That's how I feel about HyperCard. Some apps were so ahead of their time that when they were axed, nothing comparable replaced them.
I believe that this is due to a tragedy of the commons in the software industry. We're all so creative, with so many dreams, but spend the majority of our lives working 40 hour weeks to outcompete each other and make rent. Then when someone wins the internet lottery, they succumb to their ego and do a bunch of stuff in business to hoard even more wealth, rather than working to reform the system which keeps so many others down.
I would very much like to write a programming language, a blogging tool, a web framework, a game, a game development tool, etc etc etc. But I never will. Most of the people reading this never will either.
So I endure. I meditate, I practice stoicism, I go to the gym. But I had to let my dreams die for my own self-preservation because opportunity cost grew to consume my entire psyche. I simply can't think about all of the other things I could be doing while I have to work. And all I do is work.
There doesn't seem to be much help coming in terms of UBI or having N people split a 40 hour workweek or forming artist communes for makers. Sure, we hear the occasional stories. But it's like we're all waiting around for a billionaire to liberate us, rather than creating a scalable cooperative system to sustain all of us right now today.
What I'm saying is that until we look beyond the technical challenges and see that the problem is subjugation, we'll never get free of the lackluster tools, because we'll never have time to make better ones.
"but spend the majority of our lives working 40 hour weeks to outcompete each other and make rent"
THIS.
I am so sick of the competition in most tech jobs / companies to climb the stupid ladder. Everyone just wants more more more and our society reinforces that. I _REALLY_ miss working on teams that didn't have that amount of competition causing mild dysfunction.
Just for some perspective, the 40-hour work week is a relatively new invention that only surfaced with the recent rise of the white-collar workforce. In my parents' day, the 40-hour work week was called "bankers hours" and this was used in a highly derogatory "sure must be nice" tone of voice. Many or most of us are probably descended from farmers that worked doing hard physical labor from sun-up to sun-down six days a week at a bare minimum with the rare holiday being reserved for family gatherings and religious observances. No travel at all unless you could hire someone (or left your kids at home) to feed the pigs or whatever while you were gone.
I'll take 40 hours over that kind of life in a hearbeat, thankyouverymuch. Although I am still trying very hard to make it so that I don't have to do even that much for the rest of my life.
In general, I don't disagree that it's sad that we spend such a huge proporation of our precious, finite time on our planet working. Most work without enjoyment because that's how you put food on the table.
On the other hand, the person who cracks this nut will enjoy unprecedented fame and their name in the history books for the rest of human civilization if they figure it out. (And no, it's not going to happen no matter how many 140-char political rants there are on the bird site. Very arguably, those are in fact the opposite of progress no matter which "side" you think you are on.)
And thousands of years ago it would be feasible to live on 30 hours of work a week. I wouldn’t want to give up modernity for that, but it’s not as though tremendous amounts of labor is the original work week.
But how many hours does the person who lives in the RV down by the Aqua Park work? They don't need to pay for refuse dumping because they simply dump in the lake which now has Hepatitis fumes so it's not a good idea to jog around there any more. And they have huge piles of bikes.
Fail to compete and you'll be left behind in terms of compensation, performance review rankings, and career growth, the last of which also limits your future job choices. It also puts you nearer the top of the list for layoffs when corporate finances get tight.
But those things shouldn’t bother you if you aren’t interested in the “more more more” society. It’s easy to get a stable programming job in the US that pays $80k and has very little lay-off risk.
You can’t have it both ways complaining about being left behind in comp while not participating in the grind that allows those comps to go higher.
Lower paid jobs can be worse. That they can’t afford to pay you more might mean they are doing something noble but usually it is a wannabe growth startup being badly run and pushing down pressure on lower waged staff to compensate.
But you have a point: at 80k requirement you could easily freelance to earn that, for non technical people. Help set up shopify stores etc. and not need
to constantly be on a learning grind.
I don’t think wanna be growth startup is really typical. Typical lower, but not that low paid tech job is more like maintain software tooling that supports mechanical engineers testing, or aids insurance appraisal, or replacing ladder logic industrial automation with something that has more iot type features (and still might be partially ladder logic). Probably all those pay 80k-100k to someone with a few years experience. The downsides are dingy offices that you’ll have to show up in sometimes, and for the last one, potentially lots of travel to not too exciting places.
Participating in the grind however means tossing away millions of employee-hours on paper-pushing jobs that don't really accomplish much, either in terms of personal development or corporate benefit. This is being evidenced almost daily by wave after wave of layoffs for the relatively well-heeled tech industry.
Because for everyone to make what they want to make is, as of current year, a pie in the sky fantasy until scarcity is solved, and perhaps not even then.
There are 8 billion humans, the world doesn't need another hundred thousand programming languages or web frameworks or game development platform or even indie games or fiction or music or film, produced every year when the whim strikes someone's fancy. Even if we could, who can even consume that much content?
Being a cog in a machine at least means you're probably doing something of value to someone instead of writing another book that nobody reads.
As of now we have no better solution to coordination failure except to create the AGI that will save/doom us.
You make a good point. I've latched onto some goals (like making games) because I forget that they're a stepping stone to something bigger.
The bigger thing would have been the web framework, or the programming language. But even those aren't quite big enough.
If I'm being honest, the biggest stuff is curing disease, eliminating wealth inequality.. biblical stuff. Truly I want to be an inventor and work to solve the very hardest problems.
So it feels undignified to be fixing someone's computer when I could be helping researchers to like, cure death and stuff.
But you're right, that act of helping someone is the very essence of our humanity and shouldn't be written off as something inconsequential just because it's not glorious. There is glory to be found though, a different kind of glory in that covenant.
And I totally agree about AGI.
Edit: as far as scarcity goes, I think that economics correctly attempts to allocate resources between people with unlimited wants and needs. It just never got as far as the endgame we're in now, where the primary scarce resource is time. That's an artificial scarcity, so we might have a chance to turn things around if we optimize for that instead of material wealth.
I left the tech world to “cure disease” (working on a phage clinical trial, currently treating three patients, and they’re doing super well!)
With that said, I’m consumed with FOMO and opportunity cost every day. I’ve missed the boat on being founder-level or early designer/engineer on so many projects that have gone on to raise Series B it’s mind numbing. Also, we were paid $0 bootstrapping our stuff in the first five years, and now finally we get paid, but $60k a year.
I’m saying this as a warning to all devs and designers out there. Do NOT do this. If you can get into Google or FAANG or whatever, build wealth that way. Maybe you’ll feel like a sell-out or you never scratched your itch or done something good for the world, but then you can also remember you can take a year off in Bali or whatever.
Personal opinion: I think scarcity is mostly a solved problem, in that most of us are working on projects that only exist to make someone else more money, not to fulfill any actual needs of those 8 billion humans.
There are exceptions of course.
But most of us could stop working tomorrow, and aside from the lack of income, the scarcity of resources available to us would not change.
The real problems that causes hunger/poverty in our world has more to do with logistics and politics, not a deficit of resources.
I cannot understand why you would think so, even in a first world nation.
Who would grow your food? Who would make the tools and fertilizer that enable the farmers to grow your food? The robotics and software that enables those tools and fertilizer to be produce? Who would organize, transport, package, preserve and process the produce so that you can access it?
Apply the same questions to healthcare, education, transport, construction, entertainment, etc.
Some jobs are superfluous and arise out of coordination failure, that's true. Lawyers, administrators, salespeople and parts of finance and the government comes to mind. But "most people could stop working" is an unreasonable assertion.
There are about 2M farmers and ranchers in the US. 22M health care professionals. 4M teachers. 2M truckers, 135k rail workers, 40k miners, etc.
Even at our highest employment levels, under half of those in the US are employed. They're just not counted as unemployed because they're either children, in school, retired, or simply not seeking employment.
Yes, I do believe that most jobs are superfluous - that many more people could not have to work without a material impact to the availability of goods.
You forgot to count plumbers, and everyone in the construction industry.
Also the guy that fills the milk bottles. My brother used to work in a milk bottling plant, but he was not filing the bottles by hand. A machine filled the bottles, someone overlook the machine, my brother was making the chemistry and biological test to ensure the milk was safe to drink. And there was some additional people they call in case the machine gets broken (or to build a new machine.)
Even if every single position in the US held today were considered essential, there would still be more people in the US who are unemployed than employed.
And every job currently held today is absolutely not essential.
That doesn’t support your point though that we’re anywhere near post scarcity and can support people quitting. Many jobs that were classified as essential during the pandemic are things people don’t have oodles of joy doing (garbage pickup, power plant coal loader, etc).
You can cut out the entire “entertainment” or whatever industry you think isn’t essential, but we still need to convince the people working the essential jobs to do it while everyone else free-rides.
That farmer count is only as small as it is because of the massive society they are built on that allows that to scale. You briefly scratched at with miners, but you forgot all of the machinery and auto manufacturers, the massive energy industry that powers all of it, etc.
> Yes, I do believe that most jobs are superfluous
I think you just don’t understand the purpose of many jobs. If the accountant for the local grocery store didn’t exist, what do you think would happen?
Even if we somehow "solved scarcity" and robots could automatically produce all the goods and services everyone needs for free, if we don't get past the primitive "value must be provided through work" mentality, there would be no benefit.
Stuck with this "work virtue" mindset, society would find a way to make it so half the people were paid to dig holes and the other half paid to fill them in, just so we could go on with this fixation on the need to work for a living.
Parent has a point from my experience - most products I worked on never really caught on in terms of being reasonably widely used. I don't think I've ever worked on anything I'd call truly essential.
From what I've seen, most programmers are indeed spending their time building experiments that have the primary goal of making money for the person that pays them - if they create true value that's more of a lucky side effect. And lots of those experiments fail.
My thinking is this - less than half of the population in the US holds a traditional job. 150M or so. And a vast majority of those are not jobs related to "essential" work. They're largely part of the retail and administrative workforce.
And so, if a majority of less than half of the US population is working unnecessary jobs (i.e. only valuable to our economy)... how much of what we do is really valuable to us as a species?
Which is a roundabout way to say that scarcity is a mostly if not completely solved problem; working to survive is largely no longer necessary, just customary.
There's a big leap there though from "non-traditional" to "not necessary". A colleague of mine is working on a project involving ensuring that farmers can track their feed and illness statistics correctly to improve their yields. It's not a traditional job, but it's absolutely necessary to ensure that (for example) the dairy industry can provide enough milk. (And moreover, to reduce the number of people who need to be working on calculating those statistics by hand.)
Likewise, you're also assuming that jobs that meet needs are more essential than jobs that meet wants, but the point of post-scarcity is that not only our needs are met, but our wants are as well. Picard can make himself a cup of earl grey whenever he wants, as opposed to sustaining himself with the recommended nutri-pack. One of my most fulfilling jobs was working for a t-shirt printing company - in theory, nothing we did was at all essential, but it was clearly very important to a lot of people's lives. Some of the most fascinating orders were memorial t-shirts being printed for people's funerals. Not essential at all, but I would argue very valuable to us as a species.
> A colleague of mine is working on a project involving ensuring that farmers can track their feed and illness statistics correctly to improve their yields.
I doubt that's an example of a job/project that isn't just pure administrative burden. Even your example of a t-shirt printing company is more than just pure administrative burden - people need t-shirts, and people like their t-shirts to have art of some form. While art may be a luxury, it is also pleasant and required to some extent.
However, there are some roles that are pure administrative burden, and I tend to think the GP is correct that these roles are a lot more prevalent than we want to admit. I think the 80/20 rule could be applicable here - only 20% of the population produces 80% of the wealth (read: essential or luxury items) while the other 80% of the world are stumbling on themselves in bureaucracy to maybe make the rest of the remaining 20%.
>But it's like we're all waiting around for a billionaire to liberate us
Only in Silicon Valley, and that's probably a big part of the problem. In some of the highest paying, most creative occupations on the planet people are drooling at the feet of billionaires to save them while they slave away M-F.
Most people throughout history didn't look at the rich with anything but contempt. In Silicon Valley they're held up as geniuses on every subject. Look at how a subsection of the industry treated Elon Musk taking the axe to Twitter (politics aside).
You’re confusing “billionaires” with “a few select billionaires that built disruptive businesses from the ground up”. Nobody in Silicon Valley is “drooling at the feet” of the Walton children.
> Then when someone wins the internet lottery, they succumb to their ego and do a bunch of stuff in business to hoard even more wealth, rather than working to reform the system which keeps so many others down.
It doesn't even have to come down to greed though.
If some meme stock speculation 1000x'd, my family could live off the gains in perpetuity and I could spend all my time working in a soup kitchen, doing good.
But if I instead figured out how to turn that into even more money, I could start a new soup kitchen and help even more people, doing even more good.
But if I instead figured out how to turn that into even more money, ...
It's altruism if GP stops the recursion at some point and actually uses the money to help people and do good.
It's effective altruism if they use the money in a smart way, that reasonably maximizes the good it does for others, instead of doing something stupid or just extremely suboptimal.
“ Then when someone wins the internet lottery, they succumb to their ego and do a bunch of stuff in business to hoard even more wealth, rather than working to reform the system which keeps so many others down.”
I believe that this is due to a tragedy of the commons in the software industry. We're all so creative, with so many dreams, but spend the majority of our lives working 40 hour weeks to outcompete each other and make rent. Then when someone wins the internet lottery, they succumb to their ego and do a bunch of stuff in business to hoard even more wealth, rather than working to reform the system which keeps so many others down.
I would very much like to write a programming language, a blogging tool, a web framework, a game, a game development tool, etc etc etc. But I never will. Most of the people reading this never will either.
So I endure. I meditate, I practice stoicism, I go to the gym. But I had to let my dreams die for my own self-preservation because opportunity cost grew to consume my entire psyche. I simply can't think about all of the other things I could be doing while I have to work. And all I do is work.
There doesn't seem to be much help coming in terms of UBI or having N people split a 40 hour workweek or forming artist communes for makers. Sure, we hear the occasional stories. But it's like we're all waiting around for a billionaire to liberate us, rather than creating a scalable cooperative system to sustain all of us right now today.
What I'm saying is that until we look beyond the technical challenges and see that the problem is subjugation, we'll never get free of the lackluster tools, because we'll never have time to make better ones.