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Comment by 1dom | Hacker News Reader

I disagree that what you're describing isn't just another angle of "broken economic system".

The broken economic system is the lack of perceived individual choice, and the priority of business decisions and business profit over individual satisfaction or autonomy.

If we lived in an economic system where maximising individual enjoyment and autonomy was priority, we could give AI to individuals to do with what they want. No sensible human/border collie would choose to give away the fun sheep herding part of their job if there weren't other forces and incentives at work.

But instead, AI is sold to businesses to profit, rather than given to individuals to do the right thing for everyone.

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> No sensible human/border collie would choose to give away the fun sheep herding part of their job if there weren't other forces and incentives at work.

It's not about giving it up, it's about it being taken away. You can't round the sheep up if they never leave the pen.

If something doesn't need doing then it's not work, it's a game. Many people enjoy decorating, but you wouldn't trash a room just to give yourself the excuse to decorate it. A few people might like programming just for the sake of it, but for most it was because we liked doing cool stuff that was hard. It's really important that it was hard.

If things aren't hard then it's just like doing the dishes: it's just time consuming and mildly unpleasant. There's no room for creativity or pride in doing the dishes. Nobody steps back, wipes the sweat from the brow and thinks, wow, that was hard, but I'm really proud of the result. Programming is becoming like doing the dishes.

Kennedy famously said we do things not because they are easy, but because they are hard. We need the challenge. We need it to be hard. If all we're left with is boring work like the dishes, or games, then we'll be like border collies left at home with endless treats and a ball. They can and do get depressed and we will too.

I don't think a system maximizing enjoyment would be any better. Why would anyone choose to work with sewage? Or why would most developers choose to align with rest of the team or with user needs, when programming is most enjoyable?

> I don't think a system maximizing enjoyment would be any better.

That's why I mentioned autonomy too. People like working and being valuable and choosing to add value. The issue is the current economic system doesn't consider things valuable if they don't directly generate a lot of money or profit for a business. An individual developer gets a lot of value from having a job they enjoy where they produce useful code that solves problems. AI removes some of that value for the individual developer whilst promising more profit and value for the business.

> Why would anyone choose to work with sewage? Or why would most developers choose to align with rest of the team or with user needs, when programming is most enjoyable?

Why do people choose to work with sewage now? They're not paid a lot. Programming is most enjoyable when it's useful. Writing code which is going to get thrown out because it doesn't align with your team is not valuable or fun, so why you or any other individual developer choose to do that given the choice?

As a hobbyist developer, I hate busywork. Boilerplate code is the bane of my existence, as is repetitive data entry. Forcing the demon at my command to do it for me so I can problem solve is far more enjoyable, and more efficient in terms of time. AI one-shotting problems is benefited by me thoroughly understanding and solving the problem with pseudocode in the initial prompt. I still do the intellectual work, but the LLM does the busywork.

Also, some things simply are not valuable within a system, regardless of the economic structures at play. Individual happiness is one of those things that has no value under any economic system, specifically because it is a moving target and follows Goodhart’s law.

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