Why you, personally, should want a larger human population

Re:Why you, personally, should want a larger human population by Animats on Sunday February 25, 2024 @01:21AM (#39498196)

The US, at least, seems to be past peak intellectual labor. Somewhere between 30% - 60% of people with STEM degrees don't work in jobs that need them.[1] Bloomberg has worse numbers for degrees generally.[2] "A quarter of grads over the age of 25 make less than $35,000 a year, with many close to the poverty level."

It's entirely possible that the economic reward for intelligence is decreasing. Up until 1920 or so, what employers wanted was physical robustness and reliability. There was a period when intelligence was prized, probably beginning post-WWII. That may be over.

Amazon's fulfillment operations represent today's corporate ideal - "Machines should think, people should work." They want physical robustness and reliability in their employees. Not original thinking.

[1] https://www.insidehighered.com/news/global/2024/02/09/few-st...

[2] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-04-18/is-colleg...

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Re:Why you, personally, should want a larger human population by ozim on Sunday February 25, 2024 @04:07AM (#39499069)

I disagree with this take. There are so many variables like job availability in area where person wants to live, graduation does not mean one is fit for job, job openings are for experienced positions and openings for recent grads are almost non existent.

If there are only openings for experienced people, as a recent grad you take whatever else you can find. Then people just get stuck in whatever they got as first job because they get experience there and get value.

It also doesn’t say what STEM people end up with - I bet a lot is clerical job and not moving boxes for Amazon or flipping burgers.

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Re:Why you, personally, should want a larger human population by collyw on Sunday February 25, 2024 @04:37AM (#39499265)

A lot of STEM jobs are bullshit. Intellectual grunt work. Most people are fixing other peoples bugs rather than building anything innovative. And a lot of the "innovation" in tech over the last years has been a rehash of ideas from the 60s.

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Re:Why you, personally, should want a larger human population by citrin_ru on Sunday February 25, 2024 @06:24AM (#39499915)

Fixing bugs is useful work. A bias against boring maintenance toward innovation is how you end up with crumbling infrastructure.

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Re:Why you, personally, should want a larger human population by shiroiushi on Tuesday February 27, 2024 @02:28AM (#39521142)

Fixing bugs is useful, but if that's all someone does, that usually means the company's development process is bad. The developer of code should be ensuring it's bug-free, along with the rest of their team (i.e. code reviews, unit testing, system testing, etc.), not committing a bunch of crap to master and then expecting others to fix all their bugs.

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Re:Why you, personally, should want a larger human population by lukas099 on Sunday February 25, 2024 @10:31AM (#39501555)

> Most people are fixing other peoples bugs rather than building anything innovative.

And you need the former to support the latter. That's one of the points of the article.

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Re:Why you, personally, should want a larger human population by ffsm8 on Sunday February 25, 2024 @02:41AM (#39498518)

The world population was 2.5 billion in 1950, which is usually the time people mean with post WW2.

I'd argue that we're not exactly beyond peak intellectual labor, we've just got 8+x as many workers vying for these jobs (for multiple reasons)

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