"Doomers, in case you’re wondering, are Millenials and younger folks who haven’t yet found their place. [...] a Doomer might bring up to explain their negative worldview, like climate change, politics, or wealth inequality, the source of their angst is that they lack a sense of belonging in modern society."
This seems a little cynical. The Author can't think of _any_ other reason to hold concern on those topics?
It’s not that there aren’t other reasons. It’s that they use those reasons as justifications for their unhappiness. A “Doomer” would be just as miserable if climate change were solved tomorrow.
I'm not a millennial but I'm depressed about politics, global warming not mattering to people who will die soon (ie lots of boomers and greatest generation). I've got a great job, I'm a fortunate, overpaid programmer like so many others. And I can only see the slow decline of the world.
I don't want go to back to some mythically awesome time that wasn't really so great. The 50s or 60s (well before I was an adult) - remember endemic racism (far far worse than today), murders of people advocating for civil rights. I want to go forward, building on what we have. I'd like to get to the point that if you have a car accident and can't work your life is not ruined, or you get sick and can't work for a year the same happens. Somehow other western countries are able to pull this off.
How does society and its systems serve its constituents? This is the core of politics, and plenty of brainpower is already devoted to it. Assuming AGI surpasses human intelligence, I'm still not sure how it helps with politics. The problem generally isn't with cognitive bandwidth, it's more about underlying assumptions and principles that differ. In order to come up with better solutions, better "understanding" (modeling?) of those cultural values is required. It's all well and good to say we should allocate one unit of AGI to each individual in some sort of democratic distribution, but how does the individual encode their values in the AGI? Through a series of Socratic dialogues? What happens when the AGIs point out the inherent contradictions of human nature? How will the human masters deal with the cognitive dissonance raised by super-smart machines? Will we trust them? Should we?
It's certainly not very easy to read. And a real person probably would realize most readers would think Adjusted Gross Income in a title mentioning houses and jobs.
Doomer seems like an ill-suited term for younger generations.
As a Gen X who doesn't like things to fit into neat little stereotypes, I find that younger generations are incredibly optimistic and creative in how they view and change the world around them. Much of it has to do with technologies and tools, but there's a creativity there that seemed less common beforehand. Just my two cents.
Does this guy know anything useful about AGI that I don't (all I know is that we're super fucking far away)? All of these articles seem to be him tossing around ideas that feel good to his mind, and no substance.
Gen X are original doomers in spirit. FTW was the motto, and still is for some. Agreed, pension funds are ruining everything. And we do need our own AGI. Certainly not theirs. Where do we start is the question.
Atomize people until they don't belong to any group except to be judged and then fight over scraps in the dung heap. Overall, the greatest enemies of the average person and the planet tend to be just a few thousand of very, very rich people and the million/s who enable them. Old or young, middle-class/poor or homeless, black/white or purple; the people must bring their power together because they don't have enough on their own. It's the only way anything can change. And borrowing ideas from JFK: misery, poverty, corruption and injustice are like pressure in a boiler, that if the safety valve of reforms are blocked, it will find a way to explode violently.
I shy away from generational griping, because I think a lot of it is misleading. People tend to use statistics that suit them.
Eg. a lot more people are staying in school for a lot longer. There are a lot more 25-year-old grad students now as a portion of the population of 25-year-olds, than in 1960. They use individual salaries instead of household because of the growth in dual-incomes, etc.
None of those statistics are incorrect per se, but one can strategically choose the stats that are in their favour.
A lot of the difference can simply be chalked up to the generation that preceded the boomers being relatively poor in comparison to their kids.
Bitching is tantamount to passively asking others to solve problems for you, and antithetical to "Be the change you seek." This could be extended to "Find and try solutions before whining about problems."
Maybe the intent of their blog was to be a personal outlet of frustration, rather than anything constructive? It's hard to say.
More specifically: looking for a particular looking group to blame that has little influence over root cause(s) sounds a lot like scapegoating IMHO. Some trends in life have no specific person or group to blame or shame, while others do to an extent. If younger people these days are looking for specific causes to grotesque inequality, it's not old grannies who are on fixed-income Social Security (pensions), but it sure could be the lack of billionaires sharing their excessive exploitation of automation, deregulation, rollback of worker pay, decrease in jobs and increased worker productivity. People get upset when they can't start families, and blaming them that it's somehow their innate failing when there aren't enough jobs or houses to go around when there are a few people sitting on several trillion USD doesn't square that circle.
PS: I have $10k in student loan debt, have an UC CS/Eng degree that I can't use, bankruptcy, live in a vehicle, and can't hold a job because I must be worse than the Jump to Conclusions Mat-guy: I can't seem to get along with people, and it never(hasn't yet) worked out in a work situation.
This seems a little cynical. The Author can't think of _any_ other reason to hold concern on those topics?