> they can't have Top Secret Meetings where a merger or acquisition is discussed
This actually seems completely doable for a properly configured LLM. There will probably be a platform in the future where companies can setup LLM to discuss business deals with other companies' LLMs and bring the resulting proposals to the human leadership. Every morning the CEO gets an email about the 3 most promising potential deals that were discussed, a summary of the big picture with TBD details highlighted, and a link to the transcript of the conversation. Plausibly the potential deal is with a company the CEO had never heard about or dealt with.
Partly this is because the big companies are diverting vast amounts of money towards building data centers, instead of hiring new grads. I expect young people who learn AI skills will be fine, once the data center spending binge is over.
What does "learning AI skills" even mean? You're typing into a prompt box. You are not applying any skill, the model is. At best, the skill you need is discernment about _what_ to type in this magical box. But if that gets cheaper and the output of your company doesn't necessarily scale horizontally that well. Why would I need as many people as before?
- directing the model and knowing when its going off the rails
- verification
- setting up the right loops, harness, graphs around the models
economics still apply to hiring people. if all your competitors are using ai and there's market share to fight over and people still are a productivity positive vs. only ai, hiring will increase as we've seen recently with swes
The only thing here that _maybe_ has a durable long term moat is the first point. Even then, I don't see why stronger models can't also have discernment once more companies close the loop with their AI and their relevant company metrics.
The other 3 you literally just get for free as models improve. The "state of the art" of "prompting" changes literally every week. It was loops, then graphs, now its harnesses (and self automating harnesses)? Why are these not just obviated by better models? These are barely skills, and are imo, just the tech equivalent of tabloids advertising 5 minute exercises or pills to get rid of stubborn belly fat. No amount of prompt engineering or graphs or loops could get your previous version of GPT to perform like Fable, and yet somehow Fable can do all of that and more without any random built in "ai engineering skills."
The labor chart for SWEs will look like a slope up as productivity with AI increases, and then past a certain point where AI is like 99% good enough, employment will fall off a cliff. We are already seeing this with junior hiring, and who is to say that AI will magically only ever be as capable as a junior engineer?
i mean the meta point is having "AI skills" is understanding the jagged frontier and operating accordingly
Given that we can keep making infinite abstractions with software if we actually saturate software demand with AI then I don't see why every other industry is cooked (robotics is downstream of software).
I noticed the newer batch of interns tends to have less mechanical coding skills but does well on understanding and planning on the design, DB design, etc.
Again though, these recommendations are so vacuous. If you already are a capable developer, then you can pick all of that up within a week. "Learn AI skills" is such a low effort reflexive response that I'd expect it from a non-technical executive, not from an HN commenter.
You'd be surprised, I used to do a first round technical screen where we let the interviewee use any ai tool they want to build a simple api (and they can oneshot the problem if they just pasted it into any capable agent). I quite liked the problem, it was really a system design problem for senior+ but more algorithmic for junior/mid
The more senior the candidate the less they took advantage of the tools. Most commonly they would manually copy/paste error or syntax errors and then run out of time. One candidate only copy pasted his questions into google and used the AI overview
Junior candidates tended to be overly ai eager, a lot of them oneshotted the problem but were unable to explain any of the details
That being said I think 80% of the skills should come easily to a capable dev that is willing to put in the effort to learn and get used to managing agents. Building agents that perform work themselves is a lot harder (and still pretty unsolved)
I had a similar interview and I find it to be a stupid question. Of course I know AI can oneshot it, and of course I know you know it can. But I'm aware this is an interview so you're probably assessing something about my skills. Pasting the prompt doesn't assess anything so surely that isn't what you want me to do, so I don't do that. Instead I have to magically divine what level of involvement you're hoping to see on a scale from vibecode to handmade. The whole thing provides literally no information to the interviewer about real work processes, because the intelligent candidate will behave differently in this situation than they would at work.
But I don't believe what you've said disproves my point. To me, it boils down to attitude, not so much aptitude when it comes to "AI skills" in this context. You even admitted that some of the solutions could be one-shotted by copying and pasting the problem.
As for building agents that perform work themselves, in my opinion it boils down to understanding the problem space, isolating the key business logic, and determining what the pertinent requirements are. Kinda sounds like looping back around to software engineering skills IMO.
To be clear, I think young people need to learn traditional software engineering skills too (.. maybe having the wrong attitude towards it is even worse than the aptitude!) A junior with no foundational SWE skills will just become a meat wrapper. But thinking more about it I wouldn't discredit these "AI skills" so much. A lot of it is either using AI as a force multiplier or learning the specific skills around deploying it which I'd still categorize as 'AI skills'
building agents is just a completely different ballgame, theres a lot of infra and harness engineering around handling the nondeterministic behaviors that are nonobvious unless you've shipped agents at scale
I'm not discrediting them as being of no value, I am just discrediting the notion that devs who are unable to find work now should be beefing up their AI skills so that they can get a job in the future. "AI skills" as they are talked about are easier and quicker to pick up than working with a library, e.g. React. And if they are not difficult to learn, then they are not a differentiator nor should they be treated as such.
Yeah I've seen a lot of applications and some interviews where what they are looking for the most, by far, is your "AI skills". Questions like: How are you currently using AI day to day?; Can you describe your current agentic setup?; things like that are the only questions asked in the application.
And I don't understand why you would wave away needing to know anything about the codebase's underlying tech because "The AI can take care of all that, we don't need to look at code anymore" while also not believing that any competent developer could prompt AI to get a good setup within a week or two max.
Upvoting this for asking the candid question that so many commenters dance around. I can't imagine a 22-year-old confidently walking into an interview (or getting introduced to a team) and assuring everyone that they have the "harness" or "guardrails" to confidently contribute at the level of a 10x engineer.
If we apply the Gartner Hype Cycle to this disruptive technology, I do believe AI will hit a "slope of enlightenment" where an AI-assisted Analyst is properly understood in industries and can take productive roles. Conveniently, this will probably coincide with a lower interest rate where companies have funds for a talent acquisition spree/rapid growth.
With that being said, today's graduates are stuck in an awful market with a lot of charlatans selling crappy online courses and bad ideas.
I imagine the meta will be “build a micro saas product that’s marginally successful” for younger folks. It’s trivial to make a product but you learn a lot seeing what the AI does wrong.
The models are currently not at a place where you can just "type into a prompt box", any more than you could just "type into the IDE". You have to know what and why to type. The models are not at a place where no skill is needed. It may be a different still, but it's still a skill, and it's still a software engineering skill.
Tip for smart science-y young people: think about a career in experimental physics. Experimental data is the complement of theoretical power. Since theory can be provided cheaply by LLMs, experimental ability is now the bottleneck for progress in physics.
I expect to see frontier labs or startups hiring experimentalists to provide data for LLMs to analyze, pushing towards breakthroughs in areas like room-temperature superconductors and fusion.
Physics as a domain is a nightmare. Even the employment statistics are hard to understand because, like Philosophy, only the best of the best pursue it.
I've had countless friends throughout my PhD studies tell me that their decision to pursue a PhD in Physics ruined their lives. (Which is an exageration, but you get the point.)
The bottom line is that you should pusue Physics only if you still want to in the face of excessive media/reccomendations/statistics telling you not to.
My university had a great Physics department (Nobel laureate level), but every year you’d have a bunch of junior year (year 3) physics students desperately trying to switch into engineering as they realized that making a go of a pure physics degree was going to be more difficult. It was a consistently repeating pattern.
Exactly. These fields demand all you've got. Otherwise, you'll fall behind those who are willing to sacrifice everything else for the quest, so to speak. There will always be a long-tailed distribution populated largely by smart people with personal regrets.
Experimental physics is worrisome because as education becomes less-valued by society, there will be less funding available for research in general. Costly and elaborate 'big science' projects -- the kind that have to span multiple Presidential administrations in the US -- will be among the first to be classified as "waste," and performatively killed by legislators who earn votes by emulating the feeble-minded cultists who elected them.
I think the way forward, at least in the US, is going to involve leveraging AI to build better models to reduce our dependence on experiment. This will be true of both biology (where's the next HeLa line going to come from, once Christian nationalists complete their takeover of NIH?) and physics (ditto the next RHIC or SLAC.)
Yes, this policy amounts to eating the next generation's seed corn, but that's what Americans are voting for.
Experimental physics isn't just the high energy particle stuff even though that tends to get more media attention. There's a lot of condensed matter, solid state, etc stuff where you can do cutting edge research on a table top or close to it.
As someone with a BS in physics, my advice to anyone who wants to study applied physics is to do robotics. Plenty of applied physics work to go around.
Counterpoint: my entire physics phd cohort is doing great now and it didn’t ruin our lives.
I think better advice is “do you want to work in this specific lab for 5 years?”, not “do you really want to do physics”? Talk to the lab members, learn what they do.
That's funny because so many of us in my PhD philosophy program would say: I should've been a physicist, philosophy ruined my life. I had a physics prof who told me it was foolish to go into philosophy when I could've been a physicist and I thought I knew better. Oh well, I probably would've been a software engineer in the end no matter what.
If (it will) it continues like this and the line is step, as soon as math is solved good enough, the next frontier will be solved.
In regards of experimental physics, i would even argue this is being worked on for sure. The ML machines are now big enough that simulations are getting better and better fast.
Only theory that is a convex combination of existing theory. Any paradigm shift is currently unreachable to LLMs and can be only obtained by luck with RL due to the curse of dimensionality.
The term “currently” is the sticking point here. As far as I know, there is still no one who can provide evidence as to why it should remain that way. And the "by luck with RL" is soon not by luck anymore. The more stupid and not so stupid ideas are discussed with the LLMs, the chances are growing that it is not a question about luck but by growing probability.
Frankly, such paradigm shifts are almost impossible for humans as well. If a mathematician proposes a truly radical paradigm shift, they're either a once-in-a-decade genius or a crackpot.
It is quite typical that once in a decade genius is treated like a crackpot... (what was the name of the Austrian doctor that suggested washing you hands before surgery?)
... of course, the number of crackpots is overwhelming
This sounds depressing. Imagine going to work every day and your boss is a computer telling you to do rote nonsense so it can barely-better-than-brute-force search for breakthroughs in whatever field. Then when it finds one we get another breathless news cycle like this while you get no credit at all. If you could understand what you were working on, you might be able to contribute more than a .csv of data, but the computer can't read you in because there is no understanding under the surface.
Barely better than brute force (I can't believe it's not brute force!™) aside, presuming we get super intelligence it will all be depressing when it comes to intellectual pursuits like this.
Yeah I don't understand how people can not look forward to that outcome. Imagine you have your own super von Neumann who's willing to talk to you 1:1 for as long as you'd like at any time with not a hint of judgement at your intellectual inferiority. He's been working tirelessly to figure out how everything pieces together, and has 20 layers of abstraction to draw from to lead you toward understanding what's really going on along with a concrete understanding of every field to reify his thoughts into examples familiar to you and illustrate his connections.
A nerd's dream. Maybe he'll even be able to answer about turbulence.
Every single knowledge worker is going to face this kind of crisis. It will be worse for people who cared deeply about their craft, but the crisis will have the same shape. The way through is to change the way you relate to your work, and to appreciate the fact that you can now produce far more output.
Mathematicians should realize: instead of spending decades on individual theorems, you can now create whole new subfields of mathematics. Of course, you won't be doing the creation directly, in the way the mathematicians of old did; that's just not the name of the game anymore. But you will still be directing the research and involved in the creation.
Taking a helicopter to the top of Everest is not as rewarding as climbing the mountain.
You are completely discrediting the joy humans derive from actually -doing- the work, and not just, telling someone else to do the work.
There is a reason artists hate AI, its because they enjoy the actual act of painting, like mathematicians enjoy the act of proving theorems and programmers enjoy the act of typing lines of text into a file on their computer.
We are intentionally deleting all of the enjoyable high agency jobs and replacing them with "model babysitting".
Jobs are not generally meant to be enjoyable (although that is a benefit if so), they are meant to get work done. It's funny seeing office workers here on HN have this sort of opinion and contrasting that with blue collar workers, ask a miner or house builder how fun their job is.
> ask a miner or house builder how fun their job is
The average person on a residential job site I've talked to has looked and sounded like they're having as much fun as the average software dev. And none of them have said stuff like "people on my team have confided that they cry every night because the higher-level management keeps screaming about the project not being done" like I've heard at from folks, say, certain big social media places...
That's because Software as a job has become a joyless death march to poop out casino flavored adware for 99% of the industry? Go launch the Temu app and imagine being on the team that builds it.
I could imagine a desperate person with a family writing that app. I can't imagine anyone else with light behind their eyes doing it.
This has even been the startup world (even downstream of LLMs!) for some time.
The people in deep morning tend to be the people who have managed to avoid this outcome, or deceive themselves about its inevitability.
Food is not meant to be enjoyable, it's meant to nourish. But by a fortunate coincidence it may also be tasty. Now imagine replacing ice cream, or steak, or fresh berries, or whatever you enjoyed eating, with something like Soylent or Huel with a side of puréed kale. Your nutrition may actually improve, but something would be lost, won't it?
> Food is not meant to be enjoyable, it's meant to nourish. But by a fortunate coincidence it may also be tasty.
Im pretty sure the taste is an evolutionary indicator of nutritional value (we now know how to cheat to make food that tastes really good but isn’t really healthy).
But it’s not really an accident that some food tastes good.
The fact that certain aspects of work feel enjoyable is also not random. It usually indicates an elevated level of fitness for the job, a higher chance of success for a given phenotype / genotype. I can imagine that Mr Ludd had been enjoying the process of forming a complex pattern on fabric before Mr Jacquard's automatic loom made his skill irrelevant.
You said that food is not meant to be enjoyable and that it's coincidental that it's tasty -- this is flat out wrong, so your attempt to argue by analogy (always a suspect process) was bogus. And your "something would be lost" is a strawman from left field that actually undermines your argument. (BTW, I enjoy Huel and they make an effort to make the taste and texture pleasurable. And people often combine kale with fruit to make tasty shakes.)
Work, unlike food, is a social construct, and while it's no doubt a bit more complex, the statement that "Jobs are not generally meant to be enjoyable (although that is a benefit if so), they are meant to get work done" is factually correct. Because work generally is "work, not fun", people get paid to do it, with competitive salaries and perks.
I won't respond further to your very bad arguments (or the absurdly out of touch elitist arguments from others here that miners enjoy their work as much as software developers do ... I'm retired and still do software development for fun; no miner does the same).
Don't many blue collar workers (miners & house builders) do actually take immense pride in their work? There are woodworkers out there whose hobby is also woodworking.
> You are completely discrediting the joy humans derive from actually -doing- the work, and not just, telling someone else to do the work.
But humans (or at least some of them) get joy from that too. A lot of people enjoy being supervisors, team leaders, managers, executives - even though that’s largely deciding what to tell other people to do rather than directly doing it yourself
>Painters shouldn’t be mad at AI, they should be mad at the system.
AI helps enable the system. It makes it easier for the haves to justify a lack of sharing—or need to share—with the have-nots.
"There are more tools available for you to do more work faster than ever! I'm not a greedy hoarder partying while others suffer because of my choices, you're just not dedicated enough to learning and using those new tools! The tools take away your excuses for not being economically valuable to me!"
AI IS the system; the speed with which the rich and wealthy have embedded it into every aspect of our lives and the way it has been trained off the stolen work of millions without care is only possible because it is directly entwined.
AI is just another tool that’s being applied to it. But you have to think beyond the old transactional nature to get passed that. Capitalist realism is extremely hard to overcome, but it doesn’t have to be like this.
You do not need to believe what you do is valuable. That’s capitalism talking, infesting your head.
For the vast majority of us, we are imminently replaceable at the drop of a hat. We aren’t the special unique and individually “important” people we imagined ourselves to be.
There are 8.5b of us! How could we be? We aren’t special, we will be replaced when we’re gone. That’s OK!
If we can be replaced when we are gone, we can replace “work” while we are still here too.
Do you not have values, and evaluate the things you might choose to do, by light of those? Do you not seek local importance, and meaning, as you strive to do your best by those values?
Here I'm deliberately conflating (1) monetary value and self-worth, (2) social status and emotional importance. I do this to annoy you, but also because I think it's somewhat correct. Cash is hard-earned, so persuading somebody to give you some cash for your art does indeed signify that they care about it, just the same as if they had run a mile in order to collect it: and social status, if it means genuinely mattering to other people for good reasons, is likely to be part of what matters to you in your heart.
you can’t climb to the moon, you need rockets for that. In the hands of great researchers, AI will accelerate and propel human knowledge far beyond what we could achieve with pencil and paper alone.
True, but many of us have grown identifying ourselves with the kind of work we do, the discoveries that follow from our hard work. Even in the case of rockets, we designed the rockets! Here, I've to let the oracle take care of things while I'm robbed of that delight of discovery.
> In the hands of great researchers, AI will accelerate and propel human knowledge far beyond what we could achieve with pencil and paper alone.
Did you ever think that the pursuit of knowledge might be not just producing it but discovering it as a collective human effort? Putting to much mechanization in it kills the joy of it.
> Taking a helicopter to the top of Everest is not as rewarding as climbing the mountain.
Flying from Atlanta to New York is not as rewarding as walking there. You are right, but if we would be walking everywhere, we would still be stuck somewhere in ancient times.
> Taking a helicopter to the top of Everest is not as rewarding as climbing the mountain.
If you’re on the top of mt. Everest and you need medicine, would you care if it reached you via helicopter or via some guy climbing while having a lot of fun?
Yes exactly, that jumps out as a strange thing to say. The enjoyable part of programming is the puzzle, the act of figuring out how to solve the problem elegantly and well.
Although I can't speak for artists, surely the joy of painting is in the creation of a piece of art they can be proud of?
Enjoyment in work is generally about taking pride in the end result, not in the repetitive mechanical part.
Not exactly, no. What is "the problem" - is there really only one problem? - and where does the creativity go? This depends on what you're doing and how you're going about it. Maybe every little mark you make on paper or canvas or a text file is a puzzle, with associated meta-level questions, and the interest is in hundreds of intimately small creative notions, and when it all approaches the end you have mixed feelings because the (very much non-mechanical) process has stopped.
Funny thing about diffusion systems: they can't paint.
You're not talking about the joy of painting, because no machine is here to take that away. That still exists, it is still joyful. Likewise, exploring mathematics for oneself will still exist. It will still be joyful and surprising.
What you are discounting is what the article actually admitted with all the job talk. What you're saying here as well: "if we structure society around compensated labor and machines are better at the labor than my high status job is about to be farmed out to a machine."
Firstly, yes. Welcome to the proletariat? Secondly, maybe this isn't a reasonable principle to organize society around. Maybe if the only jobs left are "one of the 95 ultra wealthy tastemakeres" or "spiritually destitute model babysitter" then we should consider an alternative organizational strategy.
This is not to say I'm yearning for neo-Stalin to unmake the data center. I'm yearning for a world closer to one where labor for survival is a historical lesson.
> Every single knowledge worker is going to face this kind of crisis. It will be worse for people who cared deeply about their craft, but the crisis will have the same shape.
Normally I'm very sympathetic to the plights of those socially affected by AI, and rarely pass up the opportunity to clown on institutional actors papering over these plights with glib cliches. But in this case, I really feel like this is a case of monkey-brain overriding mathematician-brain.
The greatest accomplishment in my life is my math PhD, earned before AI got useful. I do math-heavy work for my day job, and I care deeply about every craft I practice, to the point that I am almost certainly on the unhealthier end of the spectrum of perfectionism. Yet I both acknowledge rather than deny the impending death of mathematics as we have engaged it for the last couple centuries, and am far more excited than aghast.
I would have to write a whole essay in order to communicate this in a way that is appropriately sensitive, but in a nutshell: We have always been in the business of discovering and understanding math, have we not? Are we going to call it a tragedy rather than a blessing now that the floodgates on both are bursting, just because it makes us feel less special, unique, valuable? It's such a self-serving aesthetic on the beauty of math to me. The author claims there is something profound and spiritual about math, and I agree; it exists prior to and above all of us, human or AI. Whatever way we can tap that beauty is incredible, full stop. This is what I believe.
From the article:
> These developments have triggered some deranged thoughts in me. I have wondered if it is the express goal of these companies to make me kill myself. Am I alone in this paranoia?
The severity of this line caught me off guard. I think the author is genuinely having an emotional-social crisis, and I feel terrible for them, but at this moment they may be having a hard time separating their trauma from their intellectual aesthetic for what math is all about.
> We have always been in the business of discovering and understanding math, have we not?
And the way we understand the maths is to do the maths. You can't outsource the maths to AI and continue to understand it. I don't believe we can have it both ways.
You can't remove the humans entirely and still be said to be in the business of doing math. On that I fully agree. We should still be spending the same number of hours on math, just with different tools (you might even call them oracles) at our disposal.
> The greatest accomplishment in my life is my math PhD, earned before AI got useful [..] Yet I both acknowledge rather than deny the impending death of mathematics as we have engaged, it for the last couple centuries, and am far more excited than aghast.
The "yet" should be an "so obviously", since you have your greatest accomplishment behind you.
And the article isn't denying anything, it is criticising something.
> We have always been in the business of discovering and understanding math, have we not?
I'd say that we have been in the business of not being alienated from ourselves and our work, and that that is more important than what the work is. Math, just like anything else, won't prevent the heat death of the universe. Supercomputers or wooden sticks, same outcome. So it really doesn't matter how you spend the time as much as as what, e.g. if you're an alienated cog or not. The behemoth machinery itself isn't on a journey anywhere, ultimately, anything that goes up will come down; so none of these fantasies about a point or destination can make up for the here and now.
> The author claims there is something profound and spiritual about math, and I agree; it exists prior to and above all of us, human or AI.
First off, the phrase in the article is "I am suffering a profound spiritual crisis due to these developments.", and you continue that by agreeing to something nobody said and that isn't true.
"I'm hungry :(" "Oh yeah, I also am always on the lookout for new cool bands to check out! We're on the same page here." "WHAT?!"
Doing math may be a spiritual experience, "Math is is spiritual" makes no sense, and math pre-existing is flat out wrong, it ultimately rests on axioms that are simply accepted as given. Even I as a layman know that.
> The severity of this line caught me off guard. I think the author is genuinely having an emotional-social upheaval, and I feel terrible for them, but at this moment they may be having a hard time separating their trauma from their intellectual aesthetic for what math is all about.
You just turned a profound spiritual crisis into math being profound and spiritual, and now you accuse them having a trauma that makes them unable to see something you claimed that isn't even true. And that's the overall pattern I see everywhere, those who object are misrepresented or outright ignored, I never see any facing of what people actually say. So even just based on that it seems deeply anti-human, because one side in this debate isn't even showing up, hiding behind some supposedly inevitable "future" that can just be established as fact without debate.
> First off, the phrase in the article is "I am suffering a profound spiritual crisis due to these developments.", and you continue that by agreeing to something nobody said and that isn't true.
Ahem. From TFA:
"There is something about mathematical discovery (progress, advancement, creation) which is vital to the spiritual, experiential quality of doing mathematics. The creation (or even the pursuit) of novel mathematics is one way that humans have historically accessed the ineffable and encountered the divine and mystical."
And in the comments he writes
"I am drawing on the subjective accounts of many mathematicians and my own experience. If it helps, my intuition is that the ineffable, divine and mystical are immanent and not transcendent."
> Doing math may be a spiritual experience, "Math is is spiritual" makes no sense, and math pre-existing is flat out wrong, it ultimately rests on axioms that are simply accepted as given. Even I as a layman know that.
I stand corrected, and frankly, since that misunderstanding made me a bit "mad" on behalf that person, I think I would have written my response very very differently if I hadn't made that mistake. I want to apologise for that.
Math is still based on axioms, AFAIK, but since I the author also seems to disagree and I'm the non-mathematician here I don't think I should press on that point, either.
Math is based on axioms because you need some a priori axioms to do logical deduction, but the axiom selection is also historically fluid. Mathematicians suggest new axioms or move away from old axioms based on their understanding of which results are intuitive or not, and also which are most useful, and most mathematicians that work close to the axioms have some view on how “correct” or not various axioms are. As evidence of this, I’d point to how many mathematicians find the axiom of choice problematic due to results that seem clearly “wrong”, but nevertheless accept it because they need it to prove other things that seem obviously “right”. So the axioms are not the base truth, there is some platonic ideal of mathematics beneath that.
The quote about ineffable/divine/mystical is indeed the one I was implicitly referring to. No worries, I should've been more clear.
Most math people I know don't have a religious conviction in Platonism or anything, but their zeal for math since early childhood often does boil down to awe in something larger, more primordial, more significant than the mundane business of humanity. This tends especially to be the case for pure math people.
> Every single knowledge worker is going to face this kind of crisis.
Yeah as a software developer I've already been going through a version of this for the past 8 or so months.
Less acutely than the OP I suppose (the idea of killing myself certainly isn't something I've considered) and without the mystical/spiritual overtones, but I can relate to the overall feeling of loss being expressed as someone who was always deeply passionate about hand-crafted software solutions.
> The way through is to change the way you relate to your work, and to appreciate the fact that you can now produce far more output.
I can't speak for the OP, but this doesn't comfort me much. A lot of my favorite parts of the work are still being stripped out, and producing more output doesn't actually benefit me in any way. As with most productivity gains since the 1970s, the value of more output is not likely to be captured by the majority of the people doing the work. If anything AI will likely vastly accelerate the productivity vs wages divide.
I accept that It Is What It Is and there's no point in trying to hold on to the past, but at the same time on an individual level something real is being stripped from us very quickly in a way that some "Live, Love, Laugh"-esque motivational appeal to perspective change won't fix.
> But you will still be directing the research and involved in the creation.
Somehow I doubt it.
Maybe there won't be a need for you to be involved at all.
Maybe the AI will perform even better if you're not there to slow it down.
Maybe there will be people involved, but not as many.
Maybe there will be so many people involved that their salaries will be depressed to the point they can't afford to do it anymore, and only the rich will know such joys.
We live in interesting times. This is the age of anomie. Anything could happen. There is no set path to success anymore. The world only gets more and more illegible with every day that passes.
> The way through is to change the way you relate to your work, and to appreciate the fact that you can now produce far more output.
Yeah, just like artisans enjoyed being turned into assembly line workers in the industrial revolution. There was a movie starring Charlie Chaplin about how awesome that was.
If AI is truly useful for knowledge work, that will mean a huge downgrade to working conditions for knowledge workers, whose skills are no longer as valuable. And these workers will be alienated from their craft, just like artisans were.
The way through is to change the way you relate to your work, and to appreciate the fact that you can now produce far more output.
I currently, emphasis on currently, feel like I can leverage LLMs in a very satisfying way to a deeper overview and more data about fields I'm already familiar with and that's pretty cool. I can produce more for some value of "more".
But can I be sure that what's output will continue to be what "I produce", either in terms of the thing going entirely beyond me or in terms of now having a spin different from what I'm after? I mean, mathematicians would have mostly the problem of feeling useless. Economists, say, could have the problem of both feeling and feel their viewpoint is excluded if not what-becomes-the-mainstream.
> appreciate the fact that you can now produce far more output.
... and then what?
now you have more output and it still sucks
I think the only one appreciating that fact, would be if you had a boss above you
and I don't mean the output sucks, I mean the experience
like imagine someone who spent decades learning the intricacies of playing guitar in a particular style
now you hand them a box that allows them, but also anyone else, to do it without practice. it happens to be slightly worse but everyone around you doesn't seem to care or notice
It is going to be a big problem for humanity when the superintelligent AIs start telling us that our political philosophies, to which everyone is deeply and emotionally attached, are total garbage.
One obvious example is: we have a bizarre and anomalous belief that political union has a special moral status unlike other relationships (marital, financial, social, etc). In all other cases, relationships require consent from both parties, and it is monstrous to use force to compel a relationship. If we applied this logic to political relationships, we would immediately conclude that unilateral secession is a sacred right. But no one is ready to bite that bullet.
Not sure I buy this. In my mind, dissolving this state relationship would be renouncing your citizenship as an individual.
Then, it seems naive and problematic to think you can take a personal chunk of territory with you after renouncement. At the very least, I think this is akin to trying to unilaterally drop an easement from a property deed. These territories were committed in perpetuity, not loaned with an expiration or compensation clause.
Acting collectively, it is still just many people deciding to renounce. Why would the territory go with them either? This tension is what makes it a revolutionary act.
What are you even talking about? The right to self-determination is literally Article 1 of the UN charter. Nations are governed by power relationships, not philosophical ones, so they ignore the charter, but you aren't proposing anything novel or groundbreaking in any way. It is, in fact, the very first sacred right enshrined in international law, and has been for over 70 years.
In practice, Americans supported their own independence, and they support independence for eg. Taiwan, but they don't support independence for the Confederacy because that would entail weakening their own nation. To the extent that anyone will try to rationalise the American Civil War, they might reach for slavery, but a philosophical belief that political union is absolute and nobody can declare independence is not it; at most that's just a flimsy post-facto justification for the already-decided fact that states must not allowed to secede for power reasons, and this is evident from the fact they don't condemn their own revolution and advocate for return to British governance.
Very self-serving that you believe superintelligent AI is going to tell people your ideas are the best ones, incidentally.
I think that the point of your post, which is that our morals and ethics are often illogical and don't stand up to scrutiny, is getting lost in the debate over your example.
> What possible use could there be for doing this?
The point is to generate an enormous unlabeled dataset. Historically, ML for medical imaging depended on a small number of labeled images - small because you needed to have an expert study the image and label it as healthy/cancer/etc. But the "GPT breakthrough" was that it was better to use vast unlabeled datasets - in the case of LLMs, text - than small labeled ones.
There's a kind of Efficient Market Hypothesis of career advice that I wish PG took better notice of.
If a career path (e.g. startup founder) outperforms at time T1, then this fact will diffuse quickly throughout society, causing the path to become overcrowded, which pushes down the average performance. So at time T2 the path will no longer outperform. This is analogous to a stock becoming overpriced due to hype. I consider the founder path to be enormously overcrowded at this point.
The key to finding a good career is to play a kind of Money Ball - find paths that, for whatever reason, are mispriced and thus undercrowded.
True, but only when you consider value as a combination of risk, reward, status, etc which is weighted by an individual’s preferences.
One reason why doctor is more popular is the process for becoming one is high effort but low risk. So if you have any risk tolerance you’re probably better off using that effort elsewhere.
>One reason why doctor is more popular is the process for becoming one is high effort but low risk.
Disagree completely that becoming a doctor is low risk. The amount of residency spots is capped and is smaller than the number of people graduating from medical school. Every year thousands of MDs are prevented from going to residency and thus prevented from practicing medicine, even though they graduated from medical school.
>In 2025, 9,541 applicants went unmatched, including 2,409 soon-to-be graduates of United States schools awarding Doctor of Medicine and Doctor of Osteopathic Medicine degrees.
Compared to what? Every other high status high paying career has less defined criteria for success. Where else can I sign up for a program to make 500k?
You just have to do well in medical school (an artificial program with stated requirements) and you’ll make it.
Are the career outcomes for those with medical degrees bad? Don’t they have a ton to options? What’s the risk?
This actually seems completely doable for a properly configured LLM. There will probably be a platform in the future where companies can setup LLM to discuss business deals with other companies' LLMs and bring the resulting proposals to the human leadership. Every morning the CEO gets an email about the 3 most promising potential deals that were discussed, a summary of the big picture with TBD details highlighted, and a link to the transcript of the conversation. Plausibly the potential deal is with a company the CEO had never heard about or dealt with.