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I'm thinking about the culture war around AI, specifically the whole UBI debate. If AI truly does take over a lot of human work, there's a lot of people who are savagely agitating for a UBI on one side, saying we'll be post work. The other side of course says no that's not how it works, besides we aren't even close to being able to afford that. The left (generally) takes the former, while the right generally takes the latter.
What I'm surprised by is why nobody has so far mentioned what, to me, seems the obvious compromise - we just shorten the work week! As our forefathers did forcing a 5 day, 8 hour work week, why don't we continue there? Go down to a 4 day work week, and/or shorten standard working hours to 6 per day?
If AI truly will obviate the need for a lot of work, how is this not the more rational solution than trying to magically create a UBI out of money we don't have? How come this idea has barely even entered the discourse? I have been talking and thinking about AI unemployment for years and never once have heard someone argue for this compromise.
It’s like when the Nazis designated certain sections of their population to be “useless eaters” and then gave them a lifetime stipend out of the government’s pocket so they could continue uselessly eating. Or when corporations run the numbers and decide that ten percent of their employees aren’t making the company enough money so they decide to keep paying them anyway. Or when Pol Pot decided Cambodia didn’t need scientists or intellectuals so he gave them all a monthly check to stay out of everybody else’s way. Or how during periods of food insecurity, Inuit tribes would give the most elderly and infirm members double portions of seal meat to make sure they don’t lose too much weight.
Or when the richest cities in the richest country that ever was saw people people shitting and smoking fent on the streets and spent billions on them to make sure they had a clean place to smoke their fent.
Yeah, the people potentially losing their jobs due to AI aren't as sympathetic as that bunch.
Techbros really have had horrendous PR as a class and it's not helped that people associate the average techbro with the people at the top of the techbro pyramid like Zuck and Musk etc. and so are happy with seeing them suffer, even though their suffering is often done to benefit people like Zuck and Musk etc. (less headcount, more automation).
It doesn't help that the stereotypical tech bro, even if he is no Zuck or Musk, has made a name for himself as willing to lick the SF hobo poop off as many boots as it takes for a chance to be a little more like them. It's hard to argue on an emotional level that a cringe wannabe "sigma grindset" Zuckerberg of smart juicers isn't even more revolting than the real deal.
This is part of the problem. The tech bros are the founders, but the people losing their jobs are regular techies, and are tarred with the same brush.
The "tech bros" who have become an acceptable target for MSM derision are the young men going into software engineering because it promises the most legible route into the upper-middle-class for a smart, hard-working young man from a middle-class background. The same kind of men went into finance in the 1980's and corporate middle management in the 1960's (a period mostly referred to by cultural commentators as "the Fifties"). Some of these guys get lucky and end up as founders, a lot of them end up as Seniors at FAANG grinding out an upper-middle class income in order to enjoy a quite ordinary middle-class lifestyle in a HCOL city.
There is nothing inverse about the snobbery people failing out of a class express against the people trying to rise into it. And given what has happened to media business models since the rise of the internet, pursuing a career as a journalist is one of the easiest ways to fail out of the upper-middle-class.
The Fifties corporate man (note that the ad agents of Mad Men did not work in corporate middle management - their clients did. The Mad Men are the trailblazers the yuppies would follow), the 80's yuppie, and the 00's techbro are all hated by the same kind of people for the same reason - they are chasing money and status at the expense of self-actualisation, and doing so in the way that was boring and conventional at the time.
The people who end up as senior software engineers at a FAANG (a position I have held) are generally not bros of any sort. There's a few; they don't remain in the role; bros are generally climbers, and if they can't climb within the company they'll head somewhere else. Mostly it's geeks, as you'd expect. And the bros still DO go into finance, at least in NYC.
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Can confirm, have sadly seen it happen to someone with enough talent to get their foot in the door but not quiiiite able to prise the door open under strong headwinds.
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