Is 'learn to craft' the new 'learn to code?' | Hacker News Reader

Is 'learn to craft' the new 'learn to code?'

qz.com

19 pointsgeox11 comments

Timing a market change is inherently even more risky. Think about all of the students in the past 10 years who chose compsci not because they enjoyed it but because of the lucrative salaries. Now, those without the passion or knowhow can't pass an increasingly higher bar in an increasingly difficult market.

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.

I don’t want to assume I understand the balance here, but what percentage of trade work is dependent on a strong economy? I imagine some industrial jobs are fairly immune to economic factors, but I imagine there is tons of work in the residential space that ebbs and flows.

AI will fuck over anyone that works for a living. Only the people owning stuff for a living will profit off AI.

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.

> 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.

I actually think the last point isn’t exactly true. I mean certainly in aggregate, but not at the margins. If the new tech billionaire elite just want to get to space, then they just need enough people to mine a some minerals and metal and make their space ships. If you control all the AI bots you can make money that way.

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.

Yeah, and as a tradie, your services will be paid for by wealthy white collar workers, like a guy who just moved into a bigger house he paid for with his cushy IT job, and wants a top-of-the-line HVAC system installed.

If the guy isn't making good money, he won't be hiring you either.

Look, I would love if this were true, but when digging into the data, it doesn’t seem to me like the promise of blue collar work matches the reality. Anyone have a good objective breakdown telling me I’m wrong?

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.

Ah yes, the search for meaning filtered through individual transactional fulfillment.

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.

I'm struggling to extract meaning or message from your last sentence.

Stated simply: Ignore any philosophy or ideology that fails at universal-infinite timescales

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.

I see what you are saying, thanks for going into it. I agree that recency bias leads to adopting frameworks that are a poor overall fit for explaining ongoing (for the foreseeabel future) phenomena.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com