I moved furniture for 3 years in the early 2000s to support my shareware business. Something like 500 moves, sometimes 9+ hours per day, occasionally 6 days per week. It made me who I am today, but also broke me in countless ways.
I witnessed single mothers giving us $20 tips each (around $40 today) while wealthy people didn't even offer us water. I saw the best and worst of the human condition, sexist pay policies, how workers are exploited by not being provided a schedule for the next few days so they have to call in each morning, how truck fuel costs more than workers' pay, how Right to Work states allow businesses to throw employees away on a whim, how tax brackets at the bottom create the impression that any additional pay gets skimmed by the man, among a great many other injustices, and how all of those conspire to keep the working class down so that a handful of individuals can become fabulously wealthy.
With every improvement in tech, I see the gulf widening. We can talk about how poor people now have cell phones and flatscreen TVs, while conveniently ignoring how people with a net worth over $10 million who couldn't spend that money in a lifetime are now buying politicians to shred the social safety net, among other dubious endeavors.
I say with complete confidence that the arrival of AGI will bring about ultimate wealth inequality. I foresee a world where 10 billion people work performatively to survive long after robots can do the work better, while less than 1 million people live like gods, free even of senescence. Assuming that we stay on this timeline and don't shift to a more equitable one.
I went into computers in the late 1980s to eventually build an android like Data. I didn't know that Turing test-passing AI would arrive 20 years early, or that I would spend the first quarter of the 21st century hustling to make rent due to unfortunate geopolitical realities driven by unmitigated greed and regulatory capture.
Now I'm not so sure that I even want to stay in tech anymore. It has been anything but kind to me. Every time I level up, so does the world, and expectations upon me just grow for the same pay. My people-pleasing has cost me my health on a number of fronts. I know that someday, I'll have to choose computers or my life.
After all of that, one might think that I'm all doom and gloom. But I'm not. I've come to treasure my time at the warehouse as a teaching tool after a great deal of shadow work. I admire my foreman for being the provider that I can only hope to be someday. I look in awe upon the borderline homeless vets, deadbeat dads and ex-cons who showed me what it is to give without expectation of reward. I see them in all of us, even the people I disagree with, and that gives me hope that maybe we can come together and avoid the iceberg that's about to sink this ship.
I'm reminded of this scene from Jaws which always stuck with me:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-xQQIqAiTYA
And I just watched Mountainhead, here's the trailer:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=27cN2_k0JF0
I see a world divided into two camps: one that does much for little, and one that does little for much.
It makes me wonder where we all sit in relation to this. What kind of impact we could have on the future, and how that might help everyone to self-actualize.
I don't pretend to have the answers. Some of my best years happened when things were at their worst, and vice versa.
But I do know that everything is upside-down right now, and always has been, since the dawn of civilization. I feel that tech won't really be tech until it addresses and undoes that injustice.
That's why I write this malarky when I should be working. For all the other working people who don't have time to say what needs to be said.