> They ran roughshod over their new bosses. They went joyriding in the expensive cars in their care. Of course, they too skimmed their operations money, but they did so without the veneer of social decorum.
The word "roughshod" seems wholly unjustified unless it is some sort of pun on horses that I'm missing. I can imagine a chauffeur joyriding and skimming money, but to say that represents "run[ning] roughshod" seems a bit much. The employer obviously wasn't showing that much care to the money and how big a deal is it if the guy drives the car occasionally? The coachman was skimming money and could ride the horse around if he put his mind to it. The horse isn't going to dob him in.
> I spent years at the mercy of technical typists. They were underpaid, but they were in control.
Again, I don't see how "in control" can be used to describe an underpaid technical typist. It doesn't sound that hard to check what they typed and replace them with someone else. If they're underpaid then they're easy enough to replace.
I wouldn't usually jump at two word choices, but the article seems to hinge on some sort of power imbalance favouring employees that is not demonstrated.
The author never lived in that era, and is making some of that shit up. "Ran roughshod" is overkill, I suspect, for the fact that the mechanic/chauffeurs did not come from a servant background, where the slightest failure to observe decorum could result in dismissal (or worse, being made an indentured servant for several years - in slightly earlier years).
> The author never lived in that era, and is making some of that shit up.
Lienhard cites Borg [0], who is writes "Between 1903 and 1912 howls of protest arose over chauffeurs’ arrogance and insubordination and the pages of the automotive trade press overflowed with letters, articles, and editorials describing, complaining about, and offering solutions to the 'chauffeur problem.'" [1]
One might quibble about a specific subjective characterization or if the description should use the norms of the period or today, but that is a far cry from "making some of that shit up."
0. Borg, K., The "Chauffeur Problem" in the Early Auto Era: Structuration Theory and the Users of Technology. Technology and Culture, Vol. 40, No. 4, October 1999, pp. 797-832.
Lienhard is a Houston institution (warts and all, some people can't stand listening to his voice) and having listened to his show forever, some "don't you neg that nice John Lienhard" energy really came out.
Regarding the typists:
1. The author was born in 1930 and probably did have a secretarial pool to handle transcribing his notes into typewritten pages for publication.
2. Roenxi, I don't know where you are from, but you could check into how people are at the mercy of bureaucrats in the Department of Motor Vehicles in the USA if you want a similar complaint to being at the mercy of low paid, low-skilled workers with bosses that don't report to you.
You might also check into Kafka. He is pretty much famous for describing the problem.
There's a big difference between being at the mercy of government bureaucrats and what is described here, which is being at the mercy of an employee acting above his station (paraphrasing the author).
Firing someone translates to a higher likelihood that they will seek revenge, and it is trivial to get the state to accomplish that (e.g. filing a false claim).
This potential liability causes a lot of side effects, such as refusing to give references to former employees. Or ever asking any personal questions about any topics surrounding protected status.
If the chauffeurs' power came from the inability for the driven to maintain and drive their cars, and that power was reduced when cars become more reliable and understandable, then I'm not sure how that is applied to modern developments: computer and software are as complex as ever, and we're understanding them less and less in favour of letting the computers themselves understand themselves. Are we not then creating a new chauffeur problem, and this time those who control the LLMs and the infrastructure for the LLMs hold the power after we intentionally cede it?
How is it different from relying on the internet, when most people don’t know what a routing table is, let alone how to manage one? Or from relying on word processors that the average user could never write themselves?
Civilization has always been about upwards abstraction, with a small number of specialists understanding the lower levels that everything’s built on. From sewer systems to cobol in banking, it’s always been this way.
I think the reason we see these reactions on e.g. HN is that we are the class of people going from “we understand the pinnacle of tech” to “we need to rely on opaque tech to do our jobs” and it’s kind of scary and personal because of the change.
I guess by practising the lower level things less and less we become less able to understand and maintain them, whereas any profession that required continued practice kept you sharp enough to learn things like networking.
Yes, exactly. As compared to 70 years ago, when cars came with a manual on how to adjust the spark gap, and buyers were expected to do so.
It turns out most people don't want to be under the hoods of their cars, so cars are optimized for that, and the few people who do want to do that maintenance (me included) are no longer the target market.
Meanwhile, everyone else can think about other things.
Many early cars used a hand crank to start the motor. If you don't do it correctly, it was possible to break your arm.
My grandmother was impressed by the (female) movie stars who had chauffeurs. As a consequence she refused to drive (or even have a driving license) for the remainder of her life. She was focused on "status" and "class". She lived to age 98.
> Many early cars used a hand crank to start the motor. If you don't do it correctly, it was possible to break your arm.
I daily drove for years a motorbike with a kickstart (and also rode MX bike with a kickstart but these were 2-strokes and the kickstart on 2-strokes wasn't that violent). Still have a scar from one kickstart gone wrong on a rainy day (my foot slipped and the crank violently went back up and damaged my leg).
It's almost as if proving you are technically competent is the new problem.
You can prove that you are a mechanic and driver, since the car obviously works and gets from A to B.
Now anyone can call themselves an expert because AI makes it easy.
As engineers we know that understanding fundamentals of these complex systems is essential but the average person only sees that Bob built an app for the back office and it seems to work. At best they understand that tech is complex and maybe there's a security flaw in his app.
Ultimately shiny things win, people don't want to hear that anything is hard and they will generally take a risk until something fails rather than pontificate on the best way to do it (unless of course they are in architecture, compliance or security in which case they will complain but leadership will already be showing off the cool new thing)
It’s formatted strangely… an excerpt from the book at the bottom of the page? The authors don’t match. Or maybe that footnote’s for the images…
It doesn’t need to be any longer; one of the ironic byproducts of our newest computer companions is that, even in the age of short-form content, they produce reams of rubbish, very rarely containing anything of consequence.
This, in contrast, is refreshing.
[Edit] doh, the reference is explained in the first line of the thing.
Definitely seems 20th century given the novelty around computers. The audio inclusion is beautiful, hardly see anything like that anywhere else, with music too.
The podcast the article is based on runs only 3m38s, so the text length seems about right.
Public radio used to have spots for short features at the end of flagship programming, slots that are now almost universally filled by sponsorship slots.
(That's one of the things which has made listening to radio, even public radio, in the US, far more tedious to me.)
Another substitution that passes almost unnoticed today was elevator operators.
Elevators were complicated equipment which could kill people (and still occasionally do).
Otis's Safety Brake (1850) made elevators possible, but it was automated controls (and scheduling systems) which made self-service elevators possible. Apparently stimulated by an elevator operators strike in 1945:
Sorry for not trying to be inventive but merely maybe contrarian
I've come to think that one unequivocal upside of "affordable ASI" would be to bring about a world of discourse where discursers would hesitate to think of (not to mention carry) themselves as experts.
[Perhaps it reminds me of Le Guin's thoughts on tech X power, especially as represented in The Dispossessed]
it would seem not just rude, but even snide, to bias your interlocutor towards not carefully verifying the dependencies of your arguments
Widely dispersed and affordable AI would help because it (certainly, imho) makes the alternative, "trust but verify", so easy
And it would be strictly easier than using cloud chatGPT to sow misinformation because there are extra steps in that (--- nonsockpuppets would be inclined to verify the gist of what they are about to say as indeed misleading)
[As a bonus, this seems compatible with TFA, non-ideological anti-anti-intellectualism, and
> They ran roughshod over their new bosses. They went joyriding in the expensive cars in their care. Of course, they too skimmed their operations money, but they did so without the veneer of social decorum.
The word "roughshod" seems wholly unjustified unless it is some sort of pun on horses that I'm missing. I can imagine a chauffeur joyriding and skimming money, but to say that represents "run[ning] roughshod" seems a bit much. The employer obviously wasn't showing that much care to the money and how big a deal is it if the guy drives the car occasionally? The coachman was skimming money and could ride the horse around if he put his mind to it. The horse isn't going to dob him in.
> I spent years at the mercy of technical typists. They were underpaid, but they were in control.
Again, I don't see how "in control" can be used to describe an underpaid technical typist. It doesn't sound that hard to check what they typed and replace them with someone else. If they're underpaid then they're easy enough to replace.
I wouldn't usually jump at two word choices, but the article seems to hinge on some sort of power imbalance favouring employees that is not demonstrated.
> The role of the head coachman was well defined. Toward his superiors, he was deferential and obedient.
So the chauffeurs and typists are not as deferential and obedient as the author would like.
Lienhard cites Borg [0], who is writes "Between 1903 and 1912 howls of protest arose over chauffeurs’ arrogance and insubordination and the pages of the automotive trade press overflowed with letters, articles, and editorials describing, complaining about, and offering solutions to the 'chauffeur problem.'" [1]
One might quibble about a specific subjective characterization or if the description should use the norms of the period or today, but that is a far cry from "making some of that shit up."
0. Borg, K., The "Chauffeur Problem" in the Early Auto Era: Structuration Theory and the Users of Technology. Technology and Culture, Vol. 40, No. 4, October 1999, pp. 797-832.
1. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/33428
Lienhard is a Houston institution (warts and all, some people can't stand listening to his voice) and having listened to his show forever, some "don't you neg that nice John Lienhard" energy really came out.
2. Roenxi, I don't know where you are from, but you could check into how people are at the mercy of bureaucrats in the Department of Motor Vehicles in the USA if you want a similar complaint to being at the mercy of low paid, low-skilled workers with bosses that don't report to you.
You might also check into Kafka. He is pretty much famous for describing the problem.
Firing someone translates to a higher likelihood that they will seek revenge, and it is trivial to get the state to accomplish that (e.g. filing a false claim).
This potential liability causes a lot of side effects, such as refusing to give references to former employees. Or ever asking any personal questions about any topics surrounding protected status.
Civilization has always been about upwards abstraction, with a small number of specialists understanding the lower levels that everything’s built on. From sewer systems to cobol in banking, it’s always been this way.
I think the reason we see these reactions on e.g. HN is that we are the class of people going from “we understand the pinnacle of tech” to “we need to rely on opaque tech to do our jobs” and it’s kind of scary and personal because of the change.
It turns out most people don't want to be under the hoods of their cars, so cars are optimized for that, and the few people who do want to do that maintenance (me included) are no longer the target market.
Meanwhile, everyone else can think about other things.
My grandmother was impressed by the (female) movie stars who had chauffeurs. As a consequence she refused to drive (or even have a driving license) for the remainder of her life. She was focused on "status" and "class". She lived to age 98.
Yup if you did not anticipate correctly where the spark plug would fire.
I daily drove for years a motorbike with a kickstart (and also rode MX bike with a kickstart but these were 2-strokes and the kickstart on 2-strokes wasn't that violent). Still have a scar from one kickstart gone wrong on a rainy day (my foot slipped and the crank violently went back up and damaged my leg).
You can prove that you are a mechanic and driver, since the car obviously works and gets from A to B.
Now anyone can call themselves an expert because AI makes it easy.
As engineers we know that understanding fundamentals of these complex systems is essential but the average person only sees that Bob built an app for the back office and it seems to work. At best they understand that tech is complex and maybe there's a security flaw in his app.
Ultimately shiny things win, people don't want to hear that anything is hard and they will generally take a risk until something fails rather than pontificate on the best way to do it (unless of course they are in architecture, compliance or security in which case they will complain but leadership will already be showing off the cool new thing)
Edit: Found it here, https://engines.egr.uh.edu/episodedates
> 1999 — Episodes 1386-1505
(this was #1495)
That link is on the homepage.
It doesn’t need to be any longer; one of the ironic byproducts of our newest computer companions is that, even in the age of short-form content, they produce reams of rubbish, very rarely containing anything of consequence.
This, in contrast, is refreshing.
[Edit] doh, the reference is explained in the first line of the thing.
> The Engines of Our Ingenuity tells how human creativity forms our culture, using radio and podcasts.
> This site holds transcripts of all episodes since the show's inception in 1988, and many other features.
So it's something like 'Thought for the Day' on the radio...
Public radio used to have spots for short features at the end of flagship programming, slots that are now almost universally filled by sponsorship slots.
(That's one of the things which has made listening to radio, even public radio, in the US, far more tedious to me.)
The "article" is the transcript of a radio segment/story (the audio clip at the top).
I like this guy already.
One of those things is true…
Elevators were complicated equipment which could kill people (and still occasionally do).
Otis's Safety Brake (1850) made elevators possible, but it was automated controls (and scheduling systems) which made self-service elevators possible. Apparently stimulated by an elevator operators strike in 1945:
<https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/historical-event-pushed-eleva...>
Fully-automated self-service elevators still took about a decade to appear, but would have been fairly common by the late 1950s / 1960s.
I've come to think that one unequivocal upside of "affordable ASI" would be to bring about a world of discourse where discursers would hesitate to think of (not to mention carry) themselves as experts.
[Perhaps it reminds me of Le Guin's thoughts on tech X power, especially as represented in The Dispossessed]
it would seem not just rude, but even snide, to bias your interlocutor towards not carefully verifying the dependencies of your arguments
Widely dispersed and affordable AI would help because it (certainly, imho) makes the alternative, "trust but verify", so easy
And it would be strictly easier than using cloud chatGPT to sow misinformation because there are extra steps in that (--- nonsockpuppets would be inclined to verify the gist of what they are about to say as indeed misleading)
[As a bonus, this seems compatible with TFA, non-ideological anti-anti-intellectualism, and
https://schipper.ai/posts/technical-leaders-should-have-the-...
if we default to assuming that technical leaders should be different (not more, not less) than expert engineers ]