Comment by aresant | Hacker News Reader

Comment by aresant | Hacker News Reader

While the fluffy headline promises a revelation about Google, this article is actually a poignant lament on the future of work automation.

The piece's author holds a humanities degree in Psych/Neuroscience.

I point that out because while we've accepted that blue collar jobs are/were "going to be automated" or "going overseas", there's still a pervasive trope that an undergraduate degree provides some protection and is of value unto itself in the workforce.

But - as evidenced by his systematic experience of key-pressing - his position @ Google is a stop gap, in the same way that the humans in Uber's vehicles are a tolerated inconvenience.

This while the people the company ACTUALLY values, at present, are the engineers - tasked with devising new ways to automate, regulate, and systematically eliminate human fallibility from the equation.

Solving the problem of what to do with the millions of us that take steps to educate ourselves, want to contribute, but realize that we're a poor facsimile of the machine that will eventually eliminate our jobs, is the central question of our generation.

Don't know about "poignant" - this reads like "I chose the wrong career and it's Google's fault" - but 100% yes, this is one of the biggest societal issues we face.

The author may have realized a bit late that he doesn't enjoy HR, but he still deserves a chance to pivot. That's getting harder in our economic system and with automation and outsourcing.

I remember looking at Hacker News in 1895 and remember the fear of automation was just as noteworthy then. Weird how increasing automation over the past 200 years has led to record low poverty and a higher standard sign living that would have unimaginable.

Once we resolve the issue of people being automated out of their careers then of course automation will be a net positive on society. You don't have to tell me - I work in machine learning and data. These are basically growing pains that require a societal paradigm shift.

Not just HR - the lowest rung of recruiting. It sounds like the author was doing cold-call sourcing.

Well said!

And yet people seem more interested in bickering about politics than addressing the root of the problem.

What is the root of the problem?

A fair distribution of resources and opportunities. I believe that if we do not address this problems soon enough we will be (soon) living in a cyberpunk dystopia.

How would one decide what a fair distribution of resources and opportunities looks like, if not via bickering about politics?

A Pareto distribution with alpha >= 2 (and likely alpha < 5, because that's starting to look too much like Communism) and x_m >= the cost of basic necessities for one person--including shelter, water, food, sanitation, medical care, education, and their share of upkeep for the transportation and communications networks.

No one suffers from lack of vital resources. Yet it is still possible to get rich via a combination of luck, skill, and tenacity. Seems fair to me.

Of course, this leads to bickering about how to calculate the numbers, so....

At the point where you said "and likely alpha < 5, because that's starting to look too much like Communism", we're back on politics.

This is a blind-spot I see in a lot of technically-minded folks: politics as an evil to be avoided via technological solutions, as opposed to politics as the natural side-effect of needing two or more people to come to consensus on combined action. You can definitely improve the space of possible solutions if you have technology at your disposal, but you can't remove the human from the equation if you're solving human problems.

So merely saying "Communism" is sufficient to make it political? In terms of fairness, my opinion is that alpha less than 2 puts too much wealth in the hands of the rich, hurting the baseline quality of life, and alpha greater than 5 probably doesn't concentrate enough capital to support innovation, competition, moonshots, and luxuries.

I was defining an objectively measurable middle ground between two economic antipodes that have each had extensive political backing now or in the past. This contrasts with those who decry any movement in the direction of redistribution to be greasing the slippery slope to Abhorrently Evil Communism, and any movement in the direction of concentration to be greasing the slippery slope to Abhorrently Evil Capitalism.

When you define numeric values, it becomes harder to hijack the discussion by throwing around loaded words and charged phrases.

Politics with concrete numerically-quantifiable values is much better politics.

But you can't replace the politics with the math, as the exercise of deciding the alpha value in the Pareto distribution demonstrates. The numbers don't tell us what people will value; that's where the politics comes in. It's the art of figuring out human values and coming to terms to try to satisfy as many as possible.

In theory, the optimal alpha could be determined experimentally. It would be an expensive experiment, though.

For now, we just have anecdotal historical examples, like the Soviets, and the European monarchies, and the ruins of ancient empires, and the banana republics, and the resource-curse countries.

We have already determined that the extremes at either end are bad. Concentrate the wealth too much, and you get slavery or serfdom, and stagnate. Distribute it too much, and you get socialism or communism, and stagnate. Follow some happy medium somewhere between them, and your economy grows.

In the absence of an experiment that would require extensive political maneuvering to even begin to conduct, we substitute less extensive political maneuvering in order to make some reasonable assumptions. It is better than just allowing the person that derails the discussion with the loudest distraction to win.

Besides that, experiments undertaken to determine the optimally fair distribution of wealth are as likely to be used to craft an illusion of fairness as they are to create a real environment of fairness, so even if we knew, we wouldn't necessarily be able to do.

Jobs that once existed no longer exist because they've either been automated or outsourced.

But the lack of jobs is not a problem, assuming the same amount of things can be produced. A problem would be not having access to those things.

The class relation

Is that class overloaded?

Politics is how peaceful societies address problems.

I think this guy sounds like an over-entitled sheltered snowflake. If you have the sense to get into Google, then it follows you have the sense to go and get a job anywhere else on the planet. Who cares if Google didn't work out? There is no dearth of interesting work going on in the world today. Go find it.

That said everytime I watch Sunder Pichai doing his pseudo Steve Jobs routine I get a headache at how superficial and unimaginative Google is. I am not at all surprised at the shallow culture.

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