Since you mentioned Etaoin Shrdlu and hot type / linotype...

There are a lot of industries (at least historically) that have organized labor.

In the UK, there was the “Wapping Dispute” in 1986 when computer technology enabled journalists to type in their copy directly, doing away with the need for workers to set type using linotype printing.

Linotype was a big improvement on the older letter-by-letter typesetting and sped up composition of text 3 - 5 times compared to hand composition. Its introduction enabled a small number of machine operators to set type for multi-page newspapers, leading to an explosion of print editions in the 1900s.

But in 1986, 100 years after the invention of linotype machines, they were being replaced with computerized direct input typesetting. As a result of the new process, UK print unions held a year-long strike.

Result of the strike: failure. 6000 printers were fired, but there were jobs for 670 new workers who used word processing.

You probably can't force your job to remain (well, I guess some people have).

(not a native speaker) fired up as in "optimistic and enthusiastic about the new messiah" or as in "Butlearian jihadi, all AI is haram" way?

Tell us more.

[dead]

That's a good point. I got to hang out with a printer in Slovenia for a few hours in February and your comment made me realize how deep and strong his faith is despite the changes that automation has brought to printing.

He had classes set up for kids and grown-ups to learn printing and they had a ton of cool projects to show for it. We went through all his letter blocks and he told stories about a giant building in the U.S. Northeast that was just stacked with those blocks. He loved the idea of that place and saw threats to its existence as real problems, but not as existential. Faith never came up. It was just there and that's how I know it was real.

We need a path for people effected to be able to at least cover basic needs, while also offering some kinda training into a different role that pays.

Defiantly not something most countries have setup.

What does “AI booster” mean? From this comment and username I thought you meant they were funded by AI companies or doing marketing for them, but the most I see is that they filmed some interviews with filmmakers about AI?

The about page says this:

> In the cultural realm, Studio B is networking frontier technologists with Hollywood auteurs and science fiction authors who will shape the next narrative.

The organization was founded in 2010. Asking filmmakers about AI seems pretty on brand for their goal of talking about frontier technologies intersecting with Hollywood, does it not?

Is there some definition of “AI booster” that I’m not aware of? Or does it really just mean anyone who talks about AI in a positive light? I don’t see any smoking gun financial incentive connection here where they’re getting paid to “boost AI”

Thank you for your service to community, dear stranger. o7

Thank you! HN doesn't usually do specialty/novelty accounts but I've very excited about this one.

> You cannot read these articles posing as human interest without following the money.

Thank you for that, and look who one of their speakers is? Hardcore technocrat and transhumanist Mr. Harari! You can read his opinions about transhumanism and the Fourth Industrial Revolution in "Homo Deus" and on the WEF website.

Ah yes, any funding source invalidates all the arguments....

Does this article seem like an AI boosting article? Perhaps exactly the opposite?

I dislike this article intensely, and disagree with it, but its lot because somehow the Berggruen Institute is shadow pushing AI here

before trading routes and international water navigation standardized

people could convene in secret, organize, and coordinate without leaving a digital trail

impossible task in the present. lot of gen z can't even read or concentrate for more than 5 minutes

That's a fine philosophy on a personal level, but if the labor market is shocked for entire sectors there's not enough slack in the system for all of those people to adapt at once. That's how you end up with lost generations.

You have to do something that is truly effective and productive, otherwise you live a fake life, you live in a zoo, you live a performance.

If nobody actually needs your work's output and you are simply allowed to do it out of some kind of state benevolence because it's some quaint tradition, you're laughing stock. We should not put up with being that.

Sure, as long as the new jobs pay at least as much as the old jobs and society is willing to pay for the retraining. In that case I imagine there would be lots of people willing to reskill.

>I sense there is this air around of "demand our jobs keep being relevant"

I sense the inverse: a demand that we make ourselves irrelevant to satisfy interest rate inspired demand for cost savings.

Executives have developed a religion around AI and it is inspiring an orgy of value destruction in software orgs as they try to slash costs and increase efficiency. But theyve done it rather stupidly with this new religion rather than with more prosaic and altogether more boring improvements.

Quality has plummeted everywhere and there aren't even any meaningful cost savings to show for it, just empty promises and more hype.

> The irony is not lost on me on all those years where people were advised to "just learn to code, bro" in order to escape the personally threatening situation of obsolete jobs. Well, now people feel it's our turn so, "just learn to _something_ dudes"?

Yeah, I imagine that there won’t be much sympathy for the cognitive elite when the benefits of being smarter disappear. Even if we get AI-powered communism, they’ll get the same UBI check as everyone else.

Deleting career fields in and of itself is not a problem with technology, but when it's like the eye of sauron scouring workplaces and snapping jobs away (pardon the mixed universes), it starts to become a little alarming.

University graduates are often considered min-bar for white-collar work hiring, so if it takes 4 years to train someone, how are people supposed to decide on a career path when it takes less time than that to completely alter the workplace?

My daughter is entering her first year of nursing, a career path that she is greatly looking towards. Who says in 3 years that robotics companies don't actually deliver on their promises and completely up-end the care industry? While I think that unlikely, it's not like people aren't trying to automate nurses away.

Travel agents come to mind for that. Bill Gates saw the future with and funded Expedia.com

> UBI type system in place to pad the fall, people will bounce back and adapt when industries break down

If you mean UBI that would allow anyone to stop working and live a modest life, that just doesn't work. UBI is essentially redistribution from those who work to those who don't work. That's not just a "safety net" because you could decide to stop working forever just because it's more comfortable than working.

I would possibly exploit such a system. Take 4% from my portfolio + UBI on top. Maybe work 3 days a week if I find a job that I enjoy.

Definitely agree with this! Given the pace of technological development, we should basically expect entire groups of people to constantly drop out of the competitive labor market. Don't get me wrong, new jobs will be created as well, but it's also very possible many people will also not be able to reskill into those new roles without some sort of structural support. People have faith that technology will create new markets and roles, and while that's historically been true, I think people also tend to forget that this happens in aggregate, and that someone's personal career trajectory can be largely luck dependent. You may happen to find the role of the future or you might get stuck with depreciating skills, hard to say which unless you can predict the future!

I think we've largely been able to avoid large scale disruption in society for the past several decades because the groups losing their careers were small enough, but we can see negative effects in things like health data. I think Deaths of Despair by Deaton and Case does a pretty good job at talking about this. However, AI now threatens a much more visible work segment, the upper middle class, so I do agree that now is a very interesting time to see what happens.

We never talk about social welfare programs? Odd, I hear chatter all the time. How about we never talk about rewarding management-by-breaking-things?

maybe because every time UBI is tried it fails?

"If there’s a robust public healthcare and UBI type system in place to pad the fall, people will bounce back and adapt when industries break down."

This would be great, in theory. The reality is that people would live on it and never work, have kids, and the same thing would happen with a new generation. As it expands, you run out of tax payers and the system collapses.

A 'robust' healthcare system that the government runs is a pipe dream.

"have nothing to lose and decide to attack the source of their misery. Bread and circuses will only distract so much."

"If instead we stick our head in the sand and ignore the human cost so that we can temporarily enjoy maximum technological progress AND maximum wealth accumulation for shareholders, as we have been doing for the better part of a century, things will slowly break down and eventually collapse when the pace of change accelerates to the point that enough people simply can’t keep up, have nothing to lose and decide to attack the source of their misery. Bread and circuses will only distract so much."

I suppose the people that are actually working will just need to get more guns.

Maybe I'm too pessimistic but i doubt how this can work out worldwide. It can work out maybe for some few wealthy countries but in this AI revolutions most likely we will have only 2 winners: USA and China.

Smaller EU countries cannot even today introduce a fair revenue tax on big tech so that they pay any tax without being threatened about retaliatory steps by US administration.

I had some level of faith as a scientist. Today, I expect that scientists will be replaced by faith in AI before we're replaced by AI. Either one is a threat to my job.

Probably clergy?

It seems like the occupations that are easiest to have faith in are generally occupations that are paid less.

Lawyers

Do concerts. It's the old way. It's human and personal. It's effort though, not passive income like album sales used to be.

I'm pretty sure there's literally zero risk of structural demand changes for law enforcement. Defunding the police isn't going to happen and there's no plausible path toward automating most of the work. Security cameras and robots can only do a fraction of what will be needed.

A broadly generalized super-automaton has long been a fantasy. Suddenly it's not so fantastical.

The problem in the Western world is that switching to a different career is made almost impossible. This society pushes people out of the workforce all the time. I'm one of them. I've been "unemployed" since 2012 with apparently ZERO ability to get any kind of skilled job ever again, just due to a "zigged when I should have zagged" situation decades ago.

Eh, chin up. The machines and/or the replaced masses will rise up and kill the capital class in the end.

[flagged]