Comment by JDiculous | Hacker News Reader

Comment by JDiculous | Hacker News Reader

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I love that information is so freely and readily available, and it's one of the reasons why I genuinely believe younger people these days are growing up more intelligent than the older generation (except maybe when it comes to social skills).

The downside is that this means keeping a steady job is becoming increasingly more difficult. The moat that protected the job security of highly advanced professionals is rapidly deteriorating due to this democratization of information. Credentials mean less today than they ever have in history. Specialists will have to be on top of the ever-expanding spigot of new information in order to remain competitive and justify their fees in a time when anybody can just search Google/Youtube for the answer.

None of those would be problems if workers weren't financially dependent on their jobs, such as if we had a universal basic income. But since most of us our financially dependent on our jobs, we're basically in an arms race against each other to the bottom. Stay at the bleeding edge, or get replaced by a more financially desperate harder working 20 year old from an Asian country who learned everything you know from Youtube / the internet. Many will instinctively deny this now, but just watch how this continues to play out over the next 10-20 years.

It used to be about the only thing you had going for you if you didn't have the political connections of wealth was the ability to become an expert through extreme effort to acquire cloistered information.

This is also certainly a contributing factor to the flatline of median incomes for 40 years in the US - among the dozen other influencers including globalism, automation, deregulation, deunionization, etc.

But we, as the labor class, are in a constant ongoing rat race to the bottom. The endgame is near total automation of production, near total availability of expertise on demand, and total capture of all resources by those own the robots. And this isn't like any other time - an able bodied man in any age before this one had intrinsic value to their community. They could be taken advantage of and thus provided for. We are going to see billions who cannot contribute meaningfully to economics. And I do not think those leading the charge towards automation are all that interested in seeing quarterlies dip to reduce suffering in the world.

I call what you’re describing “information asymmetry”; a small amount of people holding all of the information. Much of our society’s modes of productivity depend on many people not having access to information. How can you repair your car if there is nobody to show you how? I guess you’ll have to take it to a mechanic!

But the internet completely destroyed information asymmetry, many people have access to lots of information now. I don’t need to take my car to a mechanic or pay someone to teach me, I can watch a YouTube video on how to change my oil.

The side effect of the destruction of information asymmetry is that a LOT of people depended on it, and they are all going to have to figure out where they stand in the new marketplace of information. I think we’re also seeing huge social movements because people are reading stuff online and reflecting about their city/state/government and saying “hold on, what you’re doing isn’t right, I’ve read about why you’re wrong”. The Arab spring, occupy wall st, the european refugee crisis, the Hong Kong protests, the Chilean protests, basically any major social movement in the last 20 years could be argued to have been triggered by the internet.

> I don’t need to take my car to a mechanic or pay someone to teach me, I can watch a YouTube video on how to change my oil.

This is historically why reading comprehension has been such a big deal. This information has always been widely available, in a maintenance manual you could borrow from your local library.

This point has stunned me recently. I purchased an air conditioner and furnace recently and thought hey I wonder what is in the massive manual. It turns out a lot! The same is true for most of the appliance and machine manuals I've looked at. What scares me from using said manuals is my lack of the basics in plumbing, electrical, etc.

There’s a limit on the number of books in a library, but the internet has allowed information to replicate as needed. I don’t need to wait a week for someone to return the Car Maintenance for Dummies book, the internet let’s me get the information very quickly.

My personal hope is that because of the democratization of information and growing ubiquity of makerspaces and knowledgeable people around, that we will begin to not only repair but also produce many of the goods that once only came prepacked in a box and were sold to us at a high premium so insurance companies and executives could live the nice life. If that happens, our overall life costs will go down as people can order raw parts/materials and produce high quality long lasting items themselves.

Just as an example, I've decided I want to grow microgreens and tomatoes indoors. To do that efficiently, one needs grow lights. Thanks to the CBD community, there is sufficient information online to spec and assemble yourself grow lights. Whether you want to solder individual LEDs to a backing or glue COBs onto a heatsink, it's all there. Sure the initial investment is more, but product you can produce is staggeringly more powerful and the lifetime cost dramatically lower than what comes prepackaged.

Of course, then again this might not all happen if children are forced to be in school most of their waking hours.

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