I had a long and intresting conversation with my therapist just now. I’m not comfortable sharing exactly what we were talking about but I can rephrase it: basically I was complaining that tech companies don’t want to innovate.
I’ve been trying to bring new technologies to my boss because I thought it would give him a better opportunity to realize value from the products I’m creating/maintaining for him. That’s what I understand is my purpose in the workforce. I’m a programmer not a salesman I can’t go out to the market and get him the money so he can pay me with something, I can only make things put things in his hands for him (or hire someone to) to go out and collect the money we deserve (deserve within the limits of market demands and the nature of the product, not the labor invested). But he doesn’t want them… well he does when he needs them but I miss way more times than I hit which is making my professional feelings feel less valuable. And if I’m not valuable enough then I can’t work doing what I love.
When I started working I went in with a plan to upgrade and modernize everything I touch. I still believe that to be the case, or like… my “purpose”(as an employee not a person). But every company I’ve worked for so far has been running old ass shit. Springboot apps, create-react-apps, codebases in c and c++, no kubernetes, little to no cloud. And it feels like everything that tech companies want me to do is maintain and expand old existing codebases. And I understand why, I know that its expensive to rewrite entire code bases just for a 20% efficiency boost and to make it easier to add upgrades every once in awhile. But noone is taking advantage of innovative technology anymore and that’s what’s concerning me.
In my therapist’s opinion he thinks we as a soceity are not taking 100% advantage of technology we have. I can’t go into too many details bc our conversations are private but at the end I agreed with him. I’m seeing it now in my working day but he convinced me that it’s everywhere. Are people actually benefitting from technology enough such that nobody actually needs to work to maintain a long and healthy life?
Lets say that no, technology is underutilized in our soceity. Does that mean that if we use technology more we’d have enough value in the economy to pay everyone a UBI? Could we phase out the human workforce to some extent? Or do we actually need more workers to do work to make the value, in which case we can’t realistically do UBI because people need to get paid competitivily to do the work.
Lets say that yes, we are taking all advantages of technology. If so than there should be enough value to pay a UBI. But we don’t have a UBI, so why? If the value exists than where is it? I don’t believe its being funnelled into the pockets of some shadowy deep-state private 4th branch of government. If it was than there’d be something to take, is there? Are we sure that its enough?
Basically I don’t know if technology generates value.
Think about it like this
If its cheaper to use technology to grow an acre of corn than to use people, is that subsequent output of corn more valuable or less valuable because of the technology. And if you believe that scaling up corn production to make the corn just as valuable as if we didn’t have technology then you agree that the corn is now less valuable. If self-checkout machines are replacing cashiers, does that mean that the cashiering work being done by the machine is more valuable to soceity or less?
This is basically end stage capitalism. We need to recognize if the work we do for soceity (whether you derive personal fulfillment or not) is actually adding to soceity or not. I’d rather not give up my job as a programmer just so I can do something more valuable, but I might have to if that’s the case. And I feel like most people in the world are thinking like that too. Is soceity trying to hang on to the past, or do we just not understand the future?
Sorry for the wall of text. I feel like this might be to philosophical for this community but I couldn’t find a better place to post this. If you know of a better community for this discussion to take place then I’ll consider moving this post based on the comments already posted. Thank you for reading this and I’d love to answer any question you’d have about my opinions/feelings.
This is a great thread, as I am currently learning to program and I often ask myself, “what are we(programmers) all doing? And where are we(humanity) all going?”
I remember getting a variety of answers, but one engineer I met laughed when I posed this question and gave me one of the darker answers I heard, but it indeed resonated:
“We’re boiling the oceans while partying at the end of the world, what did you think we were all doing?”
Or something along those lines. I’d love to think new technologies, properly implemented (guided by pragmatic altruism), can get us out of the problem that technology, improperly implemented (guided by greed and misanthropy), got us into. But I just don’t see it.
Isn’t oil required to make any and all pieces of tech, even green tech? How much oil/pollution went into producing my phone? The plastic pieces on everything I consume, wear, etc.? The Electric Vehicle that will help curb climate change as long as I can afford to buy one and discard my old gas consuming vehicle that was running just fine and might for another decade if I take care of it?
There are solutions, and I’m probably not thinking deeply enough on this, but right now, in this moment, I’m highly skeptical that those in power, even if they wanted to, could ever find a way to make money while also actually fighting climate change in a way that actually prevents its worse effects.
A simple example is cars. The solution to car emissions isn’t electric vehicles, it’s better infrastructure based around trains, metros and better city planning that encourages cycling and pedestrians. But our thinking is that we can sell electric vehicles, and build planned obsolescence into those vehicles to keep capitalism rolling. You can’t do that as lucratively with rail, if at all.
We all nod our heads and then get back to work though, cuz due to a multitude of lifetimes lived reinforcing the “get yours, and fuck everyone else” attitude that is a requirement to survive in a capitalist society, we can’t do anything more than mumble and groan about it, but still go back into work on Monday.
Those of us who object too loudly are socially ostracized at best, and killed at worst, and those on the top count on the rest of us being just afraid enough to not speak too far out of line.