brin_bellway: forget-me-not flowers (Default)
[personal profile] brin_bellway
[cw: apocalypse (in links)]

Reading this, this, and this in the same span of time sure is a trip, huh.

Date: 2021-10-04 03:47 am (UTC)
thedarlingone: white text on green background reads "this episode was badly written" (galaxyquest badly written)
From: [personal profile] thedarlingone
That's definitely some whiplash. I think the first post with the diagram of four wildly different directions humanity could go has nailed it.

(Disclaimer on the rest of this comment: tired cynical tortoise way outside of the transhumanist or rationalist communities is not good at optimism.)

I think my own opinion on the trajectory of this century was formed around the time I was being homeless in DC and learned that about 30% of the service industry workers there are also homeless. We have the technology to do amazing things; for the first time in human history, we have the technology to enable *everyone* to live in relative leisure, rather than needing a giant underclass of slaves to keep a few people in luxury. But we hit points where we can make choices, and we're aggressively going with keeping the underclass subjugated, over and over again. So it's hard for me to get excited about the advances in AI and so forth when, until I see differently, I only believe they're going to be used to continue subjugating the underclass.

I kind of wonder, though... the second post points out, of course, the ways the global supply chain is breaking down, with people choosing to leave the grindingly inhumane jobs and not return. For the first time in a long while, it's a worker's market. If I was going to be the most optimistic turtle possible, this right now could be exactly what is needed to get to a brighter future. Break the monopoly of the employers by walking away, because we had a taste of being treated a little bit like humans and we're not going back.

The chatter in the virtual training room at my work this past week has centered around whether my new department will be forced to return onsite. The voice department is going onsite tomorrow (Monday), at least some portion of them; not having email yet, I don't know the specifics. They're telling my department "There is no set date for you to return to site yet", and the chatter within my own training class is basically... half the class was hired for work at home and doesn't have the ability to commute to site, and even among those of us who can commute, I'm hearing a good deal of "If I have to go back onsite with people I know are lying about their vaccination status in order to avoid masking, I'm getting a different job".

I think we're really facing a crisis point in this country right now, maybe in the developed world idk, where employers are having to decide whether they can possibly bear to treat their employees as human beings with some modicum of rights. I don't actually see any reports of employers bending in that direction yet, but I see plenty of reports of people who aren't going to take it anymore. I don't know which way that's going to go, but I think [if the workers can win this one] is the only way we're actually going to see the fancy new technology have a chance to benefit the erstwhile underclass in the ways that it could.

I don't know. I still try to be optimistic occasionally. Or we could be at a point where we're already all too poor to stick it out, and we have to go back to the grinding labor and let the employers win. I guess we'll see.

Date: 2021-10-04 10:25 am (UTC)
From: [personal profile] contrarianarchon
What can I do but scream in terror as vast grinding engines of mechanics crush us all in their wheels

Date: 2021-10-05 05:35 am (UTC)
From: [personal profile] contrarianarchon
Well, yes, that. But, mmm. It's still scary, to see vast inexorable systems at work in our lives? Even if winning is theoretically possible sometimes in the sense of saving yourself, to the extent that the things which you need to do to armour yourself aren't the evils which you fear in and of themselves, then it's still scary to see these vast powers because saving you and yours isn't *enough*, sometimes you also want to actually fix things.

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Brin

May 2025

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