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Tech and social media are making us feel lonelier than ever:
You've had a social day. Two hundred Facebook friends posted birthday messages, your video of Mr. Meow shredding the toilet paper stash got dozens of retweets, and all the compliments on your latest Instagram selfie have you strutting with an extra swagger. Still, you can't help but notice an ache that can only be described as loneliness.
That we feel this way even when hyperconnected might seem like a contradiction. But the facts are clear: Constant virtual connections can often amplify the feeling of loneliness.
"Internet-related technologies are great at giving us the perception of connectedness," says Dr. Elias Aboujaoude, a Stanford University psychiatrist who's written about the intersection of psychology and tech. The truth, he says, is the time and energy spent on social media's countless connections may be happening at the expense of more rooted, genuinely supportive and truly close relationships.
If virtual socializing cannot substitute for the real thing, will social media prove out to be nothing more than a fad of the late 20th and early 21st centuries?
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 19 2020, @01:53PM (15 children)
What about jobs that are removed due to automation? United States GDP per capita is around double of what it was two generations back, because automation keeps making production more efficient. If the human race manages not to wipe itself out, in another two generations you won't need a person to drive a car or truck, maintain landscaping, collect trash, deliver packages, clean hotel rooms or do most other forms of housekeeping, or prepare most forms of food. Most factories today require 50% or even 10% of the human personnel as factories making the same volume of product in the 1970s. The number of jobs in creating and maintaining the software and hardware for all of those automated tasks will grow, but not nearly enough to employ everyone else in those fields that gets put out of work.
I'm open to counter arguments, but I think the need for UBI is inevitable. Arguably we're past due for implementing it. The only other alternative is some kind of Luddite attack on automation, and that would be a colossal waste of resources.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 19 2020, @03:21PM (3 children)
Kill all Boomers. Oh... wait...
I know. Kill all Milleni... Errrr... wut?
I don't know, I give up. Ask aristarchus.
Well, maybe we were always at war with Eastasia? Waste of resources or not, if the resources are cheap, nothing like keeping the population busy by the constant destruction of what is created.
(Score: 2) by aristarchus on Friday June 19 2020, @06:22PM (1 child)
Don't ask me, ask Confucius:
Analects, 12:19 [acmuller.net], Mulller, trans.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 19 2020, @10:18PM
I can't. We've always been at war with eastasia.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 19 2020, @09:35PM
I don't know that the people in power are intentionally causing wars to create jobs. I think they're simply doing it because they have friends in the petroleum and military equipment and munitions industries. But yes, it creates makework jobs - more oil, more military equipment, more ammunition, and of course more jobs for soldiers and their medical care.
(Score: 1, Disagree) by khallow on Friday June 19 2020, @06:23PM (10 children)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 20 2020, @07:58PM (1 child)
That's a fair point. Washing clothes isn't a tenth as resource-intensive as it was in 1900. Farming isn't as resource-intensive as it was in 1900. Medicine is more resource-intensive and more effective than it was in 1900. So as some jobs are automated away others do increase and new work does appear.
But I am convinced a lot of the created work today is pointless work, created solely to occupy people:
Take all of that away, and I think the actual number of constructive jobs has been declining.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday June 21 2020, @07:28PM
Take that all away, and the people so employed could be (and IMHO would be) constructively employed. I'll note that the greatest creators of bureaucracy, governments, would be running the UBI programs.
(Score: 2) by dry on Sunday June 21 2020, @01:38AM (7 children)
Used to be close to 100% labour participation, people started working at perhaps 5 years old and worked till death basically. Now what is the labour participation? Looking it seems to be about 60% after subtracting people in school and retired but it is hard to find honest statistics. There's lots of people on disability, stay at home partners, people getting educated (not a bad thing but not working at a job), people who have joined the idle rich, as well as the idle poor, sure a lot of street people now a days.
Then there's all the jobs that don't really produce stuff, things like nail saloons that never used to exist. Sure they're jobs but compared to making something. Then as the AC said, the increase in middle management and other types of paper pushers that if anything decrease productivity.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday June 21 2020, @05:06AM (6 children)
It's even higher.
(Score: 2) by dry on Sunday June 21 2020, @05:16AM (5 children)
So what, a 110% of the population is involved in jobs that are actually productive? Perhaps only 101%, but I sure know of a lot of people on disability.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday June 21 2020, @07:07PM (4 children)
(Score: 2) by dry on Sunday June 21 2020, @07:52PM (3 children)
I was talking about pre-industrial revolution for close to 100% labour participation. As you say, we're now lucky to get to 2/3rds labour participation, even with a far smaller pool of people in the labour pool.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday June 22 2020, @12:59PM (2 children)
I still think you're substantially exaggerating labor participation from those times.
(Score: 2) by dry on Tuesday June 23 2020, @02:50AM (1 child)
Perhaps, or I'm considering all the home industry. Inefficient but some of it has entered our language, words like spinster.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday June 23 2020, @04:03AM
Sounds like we've reached a dead end then. I'm not seeing the point of your posts in the first place. Even if we take seriously your claim that we've declined from 100% employment prior to the industrial age to 63% pre-covid, that's not a significant drop.