Hard to just "go with the flow" when your livelihood can be possibly threatened.

Well I’m sure that one guy will be able to change the course of history to suit his job situation. It’s going to happen so you had better go with the flow. Become water.

In the US, people's jobs effectively justify their existence. Smugly saying mid or late career professionals can "become water" when their entire career category faces collapse is the most patronizing thing I've heard in a long time. That's a non-recoverable blow to many smart, capable people. There's a big difference between demanding we stop the wheels of progress to protect a few people and saying we owe the masses being crushed by them some harm reduction. Of course society on a whole will profit. But, the rust belt shows that the platitude about people deemed professionally unnecessary just "figuring it out" merely comforts the people turning those wheels.

Look pal, cry on the internet all you want but you better become water. Ask anyone from the “rust belt” what happened. You didn’t care when it happened to them and no one cares when it happens to you. Become water. Flow.

It's so funny, because that phrase when I hear it suggests going with the ML/AI flow.

"becoming water" is a double-edged sword -- if there's a storm out or really hot, it's a bad time to be water. You kind of want to be rock then.

The point is that going with the flow feels like it could easily be interpreted either way (as in -- go all in on AI/ML)

Only someone who claims to have all the answers would make such bold incorrect assumptions about who I am and what I know. The demand for my specialty is waxing, I'm likely safer than most work-a-day software developers, and it's my third career. Don't talk to me about becoming water in my career and life. I also don't think that lacking my brain plasticity and marketable cognitive profile should disqualify someone from easy access to food, housing, and health care. So if that body of water drains into the ethically feeble sewer of self-absorbed SV business culture, I'll opt for evaporating on a rock instead.

So hope for the unconditional basic income or become water ...

Or rather than blaming people who are getting stepped on for getting stepped on, the rest of us can:

a) Admit socioeconomic mobility has plunged in the US, so when you're down, it's a lot harder to get up. Stepping on people to climb to the top was always a scumbag move but now it's a lot more consequential than it used to be.

b) Recognize that absolute meritocracy is a myth. People lacking socioeconomic status and/or one of the "it" cognitive profiles don't have the same opportunities for growth, especially when young, which changes your whole career trajectory. That is not something you can change no matter how watery you are.

c) Realize that people are intrinsically worthwhile and dismissing them as collateral damage for your profit is immoral.

d) Recognize our moral obligation to create a just society and act on it.

I know it's a lot more convenient to pretend the people you're walking on are part of the floor but that doesn't make it true. Homo-sapiens didn't become the dominant humanoids by being stronger, more aggressive, or greedier-- we were able to cooperate. That concept is anathema to SV business practices.

Not all that long ago people on this very site were super enthusiastic about the prospect that my job would very likely be taken over by the robots.

Because, you see, the robots didn’t need to be perfect but merely fractionally safer than the humans.

Now all I see is No True Scotsman arguments on why the current crop of AI won’t take away their jobs and, ironically, my job is pretty safe due to Tesla’s tomfoolery causing blowback from the feds.

So robots eating the world is good or what?

Yeah, it's pretty bizarre. So many people who become incensed by businesses profiting from being shitty to customers are gleefully just dumping the clutch without looking for people in the crosswalk. Maybe literally if the car is driven by an algorithm. I'll bet they could whip up a lot of macho, patronizing personal-responsibility-based arguments in support of being able to mow down the slower pedestrians at crosswalks though.

Remember how the universe works? It doesnt care about the well-being of individuals. Thats just a fact of life. Demanding equality of outcome was always an illusion, doubly so in the face of big changes.

Demanding equal outcome is very different from saying we shouldn't kick the chair out from under someone and say it's their own fault. Homo-sapiens didn't become the dominant species on the planet because people were stronger, more aggressive, or greedier individuals. They thing that made them better was cooperation.

So that's a fact of life? Families don't work like that. Military organizations, governments, and and sports teams don't work like that. Businesses don't work like that internally. Well, not successful ones. Sears actually tried that and promptly collapsed within a decade-and-a-half of pointless infighting and undermining. The fact that you think that's a natural state of the economy and not a deliberate choice proves how great the propaganda has always been for lazzais faire American capitalism.

If this is a "non-recoverable blow" then those people were likely not as smart as claimed to begin with...

What a ridiculous thing to say. People's brains become less plastic over time and the longer we stay in one specialty, the less we keep up with unrelated tech and knowledge. Intelligence had no bearing on whether a late career radiologist could pivot into a totally different category of job if deep learning eliminated the need for the only medical career they were qualified to do. As a long time developer, it blows my mind how common this hubris was among my colleagues. As depressing as it will be to see the overwhelming majority of software developers rendered obsolete by progressively more sophisticated code generation tools, I will be glad to see the naive arrogance in the software world taken down a few hundred notches. It's an industry full of people convinced that they are too smart and useful to get left behind. Lol good luck.

sorry a bit late with my response, but original commenter here.

I'm not much of a control freak -- it's more when you see an credible posisble extinction event in the distance, don't you want to act?

And even if you didn't view it that grimly, isn't the ML stuff just SUPER cool? Trainable prediction engines are really amazing and very actually useful (feels like the first iteration was being able to recognize things in images, which felt like magic).

Going with the flow is awesome, but one thing I've found about life is that if you're not in the right flow, it's completely different. It's not like you have to be in the perfect stream, but you need one with fast moving water.

Like imagine being 10 years late to computers or the last one in your area to get a typewriter.

I personally feel like I have to immerse myself in stuff to get it, and the lack of more than surface level understanding of ML is worrying with how big it could potentially be.

I have a positive outlook for large language models where we can have new synthesized stories that break the rules of what we consider what makes something a game or not. The biggest complement to new forms of art are the people that reject the new forms.

I can’t really sing or draw anime but now my computer can so it can be a large enabler for people.

Two things to note:

No, indeed, if I see an extinction event in the distance future, I dont feel a need to act. It is hard to explain, but I dont feel responsible for human kind. Its a nice experiment, and I love to be part of it at the seemingly right time. But I dont go as far as investing personally regarding the future of humanity. If we make it (to wherever that would be), fine by me. If we dont, thats also totally fine...

Regarding the part that it is hard to keep up-to-date with current ML: thats true of course. However, what helps me here is that I feel like this is interesting, but not my field of work. Tinkering with free software was far more contagious, because I could do that literally at home, without wasting too much money. ML is totally different. I could toy with tinyGPT, but that is effectively too tiny to be fun. Once I scale up, I no longer can do stuff on my own. Sure, I could also order 1024 A100s from a cloud provider, but... that is going to bust my budget. So in a sense, this makes me free from wanting to understand it all. Its totally OK for me to have a rough overview on how it works...