Tuesday, May 16, 2023

The Disappearing White-Collar Job

 I got some practice in last night, mainly long tones. I've not been practicing worth a damn and it showed. I'm beginning to see that the shakuhachi will be just as demanding as the trumpet, where to really succeed hours of practice a day are needed. And it's all I can do to get in one. 

An interesting thing came up on Reddit on r/collapse: https://www.reddit.com/r/collapse/comments/13irda1/the_disappearing_whitecollar_job/

As soon as I started reading it, I thought, "Of course!". Some years ago I thought about it and realized robots are not going to take everyone's job. There's not the electrical grid to run them anyway, and what anyone who's not been a repair tech knows is anything mechanical, that has to operate in the physical world, wears down and breaks down all the time. 

Someone on r/lostgeneration I believe, put up some saying that goes something like, "Computers were supposed to free us from drudgery so we could do art and poetry, and now we've still got the drudgery and computers are doing art and poetry". 

Well of course! Because a computer can sit there and *calculate* art and poetry. And computers are still expensive while humans are comparatively cheap. This was striking back in the early and mid 20th century when human work-hours were valued less than small amounts of time on a computer. Humans accommodated their work around the (more valuable and expensive to run) machine. 

It's still that way. And humans can go out and do things far more cheaply than computers or machines. A person on a bicycle is still far, far cheaper for doing deliveries than a drone or a robot or any of the cute but ultimately doomed "modern" ways to do it. 

Given practically unlimited amounts of energy to run it all, the future looks like Marshall Brain's short story "Manna" with the computers doing the thinking and the humans running around getting things done in the physical world. Fortunately there's not the energy to run a world like this. But the powers-that-be will sure try. 

I packed one more thing that I could send First Class and took those up to the post office. I then rode up to Dai Thanh figuring I'd buy a couple of packages of the little cucumbers they sell but they were out. I got some "angel wing" cookies instead and on the way back stopped at 99 Ranch for some packages of peanuts, then checked behind H Mart. There were things left out but nothing I wanted to take, although I took two packages of sweet potatoes to drop off at Tom's. 

I stopped by Tom's next and he's got his lazy pot-head sidekick back since Colin left. They were hanging out inside and I handed over the sweet potatoes and some packages of coconut milk powder I won't use because I've found a better brand. 

I asked Tom to send me a link to the violin song he was raving about yesterday and he called it right up on his smart speaker. It's the most generic country fiddle thing ever, but hearing the stupid thing has Tom all interesting in learning the violin now. I told him he's in a great place to do it, with a good violin shop right over in Japantown and plenty of country fiddle groups around. 

I got back in here and called it a  day.


No comments:

Post a Comment

Heavy, man.

 Last night I got the Connstellation cornet out and put the screw for the 1st valve trigger back on, and installed new water key corks too. ...