By Prokofy Neva, Virtualtor
Illustrations via MidJourney
So this excellent thread by my long-time Twitter and SL friend John Jainschigg cloud engineer, software developer, content/product marketer, began a few tweets back with an anxious discussion, as one often finds these days, about "what to do when the robots take over." Dusty Greene asked:
If you weren't already wealthy, just a total usa normie non techie person ... how would you prepare for the near term Ai future ?
— Dusty Greene (@RustyRoad) December 6, 2023
What would your strategy be ?
A catastrophe makes me think like a Russian.
Russians would tell you to start hoarding salt and matches starting yesterday. Toilet paper and sugar at this point would be luxuries. You can make tea out of almost anything in the forest, and find some mushrooms.
— ✨magic✨ (@Prokofy) December 8, 2023
You think you gotta start prepping that hard....
— Dusty Greene (@RustyRoad) December 8, 2023
So I go by the policy that @jjainschigg has suggested. AI is going to know who helped it, and who didn't help it. You won't be able to be neutral and hide out; it will know. So either help it, or go all in as a partisan and don't help it, mindful of the consequences. I help it.
— ✨magic✨ (@Prokofy) December 8, 2023So now we come to John's History of Everything on the Internet, in a thread unroll.@Prokofy @RustyRoad @Liv_Boeree Well, I can't take credit for this idea -- it's a variation on what's called 'Roko's Basilisk,' which is itself a kind of retrocausal thought-experiment in how 'future AGI' makes itself inevitable (by this idea scaring everyone into being an accelerator) ...@Prokofy @RustyRoad @Liv_Boeree ... and I guess, given the OP here, it's also a variation on the game theory idea of a 'Moloch Trap.'
Talking non-fantasy for a moment, my approach is pragmatic. I've been through several catastrophic industry crashes caused by technology ...@Prokofy @RustyRoad @Liv_Boeree ... -- for example, the dismantling of 90s-era peak b2b publishing by web and Google. In that era, before the internet worked really well (universal broadband) and before 'the point of search' and internet ad brokerage caught on, there were thousands of nich-y magazines ...@Prokofy @RustyRoad @Liv_Boeree ... paying solid, upper-middle-class salaries to journalists and designers and print production people and ad salespeople and these magazines each had a voice and influence and could defend a territory with moats of expertise, and advocated for readers and advertisers ...@Prokofy @RustyRoad @Liv_Boeree ... And between 1997, when the magazine/web group I helped operate was sold to CMP and United Business Media for a sum that made its founders very happy, and roughly 2003 when the entire business became unsustainable, was an arc of about six years. ...Yes my brother's life was ruined by these developments. He had a degree in engineering from RIT, as did his wife, they worked for big companies for years, they had their own company doing web publishing and he did network engineering as well and then many things fell apart.
— ✨magic✨ (@Prokofy) December 8, 2023@Prokofy @RustyRoad @Liv_Boeree ... And going through that, and a subsequent decade of watching what remained of traditional publishing bounce along the bottom and watching web replace print, and watching generations of journalists ...@Prokofy @RustyRoad @Liv_Boeree ... adapt to a series of 'innovations' aimed at pulling the point of monetization back to the publishing side ('publishing company of one!' 'pivot to video!' 'podcasting!' etc.) was pretty agonizing. Because in the end, as we all now know ...@Prokofy @RustyRoad @Liv_Boeree ... there is no 'diverse economy of opportunity' when there are vast disparities of scale. Infinitely-capitalized technical monopolies gotta monopoly. And what's left behind for humans is increasingly undignified and unsustainable for most. SURE, we now have ...@Prokofy @RustyRoad @Liv_Boeree ... a handful of 25-year-old YouTube multimillionaire influencers. But that doesn't compensate for the loss of an entire metier that used to let at least hundreds of thousands of skilled people live dignified lives of material prosperity (not to suggest that ...@Prokofy @RustyRoad @Liv_Boeree ... traditional publishing didn't have problems, but a smart kid could hope to actually work in the field and learn to love writing about helicopters or supermarket in-store point-of-sale (or a thousand thousand other things). ...@Prokofy @RustyRoad @Liv_Boeree ... 'Kayso, I, personally, climbed the value-chain out of this hole. I was typically 'last fired' for a while (which meant I got to fire all my friends and dismantle wonderful staffs nurtured over a decade, etc.). And then I leveraged engineering skills and became ...@Prokofy @RustyRoad @Liv_Boeree ... a web 'engagement infrastructure' entrepreneur (built metrics systems, ad-insertion systems, rode the Google beast for a while), and then an 'other kinds of engagement' entrepreneur (which is where I met Prokofy, in Second Life) ...@Prokofy @RustyRoad @Liv_Boeree ... And then I became a cloud engineer when cloud took off. And I've done great. So, okay, arguably, it was possible (and I'm an example) of productive self-retooling past scale-driven technology inflection points. But the emotional cost was enormous. ...@Prokofy @RustyRoad @Liv_Boeree ... the cost to my values (time able to spend with family, ability to build a professional legacy, etc., etc.) was significant. And (like everyone else) I now live in the World Of Precarity -- where the old model of 'Be good at something. Get a job. Do well. Show up. ...@Prokofy @RustyRoad @Liv_Boeree ... Hire good folks. Train them. Give them career paths. Grow the business, etc. And stay with that thing as it grows for 15+ years before you get lured away to do the same kind of thing but with more scope and more lavish compensation' has been replaced by ...@Prokofy @RustyRoad @Liv_Boeree ... 'You have skills they need for the next five minutes. Twist their arms as hard as you can for TC. Then prepare to jump in 18 months as soon as you smell flop-sweat because they are not your friends and will scrag you the second they hit a speed bump ...' ...@Prokofy @RustyRoad @Liv_Boeree ... 'Kayso, as someone who's watched this happen from inside targeted organizations filled with smart, innovative people, let me tell you: it sucks. And the AI revolution is worse than any preceding revolution, because we're not talking about ...@Prokofy @RustyRoad @Liv_Boeree ... something where you can tool up with new skills and learn to 'bring buyers and sellers together, but in a new way.' We're talking about an apparatus that commodifies brainwork for basically everyone ...@Prokofy @RustyRoad @Liv_Boeree ... So my political strategy is to fight this as hard as I possibly can, and advocate for implementing every kind of regulatory, confiscatory tax, and other hurdle to slow large-scale de-jobification and build moats around metiers. And then more personally ...@Prokofy @RustyRoad @Liv_Boeree ... (because I realize the above is futile) to climb the new value-chain, keep mastering the tech as it evolves, understand and map how companies inevitably get drawn into de-jobifying eddies and whirlpools ...@Prokofy @RustyRoad @Liv_Boeree ... so I have an idea of 'who's getting the axe first and how, exactly, is that going to look?' (and believe me, it will mostly NOT look like 'We hired a robot to do your job. See ya.' -- but the effect will be broadly the same. First the hiring freezes. Then the reduction ...@Prokofy @RustyRoad @Liv_Boeree ... in use of consultants and outsourcers, etc., etc. etc. All while selling people on the idea that their individual productivity will be increased by using the tools (yay!). Then a gradual turning-of-screws as those AI-enhanced productivity levels become normalized ...@Prokofy @RustyRoad @Liv_Boeree ... and suddenly, Jane Doe will be a 'corporate marketing department of one!' with her robot assistants. And Jane's job, which used to be creative, will now be about metrics and testing and reporting up to the capital owners ...@Prokofy @RustyRoad @Liv_Boeree So, I guess, TL;DR -- my reluctant but enthusiastically-pursued strategy is 'sauve qui peut, suckers.'• • •
I then replied:
Yes my brother's life was ruined by these developments. He had a degree in engineering from RIT, as did his wife, they worked for big companies for years, they had their own company doing web publishing and he did network engineering as well and then many things fell apart.
— ✨magic✨ (@Prokofy) December 8, 2023
