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 -
I did. Most of the top comments do not have an angry tone. It's more like, a mix of resignation and excitement. With some mad mixed into it.
Anyway and more importantly, it might be time to start thinking harder about the key question of our time: is it over for humancels?
Not any time soon, I think, but I tell you this: social positions in which being human is an inherent part of the value proposition are starting to seem like much more appealing things to devote one's time to than STEMing it up.
I'm thinking positions like prostitute, politician, athlete, stage actor, bartender, socialite, rock star, cult leader, man who makes money by befriending rich people, or man who makes money for taking the fall when an organization gets in trouble.
If y'all got any other ideas, share 'em. Cause it's time to strategize. Unless you're rich already, in which case: all good. Unless Skynet scenario.
I hope the AI-boosted productivity gains soon outstrip the job losses and we get the utopian diseases-cured Star Trek scenario instead of the Great Depression or Skynet ones.
Like others have alluded to, these are already starting to be replaced. "Influencers", a job which doesn't even make sense to me to begin with, are now entirely generatable. The other day, I was on a drummer Facebook group, and someone posted about "see this photo featuring this cute twenty-something drummer chick? She doesn't actually exist."
More options
Context Copy link
I'm lucky enough to have had a career in STEM, so I'm rich already, but I'm not confident that's going to "matter" in the long run. Where the long run might be, uh, a few years. In an economy where all real work is done by AI, are we even going to honour the increasingly-fake number that is the size of your bank account? In an AI world, does it make sense for me to be able to commandeer 1000x the resources of my never-working friends?
You might say that this would cause upheaval, but there are an awful lot more poor people who'd be in favour of this upheaval than rich people who'd be against it.
Middle income families likely disagree, it is a dice roll not in their flavor, they can still go with their snp500 index fund and command the poor people, then you got the historical interesting norm where most successful revolutions were started by nobles or individual with higher wealth, they certainly aren't lossing in the current capitalism system
A lot of the big successful revolutions were started off by the downwardly mobile and/or somewhat relatively-unsuccessful children of nobles, merchants and landlords. They had the education and the resources to dedicate themselves beyond subsistence, but also the motivation to take shots at the established order.
Suddenly the world has a lot of those.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I think all of these can be LLMified as well. People already talk to LLMs like they are their therapists, extending this to bartending and cult leadership is trivial. Converting K-Pop idols into digital format is also plausible. Imagine being a penpal with your favorite BTY member! Who cares if he's a machine if he replies to your messages and likes your memes!
More options
Context Copy link
This is what I’ve been thinking. Except most places today seem less human than ever, and most people (maybe just around me, in STEM, and I’m worse than all of them) are bad at acting “human”.
So I think there’s still exclusive opportunity for nerds, until society is fixed so people can behave naturally, or reaches the point of no return. Whether that be improving the AI, or combining their nerd thinking with tacit human thinking that AI hasn’t learned to do what it can’t.
More options
Context Copy link
I'm rooting for the Deus Ex ending where we replace these too.
More options
Context Copy link
STEM is over, IMO; even more broadly, abstract thought will soon be economically valueless, including the humanities (which can have meaningful rigor to them!)
I would say that, to the extent labor income exists in the future, it's the physical aspect that matters. Prostitute, yes; OnlyFans star, no, you'll be competing with millions of AI bots who will outcompete you on every dimension.
Hoping I'll have enough to retire by the time that transition is complete.
Even in a theoretical AI distopia/ Star Trek tier utopia people still picked those grapes up, they made the wine. The starfleet cadets drew up new plans for new and exciting shuttlecraft, they had AI too. The human element will not go away unless we are all wiped out, driven by pure preference for the human connection alone.
The mechanical turk jobs will all disappear, but I shed no tears for those kinds of sweatshops.
Reasoning from fiction about the real world is a fallacy (imaginary map vs real territory?), and science fiction says more about the time it was created as the depicted future. Old scifi imagined any household chores done by robots, but they couldn't imagine that the washing machine freed women from being housewives and the coming waves of feminism. In 60s StarTrek they couldn't get female commanding officers as women in the test viewership hated the bossy actress, in 90s Star Trek there were no gay people (not to mention transgender), and Picard was bald. In a real future with Star Trek like tech everyone will have fantastic hair and some otherkin/wolfkin will use transporter tech to degenerate themselves to furry-hybrids. And the holodeck itself is a can of worms...
More options
Context Copy link
Yeah, but Star Trek is fiction, and the things you mention are why I believe that the only way it passes for progressive was because of the time it was made. People in ST are shown to posses a fanatical devotion to preserving the traditional human way of life. It's all reactionary as hell.
Which, in my opinion, is the only way humanity could ever survive the age of artificial general intelligence.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I think it will take a while, particularly for large bureaucratic entities with entrenched market positions. Even in software engineering, a rather ridiculous amount of time is spent on coordination problems, figuring out what customers want, compliance and legal, flip-flopping management... If that overhead was previously say, 50%, even if LLMs can cut the dev time to zero, the maximum speedup is still only 2x. It's effectively an organizational version of Amdahl's law.
Organizational frictions are real. A year ago, I'd guess I spent 60% of my time writing code, the rest spent doing organizational bullshit. Now it's something like 95% organizational bullshit, and 5% prompting and reviewing LLM-generated code.
This seems temporary to me, though. Once everyone finishes shifting to LLM coding, organizations (mega corps or startups) that minimize the organizational aspects will outcompete those that don't.
The organisational "bullshit" is what maintains a causal connection between what the end user wants and what your code does. The big idea of the Torvalds/Raymond side of the open source movement is that when hackers work for themselves or each other they can cut 90% of it out. That gets you Linux. Cutting 100% of it out gets you GNU Hurd, so be careful.
That's a bit optimistic about the organizational stuff in a large org. E.g. make a Gantt chart for reporting to higher ups; convert your team's tickets into a new particular spreadsheet structure; write a design proposal for a system that's already done so it can be used for promo. They aren't entirely valueless because they give organizational legibility into otherwise opaque processes for decision makers, but they're not the pleasant part of software engineering.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Physical aspect or legal aspect, I figure. By legal aspect I mean that for a while to come laws will probably mandate that certain social positions must be filled by humans. No AI politicians yet, although many might soon become meat proxies of AI instead of being meat proxies of teams of human staffers.
Maybe there are other aspects as well.
In STEM, it's probably mostly over for pure programmers. There's still going to be room for being a person who understands what customers want, coordinates the various aspects of the business, tracks down humans with domain knowledge to pump their knowledge out of them, and prompts the AI. But AI will probably cut more and more into that too.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link