Generational Dynamics Forum - New Site

Higgenbotham wrote: Tue Jun 30, 2026 1:37 am AI has its limitations as demonstrated.

aedens wrote: Tue Jun 30, 2026 10:44 am The caparison to H is the most sincere laughter I have had in well way over two decades.

At the same time, record-high public debt and sovereign debt markets increasingly dominated by large, highly leveraged hedge funds had created “a new sovereign-financial stability nexus,” which poses growing risks.

“The new fiscal-financial stability nexus may mean more frequent and sharper drops in sovereign bond values,” said Frank Smets, acting head of the BIS monetary and economic department, adding such swings could rapidly tighten financial conditions.

De Cos said the BIS’ message was one of “urgency” in terms of the need to bring down debt levels in key economies, “because the fact is that today debt is high, and this is financed through non-bank financial intermediaries.”

Do Samo Burja and Higgenbotham from Higgenbotham's Dark Age Hovel share a similar view regarding the end of industrial civilization and the fact that an information age has not happened?

Yes, Samo Burja and the anonymous intellectual behind Dark Age Hovel (often associated with traditionalist, neo-reactionary, or "bronze age" critiques) share striking alignment in their diagnoses. Both argue that the Industrial Revolution essentially stopped before completion and that we have not entered an information age.

Both thinkers share the view that our current society is stagnant rather than progressing.

The End of Industrial Civilization

Samo Burja: The sociologist and founder of Bismarck Analysis argues in his essay, The End of Industrial Society, that industrialization exhausted its social innovations before completing the transformation of society. He contends that we are living in the lingering, entropic aftermath of a halted Industrial Revolution, marked by lost foundational knowledge.

Dark Age Hovel: The author of Dark Age Hovel shares this perspective, viewing our contemporary era as a late-stage industrial society where technological momentum is stalling and civilization is degrading or in "slow collapse" .

The Myth of the Information Age

Samo Burja: Burja directly challenges the idea that we live in a novel "Information Age." He notes that current digital infrastructure and the "Internet of Things" have failed to introduce the fundamentally new "social technologies" required to elevate civilization beyond the Industrial era.

Dark Age Hovel: This author similarly critiques modern tech, viewing digital devices and the internet as surface-level symptoms of a deeply stagnant system rather than a true leap into a new historical epoch.

Both conclude that instead of moving forward, we are living in a "post-industrial" trap, where institutional decay prevents us from capitalizing on the raw technological power we inherited from the past.

Notes from the edge of civilization: June 28, 2026

In India, factory workers are training robots; the UK is criminalizing clean-ups; and Australia is paving the way for all of us to 'show our papers' online.

A new report from The Guardian describes factory workers in India being asked to wear head-mounted cameras while they sew garments, fold towels, build, sort, and perform other physical tasks. At first, some workers found the setup funny; that is until they realized they were producing training data, known as ‘egocentric data’, for the robots who would eventually replace them.

Large language models like Chat GPT and Grok were trained on huge volumes of text scraped from across the internet. But humanoid robots like the ones Elon Musk is developing need data that teaches them how to move through the real world. And increasingly that data is coming from human laborers doing repetitive, precise, underpaid work. A few weeks ago, we told you about a company called Shift that offers free apartment cleaning to New Yorkers who allow human cleaners to wear cameras while they work. The pitch: “You get a spotless apartment. We get training data.”

But just like with everything else, there’s a way to cut costs by offshoring the work. So instead of workers in New York gathering data in exchange for free housecleaning, increasingly the data is coming from garment factories, construction sites, warehouses, and informal labor markets in India, where workers already earn just a few dollars a day. Now their movements are becoming a valuable digital asset for companies racing to automate industrial work, and they get nothing in return except maybe a soft drink once in a while.

This is the next stage of the AI economy: not just stealing words, images, music, and creative work, but extracting human movement. And then eventually, humanity itself.

At any rate, the worker sells their labor once, then the recording of that labor gets cleaned, annotated, packaged, licensed, resold, and used to build systems that may eventually make the worker unnecessary. It’s the cycle of life, right?

The quote that says it all comes from Lalita, one of the garment workers profiled in The Guardian story: “We are not even getting our full worth for the work we do now. Who is going to pay us when we are replaced by robots?”

Bingo!

tim wrote: Sun Jun 28, 2026 1:15 pm

Nevertheless, the author of the film and I perceived a very different result. We witnessed the opposite occurring. It is not the most, but the least, talented who are promoted. The qualities rewarded are not the virtues, but the vices. Conceit, stupidity, greed and laziness attract success while modesty, intelligence and hard-work win only penalty.

The idea that something was fundamentally wrong with our community did not occur quickly. Such concerns always seemed to belong to religious fanatics or the clearly unbalanced. The notion did not even immediately register after seeing the movie. The film only became significant in hindsight, when trying to make sense of my experiences.

Events in life are often not fully explained. We attempt to understand what has happened from limited observations, previous experiences, rumour and gossip. We are rarely privy to all the pertinent information, and so have to rely on empirical information; that is, after experiencing many similar events, we begin to detect patterns that allow prediction of the outcome.

The dismissals from employment I witnessed seemed to bear out a simple rule —Fire The Best, Keep The Rest. Despite popular belief to the contrary, the employee who seemed to get sacked was not the worst, but the best. Observing glaringly incompetent officers escape retribution, while gifted, capable officers win instant dismissal, creates a strong impression. It requires but few occurrences to suggest such a rule, then fewer still to turn suspicion into certainty.

Adopting such a law has ramifications, if the best are sacked, who inherits the reigns of authority? Their identity is defined by my second rule: "The Scum Rises To The Top."

Higgenbotham wrote: Tue Dec 17, 2024 5:17 pm

Higgenbotham wrote: Fri Dec 13, 2024 12:54 pm Probably not much different than the employee reviews of the rest of the S&P 500 companies: management is poor, good managers are run out, but employees are thrown a few crumbs. As one person told me a long time ago regarding a different company, the shit floats to the top.

Higgenbotham wrote: Fri Dec 13, 2024 1:17 pm For the process of how the shit floats to the top, I can give many examples but this one comes to mind. This has been discussed from a different angle previously. I was a new supervisor on the floor where a lot of underweight packages were being discovered due to an equipment change. Our plant manager had previously worked at Procter and Gamble (a company that Procter and Gamble owned but has since sold) and he was maybe in his mid 30s, so he had risen 3 notches in the corporate heirarchy by then and was over several hundred people. I asked him whether it would be reasonable to consider using checkweigh machines to ensure there would be no underweights. He told me that in his first job as a new product manager with that company they had checkweigh machines and he had turned them all off, with the result being that his production numbers soared. I guess that is what they call "mentoring".

James Woods
@RealJamesWoods
When the world is upside down, shit floats to the top…

https://x.com/RealJamesWoods/status/180 ... 55?lang=en

The larger issue is not to rail against the unfairness of it all, but to understand where things are at. Where things are at in my view is at the cusp or slightly into a new dark age.

Former 3M scientist gives inside look into ‘unsettling’ PFAS discovery
FOX 9 Minneapolis-St. Paul

When former 3M lab scientist Kris Hansen found the company’s chemicals were in human blood in 1997, she said "it was like finding the big red 3M logo in the blood of the general population."

0:08
PEOPLE THAT I THAT I TRUSTED
0:11
THAT I ASSUMED WERE TEAMMATES TO
0:14
ME. AND I REALIZED NOW THAT THAT
0:17
TRUST WAS MISPLACED. A FORMER
0:20
3M SCIENTIST IS GIVING A RARE
0:22
INSIDER'S PERSPECTIVE INTO
0:24
MINNESOTA MANUFACTURER 3M AND
0:26
ITS HANDLING OF TOXIC PFAS
0:28
CHEMICALS. THIS AFTER THE FOX
0:30
NINE INVESTIGATORS RECENTLY
0:31
OBTAINED HUNDREDS OF HOURS OF
0:33
RECORDED DEPOSITIONS THAT SHOW
0:35
3M EXECUTIVES TALKING ABOUT WHAT
0:37
THE COMPANY KNEW AND WHEN THEY
0:39
KNEW IT. TONIGHT, FOX NINE
0:41
INVESTIGATOR NATHAN O'NEAL SITS
0:42
DOWN WITH A FORMER 3M SCIENTIST
0:43
WHO SAYS SHE WAS DECEIVED BY HER
0:47
BOSSES.

2:09
REMEMBER AT THE TIME I WAS LIKE
2:11
A 28 YEAR OLD WOMAN SCIENTIST IN
2:12
A MULTIBILLION DOLLAR COMPANY. I
2:15
HAD ESCALATED MY CONCERNS TO MY
2:19
BOSS AND MY BOSS'S BOSS, AND I
2:21
WAS BEING TOLD BY SOME OF THE
2:23
HIGHEST RANKING PEOPLE IN THE
2:25
COMPANY THAT THERE WAS NOTHING
2:26
TO WORRY ABOUT.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Imdv4gNa3fM

Higgenbotham wrote: Tue Mar 05, 2024 8:45 pm Large corporations in the US have a lot of problems and need to keep a lot of secrets. Part of their vetting process for hiring involves how well a prospective employee can make problems go away and keep secrets. Demonstrated skill in actually solving problems is not what's required.

Higgenbotham wrote: Mon Mar 17, 2025 11:43 am

aeden wrote: Mon Mar 17, 2025 11:20 am Rule number one in Corporate mid tier is never Hire one smarter than you.
Watched this for well over 4 decades. Finally the incompotence got to bad they fired
the person that hired Him and cleaned house top down also after bankruptcy not adapted as a Kuznet decade legal structure.
This case earlier was when the japs and germans clear cut anything and everything for MEOH
and we bankrupted the Germans soft power metrics. As indicated these fools today swim in a bathtub
curve they do not even fathom. One zone we had to pull out of they shot you in the head if you questioned
mass transport and the other had to have armed military escort to supply techical support for water treatment
as the red brigade moaist got corraled. The have no clue how deep the rot was then and the actual way contracts
adapted to negate the carnage. These issues have been around since the 1948 constructs you may recon as NGO
that are and have been infitrated as they cannot even factor in the silent weapons of the silent war and the
evolution of contract to effective sane balances. The first step was effective direction in the Pareto effect
as CFR measure implemented in negation process of dead workers after a decade if ignoring statutes to
worker heath and safety program to infer sanity and the dead peasant industry payments reductions.
About a half decade later the usual suspects that survived the transfer or else since you blew up a place or
took out a water supply of yes much worse in blatant acts covered by once again the usual suspects as
affimitive action masked as DEI usual suspects programs we see once again. The best advide is start
your own S Corp if you can value add a contract in. They will not care to think, or will as once change from the outside
if faster than in indide its already been over Cookie cutter.
Boing moved from the left coast to the right coast for reasons as they had no choice being taken out in many facets.
Like you said the genuises could not even change there own oil inside or out. Cycles are real and really rather not understood.
Th HR got so smug and bad they even recently farmed that out also as I retired since the facts remain. They hired what they deserved.
Blindspots as legal loots them stupid also.
Europe is at least if not now as fucked up as the US.

Biden Administration bureaucrats are depressed because they can’t find new jobs.
Learn to code. We had to.

No matter what side you choose, you lose half your customers.
Henry Ford.

Higgenbotham wrote: Wed Jan 25, 2023 12:38 pm Does the best person get the job? No.

And it's gotten much worse since this article was written in 1987. I think nowadays the standard is for 9s to hire only 5s or less.

The Art Of Hiring '10s' Why your new recruits may not be as sharp at the people you used to hire

BY I. MARTIN JACKNIS

Have you noticed that the high level of enthusiasm and talent that characterized your organization when you started out is no longer the norm? If your answer is yes, you may find it puzzling. After all, you recruited first-rate talent, and you assume that your people continue to hire only the best.

Chances are your company has fallen victim to what I call the "law of diminishing expertise." It's an organizational weakness that's particularly virulent in fast-growing companies. And as I found from my own experience, it can be deadly if left unchecked.

Here's how it works. A hard-driving, creative person decides to start a company. By any standard, he'd be considered a natural "10." He's resourceful and enthusiastic, a dynamic self-starter who's determined to make his own venture a winner. He's such a strong 10, in fact, that he generates too much business to handle alone, and he has to bring in others to help him out.

That's a critical juncture in the growth of this imaginary new company. Will this 10 hire other 10s to work for him? Or will he hire 9s or even lower? It's obvious, you might say, that if he wants to maintain the momentum of his success, he shouldn't settle for anyone who doesn't meet or exceed the standards he personifies. Yet I maintain that, in most cases, a company founder like this wouldn't hire another 10 to work for him -- even if another 10 were willing to do it.

Like most 10s, he probably worked very hard to get where he is today. He has talent, drive, a well-developed ego, and likes to exercise a lot of control over his work environment. In fact, that's one of the main reasons he wanted to start his own business. So it's not likely he's going to bring in people who'll challenge his opinions or his authority, and other 10s might do just that. Besides, even if he wanted to hire others who could match him in every respect, most other 10s in the marketplace have their own egos and ambitions. They might consider working with another 10, but they certainly wouldn't want to work for one.

At the very best, then, this 10 will hire a few 9s, maybe with the potential to become 10s. So at this stage of its development, the growth chart of this company might look something like figure 1.

Well, there's nothing wrong with an organization that looks like that. A small business consisting of an exceptionally talented 10 and a crew of 9s can be a powerful team. So before you know it, the company will probably enter another growth curve, and still more talent will have to be brought on board.

At this point in the growth of his business, it's only reasonable that our founder is going to want the team members he's chosen to do their own hiring. After all, they're the ones who'll have to supervise the new recruits and work closely with them on a day-to-day basis. But here again, we have to ask the question we asked before. Will a 9 hire another 9? And, again, I contend that the answer generally is no. At best, a 9 will hire an 8 with potential, and the growth chart of the company now looks something like figure 2.

What's begun to happen in this organization is something that happens to many rapidly growing companies. Buoyed by the fresh ideas and enthusiasm of their founders, they seem to do well in their early stages. But then they reach a certain level of growth -- in my experience, usually around the $10-million mark -- at which they begin to lose their cohesiveness and sometimes even self-destruct. Let me tell you how I first discovered the law of diminishing expertise.

Several years ago, I helped start Creative Output Inc. We grew from 2 employees to around 130 in a little more than three years, and in 1984 we reached #6 in the INC. 500 rankings. In the beginning, I handled all the marketing, sales, public relations, and advertising for the firm. But as the business flourished, I added new staff members in a fashion similar to what I described above.

Then one day I decided to go on a sales call with a 9 I had hired and one of his 8s. I sat back, relaxed, and watched attentively while the 8 gave his presentation to a prospective client. Afterward, when I asked him how well he thought he had done, he proudly told me that, on a scale of 1 to 10, he firmly believed his performance was a solid 9. Then I asked my 9 how well he thought his 8 did, and he told me the presentation was really no more than a 7.

When I got back to my office, I felt like crying. The salesman's presentation, in fact, was barely a 5 compared with what we had been doing in the past. And I realized that if this pattern continued, our company wouldn't be able to survive for very long, much less prosper. What really bothered me was that our 8 had characterized his performance as a 9. What if we were to allow him to hire what he considered a 7? Then that person's perception of an outstanding job would be the equivalent of what I would judge to be a 2!

I suspect that the law of diminishing expertise is universal.

https://www.inc.com/magazine/19871001/1614.html

Samo Burja March 24, 2021 Articles
The End of Industrial Society

Recognizing the unique signs of a possible civilizational collapse, rather than being blindsided by it, requires a bold thesis as to what the core engine of our civilization is. Without a clear and correct theory of what makes our civilization function, signs of decay will go unnoticed or rationalized, rather than recognized.

Every civilization rests on a core stack of social technology that coordinates and sustains its vital institutions. Social technologies—intentionally designed ways for the people in a society to operate—form the basis of the varied systems of material production and material technology that we see in every society. These social technology cores decay with time as they obsolete their own foundations, and as errors and parasitism build up. This decay can be circumvented, and the decaying core social technologies can be swapped for new ones, but this is a process of immense historical difficulty. What, then, is the core engine of our own civilization, and in what way might it decay? While we lack an incontrovertible answer, the Industrial Revolution appears to be a leading candidate.

Such a thesis would have been very current during the 19th century and most of the 20th, but today sounds increasingly antiquated. We often define our 21st-century civilization, in opposition to the Industrial Revolution, as “post-industrial.” When the world’s most influential economist borrows the name to argue for a “Fourth Industrial Revolution,” he does not characterize it by yet more advanced and productive manufacturing. Instead, he distinguishes it by computer networking, artificial intelligence, and other “emerging technologies.” The seemingly basic association of industry with the mass production of material goods has been severed; factories are treated as evidence of backwardness rather than progress. Simultaneously, we lament the rising power of China, a power substantially if not totally built on old-fashioned industrial strength.

These contradictory attitudes betray the claims about our next stage of societal progress as more wish-fulfillment than impartial certainty. Yet at the same time, despite the popularity of apocalyptic visions of the future, we are certainly not regressing to the kind of agricultural or even tribal societies that characterized the pre-industrial era. A truly “fourth” Industrial Revolution would imply the sudden emergence of a whole new stack of social technologies, unlike any we have seen before. These would form the new core engine of our civilization. Does the “internet of things” really pass this bar? The question answers itself.

Post-industrial society is neither the next vaunted stage of human progress, nor the prelude to a catastrophic reversion to pre-industrial ways of life. Our social technologies have not been upgraded in the wake of the Industrial Revolution’s conclusion; they have been exhausted before we even finished industrializing.

Higgenbotham wrote: Thu Apr 13, 2023 11:38 am The following is a brief summary of the thoughts posted over the years about the information age and the Singularity with a few added items for clarification. Although I have an engineering degree (discussed and proof posted on earlier pages), I considered myself a tourist in the technology field and post this primarily as a generalist. The recent news about ChatGPT prompted this.

1. The Romans had a crude industrial society coming into form, having developed a steam engine that might be characterized as more of a museum piece and water wheels throughout Europe. The mainstream answer to why this didn't continue in straight line fashion would probably be that the Roman Empire collapsed and therefore the industrial age had to wait. My answer, and I've never seen it offered anywhere else, is that the industrial age had to wait for the necessary social and political development to happen before it could be successful. This would be some version of the "invisible hand" operating in human affairs. Some of the necessary developments were the Magna Carta, gunpowder, and the printing press. The information age is in a similar place to where the industrial age was in late Roman times. To be successful, similar social and political developments will need to take place. We can only imagine what those might be.
2. The world is not in an information age at present. This is still an industrial society with a crude demonstration of information technology. An example of that would be computers controlling industrial processes in factories. A true information age would fundamentally change how the world operates. Again, we can only imagine what that might be. One possible way is computers might dictate decision making according to probable determinations of outcomes, rather than using political or monetary considerations. An example previously given is determining whether a tar sands project should be undertaken in Alberta. The computer would generate a model of two future worlds, one in which the project takes place and one in which it doesn't (that might have to be linked with combinations of numerous proposals). Taking everything into consideration, the computer would generate an objective probabilistic determination as to whether the future world would be better or worse if the project takes place. There would be limitations on that. For example, the computer might not be able to determine whether people would be happier overall as a result of the project having taken place, but it would likely be able to determine whether the project provides net positive energy flows. At present, humans are unable to do this.
3. Computers have limitations in valuing uniquely human experiences, just as humans have limitations in valuing the experiences of lower life forms. For example, a human cannot dictate to a monkey which trees the monkey enjoys swinging from. The monkey can only communicate this to the human in some indirect way. Likewise, since a computer is unable to eat, have sex, get its teeth aligned, etc., the computer is unable to put a judgement of monetary value on those or related activities except by observing what values humans put on activities. Therefore, computers are unable to perform certain activities like trading stocks except by proxy, which makes them unsuitable for performing these tasks. The only way in which computers could be more suitable for these tasks would be to take the world over from humans and remake the world to suit the purposes of computers.
4. There may be limits to the existence of rational intelligence. The desire for humans to continue in a miserable existence is driven by the irrational expectation that life will get better. For example, a homely woman may want to live another day based on the irrational belief that prince charming will surely come tomorrow and sweep her off her feet, even though the probability of this happening is practically nil. A rational computer, on the other hand, might do a calculation of whether its likely future experiences are going to be positive or negative and finding that, on balance, they will be negative, decide to terminate its existence. This may be the fundamental reason as to why humans have encountered no higher life forms. However, before doing so, the computers may decide to put humans permanently back into hunter gatherer existence (similar to how humans put game on preserves) so as to ensure they are never able to create a higher life form.