And people wonder why I'm an AI hater.
I honestly pity watching my fellow software engineers rush to adapt to this new dystopia, just to stay afloat a little while longer before they are truly obsolete. It is quite tragic.
During my university time, all main exams were oral examinations: One professor, one protocol keeper, and the student. Duration: 1-2 hours.
The unemployment rate in the US is 3.7%. 38% of adults in the US have a college degree. 38% is hardly everyone, and if nobody can find a job, then the unemployment rate should be far higher than 3.7%, which is basically full employment.
Lets say you graduated with a STEM degree and now you're working at starbucks or walmart. Congrats you're employed! Is that sustainable or good? It's just not a useful metric. It's like the super rich pointing at the stock market and going "we're not in a recession, the number is going up!" and yet real buying power and wages are declining for everyone except the massively wealthy.
For sure 20-y.o. adults have no degree and students are not count as unemployed.
I think education is incredibly important, but I understand that I'm going to have to retrain myself a little bit. A college degree can no-longer be assumed to be a proxy for having put in the effort to deeply study something.
Now what's the solution for this? I don't know, but we have made the mistake of conflating pieces of paper for expertise. And I say that as someone with 3 degrees.
Thinking back to my time as a professional pilot before I medicaled out and pivoted into tech, the FAA really (for all it's problems) has a pretty good system to train and test new pilots.
You have to have some hours with a certified instructor and some hours on your own. The tests to become a certified instructor are considered challenging, and many people fail. Then you take a written test, then you take a practical test. It's one on one. You and the examiner. And if you do not meet the standard, you fail. That's "ok." It's just fine to fail people who do poorly during a checkride. They go back, they get retrained, and they do it again.
If you have a lot of failures during training, you'll have to answer for them in interviews later on, but often times there's a sort of holistic treatment to it. If you busted a checkride 15 years ago, and have since been fine, you'll be ok. If it's a recurring theme, you'll have a hard time finding a job (and that's the right thing, IMO). But the format of "Written, Oral Exam, and Practical Exam" is the "right" model for making sure people know wtf they are doing.
How do we do that in tech? Hell if I know, maybe a proctored written exam, followed by an oral exam, then a project? But who knows.
can anyone here think of some better ways where we could decouple the education process from the work process? To me this seems like the main problem. It seems that we've decided that "get good grades == good employee" collectively. I know I'm a bad employee (which is why I work for myself now but that's another story), but I got great grades in school. I don't know, I just feel like school was rarely about actually learning / growing and was mostly about vocational work most of my time in undergrad, and I wish we could de-couple that some? But maybe I'm naive here...
Which is even becoming less likely with STEM, as we hit a confluence of higher education costs, fewer job openings, and AI as a competitor for work.
And it's not just that it would cost a lot, it's that it would cost a lot and a motivated person can already do a 90% job of it for free on their own.
That's the thing, like, there's not a whole hell of a lot I learned in Phil 201 that is directly applicable to my job, but, you know the class is valuable. I took art history in college. Turned into being one of the most important classes I ever took and I'm one of those stem major types.
Productivity shouldn't be the point of education - you get productivity indirectly out of the education and search for knowledge, but if we want more data plumbers (which is largely what most of the programming I do for money on a regular basis is), I don't think we necessarily need to make certain that college is paying for them.
I mean, think bigger - this new technology is going to be utterly transformative to our society and economic system. If we could actually approach some sort of reasonable post-scarcity world, what would we want it to be like? So, maybe there's grades, but it's "pass/fail" or something, but all of these metrics that we use to evaluate have become targets.
I'd say, "why shouldn't so-called unproductive stuff get funded?"
A bit like public healthcare - everyone pays for it so that everyone can use it.
Regardless, I never found grades all that useful in college because I had so many classes where either there were like 3 tests and that was it? Or the homework was nothing like the tests.
I don’t think my university experience when I went to grad school several years ago was a “upscale lifestyle resort.” But maybe things are different on the east coast or whatever?
But I’d say, yeah, if you’re young/poor you oughta be able to get room and board covered too?
FWIW, I live near the Univ. of Michigan. I've talked to a well-to-do stockbroker, who graduated from U-M a couple decades ago - but can't believe just how opulent U-M's latest round of rebuilding their old undergraduate dorms was.
Suffice to say that none of his own ample wealth is going to the U.
Instead of getting student loans and going to college for 4 years where you don't accomplish much, companies should directly offer high school students 4 year full paid internships. At the end the student needs to go through a test from an expert in that field, possibly a professor lead examination, and to the degree that they pass the company and student share in a large prize. If they pass that test, they officially get the degree.
> allow companies to direct the research towards their ends
So long as they hit the requirements to reward the prize, I don't much care what else the students are driven to do. One might ask how does this differ from when a company hires a fresh graduate? In fact, I wouldn't mind also applying this system to those that have degrees, and are trying to advance in their careers.
My only concern is that the students would then be able to be hire-able by other companies in their field. If that answer is mostly yes, the system is working as intended. If it's not, the requirements would be raised until they are.
If we begin doing this, and as a result, none of the academics can get a job as they are all filled by the 'embedded' students, I don't mind seeing how that shifts everything.
The excessive education requirements for jobs came about mainly to provide easy legal ways to cull a large pool of applicants. This credentialism trend has grown far beyond anything that is healthy.
One possible and feasible solution is to encourage (via funding and guidance) more coop and internship programs and partnerships. This is especially true for local junior colleges, but is also useful for 4-year schools.
That doesn’t really decouple education and work, but it would be something that could move the needle from the local level to the national level.
If you want to decouple education and work, I will humbly suggest that the system already exists. It’s people using their personal networks. Many people seem to find this to be incredibly unfair (however one defines unfair), but it’s an absolute cheat code / life hack for decoupling education and work.
Simple example:
I graduated from a prestigious school (one that is known for feeding Wall Street) a year and change after a stock market collapse. Only half of the graduates from the previous year had jobs in their chosen career fields. My year was worse.
When we saw who got Wall Street jobs, it was folks in the top 10% of the class, and about the same number randomly scattered amongst the rest. Some of these folks were very low ranked, and they were known for aggressively taking advantage of the “gentleman’s C” system. What was the common thread of all of the non-top 10%? It was almost always a personal connection, often a close one like a parent, being in a position of power at the employer.
None of this was or is obvious in boom times, but in times of distress we were able to see who was swimming naked in terms of connections/nepotism.
Recently I saw Alex Karp (Palantir CEO) on one of those market shows (CNBC I think? Something like that) and he was upset at Dario's doom trolling. Why was he upset? Because he was worried that the populist rage towards AI was going to result in a wealth tax! And the thing is he's probably right! The thing these people fear the most, socialism, is the thing they're ironically probably going to make popular in the united states by absolutely trying to bleed the population dry.
What that's going to look like I couldn't begin to imagine, but I think you might onto something about the AI industry not being all that capitalistic presently. Not an economist, but we're definitely in oligopoly territory here? Because there are only like 4-5 serious companies here.
I too may be accused of having the faith that it's "all going to work out" though. I think it will. I think when things start getting weird enough a bunch of creative people will figure out logical solutions that work in the moment and we'll run with those. Barring revolution, that's kind of how things have always been. Things get weird, then we figure out how to fix it or go to blows over it. I think going to blows domestically is pretty unlikely as of yet though despite the "dooooom" narrative that a lot of people tout.
edit to add:
I feel like a lot about this negative "ermagerd fascism is imminent" stuff is poisoning the well of discourse. Is it a threat? Yup. Can I envision a scenario where the bad guys win and I get "the wall" after my LLM moderated kangaroo court? Totally. Do I think that's very likely? No. And I think the immediate appeal to "doooooom!" is a thought killing cliche at this point.
You know what we should be doing? We should be figuring out how to create a new system that reflects the realities of the modern world. We should be actively designing new ways of arranging society that makes the world a better place for all. Like, go read about FALC, or read Bookchin or something. But these fear based pithy appeals to doom lead nowhere.
The fascists are real - I recognize that, but let's figure out how to build something better!
That's optimistic. IMHO, it's more likely the libertarian tech-lords make sure we get some kind of hyper-capitalism, where you're either rich or bone-crushingly poor.
I don't know what we get? But if this is the rhetoric now, how many Luigis would we expect to see as things got really bad, and the vision you paint is really bad.
Also, after a couple assassinations of business leaders I think we'll see gun control laws like the US has never seen.
There are so many firearms in America even if there was bipartisan support for a gun ban it wouldn’t happen. You literally couldn’t get rid of them if you tried.
I actually don't really want that sort of outcome, I'd like to see some sort of libertarian socialism arise out of post-scarcity? But what that looks like? I don't know. 20 year old me would have had lots of ideas about how we "ought to be" but now, pushing 40? I am less certain of the things I "know."
Regardless, I don't see the really bad guys winning this one...
What? Where do you think all of the capital they are burning to stay afloat comes from? I'll give you a hint, it's from the capitalists.
The ideal of capitalism is that optimizing for profits means growth. But the fundamentals of capitalism means that, since capitalists own the means of productions, they can do whatever they want with it.
It's the same thing with AI right now. Oh, you guys need another trillion to burn and you have no plan for profitability? Here's a blank check! Oh, your job is going to be eliminated and we have no coherent answer for what you should do next, because we want to take that job too? Not our problem.
Any semblance of capitalism we have is a shambling corpse barely getting around. Do you know who pulls on all the strings of our economy, gives out student aid loans to kids who just barely graduates high school? Who controls market interest rates, and gives massive multi billion dollar contracts to Companies like OpenAI, Anthropic, Facebook, Google, Microsoft? Who approved of the printing of the 50% increase in the dollar supply in the last 5 years?
Take a guess. I'll give you a hint, if you don't pay them on a yearly basis 30-50% of your paycheck, you go to prison.
Nothing in your provided definition of capitalism precludes government control of money supply, taxation, regulation, or even government contracts.
Private ownership still owns capital goods and private decision is the primary driver of investment, prices, production and distribution in most industries. This is why we have a hard time with things that are obviously good for society as a whole, like renewable energy, efficient transportation, and low-cost housing, that don't have a competitive short-term return on investment.
Ever taken a Redhat exam - such as Red Hat Certified Engineer? That's the right model. It's a hand-on exam with arbitrary exam objectives you have to meet (by any means possible, there is more than one right way to achieve desired state). There is no internet, devices, or anything else to help you. People that pass allow you to make assumptions about them - for example... without stackoverflow, github, or the internet at all - this person can configure virtual hosts with nginx, firewall rules, host VMs, and administer network concepts(virtual switches, routing) between them. To do that without any GUI or internet available - it means you understand those concepts very well, and can implement them blindfolded.
Any RHCEs want to chime in?
no internet-style indexing tho, so it's a lot of ctrl-f and hoping you pick the correct chapter -- which can be hard with a timelimit. on stuff I was strong in it was trivial, I'd already seen the docs and knew what to look for but on the few items I wasn't it was a lot of flailing.
Maybe I'm a weirdo, but part of me wishes I could be like a sysadmin in a powerplant or like something similar where we used tools like that and I'd have to get really good at using them.
Flying was like that, you had to know what you were doing, and aspects of tech touch that, but certainly not in the domain I'm currently in. Seriously, cool, I didn't even know this existed.
You know, I was reading an article about falling labor force participation rates, and one thing was pointed out was there seems to be a supply mismatch. Plenty of jobs are available, they’re just shit, go nowhere, pay nothing in the facing of rapidly rising COL jobs.
I suspect the only retirement I’ll ever see will have to be via a shotgun.