> a lack of intellectual community.

The issue may be simpler than that. The technical cohort that's on the chopping block of automation right now uses seemingly sophisticated words to basically describe what the coal miners and human calculators felt in the past. When you compound this with the general struggle on the social skills dimension that defines the majority of this group, you can see why the idea of stepping out of their respective narrow field and getting a hobby would seem ludicrous.

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switchbak an hour ago | parent | next [-]

There's always some anxiety around job security, that's nothing new. I've been around enough rounds of that to know it well. This isn't that.

We're talking about a fundamental disruption of knowledge work, to know that you might not even be able to pivot to something else. It's kind of like when people would callously tell the coal miners to "learn to code", except it's now "learn to be an electrician".

But I don't feel you're really acting in good faith here, with your negative stereotypes and derisive language.

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caaqil an hour ago | parent [-]

So: the anxiety is real and not new, but this phase of automation is really unique and different, because of "fundamental" "disruption" of "knowledge work". Consider me convinced, since this line of reasoning is original and not accounted for in the comment you're replying to.

	▲	boo_you 42 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		> When you compound this with the general struggle on the social skills dimension that defines the majority of this group Really appreciate you going the extra mile to drive this point home.

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ok_dad 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Yea it’s probably deep seated horror at slowly being replaced. I’m not sure what I feel but ordering a clanker around everyday is exhausting both emotionally and intellectually. I would rather not even talk to the thing, but they fucking suck at software architecture no matter what anyone says. You can’t just leave them alone with a task because you get the worst designs 7/10 times. The other 3/10 scare me enough that I’ve started learning how to install solar and battery systems online.

I should probably read something about past instances of this; you mentioned coal miners and maybe hearing their stories will help us.

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georgemcbay an hour ago | parent [-]

> I should probably read something about past instances of this; you mentioned coal miners and maybe hearing their stories will help us.

IMO it probably won't make you feel any better, for the following reasons:

1) The AI disruption is going to be far wider than any previous disruption, people will have much less chance to pivot to something else while continuing to do economically productive work, because not just one field is in danger, every field based on cognitive work is in danger (and all the manual labor isn't too far behind with robotics advances).

2) Even despite the more limited blast radius of prior work disruptions, they were still generally awful for the people who got disrupted. People love to cheerily talk about how the industrial revolution lead to a world of more, different, better, safer jobs and while that did happen, the newer world wasn't really for the people who were displaced, but rather people of the next generations. The people who were actively displaced were mostly hard fucked... economically destitute and emotionally damaged from loss of purpose.

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ChickeNES an hour ago | parent [-]

Nah, my wife is from an old coal mining family; her and her family are VASTLY better off than their immediate ancestors. I’d also suspect if said ancestors were alive now, they’d be happy to know that their descendants live in vastly better and safer world

	▲	georgemcbay an hour ago \| parent [-]
		IMO none of this is at odds with what I said. The test would be the ability to interview the ancestors in the past, near the end of their life, after they had lost their jobs. How happy were they then? And in any case, should we move into a world with real ASI the outcome is going to be very different than the displacement of a single industry. If an ASI replaces you at one cognitive job, it replaces you at all of them certainly faster than you can reasonably retrain.

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stopwatchstring an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

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