Sfm Last Update
Badomero Schoulund
I am 25. These next five years might be the last few years that I work. I am not ill, nor am I becoming a stay-at-home mom, nor have I been so financially fortunate to be on the brink of voluntary retirement. I stand at the edge of a technological development that seems likely, should it arrive, to end employment as I know it.
Many expect AI to eventually be able to do every economically useful task. I agree. Given the current trajectory of the technology, I expect AI to first excel at any kind of online work. Essentially anything that a remote worker can do, AI will do better. Copywriting, tax preparation, customer service, and many other tasks are or will soon be heavily automated. I can see the beginnings in areas like software development and contract law. Generally, tasks that involve reading, analyzing, and synthesizing information, and then generating content based on it, seem ripe for replacement by language models.
As automation rolls out across these industries, how should we expect people to feel? The common assumption about automation, even setting aside the financial effects, is that people will be incredibly unhappy without work. More evidence than not seems to point to unemployment having numerous and diverse negative physical and mental health ramifications, although the size of these effects varies:
One study that tried to tackle this looked at the effects of unemployment caused by the collapse of the Spanish construction industry on mental and physical health. This particular study was attempting to disentangle the causality because people who lose their job during a nationwide collapse of an industry will avoid this selection effect: these individuals are no more likely to have mental or physical issues than other members of the population. By looking at large-scale survey responses before and after the crisis, they found that unemployment did appear to increase the likelihood of reporting poorer health, by about 15% in their sample, and an increase in the chance of reporting having a mental disorder, by about one third.
From the studies on plant closures and pandemic layoffs, it seems that shame plays a role in making people unhappy after unemployment, which implies that they might be happier in full automation-induced unemployment, since it would be near-universal and not signify any personal failing.
Removing the shame that accompanies unemployment by removing the sense that one ought to be working seems one way to make people happier during unemployment. Another is what they do with their free time. Regardless of how one enters unemployment, one still confronts empty and often unstructured time. Is this, in and of itself, bad for people?
We also tend to view retirement positively. If people are in fact happier after retirement, it might even suggest that not working under certain conditions is actually beneficial for well-being. A study published in Frontiers in Public Health looked at men in urban China and found that they were happier after retirement. Similarly, a study found English men reported better mental health and better subjective physical health after retirement.
When not participating in the formal labor market, women overwhelmingly fill their time with childcare and housework. The time needed to do housework has declined over time due to tools like washing machines, dryers, and dishwashers. These tools might serve as early analogous examples of the future effects of AI: reducing unwanted and burdensome work to free up time for other tasks deemed more necessary or enjoyable. Roombas are a comic and clear continuation of this trend. It seems likely that more advanced AI systems will also soon enter the home to fold clothes, cook meals, and the like.
A renowned AI researcher once told me that he is practicing for post-AGI by taking up activities that he is not particularly good at: jiu-jitsu, surfing, and so on, and savoring the doing even without excellence. This is how we can prepare for our future where we will have to do things from joy rather than need, where we will no longer be the best at them, but will still have to choose how to fill our days.
The English word last is thought to derive from a Proto-Germanic term reconstructed as *laistaz and intending a track, a trace, or a footprint. Cognates include Swedish lst, Danish lste, and German Leisten.[1][2]
Well into the Industrial Revolution, shoe production was optimized by elaborate division of labor in putting-out systems arranged around central workshops but each step of production still required skilled labor.[4] Attempts at mechanization in Britain by Marc Isambard Brunel during the Napoleonic Wars were partial and proved uneconomical after demobilization.[5] Improvements to the sewing machine to suit it for work in leather took until 1850[6] and the major breakthrough was the Surinamese immigrant Jan Ernst Matzeliger's automated lasting machine, patented in 1883. This instantly centralized production, increased production by as much as 14 times, improved quality, and halved prices.[4][7][8]
A last is a mechanical form shaped like a human foot.[9] Lasts come in many styles and sizes, depending on the exact job they are designed for. Common variations include simple uniform lasts for shoe repair, custom-purpose mechanized lasts for shoe factories, and custom-made lasts for bespoke footwear. Though a last is typically made to approximate the shape of a human foot, the precise shape is tailored to the kind of footwear being made. For example, boot lasts typically hug the instep for a close fit. Modern last shapes are now usually designed with dedicated CAD software.
Lasts are typically made from hardwoods, cast iron, and high-density plastics[10] to maintain their shape even after prolonged use in contact with materials like wetted leather and under the mechanical stresses necessary to stretch and shape the material for shoes. Factory lasts must be able to hold the lasting tacks that position the parts of the shoe and then handle the force of the pullover machines used to bottom the shoe and add the sole. The usual material now is high-density polyethylene plastic (HMW-HDPE), which can be easily, cheaply, and precisely shaped; which withstand more damage from the tacks before requiring repair or replacement; and which can be recycled once they finally do wear out entirely. Wooden lasts are now used only for repair work and bespoke shoemaking, particularly in Europe and North America.
Cordwainers often use lasts that are specifically designed to the proportions of individual customers' feet. Made from wood or from various modern materials, they don't need to withstand the pressures of mass production machinery, but they must be able to handle constant tacking and pinning and the wet environment associated with stretching and shaping materials such as leather.
If something is last, it is the finalizer or terminating point. Nothing else will follow after something that is last. Last can apply to anything that involves a series, amount, or order. This sense of last is a superlative of late.
Bookmark after bookmark led to dead link after dead link. What's vanished: unique pieces of writing on kuro5hin about tech culture; a collection of mathematical puzzles and their associated discussion by academics that my father introduced me to; Woodman's Reverse Engineering tutorials from my high school years, where I first tasted the feeling of control over software; even my most recent bookmark, a series of posts on Google+ exposing usb-c chargers' non-compliance with the specification, all disappeared.
This is more than just link rot, it's the increasing complexity of keeping alive indie content on the web, leading to a reliance on platforms and time-sorted publication formats (blogs, feeds, tweets).
Of course, I have also contributed to the problem. A paper I published 7 years ago has an abstract that includes a demo link, which has been taken over by a spammy page with a pumpkin picture on it. Part of that lapse was laziness to avoid having to renew and keep a functioning web application up year after year.
I've recommended my students to push websites to Heroku, and publish portfolios on Wix. Yet every platform with irreplaceable content dies off some day. Geocities, LiveJournal, what.cd, now Yahoo Groups. One day, Medium, Twitter, and even hosting services like GitHub Pages will be plundered then discarded when they can no longer grow or cannot find a working business model.
The problem is multi-faceted. First, content takes effort to maintain. The content may need updating to remain relevant, and will eventually have to be rehosted. A lot of content, what used to be the vast majority of content, was put up by individuals. But individuals (maybe you?) lose interest, so one day maybe you just don't want to deal with migrating a website to a new hosting provider.
Second, a growing set of libraries and frameworks are making the web more sophisticated but also more complex. First came jquery, then bootstrap, npm, angular, grunt, webpack, and more. If you are a web developer who is keeping up with the latest, then that's not a problem.
But if not, maybe you are an embedded systems programmer or startup CTO or enterprise Java developer or chemistry PhD student, sure you could probably figure out how to set up some web server and toolchain, but will you keep this up year after year, decade after decade? Probably not, and when the next year when you encounter a package dependency problem or figure out how to regenerate your html files, you might just throw your hands up and zip up the files to deal with "later". Even simple technology stacks like static site generators (e.g., Jekyll) require a workflow and will stop working at some point. You fall into npm dependency hell, and forget the command to package a release. And having a website with multiple html pages is complex; how would you know how each page links to each other? index.html.old, Copy of about.html, index.html (1), nav.html?
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