Tristan Vitali

M Ljin wrote:As much as I agree with Paul’s answer to the issue, I still think the issue is likely to he different.

Paul suggests unemployment—I suggest that there will be a lot more jobs and they will be harder, more grueling, and less pleasant than today’s worky jobs. There will be a lot of jobs created in pollution management, power plants (of all kinds and fuels), in mental health management and treating AI-induced psychosis (because people won’t be forced to use their brains at all) and in general feeding the AI machine and cleaning up after it. The solution is still the same: live sanely.

There is a historical precedent, the Industrial Revolution. It took away the work of spinners, weavers, craftspeople of all sorts and started rolling out mass produced cloth, leading to lots of people losing their jobs. Then, the machine, even hungrier, had to pull a great chunk of the population out from the countryside and into the city for factory jobs. People weren’t satisfied with what the automated process could make, they wanted more! And so the machine got fed and now we’ve fast fashion and disposable clothes, a lot more worky work around and not much unemployment last I heard.

I fully agree while completely disagreeing, if that makes any sort of sense at all  

To explain a little, more jobs doesn't necessarily mean gainful employment. One good example is the shift to uber driving and gig economy stuff leaving countless young people in a bind where they can only make the rent doing 3 or more "jobs" and sometimes that doesn't even cut it.
Another example: I remember not that many years back (10 or so?) my mother trying to help make ends meet by doing gig work on the "amazon turk" thing...and it resulted in loss more than gain. More often than not, she'd spend 4 or 5 hours on a "task" estimated to take 1 or 2 hours, ending up with an equivalent wage of less than $3/hr.

As far as that last sentence, M Ljin, what country do you live in again? Last I checked, official unemployment numbers in the US were considered a complete joke by "both sides of the aisle" due to not only reporting "half the story" but also the "adjustments" that were put in place after 1994 to make the economy look "stronger". Arguably the best estimate out there of real unemployment is still somewhere between 20 and 25% (that's both the metrics combined and measured using the pre-1994 adjustments: the U3, meaning "collecting unemployment checks", along with the U6, the "underemployed" such as part time that want full time as well as those who have "run out" of "unemployment").

That number reflects (roughly) the way the BLS estimated the unemployment, peaking around 25%, during the Great Depression in the US. Hard to not notice that the numbers are comparable. Have been since the 2008 "crash" and only rebounded a bit from the peak of ~35% during the Covid fiasco.

I hope I'm not coming off as argumentative with these comments - not my intention. I just think we need a solid, empirical frame of reference when it comes to something like jobs availability.

I haven't watched the videos yet - just downloaded for offline viewing - but I keep coming back to this gut-wrenching feeling that what this discussion is missing is the idea that it is a full paradigm change happening, and the new paradigm is not even close to being set yet. We're in a transition from one "base reality" to another, and until that new reality has solidified, we really don't know what to expect. We see changes happening, but can't be sure those changes are even permanent yet.

All we know for sure is that everything is about to change in huge ways.

College is not going to prepare anyone for something like that - it's like the saying that generals are always fighting the last war. Perhaps a truly classical education would be useful, meaning the whole trivium & quadrivium style education based in classics, music and math, but certainly not the current liberal arts "design your own degree" kind. It might just be me, but I can't see either Karl Marx or Ludwig Von Mises haven't anything much to offer anyone in the oncoming "new economy".

Anyone currently reading the Illiad and the Odysee? Anyone learning guitar while designing a 3 bedroom roundwood timberframe?

Lina Joana wrote:Wish I had a crystal ball.

Don't we all? As it stands, best bet is to cover as many bases as you can and to teach others to do the same in any small way you can have an effect. I wear self-designed graphic t-shirts, hoodies and hats (and have plans to put together more designs) any time I go out in public, generally with permie related themes. This results in random conversations in supermarket aisles or in line at the checkout with other shoppers. The topic of growing or raising our own "is the only way I could survive" with the inflation, "never mind the loads of chemical gack in the food these days", is a regular. It's actually pretty neat to see how many people are becoming hip to the idea that growing and raising your own food is healthier, and there have been a few over the past 5 years or so that noted their own desire to live on a homestead where they could produce much of what they need for themselves.

Directing the youth to open their minds to alternative paths, such as Paul discusses, should be easier than it is. I suppose Paul could go full bore on tiktok, putting out 2 or 3 bids at virality per day - that's where most of the still impressionable are it seems. We could also all become walking billboards for a more sustainable counter-culture as this AI thing comes on and leaves people questioning their paths.

Whatever happens with AI, things don't look all too great 5, 10 and 15 years out for those on the "conventional 4-year degree leading to decent paying job" path. Hasn't been that way for a while now and all signs point to that path reaching something of a cul-de-sac.

Will there be jobs? Will there be professions? Will there be careers? .... I think that never goes away, but the form in which these things present themselves always change over time. Depending on how disastrous the AI automation and robotics cliff ends up being for society, we just might find ourselves "circling back" to an economy more calorie based. That or we could be living in some sort of steam-punk dystopian mish-mash where Gert's skills of stacking functions, closing energy loops and design of self-perpetuating systems will be valued much more highly than today.

Lina Joana wrote:
I can’t see this, or anything, preparing someone for 70% unemployment. For context, the height of the Great Depression saw 25% unemployment.
If it comes to that, there will either be a complete and utter collapse of society which will include the big businesses and AI (nobody to buy their products) or there will be a new economic model.

In the first scenario: How will the farmer who supposed to will his land to the skipper hang on to his land long enough to do so? How will he pay taxes when his bank crashes, taking his savings? How will he finish out farming when there is nobody who can afford to buy the crops he sells? Same questions apply even if you own land- how will you pay for electricity to run your well? How will you replace those 20-year lifespan solar panels? Or the well pump, or the excavator parts, or or or…
Upshot - lets hope this doesn’t happen. It is never a bad idea to own land, learn skills, and do a bit of “prepping”. But I personally don’t think that this will save you if we are talking full societal disintegration. Then again, I have never met a gert - only farmers trying hard to live by those principles, and finding it tremendously difficult. So maybe my perspective is incomplete.

A new economic model indeed. Or perhaps we could think of it in the sense of "the old economic model" where people were/are subsistence farmers, sell what little surplus they have and/or trade based on their practical skill sets (masonry, carpentry, blacksmithing, etc), and eek out a fairly fulfilling existence within their tight-nit communities, raising a family and teaching their children the trade.

The "prepper community" often speaks of this sort of collapse stemming from an economic implosion and point to things like gold, silver, .22 ammo and practical skill sets as "worthwhile investments for trade and barter in that dire future". Even things like alcohol and tobacco fit that bill - imagine something similar to the so-called prison economy at a community level where you can buy some apples from the guy down the road for a few packs of cigarettes.

In that sort of scenario, the government "adjusts" - a good thing to remember is that government is downstream of culture, and culture is a product of community.

Would it ever get to that point? I say "sure, why not?" - anything is possible. Add in a few natural disasters, collapse of social services like policing and welfare programs, and mobs of angry people who don't have practical skills like growing/raising food. College can't prepare you for that world and was never designed to. Instead, college prepares you only for the "rat race" world of earn money - spend money. If that fails you for any reason (such as AI taking over everything), the only conventional alternatives available to the college graduate are tax-payer funded social welfare programs or criminal activities.

If we're heading in that direction, or anything like it, I'd prefer to have millions of Gerts-in-training out there who would be much more equipped to succeed and perhaps flourish in a world with no money, no jobs and no holds barred. "Gert" is someone I don't foresee robbing and thieving as a way of life. "Gert" is a valuable, productive and highly appreciated member of a community. In fact, a community might gather around "Gert" in such a scenario in an effort to learn from her insight and understanding of how systems work, allowing the whole community to become "Gerts" themselves (Gert the carpenter living next door to Gert the blacksmith, both growing most of their own food and trading their skills / surplus for things they don't grow or can't do).

Will AI cause a 70% unemployment? I personally doubt the number, but it's certainly not making things "better". Some numbers on unemployment (such as those that include "underemployment" and those who've given up looking for work) show us to be much worse now than during the Great Depression already.

Another thing that comes to mind: Big corporations spend gobs of money trying to astro-turf culture for a reason. Collapsing society through economic implosion would be bad business. Adopting a new economic model is something they have spent a lot of time on already. We've heard some truly out-there ideas over the years of what models they'd like to bring in, but from this vantage point, they don't seem to have a solid idea of what new culture they'd like to roll out. Much of what they've "presented" to us as "options" thus far have been flatly rejected by most cultures around the world ("own nothing be happy" rental-only economies, universal basic income, smart cities, population reduction, etc).

From a purely selfish point of view, I'd rather have a generation of Gerts than a generation of college educated debt-slaves if ANYTHING dire occurs, be it AI-apocalypse or some other obvious and foreseeable future catastrophe

Craig Weiser wrote:Even if AI/robots didn’t exist, the current standard of going to college for a wage so you remain in debt for the rest of your life makes no sense.  Perhaps still viable for those who have a natural talent better than most.  But for the rest of us, the very concept of giving up our time for money to service a lifelong debt in the suburbs must be reevaluated.  So young people logically seek other options: can you live in poverty skillfully?  Can you have sufficient shelter and community with minimal dependency on the currency?  Has the definition of “work” always been sacrificing your time for money?  Now here comes AI and fine labor robotics to exasperate the whole thing!  

Trades, crafts and food production are what's in demand, and it's always been that way. Associates, bachelors, masters and doctorates, in all various studies, stems from what we often call the wealthy / elite "class" of Europe and only caught on as a "thing" in very recent times (as mentioned by a number of people already). Schooling itself is fairly new in culture, and the modern version of it even more new (and some would say quite artificial in its origin)

Up until the so-called industrial revolution, the majority of people (in the now United States) ran their own "business" off their "homesteads". The family business was just that and generally speaking, the father passed on the trade, such as blacksmithing, carpentry, etc, to his sons and likewise the mother passed down knowledge of midwifery, herbal medicine, etc to her daughters. Where a son (or daughter) wanted to learn a trade outside the family's existing skill set, they would apprentice with someone who could teach them in an on-the-job training relationship (often getting room and board as part of the deal, incurring some set number of years doing the grunt work). Not many even offer something remotely similar now, though some of the trades still give a wink and a nod to the tradition

Really, this idea of people working for someone else to earn a wage or salary arrived in a big way pretty recently. You can insert a discussion of conspiracies by notorious gangster-style bad guys in positions of political power and/or long-term astrological cycles here, but the point is that this way of life was mostly confined to big cities prior to industrialization. In fact, this is where much of the slavery in past centuries occurred, whether through full-on "owning" of people or the slightly softer version of indentured servitude. History is rife with examples of "how things were" we can all easily read.

I mean, I'm a way far out there conspiracy theorizing woo-woo character, so probably ran right of the end of the twig (to partially quote my favorite woo-woo thinker), but it makes perfect sense to me - what we're experiencing now in our current style of western culture is so bizarre, untested by time and new to us humans. For many thousands of years, or perhaps millions depending on who you talk to, humans lived a "hunter-gatherer" lifestyle which was neither about hunting nor about gathering in the way we're taught to think of such things today. Instead, they planted entire continents to "food forests" and practiced what we'd today call high intensity rotational grazing / mob-stock grazing. They certainly did here in North America, and there's signs of the same throughout Central and South America, large portions of Asia and certainly in very early Europe.

In essence, they were permaculturists. Pretty time tested methodology if you ask me

The problem we face is that the menial jobs that require very little skill, which became so prevalent during the industrialization process, are quickly being automated, leaving no place for those who are unwilling to learn a high-level skill. College degrees themselves are not skills, even when you're talking STEM related studies. Animal husbandry, herbal medicine and natural building are trades that require skill. Holistic thought and creative problem solving is required to practice a trade, and AI is not capable of those things. Robots may harvest your better than organic carrots some day, but you can bet there's a permie behind the succession planting, dense polyculture designs, nutrient cycling and water harvesting systems the robot is harvesting from.

Les Frijo wrote:

paul wheaton wrote:I hear from many people (and see it all over the internet):  gotta stop AI; gotta stop the bots ...    "DEY TERK ER JERBS!"    ...   it strikes me as twisted to desire jobs so much.

I had huge hopes that we would embrace the scenario I laid out, and then explore permaculture solutions.  

With a humble home and a huge garden ...

  - maybe it doesn't matter if you lose your job

  - maybe you have a MASSIVE advantage

  - maybe all this stuff becomes interesting rather than scary

  - is better than living in the city with a lot of money ...  which will drain away

  - maybe you can share your bounty with friends

Community seems the hardest thing to build and grow. Maybe the best thing that could happen is for jobs to go away and peeps will have no choice and more time for building community.

That would be interesting and exciting.

Those with menial job skills will and are being replaced - that's always been the case. The question is what they do with their forced free time, and the answer for the last 30 years has been "play with technology" (video games, social media, etc). I don't see that changing without a very significant (and likely involuntary) cultural change.

I believe my comment about "thinking" being the new in-demand workie job holds - there's a big push within the so-called "alternative" community toward healthy food and real, tactile experience of the world, and only thinking people will be able to produce this. From Montessori style schooling to "paleo" style diets, there's a definitive theme out there, and it's one that's driving an increasing demand for production of real food with real hands in a really contaminated world. Permaculture is the answer to this. The number of "social media influencer" and "podcaster" people that source most of their foodstuffs from the Amish community is a great example of the market demand, and that trend is only growing. Fake food is out and permie apples, land race sweet corn and free-range hams are in.

Basically, hard thinking people catch on quickly to the design of the rat race: the futility of becoming a debt slave where they make money only to pay for services they could be doing for themselves if only they didn't have to work so much for that money, resulting in a spiral of more money for more stuff.

Gert is the ultimate answer to many of the bigger questions most thinking people find themselves asking. The Mexican fisherman story is an older example of this, but has been taken to something of a conclusion by Paul in the story of Gert. But the issue is that many people aren't very good at the thinking thing, and so they don't see the value in it. That's my take anyway. Gert sounds like a crappy life to some because they don't get to have lots of expensive things and pay people to do the yucky or boring things for them. Gert can't afford a plummer to snake her toilets, so she designed around that problem and has a willow feeder...but now "she poops in a bucket - ewww!"

Considering a small-scale Gert can only help support maybe a dozen or two additional people with what she produces, we need millions of Gerts in the current economy. Think about how few we have even here on permies. I certainly haven't achieved Gertitude yet ... it doesn't happen overnight.

AI isn't going to take over the thinking jobs any time soon, but the thinking jobs need to be supported by thinking people's food.

Christopher Weeks gave a collapse of the current modern system into a dark age 50-50, but without enough thinking people to fill the rolls of producing real, healthy food, cleaning up abused land and guiding the industry of "making money" away from the edge of the very obvious cliff we stand on the edge of today, I give us a 90% chance of going completely medieval in the next quarter century. It's a choose your own adventure story as to how we get there, but I can't help but foresee a lot of people harvesting "lovely muck" Monty Python style before 2050

Not for nothing, I'll add a couple thoughts here. I rarely do these days, but steaks are just going on and I finished the paying work for the night.

The AI thing has been so big lately, being pushed all over the place and being talked about like it's such a huge fancy replacement for everything. My experience, limited at best, is that it's horrible at "thinking". It can perform simple tasks, and even sequences of simple tasks lined up in such a way as to appear complex, but it's still just a lot of simple stuff in sequence. I've spent a little time on the latest AI chat bots trying to get some basic things done to no avail. I'll detail the best example.

I needed to scrape some 10,000 official product images that I could "more easily" load into a client's square inventory. The AI told me it could do this with a spreadsheet of product names plus SKU and GTIN numbers. Then it said it couldn't. After several iterations of this kind of nonsense, I had it develop a perl script that would presumably do the task, scraping the images and renaming them according to specs for "easy" manual importing on my end. The script was a total failure over and over, failing to run, then failing to save the images, then failing to rename them, then failing to run again. This went on and on until I gave up and just wrote my own script, from scratch.

I spent probably 6 hours "playing" with the AI trying to get this task started, but ended up spending about 1 hour writing up a script in a language I have never used before to do the task.

So trying to use AI hurt more than helped with what to ME was a simple task but was actually way too complex for the AI itself to perform itself due to it's inability to "think". It just regurgitated search results from stackoverflow in various combinations.

My take at this point, after much thought and some experimentation, is that AI is not coming for "our jobs". Instead, what's happening is people are losing jobs for non-performance and misunderstandings of what AI is actually capable of doing in their place. People can think, but AI can only do what it's told (and it's not even very good at that).

We're heading right off the edge of a cliff right now, and things are going to become a complete mess if those in charge don't slow down a little and do a feasibility study first.

Robots, on the other hand, are definitely going to take over lots of manual tasks. They already have in many ways. Thinking will become a job very much in demand over the next several years, and I fear we don't have enough people with the skills to fill those jobs.

Just my two cents (or what...$200 adjusted for inflation?)

Pearl Sutton wrote:

Mike Barkley wrote:... when you think see a bunch of tiny ants roaming around on your kitchen counter. Only to realize that they are turnip seeds. Bag had a hole in it.

A variant on that I have done is when you sneak carefully to the counter, and beat a watermelon seed to death with a flyswatter.

Some bright white melon seeds fell behind the chicken scraps container on the counter - had a nice moment of panic when I thought we had a maggot infestation!

Those melon seeds are from the second year in starting the "central maine short wet season on cold heavy clay" landrace. Only gagged a little before I realized what they were  

The next "you know you're a permie when" connected to this little event is that I realized we're perennializing the beds so much I wont have enough open space / sun for these melons in a couple more years. It's definitely time to start planning more hugles (melons LOVE south slopes of hugles, btw!)

Matt Todd wrote:Looks like you're asking about lavender specifically. I grew about 3 dozen plants from seed last year with NO stratification! In my studying before, I found a lot of growers saying it was not necessary for lavender and indeed it was not for me.

I filled 6 pack cells with sterilized 1:1:1 Sand, perlite, coir soil mix. Sterilized because lavender seedlings are very mold sensitive. 70-80 degrees with light 16 hrs/day. They sprouted in about 7 days. Keep moist for about one month after sprouting (until roots are established). Pot up at 6 or more leaves.

Agreed that they don't (always) require it, but it sure does help with germination. Just a week to a month for lavender helps in a big way. About to start some sempervivum (hens and chicks) which are similar...they don't (always) require it, but it helps. A lot of seeds are like that, and when they don't necessarily require it, that's when planting in a flat and putting in a cool shady place before spring has fully sprung usually works best. Otherwise, best to plant either in the ground in mid-fall or start your flat late fall / early winter so you can control the stratification process.

... again, for those of us on low power, off grid systems (400w panels with a 400AH battery bank here at 45*N and generally cloudy winters!)  If you've got a grid connection and a fridge with the space, that probably works just as well if not better for most things

Riona Abhainn wrote:Some of this depends on your grow zone too, in some places its still winter.

Very true and that definitely has an impact. In the other half of the world, it's still summer!

Generally speaking, keeping the seeds between 32 and 45 degrees fahrenheit (zero to roughly 7 celsius) will do the trick. Many probably have basements or garages that maintain a low enough temperature leading well into the spring due to cold cement and the like, so that's also an option for some if the outdoor temps are going to be too warm in the short term. A 90 day stratification might be a bit much this time of the year, even up here in the tundra, but depending on sunshine and ambient temps, a 30 or 45 day stratification further down south might work out in a cold corner of the garage. Offgrid people that don't have magical modern conveniences would just have to pray for gloomy weather

Pearl Sutton wrote:...when you attempt to deny your inherent redneckiness by claiming this is an artistic photo, staged just for the effect that I wanted to photograph, yeah, that's it!!

Ok, maybe I'm a permie and I'm taking advantage of the warm weather to wash my flannel sheets....  :D  And drying them on the cattle panel arch arbor that grows beans and squash...
Function stacking! Solar energy!! Artwork! That's it!!

or maybe it's just laundry.

:D

That, my dear, is called stacking functions :D

Nothing more permie than what you do!