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Culture War Roundup for the week of March 24, 2025

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Personally I find "spreadsheets" very apt so far. I think they definitely have the potential to disrupt some jobs. But if I'm being honest I think a lot of the "email jobs" are begging for disruption anyway, for other reasons. I would not be surprised if "AI" takes the blame for something that was more-or-less going to happen anyway.

I think robotics (which obviously has a lot of overlap with AI!) is potentially vastly more impactful than just "an AI that can do your email job." If you started randomly shooting "email job holders" and "guys who maintain power lines and fiber optic cables" you would notice the disruption in the power lines and fiber optic cables much sooner unless you got weirdly (un?)lucky shooting email jobbers. Similarly, AI will have a much bigger impact if it comes with concrete physical improvements instead of just better video games, or more website code, or better-written emails, or whatever, notwithstanding the fact that a lot of people work in the video game/coding/email industry.

(I hope I am right about that. I guess wireheading is kinda an option...)