Can confirm via my own anecdotal data and experiences, for whatever they're worth. Elder Millennial for context.
* Up until NCLB, classes were focused more on theory than rote memorization with some notable exceptions. However, the further along I got in schooling/as NCLB approached, the more work shifted towards objective measures of knowledge rather than demonstrable understanding of theories, processes, and problem solving. By the time I was integrated into High School, most classes were graded by objective measures rather than theory - English and Social Studies were graded identically to Math and Science. The focus wasn't on the content of Shakespeare or Dante's Inferno, nor on the geopolitics of The Opium Wars or the history of European Empires; it was dates, people, how the verse was written, marking syllables, etc.
* I got lucky that my gifted status meant I spent time at a local university in grade and middle school at a special campus part of the week. That school taught me some of my most valuable lessons that continue to pay dividends in practical life: how to think critically (a semester learning game strategies with a final exam deducing whodunnit in the movie 'Clue'), appreciating the similarities and unique differences in biological life (basically a deep-dive on animals, insects, and biology half a decade before HS Biology covered the same stuff at a shallower depth), understanding the underlying physics of planetary forces (plate tectonics, volcanism, fault lines, meteorology, etc), music and art appreciation regardless of ability to understand the underlying speech (lots of VHS musicals, arts and crafts, and self-expression), and ample time understanding how computers worked - including building my first programs and coding my first website. None of my "non-gifted" classmates received remotely similar quality of education, focusing instead on rote memorization instead of abstract problem solving.
* The day NCLB was signed, I remember my World History teacher flipping his desk in the classroom. "You lot better pay attention because you're the last class who will ever get this good an education ever again." He spent the remainder of the semester trying to teach World History through his preferred lens of underlying causes, political movements, outcomes, and next-order effects rather than dates and places, with ample essay questions on exams to force you to think critically on what you learned and make arguments for/against something he posited. Subsequent classes were exclusively date-person-place tests for the sake of standardized testing and measurable outcomes.
So when I see people defaulting to AI in a world where measurable outcomes are the only things that matter (grades, KPIs, 'number-go-up'), I can't entirely fault them. I've spent enough time in this system to know my way of thinking is entirely contrary to the incentives at play, and a threat to those who benefit from it. Were I more flexible in my ethics or thinking, I'd do the same to benefit myself.
Except I continue to see growing fatigue of folks who have to deal with this slop on a regular basis. Employers have already pivoted away from AI in interviews and job postings, at least in my IT purview, because the output doesn't justify the lost opportunities of hiring quality talent with critical thinking skills to solve unique problems; they're tired of "BuT cOpIlOt SaId" in meetings as justification for any given thing, and even more exasperated that leadership seems to trust the chatbot when it's wrong more than any employee who is right.
Do I think that attitude will win out in the long run? Not really, no, because the underlying incentives make reliance on AI in lieu of personal/critical thought a better prospect than trying to forge your own identity and path forward. At least for the foreseeable future, those who blindly trust the bot will be rewarded even when they're wrong, while those of us who use it as an untrustworthy peer (or not at all) will be punished for not surrendering ourselves to its output.
Would really appreciate an archive link to read this, even though it appears to be another meta-analysis wrapped in a “everything will be fine” narrative from the limited previews I’ve been able to gleam and The Economist’s general lean.
The problem with the tech layoffs is that it’s poisoning the well downstream. Smaller employers have repeatedly cited their layoffs as justification for abysmal, unlivable salaries, and demanding those of us looking for work suck it up and deal with it while they search for bottom-dollar unicorns.
AI isn’t replacing the IT crowd outside of the expected junior roles, and even that’s starting to rebound as executives realize Juniors were how they got “white glove service” for themselves - a Senior Engineer isn’t going to wipe their ass for them, job market or not, because said Engineer’s time is infinitely better spent on literally anything else.
One other thing I’ll note is that the layoffs also seem to be remnants of the Brogrammer hustle culture: tech folks were enjoying more time for themselves to grow or live life outside of work specifically thanks to a few good years of paying down technical debt with properly-staffed teams, but the grifters up top see anything less than a 9-9-6 as somehow stealing from the employer and slash accordingly. The remnants are expected to do more work for less pay, with AI tools somehow filling the gap (even though these same employers often don’t want to pay for proper tooling to maximize use of AI).
This is definitely an industry downturn as those who stand to gain maximize their immediate returns. From the perspective of the C-Suite and Boards, the safest (albeit unethical) move is to betray: if AI is a bust, they’ll have made their wealth and can fuck off; if AI eliminates jobs and work, they believe their wealth will protect them in the future dystopia of their own creation.
It’s in that context (“fuck you got mine”) that the broader narrative fits with the myriad of puzzle pieces out there (higher interest rates, stock pumps, circular financing, tariffs, aging population, AI, etc).
Says the person who came here specifically to complain instead of doing it themselves.
For the record, I tried, but the archive site only had the preview cached; I suspect it’s looking for a URL identifier to bypass the paywall that I lack access to, but I can’t confirm either way from a mobile device.
Maybe it’s my own lived experience coloring my perspective, but man the author feels like a centrist sitting upon an imagined moral high ground. “Violence is bad but inevitable” is the kind of milquetoast non-committal position one takes when they have nothing else to contribute to the discussion at hand.
My own take goes that one step further, as I said in a prior comment rebutting Altman’s whinging blog post:
> Your staunch refusal to heed the critiques of those you harm means that these outcomes were inevitable; not acceptable, not justifiable, but inevitable nonetheless. In a society where two full-time working adults still cannot afford a home, or children, or healthcare, or education, your insistence upon robbing them of their ability to survive at all is tantamount to a direct threat of violence against them. Your insistence that the pain is necessary, that others must clean up the messes that you and your peers are willfully creating, is the sort of behavior expected from toddlers rather than statesmen.
The problem does not lie with technological innovation itself, so much as the powerful humans behind it leveraging it for selfish ends without the consent of the governed. Violence becomes inevitable when people see no alternative, and necessary when the stakes are kill or be killed, as AI is currently steered towards. That’s not to condone the actions of the alleged perpetrators so much as it’s highlighting the litany of historical examples around such transformations and the effects violence has in forcing a peaceful compromise in most (but not all) cases. The New Deal couldn’t have happened without the decades of preceding strikes, protests, and government-sanctioned violence against workers; the violence made it impossible to ignore or delay any further, and the result was outing corporate entities who had been stockpiling chemical weapons and machine guns, so fierce was their opposition to sharing the products of labor with the workforce. AI already has the weapons, it has the surveillance apparatus, the government backing; violence is presently the sole recourse left to a growing number of people, because they know they’re an obstacle to the powers that be - and will be destroyed, lest they strike first.
That’s the real story, here, and those who haven’t lived in the gutters of society cannot possibly understand the desperation of those victimized by it in the name of greed.
I like Tristan Harris' take on the situation, which is both more nuanced and more actionable. The idea being that the system and incentives are set up to select amoral technologists who will make money for shareholders, so inevitably the ones that come into power will be the ones don't see a problem with replacing all of human labor (because that's the only outcome that can justify the investment made). Reading Cory Doctorow's article from yesterday (https://pluralistic.net/2026/04/11/obvious-terrible-ideas/) was a poignant example of how the incentives are stacked against anyone with a conscience. The only solution, is political action, because the interests of the 99.9% are aligned here. And I say this as someone who loves technology and sees lots of value in AI, but it needs governance, and while in the past I was wary of government regulation in technology, in this case it's way broader and more existential to our civilization than one category of labor being disrupted.
That’s an excellent take that’s framed far better than my wordsmithing skills permit at present. Systemically, the incentives are there to maximize long-term harms for short-term gains, and the personalities who thrive in said systems are who currently run the very institutions who could change them. Absent a willful surrender of their agency to change the system in a way that would harm them in a limited financial way while improving the lives of everyone (themselves included), violence is, historically, the only way such toxic incentive schemes have been reformed.
I question how universal that is. There seems to be a meaningful difference between Altman and Amodei, for one. The Whatsapp founder was a decent guy as well, and I believe him when he claims to genuinely regret selling out. I'm sure there's more examples.
I think that framing at is "the system is set up this way" reads too passive. It reads as if it excuses the likes of Sam Altman, Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, Peter Thiel, Larry Elisson among others being despicable sociopaths whose carnage inflicted upon society for pure selfish reasons needs to justifiably be treated as treason against society, with the obvious rightful consequence.
That's fair. Yes they are all individuals with their own unique perspective and approaches, and we should definitely hold them accountable for their impacts. I'm not saying the systemic incentives absolve them of responsibility, I'm just saying that we can not depend on CEOs of corporations to do the right thing. This is the role of government, but even moreso, elected representatives are people too, so actually it depends on a more fundamental movement of the people en masse to make it known to our representatives that this is way bigger than partisan politics.
Really? I'd love to know other good examples, because he's the only one I know who has been so public about it including taking several meaningful actions as a result.
Yep, there is a reason why the Four Boxes of Liberty lists the ammo box as the last one: When soap, ballot, and jury are exhausted, it is both inevitable and moral to invoke the ammo box. Violence is never justified as the first step, but it is both expected and justified as the last possible step.
Well said. It’s striking to me how many adults can’t conceive of “violence” as an abstraction that results in certain effects and fall back on “violence is dealing direct physical injury to a person’s body or building.”
Weirdly enough, I find that victims of violence who weren’t engaged in a greater act of violence (i.e., the domestic abuse victim versus a soldier in a conflict) are often the staunchest advocates for unwarranted harm towards others to preserve their personal sense of safety. They will carefully carve out a definition of violence that speaks to the specific harm they suffered and requires explicit physical action, and then use that qualifier to reject any other notions of violence.
A recent example is the domestic abuse victim in my complex who has setup private surveillance cameras in the indoor common areas that are heavily trafficked by other neighbors, none of whom have given their consent. She does not consider warrantless surveillance of others (or calling the police on those of us who do not wish to be surveilled in a secure area of the building by her personal cloud camera) to be a violent act, nor does she consider threats of calling the police on those who shield themselves from her camera’s view to be an act of violence.
Violence is not limited to physical actions that induce physical harm, it is any action intentionally designed to reduce the safety or security of others - physical, mental, fiscal, political, etc.
Not to appeal to authority, but because I think it's useful, here's how the WHO defines it according to Wikipedia:
> the intentional use of physical force or power, threatened or actual, against oneself, another person, or against a group or community, which either results in or has a high likelihood of resulting in injury, death, psychological harm, maldevelopment, or deprivation
Note words such as "power", "psychological harm" "maldevelopment" "deprivation".
Yes. That also takes resources away from people experiencing actual violence. The qualifier “physical violence” isn’t used by people that deal with violence. They use the term “violence”.
“Intellectual violence” is a term used by cowardly people that desire power and wish not to be challenged by others. Those people must be mocked at every opportunity to ensure they are never taken seriously.
I disagree only in that there is one last married recourse, which we are fast running out of time to implement, but which is indeed non-violent and would have the effect of robbing the people driving this Thanatosian engine of their fuel. And it is this:
Bank run, general strike.
And it's up to the professional class (and their direct servicers/reports) to implement it. They're the only ones with both the power and incentive. And they're the only ones with the savings and personal networks to bootstrap community-wide mutual aid that will keep themselves and the less well-off workers who participate secure while the owner class make their panic-calculations (and, hopefully, eventually conclude that a smidge of noblesse oblige is preferable to total collapse).
It's a matter of these people realizing that their choice is not between avoiding and not avoiding being driven under the AI wheel/credit crunch wheel that the AI wheel is hiding. It's whether they want to leave their jobs now, willingly, in an act that builds leverage for the negotiations over how the next epoch of human existence will look - or if they want to do it in a few months-to-years, unwillingly, with zero leverage. It's your 3 Year Trap in action.
This remains quite the nasty storm of a job market.
* A non-zero amount of employers simply aren't opening jobs because they're all-in on AI replacing workers within the next 6 to 18 months, and have been all-in on that gambit for the past two to three years.
* Tariffs are choking out domestic tech workers in non-tech companies, as those companies try to save money by farming out to MSPs and contractors instead of retaining in-house talent.
* Interest rates choke out job growth across the economy as a whole, but the Fed can't really lower them since inflation continues skyrocketing due to tariffs and geopolitical destabilization
* The government axed 10% of the entire bodycount from the 2008 Collapse, in the span of a year, and from within its own ranks, thus increasing competition further
* The remaining folks who want to put butts in seats are being tied by their leadership into offering lower salaries for higher skills/experience, and the hiring managers still want to find a candidate that's willing to take shit pay but also not leave the second things improve
* Continued datacenter buildouts and the Nth-order effects on supply chains continue to support the narrative that AI will just replace all work(ers) anyway, so there's no point trying to deal with this crisis, but aren't displacing enough jobs to spur policymakers into actually fixing the problem through increasing taxes or passing more regulations.
* Ongoing deportations are hampering complimentary jobs for citizens. Research from the Obama era deportations show that for every 100 migrants deported, 12 citizens lose their jobs - meaning under the current regime alone, as many as 72,000 fewer jobs exist solely from deportation efforts since the start of their term.
This is bad, ya'll. There's no "easy" way out of this either, no silver bullet to make everything all better and get folks back into job roles again. If the regime capitulates on tariffs or geopolitics (which they won't), they look weak and incompetent (which they are). If the Fed lowers rates to boost job growth, inflation will take off like a rocket because that's what Capital has been trying to engineer since 2024; if the Fed raises interest rates to keep inflation in check, the job market will crater and the datacenter boom will go bust as safer investments produce good returns again. If employers keep wages low, workers will fuck off to greener pastures the literal second they find something; if they raise wages to match cost of living and promote familial growth, they'll have to hire fewer workers and thus increase competition. Hell, by some estimates it's easier to get into Harvard than land a job right now!
Shit's fucked, and until someone forces accountability and takes the L (namely the regime who started this shitshow in the first place), nothing is going to really improve.
Don't forget skyrocketing employer health care costs due to Government-endorsed monopoly and fraud that is the US Healthcare system. Robots don't need healthcare.
I mean, yeah, I'm in full agreement with you. Think Tanks, Economists, Researchers, Politicians, Philosophers, Social Workers, everyone who looks at this stuff professionally is in general agreement that our method of shoe-horning middlemen into every single transaction, forced privatization of government services, permissive attitudes towards corporate consolidation/antitrust laws, and lack of substantial taxation is what's ultimately harming our long-term growth prospects.
Try telling that to the people who have benefited from said conditions for decades and are enjoying the fruits of their harmful labors. They're the ones running all three branches of government from local to federal level and everywhere in between, and they have no intention of changing anything or sacrificing their own gains until they're dead in the ground.
Why should the majority of Americans care about a stagnant US economy? You realize THEY AREN'T BENEFITING from the current economy right?
50% of the population is always on the verge of collapse, that is shameful and pathetic. I absolutely do not care about profits until we can provide universal healthcare, universal childcare, and universal education (all levels, university, community college, vocational training).
Not being able to have freedom from sickness or having the freedom to better oneself is the ultimate sin of modern America.
The fact that you care about maybe say 10,000 capitalists over the hundreds of millions of Americans is beyond pathetic.
Who exactly are you serving with this rhetoric because it's absolutely not your children, nor your family or community. Who benefits from this delusion that money only matters in our lives?
In line with developed countries except, for example, Austria, Denmark, Finland, Germany, Iceland, Italy, the Netherlands, and Sweden, each of whom previously levied wealth taxes on individuals, but apparently didn't like the taste, and have since repealed.
I don't think the rich should be taxed a dime more until they route out the Fraud. What's the point of having all the rich people suddenly pay out $40 Billion next week, if that money disappears in California Homeless and Hospice crap. I don't disagree with increased safety nets but it needs to be done without people writing 50k Medicare billing lines per day.
Supposedly CA spent 800k on EACH HOMELESS PERSON over the last 5 years. They could have all gotten a free home in a suburb and developer salary for 2 years instead of fraud capture.
It needs to be a yes-and. We need to be better about fraud (digital ID + biometric proof on delivery of services) and we need a more equitable tax system that doesn't have the top .1% paying an effective tax rate lower than a school teacher.
I don't disagree with solving that too. But it seems like the answer is always "TAX MORE" but nothing in our government spending aligns with the fixing the ACTUAL PROBLEMS.
This is one heck of a straw man argument: “if you wanna ban datacenters but not factories they’re basically the same thing”.
The current datacenter boom isn’t general compute, but AI compute - a highly specialized form that’s not adaptive or recycled into other, demonstrably useful forms of compute should this end up being a highly speculative bubble or dead-end technology. The demonstrated environmental impacts are very real, and the reason they’re shoved through has everything to do with secrecy around their known impacts in an effort to get cheap land and government buy-in before locals protest the harms of the buildout.
As for a modern, highly automated factory like what China builds? At least then we get cheaper goods and services to buy while still creating jobs (repairfolk, technicians, roboticists, etc) as opposed to AI datacenters, which just slurp up resources while delivering chatbots that kill society’s best-paying jobs and careers and centralizing power under fewer hands.
So yeah, I’d be totally in favor of factories that build things and employ people, versus AI data centers that just hoover up resources and shunt costs to locals without consent.
> This is one heck of a straw man argument: “if you wanna ban datacenters but not factories they’re basically the same thing”.
The irony in this comment is that you are the one arguing against a strawman, much more so than GP. They never said they were basically the same thing. There's certainly some level of comparison though as GP laid out in their comment.
It's super neat! Just like Kubernetes is also super neat at what it can do. It's super neat primarily because consuming it is so easy, provided you already have all the same abstraction layers in place in your infra.
You...do have all the same abstraction layers, right? No? Oh. Well, don't worry, Google/Amazon/Microsoft can sell you those if you don't want to pay your IT staff to prop it up for you.
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Look, snark aside, yours is the correct take. Google's solutions are amazing, but they're also built for an organization as large and complex as Google. Time will tell if this is an industry-standard abstraction (a la S3 APIs) or just a Google product for Google-like orgs/functions (a la K8s).
This. K8s is easy to consume, and a real PITA to actually setup and support from an IT perspective.
If someone wants production K8s, I'm steering them (and their budget) to a managed control plane from one of the major cloud providers. Trying to prop it up locally when it really hates having to work directly with bare metal does not spark joy.
Honestly, I've been dealing with crap like this for so many decades that I'm a fervent supporter of every "installer" just showing and logging a Git PR-styled diff to the user of every file and system change, everywhere in the system, complete with the ability to rollback from it.
I am tired of inconsistent logging, opaque system changes, and vendors generally being malicious with endpoint security in the name of protecting profit.
Screw the "show me the log" option that scrolls by in a flash and you can't get back to, show me the damn diff first.
Maybe you will read it carefully every single time (and to be clear, I doubt even that) but for the majority of users this will only lead to increasing the already excessive amount of decision-fatigue they deal with when interacting with software day to day.
People already blindly click through sequences of confirmation boxes when they think they already know what they're doing. Odds are a million to one you've done that very thing before yourself. Adding even more friction is only going to make the average user spam the "next" button even more fervently.
I'd argue they need significantly more than that, if they're expected to also pay for childcare, healthcare, save for emergencies, etc. This is a polycrisis we absolutely need to take seriously lest cities become cesspools again.
"Move somewhere cheaper" ignores the reality that most good jobs are in cities nowadays, not rural or cheaper areas. It also ignores decades of calculus of the "city to save, suburbs to live" mentality that's been gradually eroded away over decades of housing mismanagement, not to mention serves as a giant middle-finger for folks who, for one reason or another, MUST live in a major city (healthcare, job prospects, career field, etc). Even if someone were to move somewhere cheaper, they'd forfeit their higher salary in the process - which would likely make the newer, cheaper location just as, if not more unaffordable than their city life was; hell, some of us were trying to move somewhere cheaper in the era of remote work, and look how that turned out. Half the planet lives in cities by UN estimates, and "moving somewhere cheaper" is the most cowardly rebuttal of the problem one could muster.
I'm also shrugging off the uninformed whinging about "welfare kings/queens". Reagan couldn't prove it, two Bushes couldn't prove it, Clinton couldn't prove it, Obama couldn't prove it, two Trumps and a Biden couldn't prove it, because they don't actually exist. Talk to people actually on benefits rather than swallow naked pro-austerity propaganda by rich people angry that their tax dollars help the working poor they themselves created in the first place, and they'll tell you how impossibly difficult it is to get benefits in the first place, nevermind keeping them. There's a vastly more evidence supporting the harms of means-testing than any WFA coming from it.
At the end of the day, NYC is not alone in these problems - but is unique in having an openly Democratic Socialist as Mayor, meaning Capital has a vested interest in pinning all the ills to him and astroturfing the same austerity bullshit that worked with Reagan et al to try and defend the problems they caused in the first place. America cannot roll back to an era where six-figure salaries meant you were "rich" and five-figures were the norm, so we need to build an America where said salaries at least cover essentials again and where median incomes can afford median housing.
* Up until NCLB, classes were focused more on theory than rote memorization with some notable exceptions. However, the further along I got in schooling/as NCLB approached, the more work shifted towards objective measures of knowledge rather than demonstrable understanding of theories, processes, and problem solving. By the time I was integrated into High School, most classes were graded by objective measures rather than theory - English and Social Studies were graded identically to Math and Science. The focus wasn't on the content of Shakespeare or Dante's Inferno, nor on the geopolitics of The Opium Wars or the history of European Empires; it was dates, people, how the verse was written, marking syllables, etc.
* I got lucky that my gifted status meant I spent time at a local university in grade and middle school at a special campus part of the week. That school taught me some of my most valuable lessons that continue to pay dividends in practical life: how to think critically (a semester learning game strategies with a final exam deducing whodunnit in the movie 'Clue'), appreciating the similarities and unique differences in biological life (basically a deep-dive on animals, insects, and biology half a decade before HS Biology covered the same stuff at a shallower depth), understanding the underlying physics of planetary forces (plate tectonics, volcanism, fault lines, meteorology, etc), music and art appreciation regardless of ability to understand the underlying speech (lots of VHS musicals, arts and crafts, and self-expression), and ample time understanding how computers worked - including building my first programs and coding my first website. None of my "non-gifted" classmates received remotely similar quality of education, focusing instead on rote memorization instead of abstract problem solving.
* The day NCLB was signed, I remember my World History teacher flipping his desk in the classroom. "You lot better pay attention because you're the last class who will ever get this good an education ever again." He spent the remainder of the semester trying to teach World History through his preferred lens of underlying causes, political movements, outcomes, and next-order effects rather than dates and places, with ample essay questions on exams to force you to think critically on what you learned and make arguments for/against something he posited. Subsequent classes were exclusively date-person-place tests for the sake of standardized testing and measurable outcomes.
So when I see people defaulting to AI in a world where measurable outcomes are the only things that matter (grades, KPIs, 'number-go-up'), I can't entirely fault them. I've spent enough time in this system to know my way of thinking is entirely contrary to the incentives at play, and a threat to those who benefit from it. Were I more flexible in my ethics or thinking, I'd do the same to benefit myself.
Except I continue to see growing fatigue of folks who have to deal with this slop on a regular basis. Employers have already pivoted away from AI in interviews and job postings, at least in my IT purview, because the output doesn't justify the lost opportunities of hiring quality talent with critical thinking skills to solve unique problems; they're tired of "BuT cOpIlOt SaId" in meetings as justification for any given thing, and even more exasperated that leadership seems to trust the chatbot when it's wrong more than any employee who is right.
Do I think that attitude will win out in the long run? Not really, no, because the underlying incentives make reliance on AI in lieu of personal/critical thought a better prospect than trying to forge your own identity and path forward. At least for the foreseeable future, those who blindly trust the bot will be rewarded even when they're wrong, while those of us who use it as an untrustworthy peer (or not at all) will be punished for not surrendering ourselves to its output.
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