Been a Hacker News user since this launched, but have been feeling increasingly like I'm not part of this culture and don't want to be part of this culture anymore. So I'm out.
It's sad and kind of tragic to see what was once a thriving, diverse community that embraced all types of marginalized people (nerds, engineers, geeks, and so on) become a cesspool of bigotry and hate speech.
And the real tragedy, of course, is that Hacker News is just a microcosm of the developer culture -- which has become disgusting and hateful.
I hope those of you who are not bigots manage to fix this place. I hope the developer culture becomes healthier and less toxic. But I'm not going to be around to help or see it. Y'all are too exhausting and depressing.
Embracing marginalized people doesn't mean automatically taking the side of the accuser in an employment discrimination case, based on a one-sided blog post with no factual evidence presented. That's just mob politics, and I'm perfectly within my rights to flag the post, just like I'm within my rights to explain why I flagged it when someone asks.
It's ironic that you labeled my comment hate speech and essentially called me a bigot, despite knowing nothing about me aside from my username.
I don't know if anyone has done the deep analysis to determine if fraud is more frequent and severe and agree this seems like a doubtful statement, but I suspect it's likely that corporate collapses have in fact become more common and more frequent -- but due simply to the fact that the global total number of corporations has increased exponentially since the mid 20th century.
1) AI is Software. Marc was just a little off on market timing, and the eating starts for real right now.
2) I worked for a large private equity company on contract for a bit. The team I worked on was doing analysis about what the likely impact of AI, robotics, and automation on true unemployment in the US was likely to be as of 2030. Largely due to the impact on food service, retail, agriculture, customer support, and entry level corporate jobs the conclusion was that we'll see true unemployment in the 40% range at that time.
Unemployment in the 40% range is beyond total societal collapse. The unemployment rate in Ukraine is 11% and they are currently being invaded. Sudan's unemployment rate was still under 20% while they were in a civil war.
So the OP is probably using "unemployment rate" incorrectly. But if they are in fact using the International Labor Organization's definition, then this is probably a self-correcting problem. Society will collapse and those working on the research an implementation of AI and robotics will find themselves on the streets begging for scraps (or getting hacked up by machete-welding gangs), instead of working on building robots to displace workers long before they achieve success.
Don't underestimate what a strong leader can achieve with an army of starving people willing to do practically anything to feed their families.
This is a hard bet to take because we also don't know what other changes will take effect by then.
Perhaps the government reclassifies full-time employment to mean 24 hours/week. Now everyone can stay employed full-time, but the same number of human hours of work are getting done.
In any event, I don't think this will happen by 2030, but by 2040, absolutely.
Our economy would have to be truly ridiculous if having robots do 40% of the work was a bad thing. I mean, that means we have almost twice as many people available to do the stuff that couldn’t get automated! The most obvious solution would just be for everyone to work a little bit more than half as hard as they used to.
If you chop incomes in half, for example, Europe's various aging welfare states would quickly implode due to lack of tax revenue. Every advanced welfare state is built on tax revenue continuing to pour in. Many of the affluent nations in Europe are already struggling with demographics v tax revenue v welfare state needs, a rapid drop in income and it'd all go down quickly.
People to repair, direct, and organize the robots.
I mean, it's kind of a laughable example. Because we don't have humanoid robots today that can do anything meaningful in society, at any kind of meaningful scale. Without that, we are a far cry from having humanoid robots that can literally do everything.
Who said anything about humanoid robots? A humanoid form is generally a terrible form for a robot outside of a small handful of use cases (mostly centering around tending directly to humans).
I'll take the way under on that bet. Despite "software eating the world" there are currently protests in France about raising the retirement age. And we don't have enough workers in many industries (unemployment is at 3.5% in US). We're also facing a demographic cliff as baby boomers retire, so any automation we can get is desirable, in my opinion. But as the article mentions, robotics are far, far from replacing service industry jobs.
Investors include Y Combinator, Reid Hoffman, Peter Thiel, Khosla Ventures, Sequoia Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, Microsoft, Amazon, Infosys, Tiger Global, Elevation Capital, Bedrock Capital, Wikus Ventures, Social Discovery Ventures, Pre IPO Club, Matthew Brown Companies, Change.org, and Fenrir.
YC sells lottery tickets, not an understanding and acceptance that the lottery ticket is more luck than skill. That’s what friends, loved ones, and a therapist are for. I highly recommend the latter.
Enjoy the experience for having attempted, but don’t feel bad if you fail. Most do, you’re optimizing for the journey. Don’t let it ruin you, there are more chapters to be had.
"But if all of your depositors are startups with the same handful of venture capitalists on their boards, and all those venture capitalists are competing with each other to Add Value and Be Influencers and Do The Current Thing by calling all their portfolio companies to say “hey, did you hear, everyone’s taking money out of Silicon Valley Bank, you should too,” then all of your depositors will take their money out at the same time."
Been a Hacker News user since this launched, but have been feeling increasingly like I'm not part of this culture and don't want to be part of this culture anymore. So I'm out.
It's sad and kind of tragic to see what was once a thriving, diverse community that embraced all types of marginalized people (nerds, engineers, geeks, and so on) become a cesspool of bigotry and hate speech.
And the real tragedy, of course, is that Hacker News is just a microcosm of the developer culture -- which has become disgusting and hateful.
I hope those of you who are not bigots manage to fix this place. I hope the developer culture becomes healthier and less toxic. But I'm not going to be around to help or see it. Y'all are too exhausting and depressing.
Peace out.