Industry Wide Strike for Worker Protection?

AI will take our jobs as soon as the suits learn how to precisely, accurately, and consistently express their needs in a backwards compatible fashion that doesn’t break existing customers.

That is to say never.

Our jobs will change. We might look more like product managers than code artisans. Or like lead engineers guiding mentoring and nudging robots to build the right thing.

But I suspect AI will take about as many engineering jobs as spreadsheets did. More people will be writing code and automating their tasks. When the spaghetti starts to break and becomes a bottleneck, we can come take over and turn it into a scalable engineering product. Perhaps with the help of our own robots doing the boring stuff.

Just as a reminder to those in the US — while regular employees have rights to organize, "supervisors" are not subject to those protections, and attempting to organize in your workplace can be lawful grounds for dismissal. While there is some jurisprudence regarding supervisor status, you should be very careful as most highly-paid software engineers who are in any way involved in hiring meet at least some of the checks defined here: https://www.nlrb.gov/guidance/key-reference-materials/nation...

    (11) The term "supervisor" means any individual having authority, in the interest of the employer, to hire, transfer, suspend, lay off, recall, promote, discharge, assign, reward, or discipline other employees, or responsibly to direct them, or to adjust their grievances, or effectively to recommend such action, if in connection with the foregoing the exercise of such authority is not of a merely routine or clerical nature, but requires the use of independent judgment.

I am not a lawyer but if you are considering getting involved in workplace activism, I strongly recommend that you consult with one.

Technological progress is a classic multipolar trap - an arms race where rational individuals take action that harms society as a whole. If you decide to not play in the game, you lose the game. There will always be "defectors" that are willing to stay in the game and gain massive economic advantages over the Luddites as a result.

When you think about the power structures of the modern world, there are virtually no examples where the powerful have gained power by swearing off modern technology - that would be a political non-starter. But we do see countless examples of powerful technologists simply crushing the cultures that stand in their way. Rational people see this and act according to their self-interested desire to not get crushed.

All that is to say, I don't think a strike based on AI protection will succeed. A strike based on more fundamental workplace and human rights, possibly. But a reactionary anti-technology strike ain't going to happen.

I wouldn't place bets on anything Zuckerberg has to say for future predictions given how insanely overvalued social media companies are.

It's his job to keep the stock price up and people are keeping their ears tuned into "AI" as if it's some magical productivity panacea.

Fighting technological progress is consistently a losing strategy unless:

1. You can take some extremely expensive or geographically irreplaceable assets out of commission while doing it. See port workers.

2. You realize that one day it will all come crashing down, and very suddenly and that you must save very aggressively for that day. Forklift drivers and manufacturing workers making 90K a year until their employers collapsed in 2008 and that freed them of union contracts.

This is exacerbated by tech being a high cycle industry, with a lot of new entrants and large firms (beyond the largest) often dying or collapsing, so chaining a few major players with contracts is unlikely to protect the industry as a whole.

There isn't a scenario where AI engineers exist and we all keep our nice tech jobs long term as they are (handwriting code).

It doesn't help that in a large factory, having 70% onboard is enough to stop a plant. In tech, if 30% break rank, the thing is still getting built.

Need to figure out where the ball is going.

Trying to protect your job against AI - if it ever becomes good enough - and the efficiency gains that will hypothetically come from it, is like protecting your job against IDEs.

You take Zuckerberg seriously and believe his thought is of value. You are wrong. He is wrong.

My belief is that we are over optimized for a particular situation that is ultimately unsustainable. You cannot make money if no one can pay you. That is the most serious issue corporations face right now. If you want some sense of that, ask yourself how the stock market is doing versus income. Then ask if it is sustainable for the stock market to do well people do not have money to spend.

There was an interesting, to me, discussion about cargo cultism recently. You have seen "cargo" appear and so you think it is caused by the observable factors. And perhaps we can generalize the term:

Cargo cultism: The belief that you know how to achieve a result when you do not understand the process that produces the result.

We do not understand the effects of AI at this point. It is likely that AI will help people become more productive programmers. But this is a two edged sword for Mark. What happens if I say "AI: write a version of FaceBook in Rust". Or "AI: write a new a library in Rust that reads, writes and displays all files supported by Microsoft Word"?

Hey for now I would settle for an AI that converted all my JavaScript files to TypeScript and back again so I get the benefit of types without the bother.

Like what I said in HN: all AI development, especially the algorithm part, should be paused until we all get some basic income at least because it has the potential of destroying many jobs in a short period of time. It is not to abandon the road completely, but to plan ahead and avoid the train wreck.

But of course people just want to move ahead. I know I can't fight the future. I'm fine with that. I'm an old man over 40. I'm going to be obsolete in about 10 years. I'll be debt free and some half million in cash and small passive income too. And you can do whatever you want. Apres moi...

If you or anyone else is interested in the idea, you really should join an existing union or form a union in your workplace. A strike, even a small strike, requires that almost all of your coworkers are organized and in agreement. A strike is the last negotiating tactic when all previous negotiations have failed. You need to already be negotiating collectively before calling a strike.

If you are interested in organizing, I recommend reaching out to CWA: https://cwa-union.org/

We are currently seeing an undeclared capital strike against workers.

It’s completely infeasible, but I wouldn’t be surprised to see significant movements inside individual companies or small groups of large companies.

As corny as LinkedIn often is, I saw an interesting take recently that I can't be bothered to find right now, but I'll attempt to paraphrase:

If AI can truly replace me at scale, I'll direct it to make billions of dollars. Why should we be afraid of AI taking our jobs, our companies should be afraid of what we can now quickly create to compete against them.

Luddite technologists. What a time.

Don't you want robots cleaning your toilets so you don't have to? A strike won't stop that from happening.

Why is engineering work any different?

In the fifth century BC, there was a secessio plebes in Rome - a strike - which won demands for the plebians.pleasant. In 1877 there was a nationwide railroad strike in the US which was put down by federal troops - it failed in the short term but led to some more scraps being doled back to workers.

It is feasible, but industry wide strikes don't just happened. Companies can move software jobs overseas easier than factories, so international solidarity is important - something US labor has notoriously been poor at.

It can happen, but a lot of work and time and effort and defeats would happen first. It starts on a small scale, with an enormous amount of effort to build up. The momentum of the past 75 years have been things going in the other direction in the US.

Not feasible at all.

If AI is going to succeed to that degree (I have doubts), then it only has to succeed in that degree anywhere. Are you going to successfully organize such a strike in India? China? North Korea?

No, you aren't. New technology is here. Those who refuse to use it are going to get run over by those who use it well (if it's all that useful).

Second point is that worker strikes are a thing of the past. If you want to strike, it is the consumers that have the power. So rather than getting all programmers to get together, have all users of Facebook just stop using it for one week. In my opinion only.

What about Zuckerberg's track record on tech progress makes you think a claim like that is worth taking seriously?

First they came for the taxi drivers…

Even though this post it utter nonsense per se, it's kind of refreshing to see how the 2021 arrogance of the SWE job market turned tables...jokes on who?

Actively resisting technological progress is a great way to make sure you are unemployable and the company you work for is bankrupt.

If you really think that you will be replaced, you already are valueless to your company.

(Pro tip: If you are valueless, striking is the surest way to get fired)

Bold to propose such a thing in a haven of libertarians and temporarily embarrassed billionaires

Sure — let's all meet in the metaverse to coordinate.