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Comment by flaburgan | Hacker News Reader

I don't understand those articles, especially, I don't see why AI changed anything. At least for me, the important quest isn't how you build, but what you build. If your product is meaningless, useful only to the company because what it does is futile, then the emptiness you feel is not coming from the fact that AI is "stealing your job". Don't quit to a farm with goats, find a way to distribute food which would have been wasted to the homeless. Find projects which make sense. Then it does not matter if you use AI or not. You actually build something useful. And if you were making bullshit PowerPoints then AI or not AI is irrelevant. Just stop that.

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But for a large proportion of people, "what they build" is meaningless (in social terms). Doing as you suggest would eliminate the majority of work.

Well then we would have more time to make art, play music, enjoy time with friends... Being fulfilled. I don't see work as a goal, just a way to accomplish something in our current society, but I would be perfectly fine in a society with no jobs the way we see them at the moment. I just spent my Saturday to take care of my grandmother. I was not paid for that, it isn't my job. But I for sure created more "value" than a day in the office.

The problem the article restates is that having more time to make art/play music/enjoy time with friends isn't accurately incentivized by this economy. Rather than employ more people a smaller share of the work week companies are optimizing for fewer people at the same share of a work week. That's what the AI Layoff Waves have been for: companies reminding laborers that they aren't desired if a company can use fewer of them.

This current direction seems to be bad both for workers and for long-term health of companies. If they layoff enough workers and can't easily replace them because they find other uses of their time like art and creativity they risk sustainability by not being able to hire back the people they need and the skills that they trained those people to have in the first place.

The article stops short of offering proposed solutions to this current crisis, though.

I wonder how long it'll be before you can ask an LLM to investigate, run surveys, and figure out what to build. It feels like it's not that far away. Hm, this may actually be an interesting business for someone to found.

It's definitely farther away for this than it is for coding, but 2 years ago it was also totally useless for coding.

> I don't see why AI changed anything.

Impacting millions of jobs under the illusion that it can change something, maybe, kind of, one day, is still changing a lot for people. Those who don't understand this haven't been impacted by a layoff (yet).

It for sure is changing a lot in term of revenue etc., my "AI did not change anything" was about people suddenly feeling empty about what they do at work. If they were doing something that was fulfilling them, then the fact that they are now doing it with AI should not change anything regarding their motivation to accomplish that task. Of course if they get fired that has a big impact, but that is unrelated to how they feel about their job.

>Of course if they get fired that has a big impact, but that is unrelated to how they feel about their job.

I see. I guess in my case it's semi - related. I still have larger goals (goals AI can't really make obsolete that easily), but the past few years did make me feel a bit aimless about how to achieve it. It's no longer just "gain skills in industry, toil at my creation on the side, prepare to transition into being my own boss" anymore. Now the act of getting a job feels impossible and I don't know when (or if) it's going to let up.

Which impacts my overall path because my "on the side" time is now spent job hunting and hustling with gigs to stay on top of bills. I feel stuck in quite a few ways, the rugged pulled from under me. Merit doesn't matter anymore. My experience doesn't feel like it matters. Its all just one big disillusionment.

I understand what you mean. Sorry to hear that. Virtual hug if you'd like one. Maybe that's an opportunity to put in the center of our work what is beneficial for us and society as a whole instead of what is profitable, but yeah before the current system collapses we still have to pay the bills. We can also build an alternate system on the side, but that is easier said than done.

I've been hearing about quitting tech to open a bakery forever. I even know several people who did it long before ChatGPT. It's the nature of any corporate job. The politics and focus on shareholder value are incompatible with most human ethos.

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