People had voted for Trump not because of lack of empathy, but because they were fed up with being patronized, negged, treated like children, observed, modeled and disempowered, belittled and generally discounted.
What you fail to comprehend is that your contemptuous attitude is the very thing that isn't working anymore. In fact, the more you crank up the rhetoric, the more you will be ignored.
If this election has taught us anything, it is that if we continually scream at and belittle adults, they will eventually ignore us. Every epithet, every word of shame-speak will then fall on deaf ears. We will find ourselves in the very position we placed them in: powerless and irrelevant.
You should be asking yourself: Why was the birther and the racial element so prominent during the Obama years? These things do not happen in a vacuum. They have a root cause, and it is not, as you might conclude, because every Trump voter is a racist, a bigot, or stupid. Think more deeply.
I might also add that by pigeon-holing the entire body who elected Trump into the category of ignorant racist bigots, you are committing the very act of stereo-typing you are decrying. You are discrediting yourself by accusing people of things they know they are not guilty of, and reinforcing your own irrelevance. If empathy is your concern, perhaps you should start with your own.
> If this election has taught us anything, it is that if you continually scream at and belittle adults, they will eventually ignore you.
I thought it was, "if you nominate a candidate against whom a successfull multidecade smear campaign has been run, turnout among the people that are otherwise likely to vote for your party will be dangerously depressed."
Trump was supported by a smaller share of the voting public than the losing candidate in the last Presidential election (about equal to the 2008 loser, and smaller than the losers in 2000 and 2004, as well) -- with less of the eligible population voting at all than in 2012.
> Why was the birther and the racial element so prominent during the Obama years?
The racial element has been a factor in pretty much every US election ever; heck, the stark divisions over racial policy underlies some of the most notorious provisions of the original constitution. It's the single most consistent and enduring political divide in the US. It wold only be noteworthy if it hadn't bee particularly prominent with a black candidate or incumbent in the Presidency.
"What you fail to comprehend is that your contemptuous attitude is the very thing that isn't working anymore."
You must be kidding me. What do you think Trump himself was doing? He is the epitome of an obnoxious screaming asshole, and he won! His approach clearly works.
It's a pity that the Democrats didn't have an anti-Trump on their side. Maybe he could have been the kryptonite that cost Trump the election. As it was, the old polite, wet rag politics that Clinton represented was defeated. (That's not to say that I'd want an anti-Trump as President either, or that I like screaming assholess, as long as they're on the left, but a more confrontational, "tell it like it is" style is clearly what gets media attention and is attractive to a lot of voters.)
In the future, the left needs to be more outspoken and confrontational towards the right, not more compromising and conciliatory as Obama has been, because the latter only leads towards moving the party further to the right.
Instead, the Democrats need to further differentiate themselves from the Republicans, and move further to the left. Otherwise they're going to keep being seen as Republican-lite, and few are going to get excited enough to vote for them (rather merely than voting against an even worse Republican option).
Sadly, given how the Democrats have behaved in the past, it's more likely that as a response to losing to Trump, the Democrats are just going to move even further to the right, in an effort to capture the "independent" vote (who were right-wing enough to vote for Trump this time around) instead of trying to win over the many more people who didn't even bother to vote because they were disillusioned with both the Republicans and Democrats.
You are making an essential error: that of false association. You are equating the behavior of a candidate, and of the candidate's most vocal supporters, with the general demeanor of the people who voted for him. If it were only the vocal or even ardent Trump supporters who voted, he would have lost. He didn't lose because the majority who voted for him were silent, in most cases brow-beaten into silence.
You are also neglecting the fact that Trump won with only 1% more of the white vote than Romney. This was not nearly enough to win. Trump won because of the minority vote. Compared to Romney he won 8% more Latino votes, 7% more black votes, 11% more Asian votes, and 1% other minorities. This statistic does much to counteract the hysterical white resurgence rhetoric. (Source: NYT Exit Polls).
You know what children can't do? Elect another child as the goddamn president. If they could, we'd be well-advised to treat them differently.
Democracies aren't run by whoever knows the most, they're run by whoever wins the election. (Record voter split by education this time, for all that achieved.) We just spent an entire year proving, in the most painful way possible, that treating voters like children doesn't work no matter how much you think of them that way.
You're writing about how the right "shouldn't be surprised" as though you're coming from a position of power, educating people who made bad choices. But we (we, even if I hate these tactics) lost. Lost the White House, lost the Senate, lost the House. 25 states with Republican trifectas, 6 with Democratic ones. (Won the popular vote, fine, San Francisco and New York City are crowded but they won't rule anything unless the secede.) We lost ground with minorities, lost ground with young people, lost ground with women - and this against Trump!
In all sincerity: what are you hoping for by treating people like children? What do you expect will happen, if not what just happened?
it never did for me. in fact i can remember many times in which i deliberately did whatever angered my parents again and again, just to piss them off more, to the point of them crying and having a near-mental breakdown (immigrant parents).
they literally could not process the reality of their child not following their authority 100%, because they grew up in a society in which that was the unquestioned norm.
eventually i conditioned them into not punishing me ever again, because they knew that punishment would beget more of the same unwanted behavior.
part of the reason i don't want kids. i wouldn't know how to handle the rebellion.
Sometimes you need a carrot, and sometimes you need a stick. I tend to think the stick worked better at shaping my behavior as a child, but you can't do that anymore.
He was called a racist many times before, including all the times he was sued for illegal racial discrimination (the first of which was more than 40 years ago.)
Now, maybe that hasn't gotten a lot of media player in places that you would notice while those in the Presidential campaign did, but that says more about your personal media consumption than anything else.
First I ever heard of his political views was when he ran for President.
If he'd been open and up-front about those views, I'm sure they would have been opposed, had anyone bothered to take him seriously. Though more likely he would have just been written off as some rich crank, much as he was at the start of his campaign.
The serious political opposition to him really mounted as his chances at getting political power increased. That, combined with people starting to realize what he and his biggest fans (Neo-Nazis and other white nationalists) stood for was why he's been called a racist now as opposed to when he was just another business man with his politics in the closet.
I don't think it's a good idea to categorize Trump supporters as uneducated hicks. Liberals love to do that to gun owners, but it is farthest from the truth--both groups are a massive cross section of society that cuts across every socioeconomic status and every education level. To think otherwise is a huge mistake and a huge generalization.
Hillary comfortably won the popular vote, and something like 100,000 voters in strategic states were what swung the election to Trump. "He couldn't lose" is a lot different from "he could win", and is a ridiculously strong claim that nobody who believes in evidence and logic-based reasoning would have made previous to Nov. 9th.
Would that mean there was no way Trump could have lost? No.
It is unclear how using counties as a metric is useful. It would be quite significant if Clinton won the equivalent of the population of LA county over Trump.
The popular vote is a relevant example of how the contest was not inevitable. More people voted for Hillary than for Trump... that's not what wins the election, but it's not meaningless to a democratic society. Counties, however, are completely arbitrary. Should winning the least populous 51% of counties matter to anyone?
You're using it as a convenient way to sidestep the obvious implication of losing the popular vote.
I'd be very careful about that "won the popular vote" meme. First off, it isn't relevant. Second off, if people who were ineligible to vote, aka illegal immigrants and felons (and maybe dead people, too) then what we know about the popular vote is a fallacy, too.
There are lots of other sources with more details, but all of them are considered now "trump shills", so I won't post them, last time I accidentally mentioned one of them (I didn't even knew the place was right-wing, it was the first time I read the site, and happened to be useful for an argument) I got lots of flak and stress.
Which is Not Even Wrong, for it implies the unknowable counterfactual that if Trump had been running a campaign for the popular vote, he wouldn't have won that. E.g. lots of people don't bother to vote when they're in "enemy territory" and they know their vote won't count for anything.
You can't take a situation based on X strategy, and then change the rules to Y strategy after the game has been played by X, and make anything more of it than a silly rhetorical point.
Are you arguing that there's no way Trump could have lost and there was incontrovertible evidence of that prior to election day or that Clinton did not win the popular vote by a wide margin? That's the extent of what I've contended here.
I don't care to discuss abstract hypotheticals, or whether this means Trump is wonderful or not.
Unless you're disputing in a roundabout way what I've presented there's no reason to be engaging in whatever you're doing.
This Neo-Luddism feels really misplaced. Do you know why some people are getting the short end of the stick? It's because the educational system has failed them by wasting their youth and giving nothing in return. But I can't blame a guy who founded a SV-centric blog to see all problems through a SV-centric lens.
one point is that most of SV's technology is in the hands of an elite of techno-libertarians and super-rich VCs with various chips on various shoulders.
they have no interest in spreading technology's monetary or possible systemic benefits to the entire population, and indeed a direct interest in accumulating and then exercising political power.
it's a real problem that cannot be explained away through a lack of education, as many over-educated, under-employed and disempowered young (and old!) people directly experience day to day. open-source software and education are steamrollered by the directed power of hierarchy.
> It's because the educational system has failed them by wasting their youth and giving nothing in return
Ah, the deserving poor!
Some never consider getting an education because it was not something to aspire to, let alone spending enough time in the system to fail them.
Maybe these people are getting the short end of the stick not because they were idle, but because their family were too busy working three jobs trying to make ends meet, maybe because their mother wanted to read to her children but was working some late to pay off medical bills, etc.
A strong welfare state and job security can break the cycle, but who is willing to pay - in taxes - for that?
> A strong welfare state and job security can break the cycle, but who is willing to pay - in taxes - for that?
Don't get me wrong, I fully agree. But I think that if I were to pick a single element of a welfare state that can bootstrap the whole thing, I'd pick education. It seems like a lot of the largest country growths were bootstrapped by betting on the educational system (Finland, Singapore and South Korea come to mind).
The process starts earlier than education. Education needs to be valued in the first place. And then, not only valued, but the parents need to have the security to afford their kids to have an education. And that means healthcare and job security.
I am all for a national health service and cheap/free college; it was what enabled my parents to afford an education for us in the first place.
I think the evidence is against you. The economics research shows that the 'best returns' come from early education, with diminishing returns the further progress is made.
It is counter intuitive I know, but mass education is similar to macro economics. Helping everybody can help nobody.
South Korea and Japan put a lot of focus on education, work insane hours for comparatively low pay, pay stupid rents and are also in a wage stagnation.
Put it like this:
You get to a middle income economy by doing 1 thing. You get to a high income economy by doing another thing. It is unlikely getting to a very high income economy is accomplished by replicating the former process that took you up a step originally.
> I think the evidence is against you. The economics research shows that the 'best returns' come from early education, with diminishing returns the further progress is made.
There isn't a single country where majority of the population does some sort of research. And guess what, that's what people in the future will have to be doing for their jobs.
> It is counter intuitive I know, but mass education is similar to macro economics. Helping everybody can help nobody.
You need a new system though. Fundamentally I think that one of the issues of the system is a lack of exploration. Like there are so many areas where you can go to extreme detail but people don't explore them because the educational system limits your worldview by limiting your choices. I guess it does get slightly better in college but not by much.
> South Korea and Japan put a lot of focus on education, work insane hours for comparatively low pay, pay stupid rents and are also in a wage stagnation.
I think that some of these issues are somewhat cultural though. To me it feels like both SK and Japan still cling to old social structures to a detriment of the society. The recent president Park scandal highlights quite a few of these issues.
> that's what people in the future will have to be doing for their jobs.
We'll have to agree to disagree.
Most post-2008 grads today are living hand to mouth in the cities. They are the new working poor. This isn't going to change. The market is saturated.
It is just that nobody wants to believe this. Not the teachers, not the parents, not the students.
> Fundamentally I think that one of the issues of the system is a lack of exploration. Like there are so many areas where you can go to extreme detail but people don't explore them because the educational system limits your worldview by limiting your choices.
We certainly agree on that.
Interdisciplinary pollination is all but forgotten. There's a cheap source of growth right there and few are picking up those dollar bills on the street.
If we lived in a world of economic growth (I'm convinced we're not, you see. I think ex-computation there is no real growth in the developed world for a long time) then we should see a flowering of new fields, new explorations, new businesses. What the GDP statistics say is only tangentially connected to reality.
The solution I would throw out is the use of AI, particularly agent based AI capable of nudging researchers and regular people along interesting lines of inquiry. I know that sounds vague but unless you think radical government reform is possible (you know: the other half of the workforce that has never seen genuine automation)... Almost any reform would probably spark a civil war.
What solution would you put forward?
> I think that some of these issues are somewhat cultural though. To me it feels like both SK and Japan still cling to old social structures to a detriment of the society.
Maybe. Maybe they're caught in the same trap we are.
I think 'Japan' is our future unless we solve for X here. They've been caught in a stagnation for decades. They don't have much social unrest, I doubt the United States would be so lucky.
I am a software engineer, and also a luddite. technology destroys jobs. the question is whether that destruction liberates or oppresses. do we fire some workers and overwork others, or find ways to reduce and share the burden and benefits of labour?
Technology also creates jobs. I think what you are missing here is that technology is neutral to human ambitions. Technology doesn't care--it could empower us, destroy us, whatever. Technology does not care about human destiny.
There's at least a very popular opinion that the accelerated rate of technological progress will make humans the horses of the 21st century, that is, we'll be replaced at jobs by technology faster than (most of us) can be retrained, and that most of us will be rendered useless and left in the cold.
The article itself was about that debate still going on, so it seems disingenuous to say you werent aware it was still being discussed.
On one hand you have increasing immigration increasing the supply of labour. On the other hand, you have increasing automation reducing the demand for labour. And in the pinched middle you have falling wages. This cannot end well.
I don't know which is the most dangerous scenario: the working classes taking it out on immigrants, or the working classes making common cause with immigrant labour against a Victorian economy of squalor, ill-health and poverty (which is good, but dangerous it had to get to this point) and turning revolutionary. The latter is a failure of politics.
At the moment the anger felt by people who fear for their jobs seems to be focused on immigration and free trade deals.
Immigration because people fear that somebody will come from another country and take their job, for less money, free trade deals because people fear their job will be outsourced to somebody cheaper in another country.
I believe this was a primary driver behind Brexit/Trump.
At some point these people will start to understand that it isn't just the immigrants threatening their jobs, it is also the programmers at home who automate them.
> believe this was a primary driver behind Brexit/Trump.
Yep. The feeling of being forgotten, of not being in control of one's life.
> At some point these people will start to understand that it isn't just the immigrants threatening their jobs, it is also the programmers at home who automate them.
Exactly. And once that anger turns inward, it can tear society apart.
The reason jobs went to China is simply because US companies were being made to pay for their pollution. China is cheap in comparison. Lower wages, less trouble with employment laws, no trouble with environmental impact. It was an extremely cynical maneuver to go and find the cheapest labor with the fewest consequences to have to manage. Same with India.
Very good point. The big question I'm also asking myself is which of the two scenarios is worse. In case of the former, the conflict would probably happen sooner and be more localized, which might mean an earlier 'solution' and/or less violence. But the latter scenario would probably have more chance of success, given that it involves more bodies to fight this revolution.
Neither sounds pleasant, and I'd like to think there are still other options. Any thoughts?
(As an aside: I've become a bit depressed by the fact that so much of the post-election and post-brexit talk is about 'who to blame' or 'what went wrong' rather than about what we can do to move forward. It feels so pointless and ineffective.)
It's not a private company's job to have empathy for the people affected by progress. Don't get me wrong, I have plenty of empathy. But petitioning private companies to change their ways will get you exactly nowhere unless it comes with a corresponding profit motive.
It's the government's job to redistribute wealth and income to the needy, and provide safety nets and retraining opportunities for people whose industries have been disrupted. Not Silicon Valley businesses.
Profit motives are short-term optimization behavior (or game-theory maneuvering), pure and simple.
I don't believe in companies because they think in the short-term. The average life-expectancy for companies in the S&P is 18 years.[1] Over our lifetimes, we will see endless companies live and die, each only seeking profit for the next quarter, year, or decade.
Believing that the role of companies (and especially Silicon Valley businesses) should be profit-seeking without any thought to empathy is like shooting ourselves in the temporal foot. What should our long-term strategies be? What company is going to care about you when you retire, or be thoughtful about the next generation's well-being?
It's the most idiotic of strategies that would invest in a few long-term strategies (governments, cooperatives, (a few) non-profits) and almost all short-term strategies without thinking about how they balance.
Right on. Silicon Valley may have an empathy vacuum/problem, but let's place the blame for this problem where it really lies: government policy makers. They are the ones that have watched globalization gut the middle class, while sitting back and collecting their fat stock grants and salaries for sitting on the board of the companies that are the beneficiaries of these policies.
We need universal basic income to soften the impact of the rise of automation in the workforce. The problem is that the same people influencing government to write policies that are clearly against the middle class also control the media, and they seem to have just convinced a majority of US voters to vote for a government that will create more income inequality by cutting taxes for the wealthy.
In a masterful stroke, now the policy makers pulling the strings are using the media to blame silicon valley for creating these problems. As if Facebook's news feed is the sole cause of the decimation of the middle class that has been happening for about 40 years now...
Then we should work to change government. Can we band together to do that? OTOH, many want smaller government. I was raised with "let the market decide". Private enterprise is always more efficient than government.
Are we conceding that only government can solve certain problems?
An alternative way to approach this, which the author of the article could also consider, is how might we, as technologists, build companies that help solve this problem?
For example, our country will have 3.5 M truckers (the most common profession in the US and in 46 of the 50 US States) out of jobs within 10 years due to automated trucking.
Option A: We cheer at the success of the automated trucking industry and ignore the impact (the 19th century robber barron approach)
Option B: We say "government clean up our mess" (the 21st century liberal approach)
Option C: We build companies, or organizations, that educate and employ those out of work truckers. (??)
Assuming we care about time periods longer than tomorrow, we cannot ignore the societal impacts of the companies and products we build. These cultural externalities are real; similar to the environmental externalities of the industrial revolution.
Its time for the entire tech community to decide what role our industry will play in society. We have a choice about if we want to be part of the solution - or just ignore it and wait for the coming societal chaos.
Educate them to do... what, exactly? What could Uber do with two million mostly-uneducated truck drivers that are scattered all through out the country? Most do not want to move, do not have the patience/desire/grit to go through long retraining periods for a vastly different job, and are currently making something in the neighborhood of $55K/yr. How could any company possibly be expected to help that large a workforce not take a dip in its standard of living, when literally the only skill they have is about to become nearly worthless? And how could you do it while still upholding your fiduciary responsibilities to your shareholders?
Agreed. This strikes me as the kind of thing that requires a government solution. Perhaps it means we should get our hands dirty (but not in that way!) and enter politics. As nice as it would be to solve problems doing what I am already good at and what I already like to do, sometimes a hammer isn't enough...
This attitude is why silicon valley is well on its way to becoming the villain in the narrative of our progress. It is a place dedicated to redefining the world we live in. Valley companies can, and regularly do, redefine how companies work and make money. Sometimes they need to be the ones to bite the bullet and lose some of their yearly profits by spending it on making this transition buttery smooth.
Without them trying to make this effort, and the common man fearing the gaze of the innovation beast, governments will have to act - and not necessarily by transition those affected into positions where they can still be secure, but by stifiling the innovation by actively targeting the catalysts of these changes with laws and regulations and hoops upon hoops to jump through.
Private companies consist of people. This message board isn't populated by companies.
The difference between the army of geeks powering silicon valley and other industries is that the SV people don't realize that they are cogs in the wheel. The optimism and hope of the late 90s is gone.
The "magic" is at an inflection point and is tipping towards becoming a menace. When SV gets "disrupted" in 10 years, either by an earthquake or some group of rich plutocrats somewhere else, the popular reaction is probably going to be a big "fuck you".
bull. You're a human being. A CEO is a human being. A software engineer is a human being.
The type of thinking you just espoused leads to sweatshops, environmental destruction, and corporate fraud.
We all have a responsibility to show empathy to others. Anyone who tries to hide behind the corporate shield of "it's just my job and fiduciary responsibility" should be shown the door.
Sweatshops, environmental destruction, child labor etc. has only been effectively fought through government intervention. Personal empathy has no net effect in a free market.
This argument then goes full circle. The government reflect the will of the people and the people currently believe that globalization and immigration are the source of all their ills - not automation. Why do believe this? Because of a failure of the free press, exacerbated by the filter bubble of social media - which is the responsibility of SV.
That lack of empathy might come back to bite those companies in the ass later on though when the people affected start to vote for politicians who promise to protect their jobs by heavily taxing companies who use/focus on automation.
I don't disagree with your analysis, but I also think the article is right that SV business in general lacks an understanding of life in the "fly over" states. I don't see that as a moral failing necessarily, because, as you point out, it's not the function of business to remedy dislocations in the job market.
However, I do see it as a business failing. Dislocations in the job market and other social and economic disruptions in middle America are business opportunities in their own right. Like the old schtick from SWOT analysis about turning threats into opportunities. For example, automation in factories will lead to laid off factory workers. They will need training for new jobs, perhaps via online courses/certifications. Providing those would be one example of such an opportunity. There are almost certainly many more such opportunities, upon which not even the slightest fraction of the intellectual might of Silicon Valley has been brought to bear.
If a general sense of duty doesn't motivate SV business to address the issue, perhaps the dim foreshadowing of pitchfork-wielding hoards streaming from the heartlands to the coasts will. Millions of unemployed truck drivers, restaurant servers, and factory workers will not idly stand by while falling into an economic ruin rendered ever more stark by the excessive accumulation of wealth in Silicon Valley. An awareness of opportunities for business growth in less prosperous regions could help prevent that.
Lack of exposure to economic realities elsewhere in the country is one of the chief dangers of a highly insulated, highly centralized tech center like SV. How we address that risk is a hard question. Empathy may not be the ideal term or tool for facilitating the flow of information between SV and other, less thriving communities across the country, but it's at least a first order approximation of the deficit.
I agree. Now when companies do embark on charitable acts, things that are beneficial to society (e.g. a tech giant pushing for green energy for their data centers), that's great and commendable. But we shouldn't generally expect them to be the ones pushing society forward except for the narrow sphere in which they offer products and services to consumers. The incentives just aren't there, not to mention they lack the power government has to set uniform standards via taxes and regulations.
> However, when you are a data-driven oligarchy like Facebook, Google, Amazon, or Uber, you can’t really wash your hands of the impact of your algorithms and your ability to shape popular sentiment in our society. We are not just talking about the ability to influence voters with fake news. If you are Amazon, you have to acknowledge that you are slowly corroding the retail sector, which employs many people in this country. If you are Airbnb, no matter how well-meaning your focus on delighting travellers, you are also going to affect hotel-industry employment.
Yes, it is not fair if a small part of the population reaps all the benefits of hundreds of years of progress, while the majority has to fear for losing their jobs.
Both. Amazon corrodes the power of brick and mortar by obsoleting it. Why go to a store limited by shelf space when you can shop at one with essentially infinite inventory?
Silicon Valley threatens the majority of blue collar workers last. This is Moravec's Paradox. The kinds of jobs blue collar labour does flexibly and in situ are extremely difficult for robots and AI to accomplish. The jobs that are rote and can be performed in a centralized production have already been automated or outsourced to China!
That is why blue collar workers are more worried about migration and globalization than computing technology. The 'robots' that threaten their jobs are other people.
It is the white collar jobs Silicon Valley is destroying. Journalists, Accountants, Lawyers and many more to come.
Solution definitely isn't education, or at least not education as it is classically understood.
Korea and Japan have already tried the education route and they have met diminishing returns. Go there if you want insane working hours for low pay and pointless competitions.
Here's a crazy idea.
Maybe young people should leave the universities and exit the cities altogether. They could live in small communities in the countryside and be ramen profitable. Integrating into the broader economy could be accomplished by traveling to like-minded communities to avail of services there e.g. an artist's colony, a computer person colony, etc
I think this is happening already but it's flying under the radar of journalists as some kind of Timothy Leary move.
There's a lot of clear failures of technology, especially coming out of Silicon Valley, to mesh well with society which highlights how difficult these companies have grasping real people and their emotions.
Security vs. privacy is the big one for me. Companies like Google try to treat "privacy" like it's an ACL: You either make something private or public, and if it's public, we can disseminate it. In reality, people do lots of things publicly within a narrow scope of attention. I post stuff on roleplaying websites which are publicly available to the Internet, but I wouldn't point them out to the people I work with, and they'd never see them, normally. I don't want Facebook or anyone else recommending them to my coworkers just because I may have people from both of my social circles friended on Facebook.
With Silicon Valley companies hiring for "culture fit" over other qualifications, they surround themselves with long hours with only people who think like they do. Since a lot of people move to work in Silicon Valley, they're likely more distant from siblings and parents than the average worker as well. It's unsurprising folks have a difficult time understanding everyone else's problems, because they experience them so little. I've long wished a few Google designers would be forced to help some senior citizens figure out how to use Gmail.
“Productivity is at record levels, innovation has never been faster, and yet at the same time, we have a falling median income and we have fewer jobs. People are falling behind because technology is advancing so fast and our skills and organizations aren’t keeping up.” It is, he said, “the great paradox of our era.”
While I believe this is true, and understand why it is a problem, I do not think there is anything that can be done about it. Now that billions of people are online, Moore's law has made hardware cheap and fast, and anyone can build a piece of software with a chance of viral growth (if lucky), we have to establish that we are in a winner-take-all environment. This is simply the power law at work.
I would also say that we are without a doubt, in the early phases of this period - going forward, any job that can be automated will be, eventually. If my company can front the capital expenditures to build/buy a robot that can do my job for $4/hour (with out lunch and coffee breaks) instead of $35/hour w/ benefits, my new salary should be $4/hour per basic economics of supply and demand.
Is this a huge problem, absolutely. Is it going away - not a chance. The writing is on the wall for a lot of repetitive tasks - the best thing everyone can do is vote for people who want to improve education, starting and elementary level in the US and push more kids in the STEM careers. If you want to contribute on an individual level, consider tutoring / mentoring younger kids in your free time. Show them that instead of pissing their entire youthful lives away scrolling through the useless feeds that are facebook, instagram and/or snapchat, they could actually build their own facebook/snapchat.
One of the things I think we forget about here, where most of us are smarter than the average bear, is that there are a lot of people that aren't so smart. If you have an 80 IQ, you might be able to learn how to code, but it's going to be really hard and you're never going to be as good as somebody with more mental resources to start with. My mother works as a special ed teacher - her main concern is trying to get her kids reading and doing math within one or two grade-levels of where they ought to be, and with a lot of effort and one-on-one work, she sometimes succeeds. Some years, 25% of the entire grade will be on her case-load.
A hundred years ago, these people could do pretty alright working on the farm. Fifty years ago, they could do real well working in the mills. Today, they struggle to subsist on WalMart and McDonald's wages. Already, we're automating those jobs away.
I agree in spirit, but I think most people are capable of obtaining an STEM degree (you're being too pessimistic). You just have to work a bit harder than say you work for an art history degree (and you certainly come out of college less well-rounded, which is also a huge problem).
There are always going to be good jobs that don't require college degrees. Plumbers can make $100K a year if they're good and work hard. I'd rather be a plumber making $100K any day then working for $25/bucks per hour trying to pay off my $180K in student loans from a B+ list law school. (a lot of people are in this position)
If you can get through law school, you can certainly get through any STEM degree.
You're very optimistic. I suspect there are tons of people who can not get through law school or get an art history degree!
I've spent quite a chunk of my life around people who are somewhere on the lower half of the intelligence curve. I grew up in poor neighborhoods, and attended a pentecostal church for much of my life (which at least over here contains the full spectrum of 'classes', but skews working class).
Lots of these people just cannot handle the level of abstraction (or whatever the thing is they need) to obtain even the easiest of college degrees.
On the other hand, I also learned that 'smart' is a very multi-dimensional thing and from their perspective 'academic me' is a complete idiot in so many ways. I'm just saying that the particular skills needed for (most of?) college are skills that a lot of people don't have.
Although I agree with you on the education part, pushing STEM is not necessarily the answer. Everyone having the same skillset is certainly not the answer to diminishing returns on employment.
I realized we were doing another one of those articles when I hit "Others have decided that the real villains are Silicon Valley giants, especially Twitter, Facebook, and Google, for spreading fake news stories that vilified Clinton and helped elect an unpopular President."
That's not a Valley opinion, it's a traditional-media opinion. In my experience, Facebook and SV types more generally are acutely aware of how unhelpful and oversimplified the 'fake news' panic is. Facebook's "news" sidebar sucks, sure, but they can't actually stop people from sharing crappy, dishonest information back and forth. And the lines between fake and misleading and simply uninformed are blurry - anything that stops fake news will have people screaming censorship in a heartbeat.
This feels an awful lot like the usual gimmick of "SV is powerful, therefore all societal problems should be solved by SV - even the ones we blame it for!"
I think it runs a bit deeper than "Silicon Valley" which makes for a nice headline and is the new scape goat. My opinion:
1. computer science has an ethics problem due to the lack of modernization of and membership in professional societies like the ACM.
2. Technology moves so fast that the ethical dilemmas created by it aren't explored and debated quickly enough, nor are the long term impacts able to be understood in time.
3. We fail to learn from our history and our own writings. Seriously, science fiction writers of the 60s and 70s have explored so many issues we grapple with today in such incredible detail yet we haven't synthesized this beyond Asimov's laws.
> If you are Amazon, you have to acknowledge that you are slowly corroding the retail sector, which employs many people in this country. If you are Airbnb, no matter how well-meaning your focus on delighting travellers, you are also going to affect hotel-industry employment.
> Otto, a Bay Area startup that was recently acquired by Uber, wants to automate trucking—and recently wrapped up a hundred-and-twenty-mile driverless delivery of fifty thousand cans of beer between Fort Collins and Colorado Springs. From a technological standpoint it was a jaw-dropping achievement, accompanied by predictions of improved highway safety. From the point of view of a truck driver with a mortgage and a kid in college, it was a devastating “oh, shit” moment. That one technical breakthrough puts nearly two million long-haul trucking jobs at risk.
Ok, and? What exactly do you expect these companies to do? Is it Otto's responsibility to provide new jobs to all the displaced truck drivers? Or should they just shut themselves down, letting all the benefits of self-driving trucks come to naught?
> we need to learn about those who are threatened by it.
I don't see what the author expects to happen here. To the extent that people get screwed over by the free market and we, as a society, want to do something about that, that's clearly the government's job.
And if people vote for representatives that oppose stronger social safety nets, as people literally just did a couple weeks ago(1), then apparently our country -- not Silicon Valley, but the whole voting populace -- is not interested in providing additional assistance to those hurt by technological advancement.
1 - with the obvious caveat about the popular vote
Helping people back on their feet, if anything, should result in a stronger fiscal future, not a weaker one. Just letting people languish in unemployment tends to result in people acquiring physical health problems, mental health problems, even drug dependency. And then those people get stuck on the disability rolls, draining taxes rather than contributing them.
Just look at all the stories around opioid abuse throughout rural white areas/the rust belt; you think those places are setting us up for a stronger fiscal situation in the future?
I would have to say I haven't seen anything from either party that would address any of that, directly or indirectly. The problems you describe have been ignored for years.
Except they didn't vote for a fiscal conservative, they voted for a guy whose primary policy proposals are tax cuts and public works programs. So they're stealing from the future either way.
If Cruz or Rubio or Ryan had been the GOP nominee, I would take your comment more seriously.
From my point of view, no candidate running for President had any fiscal conservative views. Some of the them could talk-the-talk and spit out a few keywords to the media, but none of them really had it if one would look at them hard enough. The Republican party hasn't supported the notion of a fiscal conservative in decades. So the voters went with the candidate that spoke out against the establishment.
Also, there are types of Presidents that can work on a decent future without being a fiscal conservative, it's not a requirement. We'll have to see how it plays out with Trump.
I don't see how the things he discusses have to do with empathy in Silicon Valley. Driverless trucks, for instance, have nothing to do with empathy and a lot to do with simple economics. Someone is going to build them if they can make a buck doing it, and empathy isn't going to somehow stop that.
On the other hand, I do think companies like Facebook and Google and the news sites (or whoever makes their comment systems) can do a lot about "the impact of their algorithms and their ability to shape popular sentiment in our society," as he alludes to in the article but fails to explore in any depth.
What if there were simply richer tools for users to rate things? For instance, to tag a post as "+1 nuanced" or "-3 overly divisive" or "-2 unsupported by evidence" or "-3 inappropriately political" or "-5 bigoted", and then have algorithms (and user interfaces) that deal with this additional information in ways that actually are effective while also being careful not to discourage those who don't like getting downvoted? (e.g. only show downvotes to users a month after they appear so the user is less likely to emotionally respond, but still gets feedback as to why their microphone is getting the volume turned down)
Then of course give users tools to control what they see....e.g. hide (or suppress) divisive political content, etc.
There are any number of things that can be done to tone down the hateful divisive rhetoric that pervades online social spaces, and lets the insightful, nuanced content float to the top. Is anyone doing this? Are they even experimenting with it? Are they so scared that users will run away if there are too many options? (you know, you can always put them behind a "show all ratings options" setting that by default is off)
This isn't censorship, this is just putting into place things that have in place in the real world for millennia, but that disappear in naive approaches to bringing conversations online. It won't be perfect initially, but it can at least be a lot better.
> I don't see how the things he discusses have to do with empathy in Silicon Valley. Driverless trucks, for instance, have nothing to do with empathy and a lot to do with simple economics. Someone is going to build them if they can make a buck doing it, and empathy isn't going to somehow stop that.
But whether or not you consider what happens to the people who used to drive those trucks and what they, their families, and their communities are going to do when they no longer have work has everything to do with empathy.
Ok, tell me what good it is going to do to consider those things. Are you suggesting that if we all collectively decide that building such things hurts people, no one will build them? And that such an idea is remotely realistic?
> Ok, tell me what good it is going to do to consider those things.
Well, assuming you're American, you can look at the decline of Detroit to see what happens when you don't think of these things. Or Wales and the North of England, if you're from the UK.
> Are you suggesting that if we all collectively decide that building such things hurts people, no one will build them?
No, I'm suggesting that we consider the implications of what we're creating and try to ensure that, even as we build them, we ensure that we don't damage whole swathes of society in doing so. But that's just me, and it might just be that I'm a bleeding heart. All progress comes with its benefits and its downsides, and if you think rendering people unemployed without giving them an alternative means of supporting themselves is OK and/or shouldn't be part of the calculus of how progress is made, then that's your decision.
Another option would be to commit to setting aside some of the profits for a fund of some kind to address the externalities in whichever way seems most effective at reducing the negative effects. I'm not saying I expect a company to do this, but why can it not be considered an option?
We're still humans within this system, and there are a number of examples of companies that do things differently and stay in business.
To be clear, I agree with what you're saying as an observation of how things work much of the time. I also don't think Silicon Valley is any better or worse than the rest of the 'system' (honestly I don't know).
But generally speaking I'm inclined to believe that 'this is just how things are' is one of the main reason why things don't change. Things don't have to be the way they are and it takes individuals working within (as well as outside) the systems that are in place to change this.
> don't see how the things he discusses have to do with empathy in Silicon Valley. Driverless trucks, for instance, have nothing to do with empathy and a lot to do with simple economics. Someone is going to build them if they can make a buck doing it, and empathy isn't going to somehow stop that.
The lack of empathy displayed here is exactly the problem. Appealing to economic justifications does nothing to help the communities devastated by automation. So long as they are ignored, or met with a callous response of "get a new job", then a source of anger and resentment will remain and propagate.
> the problem is that we are all chasing that buck, rather than imagining what that buck could do
So....tell everyone to stop being self interested?
> emotional problems require emotional solutions.
What emotional solution do you propose? Send everyone to therapy?
I see a dramatic difference in sites that have sophisticated moderation tools, such as Quora, vs those that don't, for instance YouTube. I just think they should go further.
Counterpoint: a lot of things like automated cars and whatnot are only possible by the wide-spread reallocation of resources to their accomplishment.
Uber is able to afford this beachhead because they flaunt local laws and exploit workers, Google because they have a massive surveillance apparatus they are able to charge money for advertisers to access.
The simple explanation "oh well somebody would've built it anyawys" is incorrect.
> The streets of San Francisco—spiritually part of the Valley—feel less crowded. Coffee-shop conversations are hushed. Everything feels a little muted, an eerie quiet broken by chants of protesters. It even seems as if there are more parking spots.
This article is the embodiment of the South Park, San Francisco stereotype of the guy enjoying the smell of his own farts.
The idea that they might be living in a bubble that is totally out of sync with 95% of America (geographically speaking) is unfathomable to an elitist.
Wow, I read this, and thought "hey, maybe there is an opportunity here... another problem to solve, to make society better".
I'm a bit surprised by the amount of denial and "not my problem" comments (or perhaps "what problem?" comments).
Yes, it's a very difficult problem -- maybe more on par with a Mars mission than the next chat app. Was hoping to see more interest and ideas. I don't think it's a sign of weakness to show empathy, or to advocate for the greater good vs. greater efficiency. Or try for both.
I'm just going to cut right through this from the start.
Unlike most of my tech friends, I actually have tried to reconnect outside our privileged circles (and if you don't think that's what they are, you're kidding yourself). And you know what I found? A lot of echoes of the personal past.
Lets face it. A lot of techies — engineers specifically — are who they are because they were socially rejected in younger years. And you know what? When you try to reconnect with normal people, you will find that the whole popularity complex never really ended. The difference now is that you are economically on-top with all the abuses that that tempts.
Are you prepared to be othered and ostracized again? Because that's what's going to likely to happen. But I think you will find that the ordinary people have dignity too, and that there is validity to many other paths that don't go through the worldview of science and technology. And yes, it will lend credence to those "feels" things, like the Facebook timeline disaster mentioned in the article.
Just don't expect any fairness or warm, loving reconciliation is all I'm saying. This isn't some feel-good Hollywood movie. Don't expect as the hippies say that we are all one people, veda-this, spirituality that, blah blah blah, because we are quite frankly not.
But that doesn't diminish the importance of bridging the empathy gap, especially if you want to design and build things for other people, including yourselves.
I don't know, as you get older you find more things you can bond with the people that used to ostracize you in the Lord of the Flies microcosm that was Junior High/High School.
Work, bills, health and fitness, homes, kids, pets, where we want to go on vacation, hell I watch about three sports games a year and that seems to be enough to bond over sports, even.
I don't really have a problem getting along with people I would have never talked to in high school because as an adult I now have a lot more similar experiences I can talk with them about.
And now that technology is literally everywhere and used by pretty much everyone nowadays, as long as I dumb that down a bit I can discuss that with them too.
I was the first in my (working class) family to go to university, followed by my younger siblings. We may not now move in the same circles as the other children of the neighbours on our street, but we sure don't patronize them, think them any less, or dismiss their and so many other people's genuine concerns be it immigration, or crime, or job security. Unlike certain media and others who claim to be left-wing in the outlook, but may as well be from a different planet.
No one is asking anyone to hang out or connect with "normal" people, but we can surely start with the generally valid assumption that most people act in good faith and not dismissing anyone as being "deplorable" or any of the -isms.
> we sure don't patronize them, think them any less, or dismiss their and so many other people's genuine concerns be it immigration, or crime, or job security
great! perhaps you have been raised well and have managed to recover from emotional trauma you may have experienced in life so far. some people unfortunately have not been so lucky.
So what if you got socially rejected in younger years? That's no excuse for anything and it's time to grow up. Social skills are just that.. a skill. Skills can be acquired through training and practice. I know because I went through all of this personally. A lot of nerds never try because they are too scared of other people and have low self esteem. Social value is an illusion, one you can craft if you know how. The first step is stop being selfishly always inside your own head and actually listen to the other person.
Not all of us were naturals or were taught this by our parents. But now we are adults and there are a lot of resources out there about social skills in work, life, and dating. Try it, and you and your new beautiful wife might find your career success going beyond anything you could have imagined. Not because you became a better programmer, but because you made connections and knew the right people.
> I know because I went through all of this personally.
Apologies for a bit of a rant. It's not targeted at you specifically, but the above statement prompted it.
I'd just like to say that some of the most un-empathic people I know use such statements as an excuse to judge others rather than understand them (let alone empathize).
I've met more than once person who worked themselves up from poverty and because they could, everyone can and should, and those who don't are clearly just not trying hard enough.
The same goes for quite a few people who grew up with shitty parents, mental health issues, religion, and so on.
Now to some degree I get that; plenty of people are just excited about their solution to their problem and just mistakenly believe that if only others would do as they did, they'd be happier. In my church-going years we called these people 'recent converts'.
But quite often there's more than just a little condescension to it, and I really, really dislike that.
I've been privileged in many ways, and I try to be aware of that. But I've also had it hard in many ways, and the most hurtful and unproductive comments were of the 'just do <x>, it worked for me' or even the usually-only-implied "you're just not trying hard enough" variety.
These kinds of statements were particularly painful if the person who said them actually had experienced similar problems, because it would give their words more weight, more legitimacy, and it would make my problem something to feel ashamed about because clearly I'm just not trying hard enough; surely they would know.
The thing is, even if it's true, it doesn't help other than make those who make these statements feel good about themselves.
I just wanted to say that. I do agree with the gist of you comment. Learning social skills has been extremely beneficial to me, and much of that didn't come naturally! And I wish there was a class for that for those who somehow haven't learned these things, because that sucks.
Clearly trying to "reconnect" with people you never got along with in the first place wouldn't ever work. But I wonder if you'd have the same problems if you didn't consider yourself a different breed than non tech folk.
nicely written. reconciliation is not like the movies, it requires from us steadfastness and courage in the face of criticism and outright character assasination.
as engineers we spend a lot of time dismissing the ethical or systemic consequences of our work in favour of concentrating on hard problems with deterministic solutions. humanity is more than that, reality is more than that.
there is real, legitimate anger, grief and confusion in the population. if we want to put technology to work for the people, we need to listen to them (us) in all their (our) messy, contradictory beauty/ugliness/realness.
grieving is a process that starts with denial and ends with acceptance.
I don't expect any fairness or warmth from those people, and I still find many of the same ones pretty thoughtless and boring.
All the same, I try to sprinkle a little more warmth and kindness on what I do now than they did then, or likely would now were our positions of influence reversed.
Not because it's fair, not because they really deserve it, not even abstract reasons like their kids shouldnt suffer for them being dicks in high school, but because I want to be in a world that errs on being nicer than it should. I want to fundamentally break the rules we grew up by, and we're genuinely on the cusp of technology enabling that.
And at the end of the day, I simply have more power than them, so we'll live a little more how I want and a little less in their Darwinian shithole.
There's been a lot of that going around the past couple of months. You feel pretty strongly about it. What makes this submission particularly on topic? Note that even though it was flagged (but not killed), it's garnered 129 comments so far. Reviewing the discussion, what in particular do you find substantive and civil about it? Why do you think users flagged this submission?
And this article is not helping it.