Technology

Does that mean that if we use technology more we’d have enough value in the economy to pay everyone a UBI?

There's already enough value in the economy to pay everyone a UBI.

But we don’t have a UBI, so why? If the value exists than where is it? I don’t believe its being funnelled into the pockets of some shadowy deep-state private 4th branch of government.

It's being funneled into monopolies and doled out as stock dividends into the pockets of investors and billionaires such as Musk, Bezos, and Zuckerberg.

dont blame the tech. blame the humans. humans suck, but not all, not even in aggregate. were nicer than we know, and were actually getting better!

that said, there is a small subset of outwardly powerful humans who deeply suck. these are the set who think that billionaires should exist. that the next quarters profits should come no matter what. i dont know what can be done about that other than humans regulating humans, which is difficult when you need to regulate the powerfully sucky.

its not a technology problem we have, its a human one.

When I started working I went in with a plan to upgrade and modernize everything I touch. I still believe that to be the case, or like… my “purpose”(as an employee not a person).

I mean this with as much respect to you OP as I can possibly put into words, and if your therapist has already touched on this, absolutely ignore everything I say and listen to them.

I have been both been this person and dealt with this person. Believe me when I say that this behavior engenders little love from management and coworkers alike. You can quickly gain a bad reputation by trying to modernize everything you see. That reputation can be (meanly) described many different ways, from try-hard to kiss-ass.

• Developers like all human beings are subject to emotions and projection. They see you running around trying to replace the things they built, and they may conflate that with trying to replace them. They feel insecure, then they project that insecurity onto you - it makes you look insecure trying to prove yourself to the company. (Maybe you have fine relationships with your coworkers, maybe they admire this trait, take me with a grain of salt.)
• Managers begin to think that if they let you replace all their developers' tools, they will have to rely on you and you alone to support all those tools. They may worry you try to gatekeep your tools, or become a bottleneck for new development. So you slowly lose their trust.

Don't let your career suffer for this. There are few reasons to risk your reputation, your chance at promotion, the goodwill of your peers, and more: "using the latest and greatest" is not one of those reasons. Sometimes, following the crowd is fine.

Springboot apps, create-react-apps, codebases in c and c++, no kubernetes, little to no cloud.

Now, speaking as a developer instead of an armchair psychoanalyst, I don't see why these traits or lack thereof make for bad software. Nor does it make you a lesser developer for working with them. It entirely depends on your industry, the applications, the users, security interests, available recruitable talent, and many more factors.

How is create react app or spring boot outdated? These are well-maintained frameworks. What would you replace them with?

There is a new framework every 6 months. Newer isn’t necessarily better, as plenty of new frameworks don’t catch on and die. Companies cannot just change their stack every 5 years even. It is not only expensive and time consuming, it requires hiring people with special skill sets that aren’t transferable to other apps in the company.

Most "technology" these days are hardly more than gimmicky baubles that don't actually bring much value to, well, anything really.

Look at all the Alexa devices. Amazon literally cannot figure out how to make a profit on it and they're quickly trying to make it a footnote.

All that hardware dedicated to Alexa will be soon a pile of garbage.

But here's the rub...

Simple technology is still technology. A hammer is technology of an early human era. We've only been in the era of modern medicine, for example, for hardly 100 years. When you talk about "technology" you're talking about way the fuck more than just computers and technobaubles.

When it comes to medical tech alone if you consider how many diseases we've wiped out, and the new advances we continue to make in medical science (RNA vaccines, recently an entirely new class of antibiotics), the idea that these don't contribute to our quality of life is a joke.

Medical advances and advances in food technology and food cleanliness have 100% improved the lives of people all over the world. We went from terrible infant mortality rates 200 years ago where half your fucking kids will die before adulthood to people basically choosing how many kids they want because by and large, most of them will make it to adulthood and onward. It genuinely wasn't that long ago that our average life expectancy was a lot shorter.

Now, the bigger question is a societal one: How to we ensure the new technology that really brings value to human life is distributed equitably? Because currently, it really fucking isn't.

As for you and your job: Technology and programming itself isn't useless at all. It's what it's being used for that is at issue. There are plenty of things a programmer can do that benefit the world, they just won't be the kind of job that pays well. Amazon, for example, isn't going to pay you money to change the world in positive ways, they'll pay you to make Amazon money. All companies are like this. We all have to have a day job, so my suggestion would be to find out how you can use your skills to help the world equitably (maybe contribution to Free Open Source Software, for example) in your spare time, and then save money with a goal to use your skills more equitably as a life-goal.

FoldIt and Folding@Home were both great examples of programming, games, and genuine forward-movement scientific research. Maybe you could contribute to new groups like this, with the aim of benefiting everyone with their research.

Some folks help the world through what some consider illegal means with their programming. Anna's Archive, Library Genesis, and Sci-Hub all exist with the purpose of giving people access to information. They use programming and networking skills to get around network blocks and so on.

Programming skills can be used for all kinds of good. You just have to choose to follow those paths.

I'll give this another read later but one thing I notice is what I'd call over-enthusiasm for software technology and rewrites. For your purely technical concerns you might have a chat with a senior programmer on your project. After dealing with real world software for long enough one gets disillusioned with the latest shiny. Keeping the existing stuff running is important and it's easy to underestimate that.

As for the product itself and its value to the world, well that depends at least in part on what you consider valuable. And that's a philosophy question rather than a technical one. If you were involved in making, say, movies instead of software, the same questions would apply.

I would say a few software jobs do real good in the world, a few do serious evil, and most are relatively neutral. If yours is neutral then I think you can feel ok about it at least for the near term. You have to take care of yourself after all. If your company is actively evil then that's of course different. And if it's doing good then you should be happy.

I think the answer to that question would completely depend on what you value.

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If its cheaper to use technology to grow an acre of corn than to use people, is that subsequent output of corn more valuable or less valuable because of the technology.

At first it is the same price, because the buyers would pay what they are used to pay. That makes the user of that technology rich. Later the price would probably decrease.

I am talking about 'price', not 'value'. Value isn't universally defined, but individually.

Warren buffet said, the price is what we pay, the value is what we get.

Very different views are possible about the term 'value'. I went with a strictly monetary view here, and therefore I'm not sure if this aspect of your question...

if the work we do for soceity [...] is actually adding to soceity or not.

... gets actually answered. Also, I didn't read all of it.

You're getting a lot of answers that are explaining to you that the value doesn't go to society, it goes to the owner class, and I agree. It seems to me you're experiencing the personal wounds that come from being alienated from your work. This is because a capitalist, hierarchical workplace is inherently low-information. Your manager is in a position of power over you, which means they don't have to listen to you, and most workers figure out sooner or later that their efforts are wasted and they'll get by easier if they just keep their heads down and don't make waves, so they stop trying to get managers to listen.

Your manager doesn't necessarily care about innovation, or making society better, or your personal fulfillment. That doesn't mean you need to find a manager that does, because the problem is that positions of power over others breed indifference to those others. Management in particular tends to go to people who are good at taking credit and ingratiating themselves to their superiors. It doesn't select for competence at the actual job. If you luck out and get a good manager, they'll be replaced eventually. You have no power over that decision.

I would recommend you read Bullshit Jobs by David Graeber (that is a talk he gave on the topic for a brief overview). It explains the mechanisms by which companies fill themselves with bloat and create jobs where very little is achieved and the people in them are miserable.

I would also recommend you look into worker owned cooperatives (google renamed that subtitle from "a cure for capitalism" to "curing capitalism", presumably because the former title leaves room to think we are curing ourselves from capitalism, but the latter implies we are making capitalism better; I suspect his intent was far more revolutionary than they would like). They give the workers that actually produce everything control over the company. Managers are elected and recallable, so if your manager doesn't listen they can be replaced by the people they manage. Their job is actually management, not a generalised rulership where they can turn your entire department upside down at a whim or just ignore you in favour of their own comfort.

This is going to be fun.

Prudence generates value. Technology speeds a task, but without prudence and principle, you will simply fill the space freed by technology with other things that are meaningless.

Regarding programming, specifically, if you're looking at creating real value for society, you need to create frameworks that give leverage to effective and ethical thinking.

Right now, the world is fucked because social networking has simply brought to light how incapable people are at managing their own lives and perspectives, particularly while being seen. Social networking has given people power, but all that does is let people make bigger mistakes. Plus, with the monetary incentives on the back-end squeezing every bit of emotion for cash, people are getting burnt out.

Structured power is better. Connections need to have consequences, and those consequences need to have real effect. To be effective, individual power (not over others, but over one's own life) must be central to the collective structure - and the collective should be granted that same right, over it's own existence.

The ideal social network would ensnare fools, catch the greedy, and reward the prudent, the wise, and the loving, through empowering them to be whoever it is they truly are.

You probably don't remember, but once, long ago, in the age of legends, Google emerged as a force within humanity. They wielded the power of "don't be evil," and they meant it. They empowered people to find what they wanted, and to communicate. The ads were tasteful, clearly marked, and unobtrusive - useful, even.

But all things that are born must die, and death does not come because things are going well for the dying thing. The Google was no exception. Did the leadership fail, or did time simply run it's course? We may never know for certain, but when The Originators left, all that remained was a vile and empty core. Where once there was abundance, there came indolence. And as the remaing scraps of mind fought over the space where they thought the power was, they thought the power of "don't be evil" was outdated. Bothersome. In the way. But in truth, it was simply arcane - their minds, profane as they were, could not comprehend the true nature that brought them power. So they ejected the power of their own foundation, and struck the rule from their books.

And so to this day, they ride the shockwave the true power made as it left. They think the shockwave is the power, but it is just a side effect. They see their hands closing to grasp it, but they do not see how weak they make themselves. They have ridden the shockwave up, and they will ride it down, and just as they are not prepared for the heights of it, they are not prepared for the depths they enter, either.

And that, my boy, is the story of how The Google came to be, and how it began to fall. It is the end of some things, to be sure, but also the beginning of another. Sovereign individual collectives are juust around the corner, waiting for their builders to come.

taps cane on the floor regularly to keep the rocking chair going, tamps pipe

Someday, I'll tell the tale of how a little bird was born, became known by all, and died, partly of it's own foolishness, and partly because of one who wanted to keep it for himself. ..Or how Unity tried to seize those who contributed to it, but lost everything in the process. It's all the same tale, though. Everything that lives, must die. But forgetting to stand on a principle can hurry any entity along that path.

blows smoke ring

There are plenty of redundant jobs, and I believe it is important to feel fullfilment in your tasks, otherwise no motivation. One thing to note, that when companies do not upgrade, they risk being redundant and falling back behind disruptive newcomers with cutting edge tech.

Uh... The internet? Telecommunications tech in general, really.

The problem is not that these things are not valuable; it's that the value they create is being hoarded by a small few at the top.

There's a lot here. Some I can comment on and some I can't. Some bits are simply how you are viewing the world, and differ to how others view it. There is no possibility for objectivity there, and are better suited to discussions with mental health professionals.

For my sins, I'm a Product Manager. While I have a background in engineering (having done a CS degree and taught myself to code in my teens), I have never held a job as a developer.

As such, I have conversations pretty much every day with developers, dev leads, people with "architect" in their title, CTOs, etc, all of whom are considerably more technically literate than I am, about what new technologies we can take advantage of. Some times it's me asking them, sometimes it's them asking me, but one thing is always constant. Time, risk, and cost of implementation is what matters most.

The majority of the time, when I am approached by Devs, the conversation goes along the lines of:

• Dev: "there is this awesome new thing we absolutely need to use now"
• Me: "OK, what are the benefits?"
• Dev: "it makes X, Y, and Z so much easier and save us time doing them"
• Me: "OK, how long do we spend doing those things currently?"
• Dev: "eh, well, I don't know exactly, but it's, er, it's loads and doing this will save us that time and it's great and we need to do it now"
• Me: "yeah, I get that, but how much time do we actually spend on it?"
• repeat forever

In short, the benefits have not been quantified, and the costs ignored.

Other times, the change that is being suggested doesn't align with the current business need. I've had to reject suggestions to refactor systems because we've literally been down to the last few pay cheques, and we need to focus on revenue generation. This massively undermines the person making the suggestion, because it shows they are not understanding the actual priority of the business.

And other times still, it can be simply a pipedream. I once had a dev lead stand up and scream at me across a desk because I didn't agree with him that we immediately rewrite our entire app in Swift, on literally the day Apple released the beta back in 2014, and I had had the gaul to suggest that he needs to come up with a plan to iteratively develop some new, low risk, functionality in the language first, before saying he wants to spend "at least a year" doing a complete overhaul, and nothing else.

This is not to say that developers are idiots or anything. The vast majority of the discussions I have had with all my collegues across my career have been good, thought provoking, and helpful. But that doesn't mean they always get what they want, and nor does it mean I get what I want. I have definitely rejected work where that was the wrong decision, and I've suffered the consequences of it. I've also definitely accepted work that ended up being a complete waste of time.

None of us are perfect.

If you are finding that your boss is always rejecting your suggestions, I would suggest you need to consider these things:

• have you quantified the benefits and costs?
• are there competitors who are already doing this thing? If so, who?
• does the suggestion align with the strategy / focus of the business?
• have you identified a small increment / proof of concept / mvp, that takes a few hours, or days, or a sprint, to demonstrate potential value?

If you can explain the potential value, how it helps the business get to where it wants to be faster, and how you can identify unknown unknowns through low cost and quick to develop POCs, then you may be able to get buy in.

If you can't, or don't know how, then there are plenty of resources available. A good starting point would be to read The Lean Startup.

It is considerably more likely that the problem is with your skills of persuasion, and writing business cases, rather than all of technology being worthless.

Lastly, regarding discussions with professionals, one bit that did concern me is this

In my therapist's opinion he thinks we as a soceity are not taking 100% advantage of technology we have. I can't go into too many details bc our conversations are private but at the end I agreed with him. I'm seeing it now in my working day but he convinced me that it's everywhere.

My experience with therapists, and in discussions with friends who are qualified pshrinks, is that a therapist should never try and convince you of anything. Their job is to structure conversations you are in essence having with yourself. They may repeat your previous statements back to you, in a way that requires you to reconcile potentially conflicting views or opinions. They may even challenge your assertions and get you to explain more thoroughly your views. These processes may well cause you to change your views on things.

But if your therapist is actually trying to convince you of their world view, you need to get a new therapist.

This is a great thread, as I am currently learning to program and I often ask myself, "what are we(programmers) all doing? And where are we(humanity) all going?"

I remember getting a variety of answers, but one engineer I met laughed when I posed this question and gave me one of the darker answers I heard, but it indeed resonated:

"We're boiling the oceans while partying at the end of the world, what did you think we were all doing?"

Or something along those lines. I'd love to think new technologies, properly implemented (guided by pragmatic altruism), can get us out of the problem that technology, improperly implemented (guided by greed and misanthropy), got us into. But I just don't see it.

Isn't oil required to make any and all pieces of tech, even green tech? How much oil/pollution went into producing my phone? The plastic pieces on everything I consume, wear, etc.? The Electric Vehicle that will help curb climate change as long as I can afford to buy one and discard my old gas consuming vehicle that was running just fine and might for another decade if I take care of it?

There are solutions, and I'm probably not thinking deeply enough on this, but right now, in this moment, I'm highly skeptical that those in power, even if they wanted to, could ever find a way to make money while also actually fighting climate change in a way that actually prevents its worse effects.

A simple example is cars. The solution to car emissions isn't electric vehicles, it's better infrastructure based around trains, metros and better city planning that encourages cycling and pedestrians. But our thinking is that we can sell electric vehicles, and build planned obsolescence into those vehicles to keep capitalism rolling. You can't do that as lucratively with rail, if at all.

We all nod our heads and then get back to work though, cuz due to a multitude of lifetimes lived reinforcing the "get yours, and fuck everyone else" attitude that is a requirement to survive in a capitalist society, we can't do anything more than mumble and groan about it, but still go back into work on Monday.

Those of us who object too loudly are socially ostracized at best, and killed at worst, and those on the top count on the rest of us being just afraid enough to not speak too far out of line.

Tech companies only want new if it generates/saves short term money. Long term money only with a understanding, far-sighted upper level, which is rare. Reallistic risk mitigation (i.e. not the magic black box á la Fortinet) only with a boss who's in tech himself.

There is a lot to unpack from your post. First of all, there is no doubt that technology in general adds value for the human race - like the another commenter said, foundational things like fire, tools all the way to the zipper and buttons you have on clothings, umbrellas you bring into the rain, the video chats you have with loved ones during COVID - those are all the fruits of technology.

But if you get down to the particulars, value can be very subjective. Some people value fancy new tech sneakers, primate NFTs whereas others value new computer vision technology or a new programming language. So are certain technologies adding value? Depends on who you ask.

As for who is capturing value in a capitalistic society, I think you already have the answer. Simply put, if your company operates at a 50% efficiency and you bump it up to 70% with tech and automation, rest assured that you are going to see job cuts to "become lean" and to "do less with more", followed by increased targets to produce more. You are not going to get more leisure time but instead be asked to push ahead until you hit the physical limit and break.

I don’t feel like most of the work I’ve done in my career has generated value. A lot of the businesses I worked for were about inserting themselves between an actual business (e.g. hotels selling time in their rooms) and their users, and thereby generating economic rent.

Similarly, the obsession we have as developers and technologists with upgrading our stacks for, as you point out, marginal theoretical efficiency improvements - it’s just busywork. I swear a lot of what dev departments do is becoming more and more over-complicated wheel spinning purely to justify the size of the development team.

Not that I mind having a job that can be really rewarding and fits my skillset like little else.

My observations:

Existing companies do tend to (but not always) stick with their legacy stack. It makes sense, it's the safe option.

Start ups OTOH, have the freedom to choose a new and innovative stack and often do. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. The ones that survive and thrive will likely be dated in another decade and be seen as the old guard with legacy stacks.

It's the circle of life.

Another aspect to consider is the term " invention is the mother of necessity" coined by Jared Diamon, in contrast to " neccessity is the mother of invension". A lot of technology either get discarded or used for something that the technology wasn't originally intended. Hence the idea that inventions come first and the necessity for them follows later. Targetes technological innovation tenda to be very expensive and involves a lot of trial/error.

I believe this phenomenum doesn't just apply to big innovations and inventions. It also applies to day to day problem solving and in your case, choosing the right technology for your work. Without prior experience and established norm, a technology that might completely makes sense to you for a certain kind of work, might not pan out in actual use.