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Comment by ironmagma | Hacker News Reader

Society doesn't owe anybody anything. So who's to say when you find something else to do, it will pay enough to live?

I think the very definition of society implies that we are all owed a lot, and we all owe a lot to society. Politics is about deciding what.

Education? Safety? Medical help? A home? Food? Transport? Communication?

These are things society needs to provide.

In turn, we provide society with labour, applied skills, decision making etc.

If there is no (trusted, working) social contract - society breaks down.

If we allow a small elite to monopolize the productivity gains and efficiency increased from new technology - the results will be dire.

I see the more feasible solutions to be some kind of universal income or negative tax - combined with reduced work hours (eg 30 hour weeks, to start).

They've earned 500k/y for a couple years, they don't need another job that pays enough, that's why they can be so indifferent about the outcome.

I'm no where near that TC and think this way too. This field of work is generally new in history. The whole woe is me what will we ever do attitude is so weak and frankly annoying.

Most of modern society is new in history; what is that supposed to say? If you are making the point that it's unproven and fragile, that would be a good point and actually one that supports "woe is me" because all of it could disappear overnight considering the fragility.

In my lifetime I have watched SPARC SUN Servers being thrown in the trash, spaghetti coded javascript and php run fortune 500s, the linux kernel adding containers, and everyone now being required to know how to code for CI so they can rerun tests, linters, and rebuild their app on every commit and publish it to an S3 bucket with specific IAM permissions tied to some SSO IAM provider.

At no point in any of that was anyone coddled or told that they will get to keep their job forever. Learn new skills. That's the game.

It's not even unique to tech. Doctors have to do this too.

There's so much work in the industry right now around LLM implementation that folks not looking into that are sleeping on good jobs.

Learning a new language or tech has always been such a minor hurdle. The whole point of the current wave of AI is that there is nowhere to retreat to if your means of income depends solely on intellectual work. Learn a trade or train to be a vet, sure, that'll last a while longer.

Doctors have to undergo minor professional development refreshers — not replace their entire education. There is a reason we educate early in life; it's hard to retrain the old (and expensive or even approaching impossible).

This comment gives me a chuckle. In my lifetime alone I've seen oncology completely transform before my eyes. New tools. New techniques. New drugs. I've also watched doctors in my family study this stuff in their off time in order to get certain positions.

"minor professional development refreshers" lol

Also known as (unpaid) hard work during the weekend.

Obviously fields like oncology and genetics are going to have major disruptions. What sort of event would trigger someone needing to redo their entire 7+ years of medical schooling?

The history is quite unequivocal about what happens when there's too many people who don't earn enough to live. Governments are aware too, I think.

> Society doesn't owe anybody anything.

That's obviously false. What's the point of society if that's true? Do you think there should be no government roads, no government health care (if you're in the US, you may think this, but only because you're indoctrinated), no legal system (or enforcement thereof) to protect you from criminals, no legally enforceable human rights whatsoever? Etc., etc.?

Once they actually understand what they're saying, no sane person believes that society doesn't owe them anything.

That’s actually something I agree with; I was making that statement as a challenge to the parent comment because it seems to be what they believe.

Correct. But don't you want something from the future? What do you imagine it to look like? How far is it from what you hope it might? What are you willing to do to bring them closer together?

"Society doesn't owe anybody anything. So who's to say when you find something else to do, it will pay enough to live?"

I don't think Society means what you think it means.

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