This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
My impression is that if we don't get further step-changes in model capability, the long-term disruption to employment will be ~0%, just like the internet ended up disrupting every job and life significantly, but at the end of the day we still have a job market that looks remarkably similar.
As long as you need a human in the loop, and as long as having a more skilled human in the loop leads to better results (which is certainly true with current agentic tooling) then white collar work will be fine, even if their work looks very different to their previous job description.
It seems to me that at least in the short to medium term the white collar job model probably looks more like a pilot's job, where the computer is doing a majority of the work, but you still need humans in the loop to set the direction, intervene in and handle anything particularly out of distribution, and bear responsibility if anything goes wrong.
This seems like an oxymoron, if we do get knowledge worker drop-in replacements the bottleneck is going to be compute; the demand curve for AGI is going to be pretty much vertical.
Still, I don't disagree that in the short-term robotics will take longer to roll out than knowledge work replacements, I just really don't think white collar jobs being gone matters if we truly reach AGI; either one of the thousand doomer scenarios happens and everyone dies, or the unemployment rate ticks high enough and public outcry forces sufficient redistribution.
If AGI is is really in the cards, there's realistically nothing actionable to be done for 99.99% of the population apart from enjoying what time that's left and praying that it goes well.
More options
Context Copy link