Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2019/07/16/good-luck-meredith.html
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Quitting won’t save them. It’s too late now. In the coming dystopia, when “the worldwide web” takes on an all-too sinister meaning, they will be tracked down and seized for “re-education” by the sino-tech global commune.
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Funny… Years ago when I worked for union shop these are the same people who told me they could do better for themselves under a merit system.
Odd how that DIDN’T work out.
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“Whistleblowing Is the New Civil Disobedience”
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How many years did you know these people, and when did they tell you that?
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Don’t be evil > Let’s be evil!
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Ugh, communists…
I like to think this sort of shit is self-correcting. Organizations, firms, nations, that best exploit the brains of EVERYONE of all genders, ethnicities, non-toxic ideologies, will win in the end. Shunting away smart, talented people seems really dumb – except for your purified clique, a bunch of okay pale guys, sure. Rule the world, as usual. That works until the plebes arise and obliterate you.
Got any idea of the timescale for this?
I have a weird intuition - not backed up by much - that things like pluralism vs. exclusivism follow a sinusoidal pattern. They rise, they reach some limiting condition and collapse until they reach the limit on the other end. Repeat ad infinitum.
The case for hope is that we can damp the oscillation…
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It does kind of feel like this might be true, but it’s probably only based on events of the last 100 years or so (my completely unqualified reading of world history here). Before that society wasn’t global in the way it has been since the invention of the telegraph and radio. Before that only really the elites were every fully informed about what was going on and they exploited it. Since then news and ideas has been able to spread faster than people can move and things feel a lot more connected. It will be interesting to see what happens in the next few decades. Maybe you’re right. Maybe climate change wipes out the problem.
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And sometimes the sinusoidal wave becomes a sawtooth. The downdrop of the sawtooth has historically shown to be a bad time to be alive.
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Quite so.
(In fact, another way I find myself visualizing trends is “sawtooth modulation on a rising trend”, but that’s probably another last-hundred-years thing.)
I would refer you to something I just got called out on of a similar feeling:
Yeah, this extract made me note that it is already too late for the Chinese.
We have a short window in which to act, to build in real guardrails for these systems, before AI is built into our infrastructure and it’s too late.
Define “exploit”. (The Chinese have, and seem to be winning as far as citizen control is concerned, if not more widely.)
I’ve worked in Silicon Valley since 1989 as a coder. At times, my friends and I would talk about whether unionizing would be beneficial. However, since one of the main roles of unions was to negotiate wages, most of us rejected the idea because we thought that we could get great wages on our own. For the most part, we could get great wages on our own but only because there was and still is a shortage of people who could code. I realize that this isn’t true for many other jobs in Silicon Valley.
Lately, I’ve been thinking that a union could still be useful for people in professional jobs, if that union was re-conceived as an organization that negotiated over working conditions instead of wages. For example, they could negotiate over some of the issues that people mentioned in the article were fighting for like whether the company could contribute to military research or work with despotic regimes.
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