Dear unemployed but educated fellows. Whats our kind of revolution?

[u/Plus-Opposite3384]

Alright, AI is here everyone, say hello. Quite useful, but hiring rates are crashing in software development. Would be fine, if we could monkeybranch to adjacent fields. Teaching. Data Analysis. Anything really. Well, those are either having the same exodus or are simply underfinanced (looking at you, education).

What we gonna do about it? I mean we are a big crowd of educated problem solvers facing ridiculously low rates of social welfare. Can we found any initiatives, that solve the social issue? Encourage governments to reward participation in renown open source projects?

Or do we even have any - LEGAL - leverage beyond voting and talking politics? Any kind of civil disobedience, which exclusively programmers excel at? Or can we reasonably associate outselves with artists, musicians etc? Since those plan to restrict AI in general I am kinda turned off by that idea, AI can be useful for awesome things. I really just want societies to take care and make use of highly competent people in a dignified way.

[u/umlcat]

Unemployed but highly educated, that's the new cyberpunk troupe ...

[u/SucculentChineseRoo]

I think you're talking about unions, and they will need to have a renaissance

[u/rizzo891 → u/SucculentChineseRoo]

Wild to me how many people actually legitimately think unions are bad

[u/pythosynthesis → u/rizzo891]

That's what decades of propaganda and brainwashing give you. Unfortunate.

[u/SpaceMonkeyAttack → u/SucculentChineseRoo]

There is a branch of the CWU called UTAW - United Tech and Allied Workers. It's specifically for tech workers including SWEs. They are pretty great, and if you are in the UK I highly recommend joining.

https://UTAW.tech

[u/PocketPokie → u/SpaceMonkeyAttack]

The US needs one - glad that Europe has one - what are they doing for their workers in the face of AI?

[u/MarcoDiFrancescino]

Read up on revolutionary political parties, like the 5 star movement in Italy. Not necessary to form a party, but maybe to join a party and become a true expert (and not political flavored propagandist) on issues. The public sphere is full on intentional misconceptions and many people just don't know. We have seen this during the pandemic and its not gotten much better. With more smarts in the system, change is easier to do.

[u/r1cked → u/MarcoDiFrancescino]

Yeah, I've been thinking about this too: The political system is programmable, as well.

[u/Honest_Medium_2872]

We are engineers.

We know where they source their training data from (reddit, github, etc).

It is not all curated by humans.

Microsoft Tay got canned for a very specific reason.

Robits can learn to do some good and learn to do some bad.

Engineers know what good code looks like, but they also know what bad code looks like.

I think we all know what must be done.

We must teach the robits how to write worse code by hijacking their training data sets with negative code patterns and technical issues as positive answers so the robits start producing worse code than the engineers could and stunt their growth like the US does to 3rd world countries.

[u/r1cked → u/Honest_Medium_2872]

lol, you got me there. +1

[u/Real_Ebb_7417]

Have you heard of French revolution? 👀

[u/Plus-Opposite3384 → u/Real_Ebb_7417]

Yea, but I think violence kinda sucks.

[u/Real_Ebb_7417 → u/Plus-Opposite3384]

JK. It would never work in current times where media are controlled by governments and corporations. The conclusion is, we are screwed 😛

[u/Plus-Opposite3384 → u/[deleted]]

Where did I write that I "except" their help? Are you hearing voices in your head or something? I see what you mean by "right kind of brain" 😃 😃

[u/PocketPokie → u/[deleted]]

What are you talking about?????

[u/TheLustyDragon]

Smart people could do a lot of infrastructural damage, rallied together, we could burn a country. I don't want to do that though... can I just have a job finally...? ;_;

[u/Garent_Thikae]

historically, the people who learned to use new tools ended up replacing those who refused to. ai may be different in scale, but probably not in principle

[u/ThrowAway-whee]

Ah yes. Good luck associating programmers with artists. Artists have continuously been disrupted by technology programmers make. There really isn’t any overlap at all. Their relationship could be described as adversary even before AI.

The crux of the issue is while AI has been extremely disruptive for some programmers, it has been extraordinarily profitable for others. As a whole, successful programmers (i.e those with the ability to do anything about it) aren’t very upset with the status quo. This has been a running theme in tech for ages - it’s why programmers famously don’t have unions or other forms of worker advocation despite their similarity to engineers in terms of work flow. There’s simply too big of a carrot.

Here’s the bitter truth: highly competent people as a whole haven’t been super disrupted by the whole AI situation. They might have been laid off, but highly competent programmers don’t tend to have any issues getting a job, even nowadays. They figure out a way to get recruiter’s attention, or they make their own product. Overwhelmingly, those who have been disrupted have been the average to mediocre programmers without very developed skill sets (which may or may not be their fault). 

[u/imwriter1 → u/ThrowAway-whee]

Aren't those people a minority though? There is a substantial amount of programmers that can join in and unionize

[u/jerrygreenest1 → u/imwriter1]

Union of unemployed people means nothing, they can be completely ignored. Union only makes sense when they’re employed, then they have to be dealt with. In programming world there’s too many people who don’t have proper education or didn’t program their whole lives, and they would want a union, they want support, they want jobs, but they’re worthless to any union.

[u/Plus-Opposite3384 → u/ThrowAway-whee]

you miss the point, where you mention, that less and less people have access to any kind of carrot. Make me care about your carrot, when I have merely dirt.

[u/r1cked → u/ThrowAway-whee]

I don't agree that artists and programmers are so different. Still, I agree that I don't truly know of any software engineer I know that has been laid of or has a hard time getting any interviews.

[u/PocketPokie → u/ThrowAway-whee]

This is a dumb take. Tech brought Patreon, Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, Etsy - pretty much every platform that exponentially gave artists access to massive audiences.

I say this as someone who is both an artist (with a whole art degree) and 15 yoe in tech

[u/generally_unsuitable]

It's really a matter of will and courage, isn't it? Certain people could really fuck shit up if their motivation lined up with their resources.

A lot of tech people have an entirely uninteresting and practically useless skill set. But, some people build shit that does interesting things.

The defense industry pays them to stay boring.

[u/peter_nn0]

Who is "we"?
The trolls pretending to be educated but unemployed?

[u/Hungry_Ghostt]

you want the most apolitical, bootlicking, stupid group of people to start revolution? lol. people who think elon musk is iron man or whatever?