My impression in recent years is that the middle class has real value in almost any society we had until now. They are the glue that brings stability to any organization, they are what keeps to energetic lower layer people from gaining power from crazy ideas, and they are the first to get blamed when a crazy idea from the top management layer fails. Do you see differences between that statement and your experience?
And the real question I want to ask: Do you feel that especially the middlest of managers have to fear AI the most, because AI could theoretically replace exactly that middle layer and do it even better than a human could?
AI will not replace the middle manager any time soon. Their job is too general and not specific enough to be solved by AI. Some of the tasks they do like scheduling can be aided by AI and have been aided by scheduling software but that doesn't mean AI could do their whole job. Stuff like talking to people about how they are getting along and helping develop and grow the people on the layer below them is something a good manager should be doing and something that would be foolish to replace with a system that has no humanity. See also defusing team conflicts and keeping up morale.
The problem is your reference is some kind of broken organisation where people are basically slave labour and managers only serve to dish out the work given from above. Sure bad managers of that description could be replaced by a good AI in the future but that would be awful because a good manager brings vitality to a team, helps individual team members and helps to filter and promote ideas up and down the organisation.
> My impression in recent years is that the middle class has real value in almost any society we had until now.
The middle class really isn't any less powerful today. Near as I can tell what happened isn't that the middle class became less powerful, but that journalists in particular no longer find themselves in the upper middle class so they spread the perception that the middle class has lost its power because they themselves feel like they have lost power, especially economic power.
I suspect that society is most likely perceived as most stable when those with megaphones and that buy ink by the barrel feel most stable.
"journalists in particular no longer find themselves in the upper middle class"
For most of the history of journalism in the U.S., journalists were not in the "upper middle class". Journalism was a poorly paid working class job for most of the 20th century. Maybe a couple decades at the end of it different.
That low pay serves as a gatekeeping mechanism so poor people can't survive on that career. On the other hand, journalists have a disproportionate influence over public discourse, now tightly controlled by the elite class.
Or maybe it's the reverse, because the field has high prestige and impact, it attracts upper class children who don't need the salary, causing a downward pressure for journalist wages.
Eh, I don't think that's what was actually going on for most of the 20th century. Journalist was not a prestigious job, it was in fact done by working class people. I think. It's instead a new thing that journalism is dominated by "elites".
The original claim I was challenging was "journalists in particular no longer find themselves in the upper middle class" -- I don't think they ever were, it's possible that MORE of them are now than previous -- as you say, even as salaries drop.
This article is just standard journalistic myth-making. The journalists cited as examples of success without college degrees, Carl Bernstein and Walter Cronkite (who both went to college, just dropped out), came from privileged backgrounds just like the privileged kids who fill the industy today.
Idealistic professions done "for the greater good" typically struggle. These days, anyone with internet access can do low-paid writing through various services or publish their own thoughts via a blog or social media. There has been tremendous downward pressure on writing and many local papers have closed, among other things.
> public discourse, now tightly controlled by the elite class.
Maybe 10-15 years ago that was true, but today the control of public discourse is no longer controlled by the elite class. Blogging completely ended that control.
Journalists for the most prestigious outlets (NYTimes, WaPo, Newsweek, Time Magazine, etc) certainly did well for themselves. At secondary institutions it was a solid middle class job.
Now because of blogging and commodification of the news, the money is no longer in journalism but in clickbait and it's a race to the bottom.
This article about the decline of Newsweek does a good job chronicling what is happening at news media companies all over the world:
Journalists now find themselves among the precariat, especially those in the long tail of journalism working at clickbait factories like Business Insider, HuffPo, Jezebel, etc. News media is now a gig industry job.
Are you suggesting that skyrocketing education, housing, and medical care costs in proportion to stagnant wages for most people resulting in less economic security and mobility for the next generation is not real?
Think about what encryption should do. Think about what Machine Learning should do. The only thing you can do with ML on encrypted data is show where encryption needs to be improved. Or maybe there is a way to create ML models that produces output which only someone with the correct (private) key can understand.
> Nowhere was the user data decrypted and in particular the cloud provider does not have access to either the orignal image nor is it able to decrypt the prediction it computed.
That's from the post. Is that what you meant by creating a model whose results only the owner of the data can understand?
Particularly since Airbnb is a two way system. I once stayed in a place where I was basically being told to give them 5 stars or else they'd give me 1 star for being a difficult guest.
That is not possible. They were lying to you. You can't see the other's review until you post your review or the review window expires. You can never change your review once posted (though you can comment on a review someone else left).
They were very pushy about asking "are you going to give me 5 stars?" before/during the stay, and saying things like "my business depends on 5 star ratings". Obviously there are lots of paths out of that situation that don't involve someone giving them 5 stars, but I'm sure it works on people.
I'm curious how they enforce this. I've never used airbnb but what's to stop a host from reading the reviews from a guest account instead of their host one? I'm assuming they're still published publicly but maybe I'm wrong?
See my other reply in the thread, but basically, they were doing a lot of stuff that at first seemed like proactive customer service initially, but later seemed much more like scouting to determine if i was going to give them 5 stars or not.
The trick is to ensure the incentives for the auditors are correctly aligned and to monitor the effects.
For example corporate auditors are paid by the company they're auditing and often actually make all their money providing other services to that same company. Guess how that works out (or read about Enron if you need a hint)
On the other hand I'd say something like the Paris MOU works. The inspectors (they're doing inspection not auditing, although the things they're inspecting are supposed to have already been inspected by the Flag State, so in another sense they're just checking that work) work for the Port State, so their interests aren't directly aligned with the ship owner and it makes sense to hold some vessels, but on the other hand, your ports aren't making money when they are full of ships being inspected or held for defects, so you don't want to go crazy.
One thing I particularly like about the Paris MOU is that it uses statistics to drive feedback. If inspections find that, say, South African flagged vessels (thus supposedly already inspected on behalf of South Africa) are often non-compliant, that flag goes on the Grey List or the Black List and there are MORE inspections of South African vessels. This has two effects, it drives up the cost of choosing the South African flag for your vessels, discouraging you from choosing a flag with bad inspection regime whether because it's cheaper or to save on vessel upkeep - and it enhances the ability to monitor other vessels that might fail too. On the other hand if say, South Africa is doing a great job, any time you inspect a South African flagged vessel it's like it just came out of the factory and every crew member is a world expert who is wide awake and handsomely paid, then South Africa goes on the white list and fewer of their vessels get inspected.
Okay, are they planning an IPO or are they planning to get bought? I'd guess IPO. Otherwise increasing amount of rentals would probably be more important than making sure everything is legally air tight.
Since I started to work for big tech myself this is what I tell people most of the time: Stop thinking about complaints, start thinking about solutions to problems that everybody has. That is where the power of big tech comes from. I mean, facebook knows all our social contacts because it's the best way to communicate over long distances and having different live situations. Gmail can learn how we write and think because it's the best and most flexible mail client out there. Google and Apple can spy on us via smart phones because these devices have gave us so many opportunities like navigation, translation, communication, photos etc.
Start building a better future and you can be part of defining what it will look like. Doesn't even have to be a competitor. Employees inside the big tech companies also have more push towards their personal goals than people outside.
This is where the power of big tech used to come from. Now it comes from the ability to use the wealth generated by innovative products to buy the market for non-innovative products.
That definition was used for a very short time in the 90s. It's long since settled into "was a teenager in the new millennium", which means born early 80s to late 90s.
Gen Z, also known as iGen, was born in the new millennium.
The first time I heard the word millenial was 2017.
This world is weird. But in a world were people can choose their gender freely I think I can have the choice to use that word as I see fit. Feel free to do the same. ;)
I strongly believe that the future should go in this direction. And not just for robots but also for AI. Just like cars and smartphones they must be extensions of us humans instead of independent actors. One reason is safety, as probably many people are aware of, and the second is about how humans feel. We don't like dealing with other independent actors who we don't fully understand. But an extension to ourselves, that feels right. That's why for instance dogs are so loved as pets, but wolves are not, although both animals look very similar from the outside.
I'd argue kettles and toasters are not independent actors. A toaster won't make a decision if another toast is needed, it will not grab a slice of bread and then toast it.
But a roomba is really an independent actor and we already see problems with it (roomba companies collecting apartment layout data, pets feeling strong competition, people feeling rather helpless if a roomba doesn't clean some place or gets itself constantly stuck on rugs etc). Sure they are not big problems, but roombas aren't really big independent actors either.
And the real question I want to ask: Do you feel that especially the middlest of managers have to fear AI the most, because AI could theoretically replace exactly that middle layer and do it even better than a human could?