Search youtube for "yes minister" :)
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On topic, I think it's a fair point that fighting is borderline useless. Companies that don't embrace new tech will go out of business.
That said, it's entirely unclear what the implications will be. Often new capabilities doesn't mean the industry will shrink. The industry haven't shrunk as a result of 100x increase in compute and storage, or decrease in size and power usage.
Computers just became more useful.
I don't think we should be too excited about AI writing code. We should be more excited about the kinds of program we can write now. There is going to be a new paradigm of computer interaction.
And you can fly without wings--just very poorly.
Unions are extremely important in the fight of preserving worker rights, compensation, and benefits.
You can fight without an army too, but it's a lot less effective. There is strength in numbers. Corporations know this and they leverage that strength against their employees. You all alone vs. them is exactly how they like it.
This works only if everyone is on with this. If they're not, you're shooting yourself in the foot while doing job hunting.
lol, good luck with that.
you thinking that one or two people doing non organized _boycott_ is the same thing as an union tell a lot about you.
It is possible that obedient people need highly paid union bosses, i.e., new leaders they can follow.
Unions are for people that don't accept anything and know that they are a target taking action alone or in non organized ways.
Unions are the way to multiply the forces and work as a group with common interests, it is for people that are not extremely selfish and egocentric.
Nobody wants to inhale toxic fumes in some factory? well then the company had better invest in safety equipment, or work dont get done. We dont need a union for this
If you leave it up to each worker to fend for himself with no negotiating power beyond his personal freedom to walk out, you get sweatshops and poorhouses in any industry where labor is fungible. If you want nice societies where average people can live in good homes with yards and nearby playgrounds and go to work at jobs that don't destroy their bodies and souls, then something has to keep wages at a level to support all that.
I'm not necessarily a fan of unions; I think in many cases you end up with the union screwing you from one side while the corporation screws you from the other. And the public sector unions we have today team up with the state to screw everyone else. But workers at least need the freedom to organize, or all the pressure on wages and conditions will be downward for any job that most people can do. The alternative is to have government try to keep wages and conditions up, and it's not good at that, so it just creates inflation with wages trailing behind.
We tried that in the past. The work still got done, and workers just died more often. If you want to live in that reality move to a developing country with poor labor protections.
You can fight without unions. Tell the truth about LLMs: They are crutches for power users that do not really work but are used as excuses for firing people.
You can refuse to work with anyone writing vapid pro-LLM blog posts. You can blacklist them in hiring.
This addresses the union part. It is true that software engineers tend to be conflict averse and not very socially aware, so many of them follow the current industry opinion like lemmings.
If you want to know how to fight these fights, look at the permanent government bureaucracies. They prevail in the face of "new" ideas every 4 years.