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The modern white-collar workplace has been understood by some as an exemplar of the "longhouse": an increasingly feminized environment where "alignment" and "consensus" matter more than "action" and "execution".
In the age of AI, I posit three phases in the evolution of the modern workplace, the labor market, and (as a result) society more broadly.
Phase 1: increased ossification and feminization. This will occur because the (mostly male) "doers" on which the company relies are likely the first to be automated. There may still need to be a handful of rockstar performers, but the age of AI will, at least initially, make all intellectual endeavors a winner-takes-all market. With the actual work mostly automated, the remaining management is free to spend even more time doing longhouse things.
Phase 2: the return of the laborer. There will be a simultaneous increase in blue-collar jobs (with a glut in software, demand will increase for physical/real-world goods) and an increase in blue-collar labor, occupied primarily by men. White-collar labor becomes increasingly rare. The layers of middle management are no longer required, and if capabilities continue on trend it won't be long before the only thing preventing some white-collar industries from full automation will be slow capability diffusion. In this step, society will become more masculine. It will appear that a "retvrn" to traditional gender roles is underway. Men will again perform the large share of labor.
Phase 3: automation. Robotics and automated factories to create the robots become a reality. Labor demand sharply declines. Depending on how society handles this transition it could be a time of broad prosperity and leisure, or it could be a time of strife and mass inequality. But either way, the longhouse will come back with a vengeance. In a society where labor and intellect are no longer required, the only thing that will matter is status games and relative positioning. This is a game that the feminine temperament is better suited for. The boot that stomps forever on our faces will be high-healed.
As a male in an intellectual role, none of these three phases will be kind to me.
I'm not too confident but I think it might be the opposite in phase 1 and generally.
(Human) speed might be what matters most. Speed of recognizing opportunities, speed in drafting and creating and redrafting and giving directives, testing, iterating, marketing, learning new things. Agents work fast, they can do months of work in weeks. I'm trying to use agent swarms right now and get my money's worth and it is quite stressful managing multiple projects at the same time, reviewing what's been done and issuing good instructions. There's no time for further collaboration between people on top of that.
By the time all the meetings and collaboration is finished, the opportunity is already gone! When work automates, the scope for competition increases dramatically (outside the govt sector at least). As tempo increases, the longhouse declines, decisions shall need to be made quickly and finally by a single actor.
Also, men have an innate advantage with AI in that they're more interested in machines and technology, whereas women are more into people. Nearly all techbros and early adopters and entrepreneurs are men. Men tend to be more pro-AI and pro-datacentre.
Switching from process-driven procedural and human-facing work to freeform instruction-giving, directorial work with machines favours men I think.
Some people seem to really hate datacentres. Can someone steelman this for me?
There's niche, addressable issues like local power/water prices (and I'm not sure I understand the water argument as it should be reusable just like in your desktop rig) and the infrasonic hum that can apparently cause anxiety over the long term. Outside of that though, it just seems like the phobia over anything nuclear.
Is this just a subconscious projection of a fear of change and obsolescence? I can't imagine seeing the first railroads go down during industrialisation and decrying the whole thing (unless maybe you're a part of the teamsters union).
People hate AI because they can sense that it is going to impoverish and disempower them and destroy their lives and futures, and datacentres are the tangible thing this is "AI", that best pattern matches to the tangible thing in previous issues, and is even something they can do something about.
Another big thing that's breaking out now is to personally abstain from using any AI and become hostile to anybody that doesn't, as a core identity issue.
Still seems like there's a missing mass feeling to become hostile to the people making it, I don't entirely understand why that still hasn't manifested at popular strength yet.
Its understandable that if a huge technological wave is coming and you don't know how to surf that you'd be against it.
I think its just a relatively small group that really knows that AI is coming for their jobs. Creatives are the most up front about this, trying to establish a cartel where they will deny anyone that uses AI a space. Gaming has this too with Steam mandating AI use disclosure so people that hate AI can boycott the product (although this just doesn't work if the game is good). I don't think Steam cares about this, but they've neatly sidestepped the issue by letting the consumer make up their own minds.
As an aside there is currently a huge AI slopwave that has swamped the Steam platform, highlighted by the recent Steam Nextfest. This trend will probably continue for quite some time.
Anyway, the mass feeling might come as more mainstream professions are automated away. By the time we have PlumberBots crawling under your sink or into your toilet, the riots will be well and truly underway. YangGang 2038?
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I think what has happened at quite a few data centers is bad planning and execution. So yes if you are just running power from the grid there will be minimal noise or pollution. But if you were a bit blase about grid electricity and just trying to get in on the boom, then you need to setup onsite power generation. Which usually takes the form of fossil fuel generators. Which are not quiet. And if you mess up you are spilling pollution as well, because you are basically running an industrial scale power generation facility without the planning or expertise that is usually deployed to run such a thing.
The other thing is that people want their money and their payoff. The perception of data centers is that they generate money for someone somewhere else. And if it comes up as a political question, ya of course people want their cut.
Railroads did have an issue if they just wanted to build through a town without adding a stop inside that town. Having a stop brought benefits, just using the land to run the rail through was not well liked.
From some articles I've seen local
bribescompensation seems be the way forward.Hope someone figures out nuclear SMRs to power these things. But then would SMRs get up and running by the time Elon exports all the compute into space?
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Yes, but how many such men will we need? That was my point about winner-takes-all markets.
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