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Notes -
The kids aren't alright (continued)
This college graduation season, many commencement speakers are extolling AI, then getting boo'd by the students. Most notably Eric Shmidt, in University of Arizona, after telling students to "deal with it"; also less recognized speakers in smaller universities (like MTSU and UCF).
Glendale Community College received additional boos because it used an AI tool to read students' names, which messed up.
In contrast, Steve Wozniak told students they "all have AI — actual intelligence" to applause.
This reflects multiple overlapping problems:
Tech students are particularly affected: many were told that if they went to college, they'd be practically guaranteed an easy, high-paying job, like their older peers; but today they graduate to a bad job market. Meanwhile, the companies they planned to join are posting record profits. AI has invalidated some of their learned skills, and moreover, has the potential to worsen the job market and wealth gap.
Although it's not just tech. Liberal arts students have worse job prospects (although some of theirs were never good), and seem to be more against AI. Law and accounting are apparently being impacted, because AI automates their entry-level jobs.
In summary, the speakers have a completely different perspective due to their age, AI outlook, and wealth; and students aren't happy to see their college which has failed them do it one last time, by appointing an out-of-touch speaker (or using AI to flub announcing their names).
Where to go from here?
Undergraduate education is deeply flawed. I think (not an uncommon position): students should only go to college if for graduate education (which is also flawed but for different reasons, and has purpose until ASI or a suitable alternative). Otherwise, they can learn degree skills in high school or on-the-job training: probably a free unpaid internship, which (as long as it demands real skills, not cheap labor) would be an improvement over paying for college; or pursue a trade. But first, employers must no longer prioritize (let alone require) college degrees; I believe this is happening in some fields, but slowly. In the meantime, more students should and will attend cheap online degree mills, possibly alongside an internship (to graduate with job experience and a better resume).
As for AI...I don't really know. It has some great use-cases, and the potential to strictly improve standards of living (why do something that AI can automate?); it and/or another revolutionary advancement is probably necessary to mitigate climate change and TFR collapse. But it also causes some problems, and has the potential to create global catastrophe. Regardless, I don't expect I or the graduates can influence its evolution or effects. For those reasons, I'm not really optimistic or pessimistic about it. At least I'm aware enough not to extol it to college graduates.
Boomers have too much and are too entitled. I was thinking the other day how we live in a stone age primitive communism tribe where the village elders get way too much deference. As people age, politics insulates them from economic consequences. First at 45 they are afforded half-UBI like middle management positions, which 20 year olds could easily do but can never get because they're essentially handouts for middle aged people. Then they hit retirement age and they live off the backs of young workers. I believe that old people are a burden and young people should clear them out and take their wealth if they don't demonstrate utility to the young, who are the ones with the thumos and the vitality and the ability to make war and innovate. What do we need old people for, their life experience? We have ChatGPT for that.
Smart young people should take old people UBI and use it to launch careers, get married, and start families as well. The money is wasted on the elderly, who will never do anything for the human race.
Motivation, that's what. The benefits and respect afforded to the old aren't an insult to the young, they're a promise that they'll be rewarded for working hard in their earlier years once they've done their time. One day, when the tonguing is done, we'll take our leave and go.
That's a weird, servile way to think. In my family, we work on credit and debt. First credit is issued, and we work hard because we feel like we owe a favor. We are generally too proud to work under a whip, chasing a carrot on a stick that is reserved for people who are suffering from the disease of old age (what good is it then?). I feel like credit is not being issued to young people in Western countries, therefore I owe nothing, and therefore I am relatively anti-social in my outlook towards the society and am more interested in looting it and swindling it legally than I am in contributing to it, since I owe it no favors.
Well, there is also credit being issued to the young - the very young, that is. We don't ask 0-to-20-year-olds to work to earn their daily bread, indeed we actively prohibit them from doing so. So the debt does exist - your 30-year-old self owes society his labor in exchange for it guaranteeing you a childhood where you didn't have to work in a Dickensian coal mine, or on a farm.
But to put it another way, the basic model of our social contract is that, out of an ~80-year lifespan, we would like people to contribute about half of that number to working full-time to the benefit of society. In exchange, they can enjoy a life of relative ease for the other half of that time-span. 40/40. It's intuitive, it's fair, it's attractive. Instead of 40 years of leisure followed by 40 years of labor or vice versa, however, we distribute the rewards on the time-honored principle of "half in advance, half when the job's done": 20 years of easy street from birth to graduation, then 40 years of toil, then 20 years of comfortable retirement in your golden years.
Splitting the difference in this way fulfills multiple useful purposes. Firstly, it includes (in your terms) both "credit" and "carrot" mechanics, thus appealing to both kinds of instinctive motivation. You should work hard because you owe society for your happy childhood, and because you still have some more comfort to look forward to later. Secondly, it concentrates the designated labor period in the years when people are fittest and thus when their time is more economically valuable. A 7-year-old gets as much happiness out of leisure time as a 37-year-old, if not moreso - and a 70-year-old doesn't get much less out of it than the 35-year-old, though admittedly he does get somewhat less. In contrast, the labor of a 7 or 70-year-old is worth far, far less than the 35-year-old's.
Above all these common-sense considerations, though, there is the even more basic point that most people like having something forward to in their future. Reducing this incredibly fundamental fact of human psychology to a servile desire for a carrot-and-stick model is bizarre and misanthropic (indeed, I had nowhere mentioned a stick/whip). Obviously I would rather be promised a few decades of comfort at the end of the road, than believe that nothing but pain and destitution awaits me once I'm no longer deemed to be useful. How you can get out of bed in the morning believing the latter baffles me.
40/40 is retarded when the back half of that 40 is begun in way better condition than the historical norm after work that is far less physically arduous and then a suite of super expensive medical therapies are stuck onto the last 5-10 years of it.
The book can't be balanced for most people who aren't self funding
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