Decouple Meaning From Employment
In his blog post, The End of the Office, Andrew Yang paints a very dire picture but one that I think must be seriously considered. I think Yang’s fifth point is most important:
Pessimism and anger will rise up. I saw a note on social media that said, “Do you really think politicians will let millions lose their jobs? They’ll ban AI first.” Has this person been paying attention? Go talk to the manufacturing workers or the journalists and see how it worked out. Hundreds of billions of dollars have not been spent on this technology for corporate juggernauts to stop now, and most officials have been cheerleading what they see as progress. The genie is out of the bottle.
The social contract of ‘study hard, go to school, get a good job, live a decent life’ is about to be vaporized to smithereens. Upward mobility for most will be a thing of the past. People are not going to take it well. Particularly educated people who think that they deserve better. That’s an ingredient for revolt.
What Yang describes has been happening for the last several decades and the wealthy class embrace of AI will accelerate the process. I fear the consequences significant. A society built on consumption is really built on employment because one must be employed to earn the money to spend on the products to be consumed. Worse is that how we define people has good or bad, successful or unsuccessful is defined by employment. Think of Ronald Reagan and the “welfare queen.” Think of the ongoing war between the wealthy class and wealth redistribution put in place under FDR that contributed to forming the middle class in the United States.
We will need to redefine employment in the United States, such as less than a 40 hour work week, decouple fundamental necessity of healthcare from employment, and change how we define and measure success.
Finished reading: Cross Purposes by Jonathan Rauch 📚
What I learned from this book is that while the United States is not a Christian nation, it was founded by people who considered Christian values a given. Consequently they did not feel it was the place of government to institute Christian virtues because they believed that best done by the churches.
Two Way RSS
Yesterday I wrote a draft post about RSS Feeds and I wrote this:
A lot of pixels are being dedicated to writing about Really Simple Syndication (RSS) feeds, which I think of as a “broadcast medium” for text and files.
The U.S. Men’s hockey team won the Olympic gold medal beating Canada in overtime, 2-1. The last time I saw the U.S. men’s hockey win gold I was 14 years old.
I got to admit that I am going to miss the Olympics after it concludes tomorrow. I’ve been in the habit of turning on the TV in the morning with the events going in the background as I do my morning routine.
The cycle of yearly new phones from Apple and Google are not about significant changes between one year to the next. I don’t think Google expects Pixel 9a users to want to replace the phone they bought last year with the Pixel 10a this year, therefore it makes sense that the Pixel 10a has incremental improvements. I really don’t know why the reviews of these phones focus on the small number of changes from one phone to the next. It makes more sense, in my opinion, to compare the upcoming Pixel 10a to the Pixel 8a and 7a. My guess is that the improvements from the 7am, or older, is the most compelling reason to by a Pixel 10a.
An observation. Learned about this directory of independent journalists, and notice that newsletter - Substack is the top platform, Instagram is second. Website is fifth with 87. Can’t help but notice that what appears to me to be newer sites usually do not have RSS feeds. Most sites do have a Subscribe button that is for an email newsletter.
In this video on YouTube, Kitt Betts-Masters shows the technology behind Wacom’s EMR pens. I currently primarily use felt nibs in the EMR pens I use with my Viwoods AI Paper Mini and Boox Note Air 3C, but I am curious about how the ceramic nibs feel. My concern has been with the effect of using ceramic nibs, even the ones provided by Viwoods, on the life of the screen.
The Guardian, Forget Maga. Welcome to Mega: Make Empire Great Again
Fresh from toppling the president of Venezuela and taking control of the world’s largest oil reserves, the Trump administration’s top diplomat arrived at the Munich security conference on Saturday with a rather new and very disturbing message for European governments. Empire is great. Empire is back. Empire is American.
Oceans Rise, Empires Fall
Title inspiration: You’ll Be Back
Joan Westernberg uses the failure of empires as a metaphor for why current predictions about AI are likely not to be completely realized. She equates empires with corporations and says this:
We haven’t seen the first great AI collapse. We haven’t seen a foundation model company make the BlackBerry mistake or the Nokia mistake, or the Roman mistake, or the Ottoman mistake or reach their Bunker-in-Berlin mistake. But we will, and we’ll see it multiple times, because these mistakes = features of power concentration. The hubris that makes a company or an empire dominant in one era is frequently the quality that blinds it to the next one. If you could ask Lazaridis in 2006, or a British colonial administrator in 1900, whether their model of the world was permanent, each would’ve given you a very convincing explanation for why it in fact was.
The interesting thing is that while she is applying the fall of empires to AI, she could actually be describing what is happening right now in the United States. We are living in a period of time in which the fall of the U.S. empire is accelerating. I think AI is a contributor to the fall of the U.S. empire because employment is a pillar of the empire that has been built using economic might.
Those of us who have been raised on the privileges of the U.S. empire are being told that the source of our pain is the “other,” however that is defined (race, nationality, gender) by each one of us. The purpose is self preservation for the people in power who created and maintained the U.S. empire for their personal benefit, but as Joan points out history shows they too will ultimately fail.
That anxiety you are feeling is being caused by the stones of the U.S. empire starting to fall around you. All you have known is the life the empire has provided to you and you know your life is going to change. We know this in our bones because change is a cosmic truth.
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