Why? I think the emphasis was on “marketing noise,” i.e. something no one wants or needs that is forced into peoples’ eyeballs against their will through paid advertising channels.
There is a perception among the broader public that techies want to automate all the jobs away and don't really care what the people displaced do to earn a living afterward.
Bland, inadequate platitudes thrown out advising people to just go find a marketable skill in the new economy ignore the fact that the number of potential occupations that you can make a decent living doing has been shrinking for decades.
If you're not a programmer, a doctor, or possess some other rare skill, you're fucked. And of course the whole point of a marketable skill is that it's only marketable because other people don't have it.
At some point we're going to have to go through the stages of grief as a society and accept that it's unsustainable to deny a middle class lifestyle to anyone who doesn't possess rare skills, especially when the list of skills considered rare shrinks decade after decade thanks to automation.
A continuously growing underclass with continuously declining prospects is a recipe for violence and revolution if we don't start taking this problem more seriously.
There are many possible answers. Universal basic income gets thrown around a lot. I like that idea, but I think it needs to be paired with wage subsidies for low wage jobs too. If basically every job is on the path to becoming low wage some day, we have to regard that as the market failure that it is and stop letting the market near-unilaterally decide the price of labor.
> If you're not a programmer, a doctor, or possess some other rare skill, you're fucked.
it's coming for these too
> A continuously growing underclass with continuously declining prospects is a recipe for violence and revolution if we don't start taking this problem more seriously.
the complete breakup of Microsoft, OpenAI, Google and Amazon will be on the political agenda in 2028
failing a political solution: violence will follow
there was a post yesterday that wished GPT-4 was never invented... it's one of Nick Bostrom's black marbles
It’s ridiculous to spin being able to spend less labor in total for the same amount of goods as a bad thing for society. It is a Pareto improvement. If it leads to people being overall worse off, you should blame the governance, not “techies”.
The governance is certainly the main issue, but bad governance is easier to sustain when those who aren't impacted are more likely to go around denying the problem.
Make the channels that those ads are pushed through.
Both are fundamentally negative for people in the long run, but I think the superiority complex comes from the naive idea that if you’re the place the garbage is sent to then it’s somehow better. There’s probably a lot of TV execs who felt the same way.
