Discollected

While I was thinking about the idea of collective action to change the fate of the job market, I noted that the United States is a very individualistic culture. And considering that a bit more deeply, it occurred to me that they may have been what was behind George Will's observation that here in the United States, we don't prevent catastrophes, we clean up after them. And maybe that's because prevention requires genuine collective, cooperative action, while clean-up can be countless individual and small-group efforts, localized to the specific places that people care about.

I think I need to buy some subscriptions to quality news sources. I'm starting to realize how impoverished my thinking can become when I don't have access to good thinkers, even if I may otherwise disagree with them.

Shifting

I was looking at the Bureau of Labor Statistics' Employment Projections, and the World Economic Forum's Future of Jobs Report, both of which were updated/released last year. Both of them had software developers on their lists of the fastest-growing jobs. The WEF predicted that Software and Applications Developers would see Global Net Growth of 57% between 2025 and 2030, while the BLS predicted that Software Developers would grow by 15.8% between 2024 and 2034.

It's easy to look at the numbers of layoff notices that have rocked the technology industry in the United States and decide, on that basis, that bureaucrats don't know anything, but of course they couldn't have known what choices people were actually going to make. One can fill out a survey or answer a questionnaire, and then have other factors come into play that result in different decisions being made. And, whether we like those decisions (or their impacts on our lives) or not, people are remunerated quite handsomely to make them.

And that's what came to mind when I saw this chart, in the Future of Jobs Report. It predicts that the share of work done by people, without recourse to automation or some sort of automated enhancement, will drop from 47% in 2025  to 33% in 2030, while the share of work done solely by automation grows from 22% to 34%.

And it's with these numbers in mind, I suspect, that people proclaim dire warning of what will happen to people who don't pivot into the jobs of the future (many of which pay less than the jobs of today). But this decline is no more a given than the increase in software development jobs was. This, too, is something that's going to be driven by the choices that people make. And maybe what's needed is for more people to be involved in those choices.

Now, Dario Amodei may be correct, and what he terms “powerful AI”  may indeed create a “country of geniuses in a datacenter” that's just better at everything we do than we are. But until that comes about (and, given human history, likely even when it does) we have choices as to what we value. There's no reason to presume that it's impossible to direct where the future is going to go by adding some intentional design to the mix. I've said before that a question that bears answering is what new demand for human labor generative automation is going to create. But that buys into the hostile framing that posits that valuable work for humans will be relegated to the leftovers that automation, even if otherwise ubiquitous can't do. Maybe, as people, we'd all be better off if there was an active effort to find/create and then nurture roles that lie outside of the capacity of machines to do, and to start moving towards them now. (Normally, I go out of my way to avoid using the word "we," since it tends to be something of a weasel word, but here, maybe, enough of humanity is in the same boat that "we" makes sense.)

Because if it's undesirable that the World Economic Forum's prediction that out of every 100 workers, some "11 would be unlikely to receive the reskilling or upkskilling needed, leaving their employment prospects increasingly at risk," turns out to be true, perhaps the onus is to come up with something that those 11 can do that makes good use of the skills they already have.

Passively accepting the idea that automation is a bear coming for the job market, and so people's primary goal should be running faster than enough other people that the beast is satiated before it gets to them, is a recipe for disaster. The people the bear seeks to eat are unlikely to go down without a fight, and the conflict could wind up doing much more injury to the collective than the bear ever could. Here in the highly individualistic United States, this may be something of a heresy, but perhaps it's time that people decide to hang together before technology, and the incentive structures behind it, hang everyone separately.
 

Scoreboard

Muslims don't belong in American society.

Pluralism is a lie.
Representative Andy Ogles (R-Tennessee)

Cue Democratic "outrage" and Republican silence.

Representative Ogles isn't the first House Republican to make such statements on social media.

Few, if any, Congressional Republicans reacted publicly to any of the posts.

But Congressional Democrats were quick to denounce it.
Tennessee GOP Rep says Muslims 'don't belong in American society'

Okay... and?

This sort of thing strikes me as pandering from both sides of the aisle. It may as well be a script. Republican lawmaker from some overwhelmingly White, Christian part of the country makes a disparaging statement about Moslems. Democrats denounce the statement and call for resignations or some punishment. Republicans, who have no Moslem members in Congress, simply say nothing. The people who care among the voters for the two groups are happy with how their side responded. Nothing changes.

What I don't know is how many people care. There was an attempt by American Moslems to lean on the Democrats by staying home back in 2024, mainly over dissatisfaction with how the party was dealing with the fighting between Israel and Hamas. I'm not sure that it worked as well as they would have hoped, mainly because they had nothing to offer Republicans other than not voting for Democrats, and it's pretty clear that the GOP had no real need for Moslem support. So they've become convenient targets for members off the Freedom Caucus who feel a need to show their constituents that Congress shares their prejudices.

Meanwhile, Democrats get to show themselves as making a lot of noise about it, but they never accomplish anything. They simply don't have the votes, and the districts held by members of the Freedom Caucus are Red enough that they wouldn't vote for Democrats to save their lives, let alone in support of a more pluralistic society. So Democratic denunciations come across mainly as virtue signalling.

Honestly, it's all an exercise in virtue signalling... only the standards of "virtue" are different.

The media helps, by portraying all of this as newsworthy on the national stage. It allows everyone to be performative in front of larger audiences, but it enlightens no-one. It's hard to imagine anyone who wasn't aware of how all of this works at this point. Still, people have to be allowed to put points on the board, even if no-one's actually watching the game.

Misfired

At the risk of coming across as flippant, I'm going to quote Superman, from the DC Comics series Kingdom Come. "You can't have a war," the Man of Steel said to Wonder Woman, "without people dying." To which most people, I expect, would respond with something along the lines of: "That, we knew already." People generally understand the nature of war. While it might not be true that "War never changes," there are certain things that tend to be constants; like casualties.

After the first three deaths were reported, Trump told NBC News on Sunday: “We have three, but we expect casualties, but in the end it’s going to be a great deal for the world.”
[...]
Then in a video posted to social media the same day, he again seemed to ask for people’s understanding about the subject.

“And sadly, there will likely be more [deaths] before it ends,” Trump said, before adding: “That’s the way it is. Likely be more.”

He then added: “But we’ll do everything possible where that won’t be the case.”
Trump’s and Hegseth’s awkward comments about US troop deaths in Iran war

But another constant is the deaths of non-combatant civilians.

Speaking aboard Air Force One on Saturday, President Trump accused Iran of being responsible for the school bombing.

"Based on what I've seen, I think it was done by Iran," Trump said. "Because they're very, inaccurate as you know, with their munitions. They have no accuracy whatsoever. It was done by Iran."
Video appears to show U.S. cruise missile striking Iranian school compound

On the one hand, I understand the President's looking to shift the blame. After all, he's been pushing a narrative of the United States being the unambiguous Good Guys in this conflict, even if looks like, once again, President Trump using the military to go after a nation that no-one else is close enough to that they'd be willing to stand up for them, and that doesn't have the wherewithal to fight back in kind.

But on the other hand, there's nothing new or unusual about inaccurate or outdated intelligence, or weapons not being quite as "precision guided" as they're advertised as being. People die in wars. And sometimes, they're people that everyone would rather had not been killed. The history of war is littered with people who has the misfortune of happening to be somewhere that a weapon also happened to be, but who weren't the intended, or presumed, targets of that weapon. Why would anyone expect this particular war to be any different?

It's reasonable for people in the United States to want their nation to have clean hands. It's less reasonable to expect that a war being fought mainly with long-distance weapons is going to result in clean hands. And if the President wants to keep American casualties to a bare minimum, then the United States is going to have to do much of its fighting from a distance. And the more that the war relies on hitting targets from a long way away, the more it relies on reports of what's where and who's who, the more that there are going to be times when a bomb, or a missile or whatever hits someone that it wouldn't if someone had realized precisely who was in the line of fire. The Commander-In-Chief, off all people, should be prepared to own up to that.

Talkative

I had just gotten out of the car when I heard it: "Hello. Hello." The voice sounded strange, like that of an elderly person, but more high pitched than one would expect.

I looked around for the source, and then heard it again; "Hello. Hello." Now I realized that it was coming from above me. I looked up, and, there in a tree overlooking the walkway was a crow. "Hello. Hello."

"Hello, hello, little crow," I said back to it, cheerfully. It really didn't seem to take notice of me. It simply repeated "Hello. Hello." every ten seconds or so.

I had shopping to do, and a time limit on top of that, so I left the talking bird to converse with my car and went into the store. While I was wandering the aisles, it occurred to me that I'd heard that crows could do this; they were one of any number of bird species that could mimic sounds from their environment. But this was the first time that I'd actually encountered a crow actually mimicking a sound, let alone a human voice.

So now I'm curious as to why it seems to be so rare an occurrence. After all, there's no shortage of the birds in this area; I see and/or hear them pretty much every day. And when it comes to grocery store parking lots, and other places where one might encounter dropped or discarded food, they're effectively a constant presence. And while Seattle and the Eastside are much quieter (at least as it seems to me) than my native Chicagoland, there are still plenty of sounds to repeat.

It's possible that I simply haven't been paying close enough attention, so I'll have to be more alert in the future, to determine if there are more talking birds in the area.