward a path of contribution. There are problems[1] but I think the thing I've learnt is that the task of finding and following through on something that actually contributes to society is hard, and the fact that capitalism makes it easy is kind of amazing.[2] Left to your own devices you tend to massively underestimate the difficulty of whatever scheme you come up with, and burnout/get demotivated without others around you who are doing the similar work.
Ahh well, hopefully I figure how to properly do this "contribution" malarky in the next ten years.
[1] Apart from avoiding externalities, the other major issue is that capitalism serves dollar-weighted humans, and with the current wealth distribution that is vastly different from serving humans.
[2] Find a job that isn't obviously evil. If you succeed, you're probably contributing positively to society.
In the grand stream of things, I've done more actionable and powerful work outside of my job I attend 5 days a week. If I had more time, I could push more innovation in many areas. The money would be nice as well. It's a hard choice, balancing money and time.
I yearn for the days when we finally have UBI or something guaranteeing us the rights to live without being coerced into selling our bodies and minds. Because right now, I feel there's little between me selling my body and mind and that of a prostitute selling theirs. I just don't do sex as work, so it's somehow "better".
And having rights to live for everyone would allow me to work much more in automation tech without the ethical qualms that I am putting many more people out of work - and thusly depriving them of living. Automation tech can work for a limited amount of people (now), or it can work for everyone.
Perhaps I'm just an idealist.
Is it the entire human population of the Earth? Just the people of your own nation? The people in your hometown? Just rich and influential people?
Most of the time, I'm contributing to my own nuclear family by exporting my labor and importing other people's money. And that's "society" enough for me.
Other people can derive some ancillary benefit from what I do, but for the most part, the majority of them have been quite rude to me for no readily apparent reason beyond my general homeliness, so I stopped trying to satisfy them a long time ago.
The only contributions I feel are valuable in the ultra-long term are development in more efficient space launch technologies, space habitats, space propulsion, and ecological remediation here on Earth. But I don't do any of those things, so I don't value my own work very highly. I'm just workin' for The Man, and he doesn't love anybody or help anyone except Himself.
I don't save lives myself, but I help collect the data that's used to do so.
Currently looking for a new gig and wondering whether I'd be able work on shitty adtech and still look at myself in the mirror.
Also, I'm part of a country that has one of the highest standards of living in human history which was built on immense toil over thousands of years by my ancestors and millions of others, which only continues to exist based on mutual support between myself and many others.
I may question the value of what I'm working on at the moment, but I don't question the value of knowledge, technology, and the society that allows me to pursue it.
Like many, I help in a number of small ways I'm sure, and perhaps I've even made a big impact on a few lives for the better, but I can't help but think I should be able to scale up and do more for a far, far greater number of people.
I'm curious because I've had a few coworkers come from hedge funds and they left for a lot of reasons.
(That's what I tell myself about my phd anyway)
I worked EMS in undergrad; none of my patients ever found me afterwards to thank me, but we _probably_ saved a life or two. (narcan is magical)
it's a fun conversation to have over a few beers.
The basic argument for display ads not being evil is that they give journalists and other content creators a way to get paid for their work. A lot of people, concerned about incentive distortion and other problems with ads, would rather see this happen through alternative models like subscriptions or microtransactions, but it's not clear to me that that can work. In particular, the amount that publishers would have to charge in order for such models to be revenue-competitive with ads far exceeds the average reader's willingness to pay—which suggests that ads provide a significant consumer surplus.
The question that currently worries me a bit is where that surplus comes from. One possibility is that the cost to consumers of being shown ads is much greater than it appears, because ads strongly influence consumers' behavior in ways that directly oppose their own interests. (Note that this is different from the hypothesis that publishers manipulate readers' behavior to maximize ad revenue; this is about the what advertisers do directly.) Obviously there's some of this going on; the question is whether it's enough to negate the consumer surplus. (Some also argue that there should be zero tolerance for this, even if the consumer comes out ahead, because it undermines their ability to navigate the tradeoffs in their own interest; I won't get into that argument here.) I think this hypothesis can't yet be ruled out, and if true certainly means that I'm making the world worse, but I'd like to see stronger evidence for it before I believe it with much confidence. In particular, lots of people who argue strongly for it seem to be basically motivated by their own aesthetic revulsion towards ads, and rarely present much real evidence.
Another hypothesis is that advertisers are basically engaging in a dollar auction against one another, paying more than they should for ad inventory because if they don't their competitors will, and/or because they can't measure the effectiveness of their ad spend well enough. (Obviously we try to give advertisers the tools to measure and understand the effects of what they're doing, but some argue that it still doesn't work well enough for that purpose.) The proceeds from this dollar auction effectively wind up subsidizing publishers, readers, and me. If this is true, then I think I'm making society better, by moving wealth from things like consumer product marketing (less socially valuable) to things like journalism and content creation (more socially valuable). Such an arrangement may not be stable in the long term, as greater competition increases selection pressures against companies that waste money like this, but I'm okay with crossing that bridge when I get there.
There are likely other possible explanations that I haven't thought of.
Two other relevant factors in defense of what I do: 1. My job in particular is significantly about defending users' interests. As HN readers are well aware, there are a lot of ways that display ads these days just plain suck for users, and much of what I work on is about finding ways to make that less true. 2. I donate a significant fraction of my salary to the most socially valuable causes that I can find, and I intend to increase that amount a lot more once I've got a financial safety cushion built up for myself.
I don't think I could do much more social good than this while still working on pure technology. I do think I could do a lot more social good if I took a job that involved significantly less programming and more of other kinds of less-pleasant work that I'm worse at. I frequently feel bad about not doing that, but it does seem reasonably likely that I'd burn out if I did.