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Sam Altman's bad week continues, as a car stopped and appears to have fired a gun at the Russian Hill home of OpenAI’s CEO.
It appears that, if measured by deed, Mr. Altman may be in contention for the title of most hated business executive in the country.
Unless I am profoundly misinformed about the base rate of assassination attempts on tech CEOs, it appears AI anxiety has apparently reached a precipitation point among American youth, to the point where discontent is crystalizing into direct action. I've seen this in my personal life. My youngest brother is a bright kid - top of his class, eagle scout, 1400+ on his SATs as a junior, the whole shebang. He's completely given up on his original goal of going to college for something software-related, and he's not only adrift about what he's going to do with his future, but he's angry about it. I hope he has a support network sufficient to keep him on the right track, but I don't like what I see.
I'm not exactly old, but I'm sure as hell not young either. For those of you who are 25 or under, what does it feel like on the ground right now?
This is very sad because this was me. Eagle Scout, 1460, varsity athlete, interested in software development, graduated in the aughts.
I had the opposite problem: The future was so open wide, that I took gambles on more creative pursuits than b-lining a traditional software job, where I could have made much more money more quickly. Now in my late 30s, with a young family, I feel the combined constant breath of the treadmill trying to keep up and catch up, while simultaneously worrying about what the heck my children will do.
The best I can do, is to pretend it's not here. Living vicariously as a parent is, in many, ways sweeter than childhood itself,; you get to be a gardener as well as enjoying the fruits of their joys. My parents got to show us a wide open world, and tell us that we could be anything we wanted, be excited to see us reach further than them, on their own shoulders...
I, instead, have to build a careful facade and guard the edges. Not tell my kids that I have no idea if they'll get to be anything at all, that I have no clue what their future will look like, while panicking that it won't all fall down before I've given them a rich childhood.
I am, of course, very very lucky in that I get to still be where I am with a family and still living in the modal 'good life'. Much better being here worried about it ending, than being on the other side worried you'll never get a chance.
It really does seem like the Boomers ended up being History's main characters; the generation born at the absolute peak.
Something is wrong if the age of thought machines and the internet is outclassed by the mid 20th century. It's almost like Boomers won't let us enjoy our new developments. They continue to insist on in person work, 40 hour work weeks, a mid-20th century education and credentialing system, and toxic levels of laissez-faire economics that leaves hard working, intelligent fathers like you worrying your kids will suffer immensely because of the creation of machines which should only grow the pie.
In person work will save your cushy white collar jobs, boy. A computer can do the work, but it can't be physically present.
Indeed. Furthermore I would argue that at the end of the day plumbers janitors and morticians are more essential to maintaining a "first world" quality of life than anyone working in software or finance.
Maintaining on the day to day, perhaps. But building it... that's required finance since before the US was a nation, and software is ubiquitous nowadays. To be fair, a 1950s American standard of living might still be "first world", and you could advance it quite a bit without software. But hate 'em or not, you still need the financiers.
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In the case of finance I’d agree with you. Finance is best put to use when it’s made the servant of the industrial sector.
But don’t at all underestimate the depth and range of importance digital services has in the economy. Just because it’s more intangible and abstracted away from concrete, physical and more visible productive labor doesn’t mean it’s less important.
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Plumbers in particular are absolutely essential for running water, have robust guild protections, and it's hard to automate.
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