tldr: tech jobs are over, overvalued products, ai taking over, and prepare to be socially competent Tech has been economic actinide for the past 10 years. It’s been draining talent from more fruitful investments in healthcare, construction, and manufacturing services. The app and social revolution ignited by facebook and Uber has created billions of dollars on wasted money on apps. Investments that have not marginally improved the quality of life of people, if anything the quality of life has decreased in the past decade thanks in part by the advertising model. Mental health has declined, social cohesion has decline, heck even kids’ exam scores have decline, and we all know well enough that it was big tech in part that has been driving the wheel here. VC firms across the valley have invested billions of dollars in ideas that have compounded societal harm. For every dollar they have successfully damaged society 10 fold. Think for a moment who does uber eats cater to? The main costumer are upper middle class people who have way too high of income to care for the absurd delivery fees. Who does apple sell their phones too? upper middle class people! But well, now you can be less social and instead of spending a night out you can order in food and watch a movie from the comfort of your house. Don’t ever leave home please! The silver lining is AI and remote work. Although in the short term people will be able to work remotely, these two trends will compound each other and longer term only in person jobs will be left, thanks to AI automating remote work. Do you think that your job is safe if you interact daily with the same technology that is automating jobs? Grow up! But for AI do not thank VCs, because it was here big tech who spent billions of dollars on research and development backed by generous tax breaks offered by the government. It was not the good will of big tech, it was their greed. For the AI boom to happen time was the only thing needed(no need of VCs), not billions wasted on food delivery apps, adversing apps, and crypto ponsi schemes. You should prepare to be social because it’s the only skill left. The most valuable interface is real life social skills and real life physical skills. Good luck to us because we are not prepared…
Apes together strong
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Love the poem SF 1950s
Train has left the station.
What sphinx of cement and aluminum bashed open their skulls and ate up their brains and imagination? Moloch! Solitude! Filth! Ugliness! Ashcans and unobtainable dollars! Children screaming under the stairways! Boys sobbing in armies! Old men weeping in the parks! Moloch! Moloch! Nightmare of Moloch! Moloch the loveless! Mental Moloch! Moloch the heavy judger of men! Moloch the incomprehensible prison! Moloch the crossbone soulless jailhouse and Congress of sorrows! Moloch whose buildings are judgment! Moloch the vast stone of war! Moloch the stunned governments! Moloch whose mind is pure machinery! Moloch whose blood is running money! Moloch whose fingers are ten armies! Moloch whose breast is a cannibal dynamo! Moloch whose ear is a smoking tomb! Moloch whose eyes are a thousand blind windows! Moloch whose skyscrapers stand in the long streets like endless Jehovahs! Moloch whose factories dream and croak in the fog! Moloch whose smoke-stacks and antennae crown the cities! Moloch whose love is endless oil and stone! Moloch whose soul is electricity and banks! Moloch whose poverty is the specter of genius! Moloch whose fate is a cloud of sexless hydrogen! Moloch whose name is the Mind! Moloch in whom I sit lonely! Moloch in whom I dream Angels! Crazy in Moloch! Cocksucker in Moloch! Lacklove and manless in Moloch! Moloch who entered my soul early! Moloch in whom I am a consciousness without a body! Moloch who frightened me out of my natural ecstasy! Moloch whom I abandon! Wake up in Moloch! Light streaming out of the sky! Moloch! Moloch! Robot apartments! invisible suburbs! skeleton treasuries! blind capitals! demonic industries! spectral nations! invincible madhouses! granite cocks! monstrous bombs! They broke their backs lifting Moloch to Heaven! Pavements, trees, radios, tons! lifting the city to Heaven which exists and is everywhere about us! Visions! omens! hallucinations! miracles! ecstasies! gone down the American river! Dreams! adorations! illuminations! religions! the whole boatload of sensitive bullshit! Breakthroughs! over the river! flips and crucifixions! gone down the flood! Highs! Epiphanies! Despairs! Ten years’ animal screams and suicides! Minds! New loves! Mad generation! down on the rocks of Time! Real holy laughter in the river! They saw it all! the wild eyes! the holy yells! They bade farewell! They jumped off the roof! to solitude! waving! carrying flowers! Down to the river! into the street!
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Love the poem SF 1950s
Well said Op, but if you zoom out enough we humans are moving in the right direction, though it might not look like a lot the amount we are spending on good research as a percentage of total, that is still very high in absolutes which would not have been happened without the greed development.
I’m not against progress. I think we will enjoy a much better life thats to AI even if we don’t enjoy the high salary associated with SDEs. However, I think this technological revolution would have been archived even in the absence of growing inequality, societal harm and tech ponsi schemes.
Leave the industry then, be the change you want to see. I do what I love and you should too, being bitter is sad
ngl sde is no my dream job and i’m currently hedging my future career prospects. Sde is a nice compromise between intellectual work and high income which comes at the expense of social isolation. I enjoy intellectual work, high income but i dont enjoy the social isolation aspect of being an sde. Life is full of compromises.
“It’s been draining talent from more fruitful investments in healthcare, construction, and manufacturing services.” I think everyone agrees that aiding healthcare, construction, and manufacturing with tech solutions only makes these practices more efficient “The app and social revolution ignited by facebook and Uber has created billions of dollars on wasted money on apps.” You’re forgetting entertainment is a huge industry and always has been. People aren’t working all the time, they’re also relaxing and using products designed for entertainment. Agree these things have damaged society in terms of net happiness amongst individuals. But I don’t think this will destroy tech like your post indicates. Tech is designed to make our lives easier and there’s no stopping it. AI only accelerates it. This is what a society does… tries to advance itself until it becomes extinct.
I’m not against tech but against most of business and economic incentives of the past decade. I honestly think that the coming decade will be better for society.
Probably because people are aware of the negative impact social media has, but how do you fix it? Money triumphs all. If it’s profitable it’ll be implemented, even at the cost of damaging society. Maybe to the cost of extinction, not sure. The only reasonable things that can be used to deter negative consequences are laws and regulation, but good luck. Can you give some examples of how society will improve in the coming decade and why?
Bro chill tf out
Anyone notice how the Microsoft people are always doomsayers?
I don’t think the future is bleak for society. It’s bleak for our careers. I think AI will create immense wealth, and improve the quality of life of humanity. We will be better off after it than at our current top 10% percentage income. The future, however, we will not be in 10% just due to our abilities at translating tasks to code.
All AI does is raise the baseline of what's expected. Everyone's going to end up using the same foundational models, GPT, Claude, LLaMa etc with maybe some fine tuning for specific use cases, no one is going to invest in their own foundational models. If you think about what that means, it means everyone's going to end up using AI systems that are broadly comparable, if that's the case then there won't be a much of a differentiating factor between companies, it's like having multiple companies that all share the same employees. The only way companies can build a moat in that case is to invest in areas that are hard for these models to automate (and there are things these models struggle with and to which there's not an easy answer), that means more money and an explosion of jobs in those areas as companies try to carve out their own space. Thing is the technology is too new to know yet where companies are going to need to invest to make sure they stand out from the competition. There will be a lot of new jobs as we learn more about the models and they're used more.
I think of this in two dimensions: 1) the datasets and 2) the “intelligence” of the model. Moving forward datasets that can be used to teach an LLM useful use-cases such as in law or medicine. Here surprisingly, big tech does not have a clear advantage. On the second dimension, creating smarter models requires a lot of compute and capital to allocate to researchers, here is where big tech shines. We’ve also seen a rise on smaller models but they do require gpt-4 so we are back to square one. In my opinion some of these datasets should be public goods. GB’s NHS’s medical dataset is one of such cases. There still tech to be built but it is requiring increasing specialized labor, think about phds.
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