[01100011]

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.

[maweki]

> 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.

[larodi]

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.

[lcnPylGDnU4H9OF]

> 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.

[larodi]

Sorry, but history saw so little (as a fraction) of people that were actually getting fair living that others guaranteed for them. Even when it is about living in decent conditions provided by the community if you want.

Even in a tribe, there’s a lotta suffering and very little remorse for it.

We may say we chase a society that would see everyone understand the principle of ‘your child should also get a decent life’, but what we see now, across nearly all societies is really the opposite. And it phrases like this - we don’t care if your children live or die for as long as our children get better chances.

[lcnPylGDnU4H9OF]

> Sorry, but history saw so little (as a fraction) of people that were actually getting fair living that others guaranteed for them.

This statement is rather plainly not true. It describes child rearing and claims it does not happen in one breath.

There is a concept of "fairness", which I don't want to discount, but there's not much of a history of people being bottom feeders who do nothing to help those around them. Sure, there's a lot of sentiment to that effect but it is somehow something I fail to observe to this day. It is in the eye of the beholder and I worry for the souls of the beholders who judge so harshly.

This idea that someone is not deserving of food because they have not earned it a sad, anti-social thing to believe, perpetuated by psychological attacks from those who have more than they could ever need. You and your children deserve to eat and disagreement with that statement says more about the one disagreeing than it does any other, regardless of the judgement inherent to the nature of the disagreement (really, because of it, I suppose).

[canelonesdeverd]

> How come is anyone "entitled" to a decent living?

kind of the point of living in a civilized society i reckon

[lopsotronic]

Yeah once payback goes below subsistence[1] - even when it gets near it- things get unstable and extremely dangerous. Ancient people understood this very quickly and built up institutions to keep the baseline above subsistence for urban civilizations.

It's been so long since we've seen actual bread riots I fear we forgot how nasty those are.

I think the notion is that with new automated systems of violence and control, some of them built onto the people themselves, our "future civilization" can dial back the worker's compensation to below subsistence. There was a big zillionaire conference where they talked about slave collars, for example, or humanoid AI workers. I'm always a little distressed when the masters of industry fall back on science fiction in order to build a machine that needs to function in the, well, in the present.

[1] One person's output in terms of agriculture

[alt_422568]

> There was a big zillionaire conference where they talked about slave collars

What? Do you have a link?

[lopsotronic]

https://www.popsci.com/environment/douglas-rushkoff-survival...

It was a private 2017 desert retreat where five wealthy tech and hedge-fund investors flew out media theorist Douglas Rushkoff, ostensibly for a speaking engagement.

Rushkoff wrote it up first as a Guardian essay and later expanded it into his 2022 book Survival of the Richest: Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaires.

The problem's super duper obvious if you studied history, but it is also pretty obvious if you can think about second order effects. In collapse the wealthy obviously need security forces to hold on to their stuff, but in a collapse your stuff will - presto changeo - become the security force's stuff. Essentially the singular founding story of all European royal families. Barbarian general took the house, banged the wife, now he's king. Or King-Sound. Kai- Zar

At the end of the day all these little lords and lordettes figured out the time honored lesson that to be actually safe you want to make friends with the locals. And that's part of being new king types as well. But "making people like you" isn't a popular notion with the Revenge of the Nerds types who love this "Lord of the Bunker" kind of thing.

I've seen zoo chimpanzees make a mockery out of this sort of device in VERY short order, and I would dread to impose it on a Delta Force psychopath who also has more higher degrees than I do. Because he's going to know who it was who did it and have all sorts of ideas about what he's doing about that. So the basic premise is also idiotic.

Sorry, I was a little more snide than I usually am on HN, it's been a long day.

[loose-cannon]

There will always be scarcity and inequality. The point is to minimize/mitigate their effects. Can't you make the same argument for justice? Why does everyone deserve justice? Isn't that just entitlement? What is the historical or evolutionary basis for justice?

[larodi]

Nature does not exhibit anything as entitlement to justice. The whole concept of divine intervention (that we would like to exist more often than we like to admit) rarely manifests as measurable and consequential principle in how evolution operates. And it operates on brutal training cycles with lotta loss…

So, yes, in order to have a society one perhaps and most likely needs to define how rights are guaranteed. But it does not mean anyone is entitled to it by definition. Otherwise millions of dying children throughout modern history, and now also, would see the perpetrators get a ‘fair’ treatment. But they don’t.

Perhaps only as second order effects that are hard to understand and are not entitlement.

[loose-cannon]

So nature doesn't exhibit justice, but a society likely needs to implement it, yes? But you don't want to say who gets to receive those rights? Some might say that those millions of dying children is an injustice that we should try and prevent. In particular, the people whose lives are the most affected might want to have a word with you.

I'm not really sure how your reasoning here is in line with your previous post.

[munksbeer]

World GDP and standard of living has never been higher.

[Ygg2]

If two trillionaires bounce a 4 trillion dollar IOU, the GDP could be the greatest in the universe, even though nothing would substantially change.

[munksbeer]

Living standards for the median person in the world improve every year, and have done for decades.

[valleyer]

That's not what GDP means.

[FrustratedMonky]

"(GDP) measures the total market value of final goods and services produced"

It can be circular.

MS invests 5 billion in OpenAI.

OpenAI invests 5 billion in MS.

Do we have 10 billion now?

[valleyer]

No goods or services were produced in your example, so GDP would not be affected. Purchases of securities are not goods or services.

[stevenlangbroek]

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.

[munksbeer]

Everyone wants that. But people on this thread are arguing that technology is reducing our standard of living, which is just factually untrue.

[stevenlangbroek]

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?

[CRConrad]

Who was arguing that technology is reducing our material "standard of living"?

There's more to life than one's material standard of living. I think people were mostly talking about the other bits.

[esseph]

There is more to life than economics.

High trust societies, a feeling of place and well-being in a culture, connectedness, etc.

https://data.worldhappiness.report/map

Note: Look at the US continuing to move down the report year after year.

[eloisant]

It also doesn't owe your CEO billions for hovering over a company where other people (like you) do the actual value creation.

[roenxi]

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.

[grim_io]

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.

[ramon156]

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.

[lproven]

> 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.

[philipp-gayret]

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.

[kaashif]

Something interesting: for me, that comment was the 6th Google result for "medior". Interesting term.

[63stack]

The first 3 hits on any search engine weren't relevant?

[lproven]

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.

[boogierobis]

What I was going to ask as well, seems that people are getting dumber by the day.

[Izkata]

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".

[imtringued]

There are three levels of seniority. You can be a junior, a medior or a senior.

[coolThingsFirst]

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.

[ironmagma]

Society doesn't owe anybody anything. So who's to say when you find something else to do, it will pay enough to live?

[e12e]

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).

[simgt]

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.

[hparadiz]

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.

[ironmagma]

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.

[hparadiz]

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.

[simgt]

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.

[ironmagma]

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).

[red75prime]

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.

[antonvs]

> Society doesn't owe anybody anything.

That's obviously false. What's the point of society if that's true? Do you think there should be no government roads, no government health care (if you're in the US, you may think this, but only because you're indoctrinated), no legal system (or enforcement thereof) to protect you from criminals, no legally enforceable human rights whatsoever? Etc., etc.?

Once they actually understand what they're saying, no sane person believes that society doesn't owe them anything.

[ironmagma]

That’s actually something I agree with; I was making that statement as a challenge to the parent comment because it seems to be what they believe.

[stevenlangbroek]

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?

[FrustratedMonky]

"Society doesn't owe anybody anything. So who's to say when you find something else to do, it will pay enough to live?"

I don't think Society means what you think it means.

[CRConrad]

If you've been getting over $500k/year for years, you are "rich people". So no wonder you're not going to blame yourself for anything.

[113]

You are the rich people.

[stevenlangbroek]

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.

[113]

Of course there is. The person I'm responding to is still rich though.

[alaaalawi]

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

[eggsandbeer]

Fuck the American Dream