Its nothing new that technology will replace workers, the automobile replaced entire legions of horse based workplaces and related industries. Automation has increased every decade. But never has a singular technology captivated the economic landscape quite so wholly as Artificial Intelligence. Complex language had long been the sole domain of humanity (extraterrestrial life not withstanding) but now the machines can interpret and communicate directly with us. A fundamental gap has been bridged. No longer bits and bytes or even convoluted syntax and algorithms, but plain speech can be fed to LLMs and actions, often quite complex, can be taken and the desired outcome is achieved. This was science fiction a few years ago, today we must scrutinize everything lest we be taken in by “AI slop”.
In my personal field of software development the writing is all but on the wall. Anyone with sense can extrapolate out the next 5-10 years, the field will either shrink significantly of people who have sound technical understanding and can architect using AI to implement effectively, with the rest learning the current flavour of the month tricks to brute force a close enough outcome. Or, a mass displacement with a lucky few holding onto employment but needing to deliver and support the workload of 10x, 25x, 50x, 1000x? In any case, anxiety and doomerism is rife amongst the field and other professions are not far behind.
So in light of all this, plus the ever encroaching techno-feudalism, I created handshakeunion.nexus a place for humans to reclaim the Internet back to its roots of practically* anonymous live chats where people can share information, vent and shit post their way through whatever comes.
The portal is privacy focused while trying to allow us to stop this individualistic bullshit that isolates us from any class consciousness, that culture forces us to bargain against corporations alone. After sign up via magic link a basic form, whose content is anonymised, is aggregated so that the people can have some baseline data, freely available, to ensure you know what you’re worth! Failing that, come chat just to say hey, and connect with actual people without the baggage of social media, no following or up votes or likes just a streaming chat that only lives for 6 hours
No fiefs. Nor algorithm. The guild is us.