People had voted for Trump not because of lack of empathy, but because they were fed up with being patronized, negged, treated like children, observed, modeled and disempowered, belittled and generally discounted.<p>And this article is not helping it.
This Neo-Luddism feels really misplaced. Do you know why some people are getting the short end of the stick? It's because the educational system has failed them by wasting their youth and giving nothing in return. But I can't blame a guy who founded a SV-centric blog to see all problems through a SV-centric lens.
On one hand you have increasing immigration increasing the supply of labour. On the other hand, you have increasing automation reducing the demand for labour. And in the pinched middle you have falling wages. This cannot end well.<p>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.
It's not a private company's job to have empathy for the people affected by progress. Don't get me wrong, I have plenty of empathy. But petitioning private companies to change their ways will get you exactly nowhere unless it comes with a corresponding profit motive.<p>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.
> However, when you are a data-driven oligarchy like Facebook, Google, Amazon, or Uber, you can’t really wash your hands of the impact of your algorithms and your ability to shape popular sentiment in our society. We are not just talking about the ability to influence voters with fake news. If you are Amazon, you have to acknowledge that you are slowly corroding the retail sector, which employs many people in this country. If you are Airbnb, no matter how well-meaning your focus on delighting travellers, you are also going to affect hotel-industry employment.<p>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.<p>A lack of fairness means a lack of empathy.
Silicon Valley threatens the majority of blue collar workers last. This is Moravec's Paradox. The kinds of jobs blue collar labour does flexibly and in situ are extremely difficult for robots and AI to accomplish. The jobs that are rote and can be performed in a centralized production <i>have already been automated or outsourced to China!</i><p>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.<p>It is the white collar jobs Silicon Valley is destroying. Journalists, Accountants, Lawyers and many more to come.<p>Solution definitely isn't education, or at least not education as it is classically understood.<p>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.<p>Here's a crazy idea.<p>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<p>I think this is happening already but it's flying under the radar of journalists as some kind of Timothy Leary move.
There's a lot of clear failures of technology, especially coming out of Silicon Valley, to mesh well with society which highlights how difficult these companies have grasping real people and their emotions.<p>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.<p>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.
“Productivity is at record levels, innovation has never been faster, and yet at the same time, we have a falling median income and we have fewer jobs. People are falling behind because technology is advancing so fast and our skills and organizations aren’t keeping up.” It is, he said, “the great paradox of our era.”<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.
...as you see by the rank of such articles here on HN.<p>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..
I think it runs a bit deeper than "Silicon Valley" which makes for a nice headline and is the new scape goat. My opinion:<p>1. computer science has an ethics problem due to the lack of modernization of and membership in professional societies like the ACM.<p>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.<p>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.
> If you are Amazon, you have to acknowledge that you are slowly corroding the retail sector, which employs many people in this country. If you are Airbnb, no matter how well-meaning your focus on delighting travellers, you are also going to affect hotel-industry employment.<p>> 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.<p>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?<p>> we need to learn about those who are threatened by it.<p>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.<p>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.<p>1 - with the obvious caveat about the popular vote
I don't see how the things he discusses have to do with empathy in Silicon Valley. Driverless trucks, for instance, have nothing to do with empathy and a lot to do with simple economics. Someone is going to build them if they can make a buck doing it, and empathy isn't going to somehow stop that.<p>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.<p>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)<p>Then of course give users tools to control what they see....e.g. hide (or suppress) divisive political content, etc.<p>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)<p>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.
> The streets of San Francisco—spiritually part of the Valley—feel less crowded. Coffee-shop conversations are hushed. Everything feels a little muted, an eerie quiet broken by chants of protesters. It even seems as if there are more parking spots.<p>Or maybe it was just Thanksgiving week?
This article is the embodiment of the South Park, San Francisco stereotype of the guy enjoying the smell of his own farts.<p>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.
Wow, I read this, and thought "hey, maybe there is an opportunity here... another problem to solve, to make society better".<p>I'm a bit surprised by the amount of denial and "not my problem" comments (or perhaps "what problem?" comments).<p>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.
I'm just going to cut right through this from the start.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.
> There will be a recognition that if we don’t have control of the nation state, we should reduce the nation state’s power over us<p>Does this mean he's defending separatism?<p>Am I reading this wrong?