>not [seeking] an argument

Oh! Oh! I'm sorry! This is slashdot, in Room 12. This is Abuse!
For arguments, you want 12A, next door!

>people don't hire on merit
>Which candidate would you feel most comfortable working with for 40+ hours a week?

Why do you think "merit" and "works well with the employees I already have" are unrelated?

>Of course the candidate with a similar socioeconomic profile as your own would be preferred:

I suspect that's often true, but certainly not universal.

For example, allegedly, some people want slaves and want to lord themselves over their slaves. So they would never hire people like themselves, SES wise; they would only hire people where it was clear (in their own minds) that there was SES or other status daylight between themselves and their "underlings" So I'm not sure there's a universal law of hiring. I agree that "hiring someone like me" is a common -- but not universal -- pattern.

(Oddly enough, in the USA in 2026, I think you'll find that white males are the _least likely_ to use the "someone like me" hiring strategy - if for no other reason than decades of targeted enforcement against that that group for appearing to employ that strategy. Eg the Indian preference for hiring Indians, or the female preference for hiring females, is stronger than the white-male preference for hiring white-males. Maybe not in terms of hidden preferences, but in terms of actual hiring outcomes, yes, that's what the data will show)

Back to the non-universality of hiring strategies: A friend of mine with a tech business intentionally tries to hire mid-field performers. He doesn't want a rapid climber, because he cannot afford to keep them on staff once they understand what they are worth. He wants mid-field performers who are going to do solid, reliable work, and be content to work for him for a long time. So he doesn't hire on "merit" - he hires for "good enough, low turnover"

Other businesses have other strategies.

> but "not understanding cost" is a dangerous assumption to make.

One of the best, most succinct phrases in this discussion. Thank you.

We don't have to wait for AGIs to develop their own agency and build terminator robots. Industrial robots with no agency and with auditable and deterministic programming already kill humans. The industrial robot doesn't understand there's a human in the safety cage with it. It doesn't understand that moving through space occupied by a human has a cost. It doesn't know there's a human there and it doesn't know what a human is.

Designing automation that can never kill a person is already an unsolved problem with standard, non-intelligent technology.

I don't know if AI makes it harder or easier. On one hand, AI behaves, in effect, non-deterministically (even though at some level it is deterministic, it's not observably so).

OTOH, in organic intelligences, adding sensors, adding alignment, giving feedback - tend to produce humans who accidentally kill less frequently. So maybe something like the 3 laws will conceptually be part of the System Prompt of future AIs, and they'll figure out how to avoid HAL 9000 problems.

Thanks for the interesting response.

The strongest man today; the hardest workers today... are not 10x or even 2x as strong or as physically productive as the best in human history. Depending on what you think about ancient man, we are possibly weaker and dumber than some of our ancestors.

The transmission of new ideas across memory, time, and place is the extra term in the equation of human achievement, civilization, and prosperity. It's not that labor doesn't matter. It's that ideas are like compound interest. Labor adds principal to our civilizational account balance. But Ideas compound it.

In the long term, ideas are all that matter.

I have the same reservations you do - powerful people will continue to want to corner and concentrate their power.

It's unclear how well they will be able to do that, however. The capability lag time between a paid frontier model and a self-hostable open-weights model is months.

The ability to train a good-enough model will also be commoditized. In my youth, we had distributed crypto challenges.... to get super-computing work done on mass democratized hardware of like-minded individuals. So in the future, we can fall back on analagous distributed model training efforts if some better alternative doesn't exist.

I am skeptical about a post-scarcity society and I am skeptical about man's "labor" ever going to zero. Of the infamous twelve possible AI outcomes, I am somewhere in middle. For biblical reasons, I believe the extinction of man is not going to happen, and I believe the utopia of man is also not going to happen.

And then what, she withholds hex?

Control of other people's speech is always about asserting power.

It's never actually about "reducing harm"; it's about asserting power.

Talking about it in "harm" terms is a clever hack: ... because most humans are sensitive to harm/harm reduction along their moral reasoning (see: Jonathan Haidt)

But "Never hurt my feelings" is an impossible bar, and it doesn't scale across a civilization. It cannot be a basis for law.

The attempt to abuse the "harm receptors" of political enemies is contributing to the mutual dehumanization across faction lines.

Firefox doesn't preview webp images in the file dialog on Linux either. So fucking annoying. What year is it?

I prefer the majority of canned or virtual male voices I hear on the phone to the majority of female ones today. I think this is because they care about what women think about them these days and don't care what men think, because we are less likely to complain to them about the voices. They used to choose soft female voices, now they are choosing harder ones. I am not looking for confrontation from phone operators, so this doesn't seem positive to me. I'm seeking service, not an argument.

It's complicated. Where does society end and the workplace begin?

You can't find Wikipedia? Learn to Internet, noob

And by extension, so do the owners of this site for providing a safe haven for these cowards

This is stupid racist dickhead bullshit because ICE has detained at least 500 citizens so far, and every person who was "deported" to a country they didn't come from was trafficked by ICE. Fuck your support for racism in pursuit of your support of a child rapist traitor. It also makes you a traitor.

As if you would know anything about feelings

Correction: ... Why are ISRAELI Jews etc etc

Netanyahu is currently doing what every expert says is a genocide in Gaza. Hamas was founded in response to a massacre in a mosque done by a Jewish "settler" assault-colonialist.

What is the death toll on each side?
Why are Jews protesting for the right to rape Palestinian hostages?