Dreary Day

Yesterday was so incredibly frustrating.  We're generally getting bad news on winning the work I really want to do, and I am left overseeing a bunch of projects that don't appeal to me.  My firm never had the best qualifications for this sort of work in the first place (and personal quals don't count for much), and now a bunch of firms are coming in selling snake oil about how AI can harness Big Data and do the same work at a fraction of the price.  It's all a lie of course, but it just muddies things up a lot (and frankly firms that won't embrace the lie get left behind).  I thought there might have been 5 decent years left in this field, but it looks like less than that, maybe just 2 or 3.  I'm a bit too old to retrain for anything else. My back-up plans aren't really any better, so I am in a deep funk today, not at all helped by the weather.

I'll just post this cartoon (by Ben Jennings in The Manchester Guardian) as it certainly fits my mood right now (and it even hints on how in the midst of this shitstorm, we are still distracting ourselves to death -- with apologies to Neil Postman* for stealing from his book Amusing Ourselves to Death). 

There's another cartoon I will get to soon, but it requires a much longer discussion.

 

 

* I'm amused by the AI-generated summary that popped up, as I often forget to turn off AI in Google searches, which said many critics turned on Postman for offering "Pessimism Without Practical Solutions."  I am definitely in Postman's camp and think that the search for silver linings or win-win-win campaigns, barf, at all costs has prevented people from realizing that we are in the boiling water, and it is now too late...  In general, people don't like being around pessimists (and especially those Cassandras who are nearly always right), and a lot of times I don't like sitting with my own dark and dreary thoughts.  But maybe even more fundamentally they don't want to be told that their current standard of living is unsustainable and that they have to change their ways and consume less (and it absolutely isn't enough to just blame Big Oil and other corporations -- it actually means delinking environmentally destructive economic growth (i.e. essentially all of it) from modern life).  Almost no one is on board with that, particularly where it means getting less (and probably paying more for it!), so it is easier to just ignore and shun the messengers.