And this article is not helping it.
Oh, perhaps it was because they claimed Obama wasn't born in the US. Or because they denied global warming. Or because they hate Mexicans and Muslims.
In short, because they bought in to the steaming pile of bullshit that is the right wing media echo chamber.
When they think like children, talk like children, and act like children, they shouldn't be surprised that they're treated like children.
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.
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?
and does punishing children cause them to behave better?
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.
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.
But they're making world-changing phone apps!
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?
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).
Great PR to use their name as an insult before resolving whether they're right or not.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
[1] https://www.innosight.com/insight/creative-destruction-whips...
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...
People need to feel useful. Universal basic income doesn't give that to people by itself.
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.
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.
This is the problem.
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".
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.
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.
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.
A lack of fairness means a lack of empathy.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
For real, I'm not saying SV is doing enough but taking SV as the prime example of everything bad in capitalism has a weird touch as well..
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!"
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.
> 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
If they don't want to help themselves then I'll take the tax breaks and avoid being affected by their self inflicted pain.
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.
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.
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
> What if there were simply richer tools for users to rate things?
they would be abused by those with underdeveloped empathy to marginalise views that threatened them. emotional problems require emotional solutions.
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.
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.
Or maybe it was just Thanksgiving week?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Does this mean he's defending separatism?
Am I reading this wrong?
