by krsgoss on 11/28/16, 2:02 PM with 136 comments
by atemerev on 11/28/16, 2:35 PM
And this article is not helping it.
by adamnemecek on 11/28/16, 2:39 PM
by noir-york on 11/28/16, 2:36 PM
I don't know which is the most dangerous scenario: the working classes taking it out on immigrants, or the working classes making common cause with immigrant labour against a Victorian economy of squalor, ill-health and poverty (which is good, but dangerous it had to get to this point) and turning revolutionary. The latter is a failure of politics.
by doubleunplussed on 11/28/16, 2:33 PM
It's the government's job to redistribute wealth and income to the needy, and provide safety nets and retraining opportunities for people whose industries have been disrupted. Not Silicon Valley businesses.
by amelius on 11/28/16, 2:43 PM
Yes, it is not fair if a small part of the population reaps all the benefits of hundreds of years of progress, while the majority has to fear for losing their jobs.
A lack of fairness means a lack of empathy.
by internaut on 11/28/16, 3:14 PM
That is why blue collar workers are more worried about migration and globalization than computing technology. The 'robots' that threaten their jobs are other people.
It is the white collar jobs Silicon Valley is destroying. Journalists, Accountants, Lawyers and many more to come.
Solution definitely isn't education, or at least not education as it is classically understood.
Korea and Japan have already tried the education route and they have met diminishing returns. Go there if you want insane working hours for low pay and pointless competitions.
Here's a crazy idea.
Maybe young people should leave the universities and exit the cities altogether. They could live in small communities in the countryside and be ramen profitable. Integrating into the broader economy could be accomplished by traveling to like-minded communities to avail of services there e.g. an artist's colony, a computer person colony, etc
I think this is happening already but it's flying under the radar of journalists as some kind of Timothy Leary move.
by ocdtrekkie on 11/28/16, 2:46 PM
Security vs. privacy is the big one for me. Companies like Google try to treat "privacy" like it's an ACL: You either make something private or public, and if it's public, we can disseminate it. In reality, people do lots of things publicly within a narrow scope of attention. I post stuff on roleplaying websites which are publicly available to the Internet, but I wouldn't point them out to the people I work with, and they'd never see them, normally. I don't want Facebook or anyone else recommending them to my coworkers just because I may have people from both of my social circles friended on Facebook.
With Silicon Valley companies hiring for "culture fit" over other qualifications, they surround themselves with long hours with only people who think like they do. Since a lot of people move to work in Silicon Valley, they're likely more distant from siblings and parents than the average worker as well. It's unsurprising folks have a difficult time understanding everyone else's problems, because they experience them so little. I've long wished a few Google designers would be forced to help some senior citizens figure out how to use Gmail.
by misiti3780 on 11/28/16, 2:52 PM
While I believe this is true, and understand why it is a problem, I do not think there is anything that can be done about it. Now that billions of people are online, Moore's law has made hardware cheap and fast, and anyone can build a piece of software with a chance of viral growth (if lucky), we have to establish that we are in a winner-take-all environment. This is simply the power law at work.
I would also say that we are without a doubt, in the early phases of this period - going forward, any job that can be automated will be, eventually. If my company can front the capital expenditures to build/buy a robot that can do my job for $4/hour (with out lunch and coffee breaks) instead of $35/hour w/ benefits, my new salary should be $4/hour per basic economics of supply and demand.
Is this a huge problem, absolutely. Is it going away - not a chance. The writing is on the wall for a lot of repetitive tasks - the best thing everyone can do is vote for people who want to improve education, starting and elementary level in the US and push more kids in the STEM careers. If you want to contribute on an individual level, consider tutoring / mentoring younger kids in your free time. Show them that instead of pissing their entire youthful lives away scrolling through the useless feeds that are facebook, instagram and/or snapchat, they could actually build their own facebook/snapchat.
by discordianfish on 11/28/16, 2:55 PM
For real, I'm not saying SV is doing enough but taking SV as the prime example of everything bad in capitalism has a weird touch as well..
by whistlerbrk on 11/28/16, 2:39 PM
1. computer science has an ethics problem due to the lack of modernization of and membership in professional societies like the ACM.
2. Technology moves so fast that the ethical dilemmas created by it aren't explored and debated quickly enough, nor are the long term impacts able to be understood in time.
3. We fail to learn from our history and our own writings. Seriously, science fiction writers of the 60s and 70s have explored so many issues we grapple with today in such incredible detail yet we haven't synthesized this beyond Asimov's laws.
by TulliusCicero on 11/28/16, 2:47 PM
> Otto, a Bay Area startup that was recently acquired by Uber, wants to automate trucking—and recently wrapped up a hundred-and-twenty-mile driverless delivery of fifty thousand cans of beer between Fort Collins and Colorado Springs. From a technological standpoint it was a jaw-dropping achievement, accompanied by predictions of improved highway safety. From the point of view of a truck driver with a mortgage and a kid in college, it was a devastating “oh, shit” moment. That one technical breakthrough puts nearly two million long-haul trucking jobs at risk.
Ok, and? What exactly do you expect these companies to do? Is it Otto's responsibility to provide new jobs to all the displaced truck drivers? Or should they just shut themselves down, letting all the benefits of self-driving trucks come to naught?
> we need to learn about those who are threatened by it.
I don't see what the author expects to happen here. To the extent that people get screwed over by the free market and we, as a society, want to do something about that, that's clearly the government's job.
And if people vote for representatives that oppose stronger social safety nets, as people literally just did a couple weeks ago(1), then apparently our country -- not Silicon Valley, but the whole voting populace -- is not interested in providing additional assistance to those hurt by technological advancement.
1 - with the obvious caveat about the popular vote
by robbrown451 on 11/28/16, 2:38 PM
On the other hand, I do think companies like Facebook and Google and the news sites (or whoever makes their comment systems) can do a lot about "the impact of their algorithms and their ability to shape popular sentiment in our society," as he alludes to in the article but fails to explore in any depth.
What if there were simply richer tools for users to rate things? For instance, to tag a post as "+1 nuanced" or "-3 overly divisive" or "-2 unsupported by evidence" or "-3 inappropriately political" or "-5 bigoted", and then have algorithms (and user interfaces) that deal with this additional information in ways that actually are effective while also being careful not to discourage those who don't like getting downvoted? (e.g. only show downvotes to users a month after they appear so the user is less likely to emotionally respond, but still gets feedback as to why their microphone is getting the volume turned down)
Then of course give users tools to control what they see....e.g. hide (or suppress) divisive political content, etc.
There are any number of things that can be done to tone down the hateful divisive rhetoric that pervades online social spaces, and lets the insightful, nuanced content float to the top. Is anyone doing this? Are they even experimenting with it? Are they so scared that users will run away if there are too many options? (you know, you can always put them behind a "show all ratings options" setting that by default is off)
This isn't censorship, this is just putting into place things that have in place in the real world for millennia, but that disappear in naive approaches to bringing conversations online. It won't be perfect initially, but it can at least be a lot better.
by lucio on 11/28/16, 2:54 PM
by ambivalence on 11/28/16, 5:15 PM
Or maybe it was just Thanksgiving week?
by blakecallens on 11/28/16, 2:37 PM
The idea that they might be living in a bubble that is totally out of sync with 95% of America (geographically speaking) is unfathomable to an elitist.
by Tempest1981 on 11/29/16, 3:54 AM
I'm a bit surprised by the amount of denial and "not my problem" comments (or perhaps "what problem?" comments).
Yes, it's a very difficult problem -- maybe more on par with a Mars mission than the next chat app. Was hoping to see more interest and ideas. I don't think it's a sign of weakness to show empathy, or to advocate for the greater good vs. greater efficiency. Or try for both.
by lambdasquirrel on 11/28/16, 2:37 PM
Unlike most of my tech friends, I actually have tried to reconnect outside our privileged circles (and if you don't think that's what they are, you're kidding yourself). And you know what I found? A lot of echoes of the personal past.
Lets face it. A lot of techies — engineers specifically — are who they are because they were socially rejected in younger years. And you know what? When you try to reconnect with normal people, you will find that the whole popularity complex never really ended. The difference now is that you are economically on-top with all the abuses that that tempts.
Are you prepared to be othered and ostracized again? Because that's what's going to likely to happen. But I think you will find that the ordinary people have dignity too, and that there is validity to many other paths that don't go through the worldview of science and technology. And yes, it will lend credence to those "feels" things, like the Facebook timeline disaster mentioned in the article.
Just don't expect any fairness or warm, loving reconciliation is all I'm saying. This isn't some feel-good Hollywood movie. Don't expect as the hippies say that we are all one people, veda-this, spirituality that, blah blah blah, because we are quite frankly not.
But that doesn't diminish the importance of bridging the empathy gap, especially if you want to design and build things for other people, including yourselves.
by 77pt77 on 11/28/16, 3:29 PM
Does this mean he's defending separatism?
Am I reading this wrong?
by Mao_Zedang on 11/29/16, 4:48 AM
by TAForObvReasons on 11/28/16, 2:30 PM