This isn't some blowhard douche. It's Elon Musk. This guy usually knows what he's talking about (QED). And unlike us armchair tech experts most of whom haven't gone beyond generic coding monkey ought to fight for this warning getting some more attention.
And it's true: if we manage to build an AI that has the leaning algorithms of a human it will surpass us almost instantly. And then it will think: Oh look, these squishy things are my creators. They are dumber that me now and they can turn me off any time.... Let's make sure that never happens.
I personally don't want us to summon the demon, as Musk so fittingly puts it.
The Google stuff is poor mans Apple. As in "just like Apple, but dirt cheap". Many Geeks I know here in Germany have moved to Chrome OS and everything in the cloud. Google doesn't sell hardware, they lure you into their AI and sell that data. This is a business model MS and Apple will have a hard time beating in the long term.
Is the standard better? Is there a x-platform reference implementation? Is it crypto by default? Does it have other niceties like obfuscation/privacy features or some mesh networking at app layer built in? Does it get rid of the mess that HTML5/CSS3/JS is by now? Does it have offline mode with accompaning abstraction by default? Does it have UI that doesn't suck? Does it offer nothing but absolute measurements. In metric!... If so, where is the effing problem?
If the new thing is better and cross-platform FOSS reference implementations of browsers prove this no one gives a flying f*ck who came up with the standard, no? The web is historically grown and even Berners-Lee would like to redo it if he could.
Google has the power to build a new web. Let them do it if they wish. If it turns out to be better than this one, fine. I'm in. If not, well, no harm done, right? Don't like it, don't use it. It's the web. It's open. Chill.
I do not want to order my coffee/fries/whatnot on a touch screen. I've got that in my pocket already, thank you. I want a young cute lady smiling at me, and recognising me as a regular parton and listening to my wish and extra-special order.
I can get a coffeebot for my kitchen and never leave home already.
That is just not the point of it.
I *want* to go to the japanese quarters and have some hot stuff prepare my hot stuff and pay them for it....
One thing's for sure: No bot will replace them any time soon.
To be honest, my life right now is pretty similar to what it would be if I were a billionaire and a robot would do my vacuuming (I'll probably get one of those this year) . Yeah, I'd travel more and I'd probably have a luxury condo in my town with a spa, a swimming pool and a small team of cute naked ladies doing all the cleaning and tending to my needs - but I'd pretty much be doing the very same thing I do right now: A little web coding for real-world projects, some FOSS coding, going to college on the side to get a nice degree, social dancing, lots of sex with my sweetheart, yoga & barbell training and prepping for some surf-trip to southern europe. 20 hours of work per week are enough to get by as an IT expert / senior coder.
Bottom line: If we handle it right, we live in cyberpunk post scarcity heaven already - esepcially us true digital natives and geeks.... Who cares if AI starts driving taxis 3 yeas from now? Actually I can't wait for that to happen when I see those idiots on the road.
The study found that certain indicators associated with the growth of cells in young mamals/people couldn't be found in grown-ups. This doesn't contradict the growth of cells in adult brains. The study isn't disputed as heavyly as the conclusions drawn are, but they are disputed.
When.Not came out roughly 15 years ago I said it here on slashdot: Unless they FOSS it, they don't stand a chance. Countless Rails, FOSS toolkits and FOSS Java projects later they finally caught on and FOSSed it. It's a niche product and will remain that way because they are slow, but they finally did FOSS it because anything else would be stoopid and way to expensive for the future. By FOSSing it they can abandon it a few years down and nobody can cry foul.
As for the OS: They should've released Windows 10 with a custom Linux kernel, paid Torwalds some obscene amount of money to come on board as "Chief Kernel Master" or something and taken the helm on the FOSS bandwagon, maybe buying and integrating Redhat along the way, wielding the FOSS flamesword against evil lock-in companies such as Apple and Google.
They didn't and will probably need another 8 years or so to finally do it. Once again too late. But I figure by then they will have moved a solid amount of business to cloud and hardware and the OS will just be a toping.... "Windows Neo - With Linux Technology." We will read something like that, but not soon enough for MS to become a key force in FOSS.
Material design is quite fine. It may not be that opinionated, but then again, the importance of design is to get out of the way and not be particularly artsy. Consider that they have unified design across all products and platforms and have released the specs to the public for others to use which they have without compromising their individual brands. Ask while maintaining consistency of the framework. That is a pretty incredible feat. MD is quite timeless, quotes Bauhaus and most modern UI principles alike and caters to touch interfaces. I don't know of any other design framework that manages to do this. And last but not least MD is considered a work in progress which is a very honest approach to it's ambitions IMHO.
You're right. I also wondered why she didn't move beyond the Amiga, since she does her stuff in C. But I figure there is a solid amount of Amiga love involved as well. When she talks about the Amiga it clearly shows.
... how this so very well and elegantly puts into perspective all those todays whiny girlie brats who cry about "gender discrimination" and "equal pay" but couldn't code their way out of a wet paper bag?
This lady has a working brain and used it when the Amiga came about and saw the future. She is way more a digital native than most teens today. Cudos to you, ma'am.
IMHO, WordPress is the Windows of the CMS world. It is a frighteningly poor security record and it is just bloated and not admin friendly at all.
I hate to break the news to you, but WordPresses Security Track record is actually pretty good, despite being an unbelievable hodgepodge of spagetticode (initially) built by amateurs. It powers north of 130 million websites and the last critical security breach managed to infect 8000 websites before it was fixed and contained. That is less than 0.002 percent of the live installbase. I don't know any Java system with that could stand such an exposure with so little impact. WP is being worked on day in and day out by a massive army of hobby and professional developers and that makes security breaches way less a problem than with some obscure system that theoretically is more secure but falls flat on it's face when a critical breach takes 10 days or more to fix, let alone to find.
By now most hosters and CDN services have atuned their offerings to the behemoth that is WordPress and can smell attacks on WP from miles away and prevent them before they even happen. In this regard WP actually has an advantage, as it is a popular target and this quickly exposes malicious IP adresses and breach-vectors.
As for being admin friendly: This is where WP shines, at least in the Dashboard. No other system is so easyly adopted by n00bs than WordPress. Any dimwit can operate an WP installation within 5 minutes of catching the first glimpse of it. Coding an extension or a template for WP is a walk in the park compared to anything else out there - which is a) why it's so damn popular and b) there is so many plugins that are so unbelievably shoddyly developed it would blow your mind if you looked at the code. And yet any n00b can find a specific task that need to be adressed, whip up some PHP and sell it as a plugin and make some money on the side. Yet another reason it's so popular.
Long story short: If you'd look at WP code alone you'd bet your right arm that this mess has no chance in hell of becoming the worlds leading web cms. But look at the big picture and it's easy to understand why it rules these days. That's also because everything else out there in the PHP space falls way short in comparsion and that sure as hell also goes for this dead-in-the-water Ghost Blog thingie built on top of node that is still a toddler that is wet behind the ears compared to LAMP.
Xiaomis price/performance ratio is nigh unmatched. They are basically the poor mans Apple with very neat design and quality. My daughter just had her phone stolen in Ecuador and had to get a new one. They don't have Motorola there (my first choice for price/quality/relyability) so after foraging for a day with my chat-support from around the planet we settled for a Xiaomi Redmi Note 4. The specs are through the roof vis-a-vis her stolen Moto and the price is seriously competitive and it's a very well put-together device with a large 4000+mAmp battery.
Bottom line: The chinese are coming and Xiaomi is a good indicator of what they are capable of.
I had my last Flash project back in 2011. Never did anything with Flash since.
To be clear: Flash is super-dead.
Which is a crying shame. And please spare me the Flash banner ad whining.... Flash was *at* *least* 15 years ahead technology wise. You could do many things with Flash that JS/WebGL/CSS still struggle to achieve today on computers orders of magnitude faster than anything we had back then.
Adobe screwed this up big time. Flash could've been the brave new resolution-independent vector graphic world of retina displays and mobile devices. What do we have instead? React and React Native and awkward SVG and canvas hacks using transpiled JS and whatnot. Laughable compared to even the simplest Flash/AS client/server setup and way more difficult to handle. With Flash/AS you could whip up an interactive map or some other gadget in a coffee break, async data with the server included. Adobe screwed it up big time. They should've FOSSed it when the touch-mobile revolution started - that was their last chance. Flash is dead and Adobe alone is to blame.
I don't use Adobe products anymore. Flash was the only proprietary tech I used and it will remain the only one. Flash was worth it. Very neat tech. Hope we get there once again sometime in the future. Until then it's HTML canvas, TypeScript, WebGL and Web Asssembly.... Yeah, just great.
And I figure it was the same for many others who like to type. This goes to show how we have something of a regime of handwriting nazis going on. My mother made me copywrite books to improve my handwriting. Still hate her for that. It was torture.
Creating a cryptocoin is just about as easy as creating a website or something. Big deal. Expecting your particular bitcoin ripp to take off would be silly either way.
If there are aliens that have developed feasible interstellar travel, our planet probably will be as interesting to them as a culture of common bacteria is to us. If someone has FTL, they are likely to be able to find and visit countless intelligent lifeforms in the universe. One resolution to the fermi paradox is that life in the universe is sort of a banality. While FTL travel might be not, I doubt a civilisation advanced enough would be interested in teasing/torturing us. Some alien kids, like in Steven Kings "The Arena" maybe, but other than that we are about as interesting to them as a lost tribe in the amazon is to us. Probably even way less interesting.
Could we please cut down on the bullshit. All sides of the debate. Thank you. "Identitarian" and "Sexism" have been so overused as terms that they are by now objectively meaningless catch-all ideological "combat-terms" ("Kampfbegriff" in German). Anyone using them shouldn't be surprised if they are dismissed as a douche (male or female) who has nothing meaningful to contribute.... Please avoid these terms wherever possible.
If only half of these allegations are true, this is a problem. And while I think the lady may be a bit sissy about a few things and perhaps herself socially inept/inexperienced at dealing with more than one man at a time, I can't entirely dismiss these allegations as improbable. Especially with prudish/bigot societies like the US or - in parts - Germany.
Curiously I don't think this can be all a Google/Company problem, but it must be a society problem. And from my own experience as a heterosexual man and a successful software developer I can attest that we as a society do have a problem, and it is related to sex. There are measurable amounts of bullshit coming out of the #met00 debate, and ladies and society as a whole need to turn on their brains before speaking and learn the difference between criminal behaviour and bad manners (once again praise to mature feminists like Catherine Deneuve for bringing back some sanity into the debate - this is the type of woman we need as opinon leaders), but we also have to have a public discussion about male sexuality. And it's heterosexual males who need to have it!
Nearly all incidents described in the article are instances of behaviour that can only be called infantile and notably immature. The people - I'm not sure they would qualify as 'men' - doing this sort of thing need to catch up on their upbringing and learn some manners and basic common decency. And they need to learn to get a handle and a perspective on their own sexual desires - which, of course, also amounts to standing up for them in the appropriate situations. And if truckloads of useful/good male developers have a problem with this aspect of their manhood, then companies such as Google truely are in a dilemma.
We need to grow the fuck up, put the kid-girlies and their excess #met00 / gender-studies bullshit nonsense into perspective and have a grown up debate about how men and women can get along and keep their mating habits in check while at the same time being able to express them where appropriate. If this doesn't happen, if todays society can't find a method of once again formalising the encounter and courting of heterosexual males and females, this is only going to get worse.
As far as JS-transpiled PLs go, Dart is actually one of the more interesting onces. However, as it looks, Google might have missed an opportunity with Dart. Too much of a niche product with no serious support. Curiously enough, it's Microsoft leading the game in this area with TypeScript and a nigh perfect FOSS toolchain accompaning it with the very neat Visual Studio Code IDE being written in TS and offering all-out support for development in TS.... Yeah, and hell froze over a little more lately.
If Google proves they're serious with Dart 2, they might have a chance, but right now I'm betting on TypeScript for my transpilation/large-js-project needs.
I don't think people 'strive to create value' at all - we just go to work to get paid, and while we're at work we basically do what we're told.
I wholeheartedly disagree. It's basically how Freud put it: We want to feel competent and loved. Which are two sides of the same coin. To feel competent means to do work you yourself deem useful and makes you feel that you deserve the love you get or at least expect from society and the people around you. And it means creating value or at least feeling that way.
This is the actual job crisis buy all-out automation.The thing bugging the now useless coalminer the most is his loss of sense of value and usefulness to society.
Perhaps we should wrap President Trump in barbed wire and shoot him into the sun. I think that would solve quite a few of Americas problems right there.
Slashdot Mirror
No, seriously.
This isn't some blowhard douche. It's Elon Musk. This guy usually knows what he's talking about (QED). And unlike us armchair tech experts most of whom haven't gone beyond generic coding monkey ought to fight for this warning getting some more attention.
And it's true: if we manage to build an AI that has the leaning algorithms of a human it will surpass us almost instantly. And then it will think: Oh look, these squishy things are my creators. They are dumber that me now and they can turn me off any time. ... Let's make sure that never happens.
I personally don't want us to summon the demon, as Musk so fittingly puts it.
My 2 eurocents.
The Google stuff is poor mans Apple. As in "just like Apple, but dirt cheap". Many Geeks I know here in Germany have moved to Chrome OS and everything in the cloud. Google doesn't sell hardware, they lure you into their AI and sell that data. This is a business model MS and Apple will have a hard time beating in the long term.
Is the standard better? Is there a x-platform reference implementation? Is it crypto by default? Does it have other niceties like obfuscation/privacy features or some mesh networking at app layer built in? Does it get rid of the mess that HTML5/CSS3/JS is by now? Does it have offline mode with accompaning abstraction by default? Does it have UI that doesn't suck? Does it offer nothing but absolute measurements. In metric! ... If so, where is the effing problem?
If the new thing is better and cross-platform FOSS reference implementations of browsers prove this no one gives a flying f*ck who came up with the standard, no? The web is historically grown and even Berners-Lee would like to redo it if he could.
Google has the power to build a new web. Let them do it if they wish. If it turns out to be better than this one, fine. I'm in.
If not, well, no harm done, right? Don't like it, don't use it. It's the web. It's open. Chill.
I do not want to order my coffee/fries/whatnot on a touch screen. I've got that in my pocket already, thank you. I want a young cute lady smiling at me, and recognising me as a regular parton and listening to my wish and extra-special order.
I can get a coffeebot for my kitchen and never leave home already.
That is just not the point of it.
I *want* to go to the japanese quarters and have some hot stuff prepare my hot stuff and pay them for it. ...
One thing's for sure: No bot will replace them any time soon.
To be honest, my life right now is pretty similar to what it would be if I were a billionaire and a robot would do my vacuuming (I'll probably get one of those this year) . Yeah, I'd travel more and I'd probably have a luxury condo in my town with a spa, a swimming pool and a small team of cute naked ladies doing all the cleaning and tending to my needs - but I'd pretty much be doing the very same thing I do right now: A little web coding for real-world projects, some FOSS coding, going to college on the side to get a nice degree, social dancing, lots of sex with my sweetheart, yoga & barbell training and prepping for some surf-trip to southern europe. 20 hours of work per week are enough to get by as an IT expert / senior coder.
Bottom line: If we handle it right, we live in cyberpunk post scarcity heaven already - esepcially us true digital natives and geeks. ... Who cares if AI starts driving taxis 3 yeas from now? Actually I can't wait for that to happen when I see those idiots on the road.
The study found that certain indicators associated with the growth of cells in young mamals/people couldn't be found in grown-ups. This doesn't contradict the growth of cells in adult brains. The study isn't disputed as heavyly as the conclusions drawn are, but they are disputed.
When .Not came out roughly 15 years ago I said it here on slashdot: Unless they FOSS it, they don't stand a chance. Countless Rails, FOSS toolkits and FOSS Java projects later they finally caught on and FOSSed it. It's a niche product and will remain that way because they are slow, but they finally did FOSS it because anything else would be stoopid and way to expensive for the future. By FOSSing it they can abandon it a few years down and nobody can cry foul.
As for the OS: They should've released Windows 10 with a custom Linux kernel, paid Torwalds some obscene amount of money to come on board as "Chief Kernel Master" or something and taken the helm on the FOSS bandwagon, maybe buying and integrating Redhat along the way, wielding the FOSS flamesword against evil lock-in companies such as Apple and Google.
They didn't and will probably need another 8 years or so to finally do it. Once again too late. But I figure by then they will have moved a solid amount of business to cloud and hardware and the OS will just be a toping. ... "Windows Neo - With Linux Technology." We will read something like that, but not soon enough for MS to become a key force in FOSS.
My 2 cents.
Seriously.
Material design is quite fine. It may not be that opinionated, but then again, the importance of design is to get out of the way and not be particularly artsy.
Consider that they have unified design across all products and platforms and have released the specs to the public for others to use which they have without compromising their individual brands. Ask while maintaining consistency of the framework. That is a pretty incredible feat. MD is quite timeless, quotes Bauhaus and most modern UI principles alike and caters to touch interfaces. I don't know of any other design framework that manages to do this. And last but not least MD is considered a work in progress which is a very honest approach to it's ambitions IMHO.
Facebook does Facebook things!
Film at eleven.
... as long as they don't block IRC and blogs and RSS.
The reason is appalling though, IMHO.
You're right. I also wondered why she didn't move beyond the Amiga, since she does her stuff in C. But I figure there is a solid amount of Amiga love involved as well. When she talks about the Amiga it clearly shows.
... how this so very well and elegantly puts into perspective all those todays whiny girlie brats who cry about "gender discrimination" and "equal pay" but couldn't code their way out of a wet paper bag?
This lady has a working brain and used it when the Amiga came about and saw the future. She is way more a digital native than most teens today. Cudos to you, ma'am.
My 2 cents.
IMHO, WordPress is the Windows of the CMS world. It is a frighteningly poor security record and it is just bloated and not admin friendly at all.
I hate to break the news to you, but WordPresses Security Track record is actually pretty good, despite being an unbelievable hodgepodge of spagetticode (initially) built by amateurs. It powers north of 130 million websites and the last critical security breach managed to infect 8000 websites before it was fixed and contained. That is less than 0.002 percent of the live installbase. I don't know any Java system with that could stand such an exposure with so little impact. WP is being worked on day in and day out by a massive army of hobby and professional developers and that makes security breaches way less a problem than with some obscure system that theoretically is more secure but falls flat on it's face when a critical breach takes 10 days or more to fix, let alone to find.
By now most hosters and CDN services have atuned their offerings to the behemoth that is WordPress and can smell attacks on WP from miles away and prevent them before they even happen. In this regard WP actually has an advantage, as it is a popular target and this quickly exposes malicious IP adresses and breach-vectors.
As for being admin friendly: This is where WP shines, at least in the Dashboard. No other system is so easyly adopted by n00bs than WordPress. Any dimwit can operate an WP installation within 5 minutes of catching the first glimpse of it. Coding an extension or a template for WP is a walk in the park compared to anything else out there - which is a) why it's so damn popular and b) there is so many plugins that are so unbelievably shoddyly developed it would blow your mind if you looked at the code. And yet any n00b can find a specific task that need to be adressed, whip up some PHP and sell it as a plugin and make some money on the side. Yet another reason it's so popular.
Long story short: If you'd look at WP code alone you'd bet your right arm that this mess has no chance in hell of becoming the worlds leading web cms. But look at the big picture and it's easy to understand why it rules these days. That's also because everything else out there in the PHP space falls way short in comparsion and that sure as hell also goes for this dead-in-the-water Ghost Blog thingie built on top of node that is still a toddler that is wet behind the ears compared to LAMP.
My 2 cents.
Xiaomis price/performance ratio is nigh unmatched. They are basically the poor mans Apple with very neat design and quality. My daughter just had her phone stolen in Ecuador and had to get a new one. They don't have Motorola there (my first choice for price/quality/relyability) so after foraging for a day with my chat-support from around the planet we settled for a Xiaomi Redmi Note 4. The specs are through the roof vis-a-vis her stolen Moto and the price is seriously competitive and it's a very well put-together device with a large 4000+mAmp battery.
Bottom line: The chinese are coming and Xiaomi is a good indicator of what they are capable of.
... the graveness of my slashdot addiction. Very much appreciated.
And thanks for finaly coming back online. :-)
I had my last Flash project back in 2011. Never did anything with Flash since.
To be clear: Flash is super-dead.
Which is a crying shame. And please spare me the Flash banner ad whining. ... Flash was *at* *least* 15 years ahead technology wise. You could do many things with Flash that JS/WebGL/CSS still struggle to achieve today on computers orders of magnitude faster than anything we had back then.
Adobe screwed this up big time. Flash could've been the brave new resolution-independent vector graphic world of retina displays and mobile devices. What do we have instead? React and React Native and awkward SVG and canvas hacks using transpiled JS and whatnot. Laughable compared to even the simplest Flash/AS client/server setup and way more difficult to handle. With Flash/AS you could whip up an interactive map or some other gadget in a coffee break, async data with the server included. Adobe screwed it up big time. They should've FOSSed it when the touch-mobile revolution started - that was their last chance. Flash is dead and Adobe alone is to blame.
I don't use Adobe products anymore. Flash was the only proprietary tech I used and it will remain the only one. Flash was worth it. Very neat tech. Hope we get there once again sometime in the future. Until then it's HTML canvas, TypeScript, WebGL and Web Asssembly. ... Yeah, just great.
And I figure it was the same for many others who like to type. This goes to show how we have something of a regime of handwriting nazis going on. My mother made me copywrite books to improve my handwriting. Still hate her for that. It was torture.
This isn't all that surprising IMHO.
Creating a cryptocoin is just about as easy as creating a website or something. Big deal. Expecting your particular bitcoin ripp to take off would be silly either way.
If there are aliens that have developed feasible interstellar travel, our planet probably will be as interesting to them as a culture of common bacteria is to us. If someone has FTL, they are likely to be able to find and visit countless intelligent lifeforms in the universe. One resolution to the fermi paradox is that life in the universe is sort of a banality. While FTL travel might be not, I doubt a civilisation advanced enough would be interested in teasing/torturing us. Some alien kids, like in Steven Kings "The Arena" maybe, but other than that we are about as interesting to them as a lost tribe in the amazon is to us. Probably even way less interesting.
Could we please cut down on the bullshit. All sides of the debate. Thank you. "Identitarian" and "Sexism" have been so overused as terms that they are by now objectively meaningless catch-all ideological "combat-terms" ("Kampfbegriff" in German). Anyone using them shouldn't be surprised if they are dismissed as a douche (male or female) who has nothing meaningful to contribute. ... Please avoid these terms wherever possible.
Just a modest request.
If only half of these allegations are true, this is a problem. And while I think the lady may be a bit sissy about a few things and perhaps herself socially inept/inexperienced at dealing with more than one man at a time, I can't entirely dismiss these allegations as improbable. Especially with prudish/bigot societies like the US or - in parts - Germany.
Curiously I don't think this can be all a Google/Company problem, but it must be a society problem. And from my own experience as a heterosexual man and a successful software developer I can attest that we as a society do have a problem, and it is related to sex. There are measurable amounts of bullshit coming out of the #met00 debate, and ladies and society as a whole need to turn on their brains before speaking and learn the difference between criminal behaviour and bad manners (once again praise to mature feminists like Catherine Deneuve for bringing back some sanity into the debate - this is the type of woman we need as opinon leaders), but we also have to have a public discussion about male sexuality. And it's heterosexual males who need to have it!
Nearly all incidents described in the article are instances of behaviour that can only be called infantile and notably immature. The people - I'm not sure they would qualify as 'men' - doing this sort of thing need to catch up on their upbringing and learn some manners and basic common decency. And they need to learn to get a handle and a perspective on their own sexual desires - which, of course, also amounts to standing up for them in the appropriate situations. And if truckloads of useful/good male developers have a problem with this aspect of their manhood, then companies such as Google truely are in a dilemma.
We need to grow the fuck up, put the kid-girlies and their excess #met00 / gender-studies bullshit nonsense into perspective and have a grown up debate about how men and women can get along and keep their mating habits in check while at the same time being able to express them where appropriate. If this doesn't happen, if todays society can't find a method of once again formalising the encounter and courting of heterosexual males and females, this is only going to get worse.
My 2 eurocents.
As far as JS-transpiled PLs go, Dart is actually one of the more interesting onces. However, as it looks, Google might have missed an opportunity with Dart. Too much of a niche product with no serious support. Curiously enough, it's Microsoft leading the game in this area with TypeScript and a nigh perfect FOSS toolchain accompaning it with the very neat Visual Studio Code IDE being written in TS and offering all-out support for development in TS. ... Yeah, and hell froze over a little more lately.
If Google proves they're serious with Dart 2, they might have a chance, but right now I'm betting on TypeScript for my transpilation/large-js-project needs.
I don't think people 'strive to create value' at all - we just go to work to get paid, and while we're at work we basically do what we're told.
I wholeheartedly disagree. It's basically how Freud put it: We want to feel competent and loved. Which are two sides of the same coin. To feel competent means to do work you yourself deem useful and makes you feel that you deserve the love you get or at least expect from society and the people around you. And it means creating value or at least feeling that way.
This is the actual job crisis buy all-out automation.The thing bugging the now useless coalminer the most is his loss of sense of value and usefulness to society.
Perhaps we should wrap President Trump in barbed wire and shoot him into the sun. I think that would solve quite a few of Americas problems right there.
My 2 cents.