That was equally true for previous generations, and all those generations had exceptions -- kids that were excited about it, despite the other kids not being interested. (I figure the majority of Slashdot may have been such exceptions.)

Do we have reason to suspect the current generation is a unique special case, the one generation where somehow all of them make an effort to never learn about computers?

I bet some of them are like some of us, a 2026 minority that we would have recognized 40 years ago.

This one's interesting on several levels. I mean, for starters? We already know most competitive sports involve people taking various drugs and supplements in an attempt to get an edge. So it's a lie and a farce when the Olympic committee or the Major League Baseball association or anyone else doing pro sports claims we're watching athletes who achieved everything they do 100% naturally.

Viewed that way, I can see how holding a "performance enhanced Olympics" challenges that and calls it out. Essentially, it's saying, "Hey... we don't just randomly catch and disqualify a few athletes, to keep up a facade that the rest of them aren't doing any of it. We let you see what people can do, period, in a world where these drugs and supplements exist and people take them."

Where it gets questionable for me is ethically, when you start asking if it's right to dangle large sums of money in front of people to encourage them to take dangerous amounts of drugs and push themselves into potential health crisis? I think most of us know that normally, athletes would limit drug usage to what they believe is relatively safe. (They're surrounded by others who have been doing the same and can make a judgement call based on what's actually worked and happened to that group.) Start changing things to huge cash prizes to win ONE event, and now people will get reckless. "I only need that $30 million this one year and I can quit the whole thing."

Historically, knowledge-workers had little interest in unionizing because they knew they possessed the ability to learn and adapt. Sure, they had useful skills and knowledge. But much of I.T. is about possessing the ability to learn new things quickly. Everything's in constant change or evolution. The software package you use today will get a new update in a matter of weeks and then it has new functions or features have been moved around to new locations in it. The programming language you use may even get deprecated, demanding you learn whatever replaces it. The hardware you troubleshoot and support changes on a regular schedule.

Unions primarily benefit people who want to retain fair compensation for doing the same specific tasks repeatedly. They want reassurance they won't be forced to do anything new that's outside the scope of what they were hired for. Such a thing requires a new job title/role and a contract specifying exactly what they agree to as part of it.

I.T. workers usually felt if they were getting a bad deal someplace, the best move was to quit and find a new job where pay/benefits and/or working conditions were better. There wasn't so much fear or concern if a place used different software or tools than what they used before. That didn't matter much as long as they could learn the differences between it and what they had previously.

I think that might be changing in recent years, though? Now, you probably have an edge if your resume shows you already worked at companies people are familiar with and impressed by. But otherwise, they mostly want newer/younger people who they can pay lower wages to and get the most out of. Most places are starting to treat anyone in I.T. as more of a necessary expense than an asset to the business, and fewer and fewer pay well for your decades of experience.

I know that's just me being a bit sarcastic or mean. I don't wish unemployment or a tough time on any of my "people" working in I.T. or with an interest in computers and technology. That's been my thing since I was a kid.

But ... I spent the majority of my career working for small businesses and even working for myself (on-site consulting and computer service). When I finally got hired on with "big tech", I lasted only a year before resigning, because I couldn't bear the constant changing demands, stress, foolishness and teams getting pushed around by middle managers in competition with each other.

I noticed a huge rift in "big tech" employment between the "chosen ones" and everyone else employed there. If you got into management in some capacity, or you were important enough in software development - you were compensated really well and made to feel like your job was fairly secure. The others doing such roles as deskside support or audio-visual support were in another world. They were just herded around by project managers who in turn would change direction on initiatives on a dime, when managers over them declared they had some new direction to go. For them, employment was a revolving door of hiring and firing (after tossing people on "performance improvement programs" to pretend they cared).

So when the big tech shakeup starts involving the middle managers and those all comfortable with lots of stock options and a high salary because they help code the site's web portals? It's hard to be THAT sympathetic. Time to learn how the rest of us in the career feel.

Correct, as anyone can see by looking at who they rounded up.

"Then they came for the Socialists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Socialist

Then they came for the trade unionists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a trade unionist "

But in the next state over, the next company will also treat you as badly as they can get away with.

The natural model for a programmer's union is the Screen Actor's Guild. That's another field with a wide range of talent. SAG members can get the best pay their agents can negotiate, lots for stars. But everyone is protected from exploitation.

Perhaps, but I suspect Starlink (etc) already fills most of that use-case, and for the rest, they'll want that compute to be physically located inside the drones themselves, because otherwise the drones will be susceptible to jamming or spoofing.

There will be jobs that AI can't do. How many? Enough to keep 5-10 billion humans employed? What makes you so sure there will be?

Clearly AI has progressed considerably over the last 5-10 years. It's anyone's guess how much further it will progress -- maybe it'll plateau right where it is now, or maybe it will keep becoming more powerful as better algorithms are discovered. I'm not qualified to predict that, and neither are you, but the AI people certainly seem bullish about it.

Sorry, I thought you would understand that I meant that the resources that money represents appear, once you've solved the automation problems that currently make mass-production difficult. That's why you can buy a pocket computer today for $300 that would have your cost you billions of dollars twenty years ago, if you could have obtained it at all.

I bet you'd have more interesting conversations if you made a good-faith effort to understand what the other person was saying, rather than just jumping straight to the part where you get to throw insults at them and tell them how dumb they are. Doesn't that get boring?

I have yet to hear of a remotely plausible business case for putting data centers into space. The only benefit is 24/7 solar power, but that benefit is more than offset by the cost of launching everything into orbit, plus the cost of keeping everything properly cooled, plus the cost of radiation-hardening everything, and finally the cost of maintaining hardware in space (or, more likely, the cost of periodically having to write off the entire investment and build and launch new replacement hardware).

Unless Musk is trying to corner the market for AI-generated kiddie-porn (or something similarly illegal that needs to be operated beyond the reach of Earthly authorities), his ground-based competitors will undercut his pricing by a factor of 100, and he therefore won't have a viable product to sell.

Certainly new categories of work will emerge. The question is, will hiring and paying human beings be the most economically efficient way to fill those new positions, or will those jobs be done by AIs instead?

Previous waves of automation allowed people to move "up the food chain" and do jobs the machines still couldn't do, which was fine (at least, for the people capable of doing the new jobs), but if we get to the stage where there aren't many jobs left that the machines can't do, then we're out of luck -- it's unlikely that our tech-bro overlords are going to hire people simply on humanitarian grounds, if they can get an unquestioning machine to do the same work cheaper.

I agree that UBI is unlikely, but only because the billionaires don't like sharing and therefore won't support it. The money does "just appear" when you have mass automation doing the work to make it appear, but it will go into Bezos' checking account, not to the general public.

and radio ads that claim such should be sued to Pluto.

There was a tech slump around 1983 due to the video game crash, and again in 1992 due to mass "Glasnost" aerospace layoffs. There probably would have been one around 2009, but mobile devices were booming, taking up the slack.

Save up, the "business cycle" ain't going away.

I mean you are cherry-picking experts' opinions of that time after you know the outcome. Let's say there were 100 experts with an opinion back then. Let's say 20 predicted it was not transitory. You now quote the 20, pretending the 80 didn't exist. A propaganda trick.

A buffed Darwin Award

Yes, and that's the problem for Disney -- theme parks can only physically accept so many people per year, and they can't (easily) build more of them. So theme parks can't be more than a small amount of their total income; to really make the big money, the Mouse has to ship products that can and will be purchased by everyone. In practice, that means movies; ideally good movies, but at a minimum, popular movies.

You are cherry-picking opinions after the fact