Society doesn't owe me over $500k/year for writing some instructions in a cryptic specification language. It's cool that I've been getting that, but I consider that luck and circumstance. When robots take my job I'll go find something else to do. I'm not going to blame evil rich people or some other boogieman.
It also doesn't owe your CEO billions for hovering over a company where other people (like you) do the actual value creation.
That's fairly well understood. If people get wind that the CEO isn't necessary they'd be out on their ear in short order. I don't think I've ever met anyone who'd shed a tear for the CEO losing their job. Except CEOs.
CEO's don't lose jobs, they just move into other board/CEO positions.
Never a shortage of those, it seems. But only for insiders, of course.
> Society doesn't owe me over $500k/year
No it doesn't. But as a human being, you and everybody still deserves a decent living. And our current system clearly does not provide that for a lot of people.
How come is anyone "entitled" to a decent living? I don't think this holds evolutionary, nor from historical perspective. It is commendable for a person to want to think that everyone deserves it, but I don't see it follow from anything or manifest in general in a fair way. There are plenty of examples that people are very likely going to be deprived of even whatever they deserved by means of struggling to get it.
> How come is anyone "entitled" to a decent living?
kind of the point of living in a civilized society i reckon
> I don't think this holds evolutionary
Sure it does. Our species is social, meaning we form societies for evolutionary success. Both of us being members of that society, it is in my interest to see your child survive. It is a tragedy to think your child may not survive because human greed prevents them from accessing resources we have in abundance.
The opposite perspective is anti-social in a literal way: the greedy cannot use all of the resources, can't eat all of the food; they want control so you can't have it without their permission. You are entitled to eat, seeing as we have more than enough to feed you. That others think you are not is disagreeable, to put it mildly.
World GDP and standard of living has never been higher.
If two trillionaires bounce a 4 trillion dollar IOU, the GDP could be the greatest in the universe, even though nothing would substantially change.
So? We produce enough food for 10 billion people every year, there's only 8 billion of us and a billion are hungry. Those seem like legible KPIs for shareholders (i.e. humanity) to pursue, no? And while World GDP is up, it's come at the expensive of the systems we depend on.
I want my son to live on a livable planet, and not under the constant threat of destitution. And I want that for all children, not just mine.
Everyone wants that. But people on this thread are arguing that technology is reducing our standard of living, which is just factually untrue.
Depends on who & what you ask. Aggregates hide important nuance. For who? At what cost to who? Do the people who bare the cost have a say? Would they agree that it's worth it? What's their life worth?
Im a medior and I earn 42k/yr. It would be a privilege for me to earn this much, as I cannot afford a home.
> Im a medior
I do not know that word. I looked it up and found nothing helpful. What does it mean, and what do you mean?
Also, may I ask you to use more punctuation and things like currency symbols, because your message lacks so much context I can't even guess.
In the Netherlands, it's the name for anyone between junior and senior, in software. From my perspective it's more something used by recruiters and employers to tell people they don't get a senior engineer's compensation.
Something interesting: for me, that comment was the 6th Google result for "medior". Interesting term.
The first 3 hits on any search engine weren't relevant?
No, they weren't. They told me an awkward neologism for someone who isn't senior and isn't junior, and that means that neither they nor the original message tell me mid-level what.
So, no, they were not, or I would not have asked.
What I was going to ask as well, seems that people are getting dumber by the day.
At least in English, this appears to be slang that only recently leaked out of its original context. I've never heard the term before and whatever they used to look it up probably had no results.
The usual English term is "mid-level".
There are three levels of seniority. You can be a junior, a medior or a senior.
You are the rich people.
No, there's a difference between doing well for yourself and exploiting the labor of others to capture stupendous amounts of excess capital, then reinvesting part of that to make even more.
Society doesn't owe anybody anything. So who's to say when you find something else to do, it will pay enough to live?
They've earned 500k/y for a couple years, they don't need another job that pays enough, that's why they can be so indifferent about the outcome.
I'm no where near that TC and think this way too. This field of work is generally new in history. The whole woe is me what will we ever do attitude is so weak and frankly annoying.
Most of modern society is new in history; what is that supposed to say? If you are making the point that it's unproven and fragile, that would be a good point and actually one that supports "woe is me" because all of it could disappear overnight considering the fragility.
In my lifetime I have watched SPARC SUN Servers being thrown in the trash, spaghetti coded javascript and php run fortune 500s, the linux kernel adding containers, and everyone now being required to know how to code for CI so they can rerun tests, linters, and rebuild their app on every commit and publish it to an S3 bucket with specific IAM permissions tied to some SSO IAM provider.
At no point in any of that was anyone coddled or told that they will get to keep their job forever. Learn new skills. That's the game.
It's not even unique to tech. Doctors have to do this too.
There's so much work in the industry right now around LLM implementation that folks not looking into that are sleeping on good jobs.
Doctors have to undergo minor professional development refreshers — not replace their entire education. There is a reason we educate early in life; it's hard to retrain the old (and expensive or even approaching impossible).
This comment gives me a chuckle. In my lifetime alone I've seen oncology completely transform before my eyes. New tools. New techniques. New drugs. I've also watched doctors in my family study this stuff in their off time in order to get certain positions.
"minor professional development refreshers" lol
Also known as (unpaid) hard work during the weekend.
Obviously fields like oncology and genetics are going to have major disruptions. What sort of event would trigger someone needing to redo their entire 7+ years of medical schooling?
Learning a new language or tech has always been such a minor hurdle. The whole point of the current wave of AI is that there is nowhere to retreat to if your means of income depends solely on intellectual work. Learn a trade or train to be a vet, sure, that'll last a while longer.
I think the very definition of society implies that we are all owed a lot, and we all owe a lot to society. Politics is about deciding what.
Education? Safety? Medical help? A home? Food? Transport? Communication?
These are things society needs to provide.
In turn, we provide society with labour, applied skills, decision making etc.
If there is no (trusted, working) social contract - society breaks down.
If we allow a small elite to monopolize the productivity gains and efficiency increased from new technology - the results will be dire.
I see the more feasible solutions to be some kind of universal income or negative tax - combined with reduced work hours (eg 30 hour weeks, to start).
Correct. But don't you want something from the future? What do you imagine it to look like? How far is it from what you hope it might? What are you willing to do to bring them closer together?
The history is quite unequivocal about what happens when there's too many people who don't earn enough to live. Governments are aware too, I think.
is it like society does not owe any body money for puting sand gravel cement and water. we are talking about products not their assembly
No, but it owes you around 100K with a great work-life balance and job security because you spent years and years studying and honing your skills for it.
Fuck the American Dream