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by stevefan1999 109 days ago
They are not eliminating job, you still have jobs in 1984 which is where we are heading to. You still need to hire someone to do the mass surveillance and policing, and enforcing the laws that are getting more and more draconian day by day. And you still need people to instigate-cough-motivate hate on something in order to keep the momentum of the society to shift the focus. Those still took labor but AI makes it easier.

We are indeed entering a post-job-scarity environment though. You see a lot of ghost posting and lack of response for years now, 6 out of 10 application is ghosted, 2 out of 10 said no, and just a few remaining. Jobs are getting rarer and are going to be more of a status rather than for breadwinning
2 comments
uncletaco 109 days ago
It really sucks that everyone’s go to dystopia is 1984. Especially in this case given 1984 required the active participation of millions of citizens whereas Brave New World maps better where control is enforced through comfort and irrelevance instead of force.

The tech dystopia doesn’t even try to flatter us by assuming we’re important enough to oppress individually.

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joquarky 109 days ago
If we're closer to BNW, then where are the comforts?

Everything that were comforts before COVID are far too expensive now.

Even the bread and circuses are gradually being taken away.

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AndrewKemendo 107 days ago
>If we're closer to BNW, then where are the comforts?

Netflix/Sports/RealityTv + Onlyfans/PH + Doordash tacobell/chic-fil-a

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stevefan1999 109 days ago
The comforts, you mean soma? Well, besides from the fentanyl and tranq that turns people into almost-literal zombies since they can't get high from oxycontin and from codein no more, now instead we have all the free dopamine hits from gacha game lootboxes, endless attention seeking short videos, that is, tiktok/youtube shorts and instagram reels. Sometimes you feel high in the ups and lows of stock market and crypto bro doing rug pulls too. I have to unfortunately say I also fell into some of those lately, mostly in gacha games and opening weapon cases in CSGO, and for some reason I got rid of instagram which is a good thing I guess?

After all, "attention is all you need". Although it is nothing but just a title of the paper who introduced us to "transformers", and enabled all this AI slop lately (note: I'm not against LLM "AI" but I'm against using it in an irresponsibly, e.g. vibe coding without knowing your domain knowledge in the first place is one), but it is quite a dark humor to me that we can actually use this title literally to describe a lot of real world phenomemon.

All of that to make you feel numb in the rat race to the bottom. I don't think your argument that we are closer to BNM than 1984 is wrong, just that the antifa and all the ICE, and the politics fiasco makes me feel like it is more 1984 than BNM. Or maybe we have a super deluxe package to have both.

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jjj123 109 days ago
The comforts are digital. TikTok, YouTube, Twitch, Instagram, video games.
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Someone 108 days ago
> You still need to hire someone to do the mass surveillance and policing

Someone, yes, but not millions, maybe not even thousands anymore.

The Stasi needed 1 in 40 of the working population as informers (https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2015/03/lessons-from-...), but large parts of surveillance can be automated now.

For policing, you may not need that much, either. To put out smaller fires, you only need local superiority in numbers. That can be achieved by having a small force that can be rapidly deployed.

For large uprisings, you can use drones. You’ll want to avoid that, though because that isn’t guaranteed to keep you in power.

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