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Devs and the Culture of Tech - Final part (unserious.substack.com)

submitted 4 months ago by UnseriousAcademic@awful.systems to c/techtakes@awful.systems

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Hello all. People were very kind when I originally posted the start of this series. I've refrained from spamming you with every part but I thought I'd post to say the very final installment is done.

I got a bit weird with it this time as I felt like I had an infinite amount to say, all of which only barely got to the underlying point i was trying to make. So much that I wrote I also cut, it's ridiculous.

Anyway now the series is done I'm going to move on to smaller discrete pieces as I work on my book about Tech Culture's propensity to far-right politics. I'll be dropping interesting stuff I find, examples of Right Libertarians saying ridiculous things, so follow along if that's your jam.

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[–] BlueMonday1984@awful.systems 11 points 4 months ago (6 children)

Ah, hell yeah, the much-anticipated finale.

Gonna give particular praise to the opening, because this really caught my eye:

Tech culture often denigrates humans through its assumptions that human skills, knowledge and functions can be improved through their replacement by technological replacements, and through transhumanist narratives that rely on a framing of human consciousness as fundamentally computational.

I've touched on the framing of human consciousness part myself - seems we may be on the same wavelength.

As for the whole "replacement by technological replacements" part...well, we've all seen the AI art slop-nami, its crystal fucking clear what you're referring to.

[–] UnseriousAcademic@awful.systems 8 points 4 months ago

Forgot to say: yes AI generated slop is one key example, but often I'm also thinking of other tasks that are often presumed to be basic because humans can be trained to perform them with barely any conscious effort. Things like self-driving vehicles, production line work, call center work etc. Like the fact that full self drive requires supervision, often what happens with tech automation is that they create things that de-skill the role or perhaps speed it up, but still require humans in the middle to do things that are simple for us, but difficult to replicate computationally. Humans become the glue, slotted into all the points of friction and technical inadequacy, to keep the whole process running smoothly.

Unfortunately this usually leads to downward pressure on the wages of the humans and the expectation that they match the theoretical speed of the automation rather than recognise that the human is the the actual pace setter because without them the pace would be 0.

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