Robots vs the middle class: everyone's endangered, white people less so

boing
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Yes, yes, yes. You’re reiterating the point I made.

I blame a lot of the issues and failures with programming on the very fact it’s led by engineers. As soon as we have coding structures that can adjust to different types of people with different levels of education, we’re in better shape.

But for the price of a used computer, or for a Raspberry Pi, people can pick this stuff up with not much education. Most programming doesn’t need to involve complex maths or the creation of a new AI. It’s low capital intensity and potentially high outcome.

Imagination + effort goes a very long way.

I’m not saying it’s easy, or obvious when you’re stuck in unemployment oblivion. But it’s a choice. And for that matter, one I’d happily make. In point of fact, I’m on the verge anyhow.

And as to your point on inclination to education. Ouch. Anyone without a job and kids to feed will be pretty available for any kind of opportunity you can provide them, and they’ll try hard at it.

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I think maybe you’ve not had much exposure to the real low functioning working class population, rather than underachieving slackers. A HS dropout who can no longer find a job in a factory or warehouse is unlikely to discover a love of coding. We’re talking about lots of people who really don’t have much of either motivation or ability to learn something complex and new, often both. I think this is what separates a lot of them from the immigrants they resent, people who had the drive to leave their homeland in search of opportunities. I’m not pulling this out of my butt, my wife has been an inner city social worker for decades and how different populations deal with life is dinner table talk.

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Please. Let’s not be encumbered by assumptions. They tend to funnel thinking down limited gullies.

Most humans are underrated in terms of capability. There is, for sure, a percentage that has true disfunction, but really, that’s a low percentage.

I live in the UK. Famously, you can take dumb middle class kids and put them through the private education system, and they come out appearing to be bright. The mechanic who serviced my car yesterday is not educated or seemingly brilliant, but he’s great at math for business because when you do something important over and over, you end up just getting it right.

True - sounds like your wife is on the cutting edge of dealing with the people who are or have become dysfunctional. But that’s not everyone, certainly not yet.

What people lack now is opportunity. But it’s there, staring them in the face. Two local 20 year olds - regular kids from not special backgrounds - just hit the local news with their AI firm. They’re not geniuses - they’re just applying what they learned.

As time goes on, there will be more fields where the application of AI will be useful, and will need “plumbers” for want of a better word, to teach AI what to do.

As for exposure to the low functioning working class population. Well, if you’re talking the disabled, the wounded, the cerebrally challenged - yes but not day to day. If you’re talking behavioural issues, difficult backgrounds, drink drugs and freewheeling idiocy - yes, plenty. I grew up with them. Surrounded.

Boringly, the ones who made it out both made a choice to, and applied discipline to make it happen.

As it happens, programming was one of the paths I saw to freedom. Back then it took long hours copying out of magazines. Now, with iOS etc - jebus, I only wish I could take a bite of that apple. But the disadvantaged today - so many of them have a smartphone in their hands - they could choose to wield it differently, to do something special with it.

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I said nothing about absolute capability, but you identify the crux above. For subnormal intelligence there’s not much to talk about, but there’s plenty of educated people who can’t make more of themselves, I have 2 tenants in their 30’s with bachelor degrees who tend bar. I have an acquaintance who went to med school and then dropped out of residency, fooling around with mostly losing money at financial games till his late 40’s till he realized he had to support his family and found a hospital that would take him a a resident. You are in the minority to have the discipline to change your fate.

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WRT to the current discussion about computer literacy as ability and aptitude - I have encountered many people who resolutely avoid learning about computers. Probing about it convinced me that this was not a problem of intellect nor available resources. Many (most?) chafe against the systematic nature of the thinking involved. There might be a debatable threshold as to what extent an aversion to step-by-step problem solving is a matter of preference versus ability.

I am not really an educated person, but have had to do a fair amount of tinkering with computers, so people sometimes come to me for help. They inflate the apparent difficulty involved with basic operation of these systems. And those times when I try to engage their interest and simplify it as neat understandable steps I can see their eyes glaze over. It is a resistance to thinking methodically. Not so much that it is difficult but rather a different kind of problem solving which they lack curiosity about and patience for.

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Some persons’ workflows are just as difficult and complicated as their thinking patterns.

When I did my phone jockeying nearly two decades ago, I ran the gamut of intelligence and had to break down the general computing concepts to many different levels of class, intelligence, age and education.

There’s a good amount of “I want this to just work”, general stubbornness towards established UI design, and one’s interest in listening :stuck_out_tongue:

My best private clients after that were retired lawyers, very stubborn but loyal, I would advise a particular workflow and they’d shrug and say they like it the way they like it, which would get broken and I’d have to fix regularly, but I was paid regardless.

On the other hand, there were plenty of elderly customers (where I was more paid to fix problems for a corporation) that listened to concepts and followed directions patiently and were better able to grok concepts than plenty of younger professionals.

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During our conversation here I came up against this fabulous term - “Anomie” - check Wikipedia - the breakdown of social bonds between an individual and the community. It spoke to me.

We have a lot of that in the western world. It’s coming in the East too (as with the famous hikikomori).

Many causes have vectored in between the individual and society, and basically, freedom. Many people are fooled by and lost in consumerism.

I’ve always advocated reading Benjamin Franklin’s autobiography. It’s hilariously brief. But I take that guy’s advice over many others.

We don’t teach people much of resilience, stoicism, flexibility, saving - all sorts these days. Shame.

I honestly don’t think it needs a steel spine to change one’s fate. It just needs a decision to do so, and the continuous waking up in the morning with that in mind, every day. The rest follows.

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In every avenue of talent, there is a general bell curve of ability. (And yes, there are hundred’s of avenues of talent.) However, with each technological advance, certain classes of jobs that favoured certain talents diminish in number and importance and other classes of jobs which favour different talents appear (often because greater over-all wealth makes new jobs economically viable.)

We’ve had generations of progress that have favoured analytically-oriented talents (I’m a beneficiary of such), and for no particularly good reason we largely equate these talents with human worth. (Why is calling someone stupid an insult, but calling someone clumsy simply a description?)

Because of this conflation of academically-oriented talents with human worth, we are loathe to admit that these talents, like all others, run along a curve.

So, let’s look at a different set of talents: Computers manipulate information with ease. Physical reality (robots) is really hard. If anything is going to get eradicated by AI research, it’s going to be the former high-flying professions associated with information management. Sure, there might be a few thousand jobs out there for the .001% of the academically-oriented talents, but the vast majority of high-paying information-related jobs are on the chopping block.

And what is likely to take their place? Well, quite possibly personal service jobs.

Now, I will freely admit that I suck at service jobs, where the talents necessary include making people feel at ease, making them feel good about themselves, constant friendliness, gregariousness, pleasing personal appearance, etc. In fact, there’s no personal pejorative attached to the lack of those talents, and I don’t think it’s just a matter of opportunity or training.

So in the end, I think that it’s quite likely that if we weren’t talking about talents that get associated with “intelligence”, we’d be much freer to admit that it’s quite possible that future job markets may require talents that are absent from a substantial portion of the working-age population and are unlikely to be rectified by either training or opportunity. It doesn’t require “dysfunction”, any more than being tall or short is a “dysfunction”.

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Agreed.

We’re stuffed. However, mutations play here. Ugly parents can bear stunning children. Genius brains pop seemingly out of nowhere. There’s a lot we don’t yet understand.

My fear for humanity is that first the elderly and infirm will be made dependent on artificial stimulation and assistance, and although perfectly happy till death, will lead a false life. This will work so well, it will extend to the difficult underclasses. In exchange for sterilisation, people will receive attractive synthetic partners. Breeding will cease.

And so on. A seemingly ethical and appropriate version of Huxley’s soma.

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Given that we’re currently headed for something between Mad Max and The Man in the High Castle, Huxley’s dystopias are looking increasingly utopian in comparison.

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I read a piece a few years ago about how Huxley’s Brave New World was a more accurate description of the political threats we faced than Orwell’s 1984, and at the time I nodded along. Now, alas, we’re rapidly heading back into 1984 territory.

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Looking back on the last 50 years of popular culture - it’s almost like the artists are prescient or something.

And like they’ve been shouting it from the rooftops! Again, and again, and again!

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Selection bias: don’t forget all of the stories about privately owned atomic torch ships manned (gendered term deliberately chosen) by sliderule-wielding libertarian engineers, leading Man’s (again) manifest destiny amongst the stars.

For every bit of prescience from Orwell/Brunner/Haldeman/Gibson et al, you also have matching daftness from the hacks.

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Yes, underrate people skills at your peril. What I recognized at an early age and have told many young people is that every very successful person was also a great salesperson, and great salespeople are rare. My dad was a good but not great one, he could sell good products but not ice to eskimos. I’m pretty bad, and my freelance career could have been better.

The sales industry goes through dozens if not hundreds to find one person actually good at it. But getting a job to begin with is selling yourself. And whether you’re Frank Lloyd Wright or Steven Spielberg, you’ve got to sell yourself to get your projects made. Of course the big Kahuna, Bill Gates, was primarily a great salesman and dealmaker.

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Sadly, there’s a huge amount of truth in this. Most organization are relatively hands-off, so your boss doesn’t really know personally your competence, but is filtered through your interactions with your boss.

Your appearance to those that would hire (or promote) you is basically:

[whatever-metric-of-job-competence] X [your-people-skills].

If your people skills are zero, then you are functionally incompetent in the eyes of your boss.

Especially in the arts (which I don’t have to worry about, thank God), with the advent of social media it is now almost mandatory to “connect” with your customers on a personal basis through Facebook/Twitter/etc. Now even the customers measure their satisfaction with your artistic product through the lens of personal people skills.

And if you don’t really have/enjoy those people skills, you are basically hosed. After several hundred years of having the anonymity (kinda-sorta) of the city that forced many to transact at arms length, we are now once again back to being judged on “who you are” rather then “what you do”.

Welcome to the global village.

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Or you work in technology…

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Money isn’t the only measure of success, but using that metric of course the leading figures in business would be salesmen. There is a whole world of nice, quiet, socially-defunct multi-millionaires that gained their success as pioneers in their fields and are only recognized by a very small circle within their field.

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Even in tech, if your people skills are zero, you are seen as incompetent. If you can’t negotiate for yourself, explain the work that you do, defend yourself against office gossip, etc, you’re hosed.

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and yet I work with autistic folks with, literally (not making it up), zero people skills and they still manage to have careers in technology in Silicon Valley.

I could tell stories of things I’ve seen but I have no interest in shaming autistic people considering my grandfather was super aspie (and an engineer) and my mother was diagnosed with asperger’s (and I’m an open question). The more extreme autistic end does fine as long as folks know and they find the right environment or company. California law (if not federal) also requires accommodation for people with Asperger’s/Autism (since it is one spectrum disorder now).

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