"Silicon Valley is the place where you get rich without creating jobs. It’s run by investors who hate the idea of paying people. That’s why AI is so exciting for Silicon Valley types: it lets them fantasize about making humans obsolete."
— @pluralistic at https://doctorow.medium.com/https-pluralistic-net-2024-05-30-posiwid-social-cost-of-carbon-ea59fe4ba150
Oof, that's worth a bookmark...
So.
I worked at a tech startup and heard a talk given by a venture capitalist.
He was waxing poetic about the big future potential of self-driving vehicles, and was frank about why:
He hoped that this would destroy the jobs of 30 million people employed driving things...
To workers, the tech pitch to us, is that we will each get a cool robot servant.
To oligarchs, their hope is that workers are *eliminated*.
@murodegrizeco @pluralistic That is a stark contrast indeed.
@murodegrizeco @mike @pluralistic Pretty much the same way the software people fell in love with containers. They wanted to swap admins with deskilled operations staff and then automate them out of existence
"Containers make your job easier"
"Containers mean we can replace you with a minimum wage person"
@etchedpixels @murodegrizeco @pluralistic I'm not AT ALL sure that's true, having seen our ops department grow from one person to six since we adopted containers!
@mike
Well that's not a contradiction.
Just because they planned something does not mean that they succeed .
But the price of eliminating jobs or downgrading then it's such a tasty morsel, the employers try and try again.
Sidenote: how much work does the ops with 6 persons handle versus before. The growth is probably not only caused by the more complex software environment.
@yacc143 @etchedpixels @murodegrizeco @pluralistic Sure, we do a lot more ops work now than we used to. But I don't think de-skilling is a coherent rationale for containerization.
@mike @etchedpixels @murodegrizeco @pluralistic
That does not mean that it was not sold as such. That's my point.
More than one hype in IT was sold as something that it wasn't in the end. Some of them still left visible traces, even if they were different ones than the predicted.
@mike @murodegrizeco @pluralistic I didn't say it worked but all the senior folks I dealt with saw containers as turning their admin into a McDonalds type operation where minimum wage staff served pre-made containers
@murodegrizeco @mike @pluralistic
Contrast this with the great concern about the 'workers' involved in the health insurance administration (shakedown) of people in need of actual health CARE. Those workers they'd cry real tears over.
@murodegrizeco @mike @pluralistic Well, hypothetically I would still approve a future we’re no one needs to drive a car anymore (not that I think Silicon Valley will deliver on that promise).
I agree about that.
A century of pouring resources into a transportation infrastructure with no long term future, endless roads and uncountable cars, has been quite the mistake.
@murodegrizeco @babbeltea @mike @pluralistic
Want to harvest from rich fields, making useful things for people who need them?
Go to West Africa. Take a look at those marketplaces. Go to their secondary school - Africa does not lack for talent and ingenuity.
What it lacks is good government.
Remedies I have none, having watch my own nation's dumbassery re-elect Trump - but Africa is evolving fast. The Big Future is there.
@murodegrizeco There hasn't been "a century of pouring resources into a transportation infrastructure." There's been a century of pouring resources into roads. It's not a mistake, it is deliberate. The wealthy don't use public transport.
@murodegrizeco @mike @pluralistic
I'll never really understand that. Where do they think their wealth will come from?