I'm almost certain there is biblical-level astroturfing happening to make camp (1) much bigger than it really is.
Otherwise, Schmidt wouldn't have drowned in a sea of boos at his commencement speech at UA.
Otherwise, Schmidt wouldn't have drowned in a sea of boos at his commencement speech at UA.
New graduates haven’t known anything else and don’t have the money to be nostalgic about a party they missed.
Respectfully disagree. New grads entering the workforce now started college in 2022. This was during the post-COVID "Great Resignation" when offers and employee leverage were at their peak and AI wasn't that useful.
Very different from the "use AI or your fired/blackballed" age we live in now.
That "lower-value human capital" isn't janitors - it's a wide array of highly skilled professions including software engineers and many others. Of course the guy who's at the top engaging in nothing but 'unfalsifiable' fuzzy actions, and could be replaced (sans his connections/corruptions) most easily of all, is ultra-high-mega-untouchable infinity value humanity embodied.
I really don't like what big business does to people, on the bottom and the top. The fact somebody could even use the term lower-value human capital without cringing at themselves, let alone to a reporter in public - that's one hell of a bubble this guy lives in. And now we're dumping "AI" into this bubble. WCGW?
[1] - https://news.sky.com/story/standard-chartered-to-replace-low...
Hell, janitors' work is less threatened by GenAI than most of the CEOs who are super-hyped about that very same GenAI.
David Graeber's Bullshit Jobs might actually work as a roadmap of sorts..
But that's cold comfort, because janitors are already paid shit wages.
The insecurity about AI isn't exactly "will I keep my job?" It's "will I be thrown into a life of precarity as my skills are devalued?"
Janitors aren't threatened by GenAI, because they're already where the threats take you.
Every other market where they could transfer their skills to is threatened by the same hypothetical. And if they jump the collar colour divide, they’d have be limited to the least skilled ones, which includes Janitors.
Now perhaps that would still not threaten the job itself as much, but an increase in supply definitely won’t be good for the wages.
While tech pays well, in many countries it is seen as a regular office worker, with a similar salary level.
And if you are doing consulting is very much a gig economy job, if you're going on your own.
False consciousness always strikes back.
For all those coders who claim "coding is the smallest part of s/ware dev", they're in for a rude awakening when they realise that while it may have been a small part, it was the part that lead to high salaries.
After all, anyone who wanted to be a business analyst (i.e. spec a solution and hand it off to someone else for coding) could have had that job ages ago, but they didn't because it pays so poorly (even more poorly when all coders are moving into that role too).
Ok, bud; sure.
I didn't start my professional career as a BA 20 years ago that did exactly what most devs are being "gently forced" into doing now, but whatever.
For what it's worth, I'm pretty "left" - at least within the HN bubble - and I like the cut of your jib. I devoutly wish that the broader "right" cared even one iota about anti-trust / anti-monopoly enforcement.
The biggest error of the "left" in most of these conversations is treating political institutions as something uniquely well-intentioned and competent, rather than understanding them as just another set of institutions in society, subject to the same incentive structures, biases, and errors as everything else.
A lot of skepticism of political interventions doesn't necessarily come from refusal to acknowledge that there is a problem, but rather from the recognition that the proposed solutions often just represent even worse instances of the same sort of problem. I think a lot of the people who've tended to support political intervention may have operated under the naive assumption that giving the federal government expansive power to intervene into our social and economic affairs could only bring net benefit; hopefully, the behavior of the current administration in the US should be something of a wake-up call.
On the other hand, skepticism about political intervention over-corrects when it assumes or insists that government action can never be a net benefit. Even the first Trump administration produced one extraordinary success - "Operation Warp Speed" - though, ironically, their faction is too ideologically warped to claim it.
The only point of difference I would identify is that I think a democratic government is more accountable than the monied interests to which it is a necessary counter-balance - and that, historically, the US government has (albeit imperfectly) functioned as such. However, the current US regime is, as you suggest, endeavoring to place itself beyond all democratic accountability, so yeah: I can read the writing on that wall. The bitter irony, of course, is that the political movement which has delivered an historically corrupt and unaccountable executive has been built upon the support of naive skeptics. I hope they will recalibrate their assumptions accordingly.
I'm not entirely sure about that. It makes sense in theory, but in practice, we often see vested interests successfully influence democratic processes to achieve ends that would be more difficult to achieve via pure market dynamics.
We've ended up with the worst of both worlds: institutions that derive their legitimacy from perceived democratic accountability, but with the functional mechanisms of that accountability reduced largely to performative rituals; meanwhile, the incentive structures and motivations that drive their day-to-day behavior derive largely from the influence of special interests or ideological factions.
I think public choice theory is largely correct on this, and many of the policies that are intended to pursue the public interest actually end up working against it.
Democratic accountability is meant to be the alternative to mass violence. The Demos will, in the end, have their say, and it's far better for everyone that it be through the ballot box than otherwise. Elites forget this, over and over throughout history, to their (or their descendants', if they're lucky) cost. That's the lesson I wish was more remembered, because I don't want to have to live (even if I do) through that kind of time.
Spot the (other) Slashdot refugee! (And why were you at the Devil's Sacrament, Mr. Danaris?)
A group of 22 year olds are 'hissing' because they're upset, not because they have some magic insight.
AI is real, it is overstated, the value is not comping to Main Street.
That's assuming both that the audience there was a representative sample of the general population and that ~50% of an audience can't generate a sea of boos. The second one in particular is certainly wrong.
https://www.thedailybeast.com/ex-google-ceo-eric-schmidt-boo...
and why did that real estate lady who gave a speech at UCF get the same treatment whenever she (also) said that AI is the future?