> Like, what's the point, if the next AI can do it in 5 seconds?
Post-work society is an inevitability if we don't destroy our planet.
If we had something like a Maslow’s hierarchy of needs but for work, I think meaningfulness would be the top of the pyramid. For most people in the world, not going hungry or affording housing are reasons enough to do work. Getting to do work you find meaningful is truly a privilege.
Highest violent crime rates:
Memphis, Tennessee: ~2,400–2,500 per 100k
St. Louis, Missouri: ~2,000–2,100 per 100k
Detroit, Michigan: ~1,700–2,000 per 100k
Little Rock, Arkansas: ~1,600–1,800 per 100k
Baltimore, Maryland: ~1,600–1,700 per 100k
Oakland, California: ~1,400–1,900 per 100k
New Orleans, Louisiana: ~1,600–1,700 per 100k
Birmingham, Alabama: ~1,600–1,700 per 100k
Milwaukee, Wisconsin: ~1,100–1,600 per 100k
Cleveland, Ohio: ~1,500–1,600 per 100k
Most popular holiday destinations:
New York City, New York
Orlando, Florida
Las Vegas, Nevada
Maui, Hawaii
Grand Canyon National Park, Arizona
San Francisco, California
Miami, Florida
Yellowstone National Park, Wyoming
New Orleans, Louisiana
Great Smoky Mountains National Park, North Carolina/Tennessee
It would be fun to get to post-work society, but hard to imagine atm. TPTB won't let it happen
Soon we will have some machines that can replace 50% of jobs, and this will happen basically overnight...
"I am the best economist in UK!"
Is it?
I can't see a future in which almost every system (both physical and virtual) are not automated and optimized by autonomous entities.
What do you do when everyone is out of a job?
If you don't want pitchforks and riots in the streets, you give everyone UBI and housing so society doesn't collapse.
As much as I’d love UBI to happen, in current geopolitiks it’s a no-go. People are not happy with having what the others have.
The beach houses, mansions, mountain views could be vacation places, or used as libraries, or simply dismantled for the materials.
The "slums" on noisy roads could be eliminated entirely and used for something people don't need to be at.
We'd move to a more equal distribution of assets closer to the middle line.
Ah yes because these AI companies are just gonna give away the models for free that I use with my free computer and free smartphone while I eat with my free food in my free apartment.
I built a phone app recently, not released to the public, just an idea I had for ages but could never spend the time actually building. Its 100% vibe coded, and took me a few weekends to build... I'm talking a few hours in total.
The point I'm making is that you now have the power to create stuff you would never have had the time to build. You can think big, wild stuff. Experimentation. Throw-away code.
What a time to be alive!
Before it was cool to share an app you made, but now? What's the point of sharing an app, if the other person can make their own, even better suited for their needs, in a few seconds?
But, you can create cool stuff just for yourself. That’s the upside. It’s just hard to make a living on cool stuff for yourself.
I built several projects at home, many involving learning e.g. graphics programming and rendering, that would never be useful in my professional work, but which were intrinsically interesting and enabled me to build other, more useful projects later on. It also gave me greater confidence in my abilities as an engineer, and cursory skills I learned in the process did help in my professional work.
Now it feels like what’s the point. The machines can or will be able to build anything I could want, useful or not, faster and with less frustration. I probably won’t be able to be employed as an engineer long enough to build a career on said skills. And I can’t mentally justify not spending that time with friends and family, when the expected return is basically zero.
I still find math, science, and engineering interesting and intrinsically rewarding, but in a closer sense to how one might feel about playing video games. The information is or will eventually be useless, so it isn’t worth spending a significant amount of time on.
I find that very motivating. I can do things alone that would have required a team only one year ago.
People SHOULD feel like making a useless Mario Kart clone isn't worth the effort anymore. They should, instead, be trying to figure out how to actually use these models to make something that doesn't feel like a useless Mario Kart clone.
Software will be more like a "proof of work", where people would still pay $100 for good software that took $10k tokens to build.
Now it's just the product for the world, which was where most of the value was anyways.
It's a big paradigm shift and the industry is quickly going to shed people who needed the process to care about the product and we'll be left with people whose motivation to build the product (or money) is enough.
They won't even have to ask for a specific product, they will just state their problems/needs.
In this game of work/development, you can't make sure that other humans don't "cheat". Our work won't compete anymore with other human's work, but with a computer.
Also, creating something with AI doesn't really feel like you made it yourself.
And, if you make it without AI, most of the times it feels pointless, why spend 30 days on working on something that can be done faster and better in 1 hour?
I am not saying about doing things for fun, but about creating useful things.
Yes, you can do "hand-crafted" things, and people appreciate that, but for code, people aren't able to see the craft anyway.
If the motive is profit then you should be adopting AI just like you have adopted any other skill or tool of your profession.
You can't cherry pick somebody's opinion and assume it applies to everybody.
I have started building my own Digital Audio Workstation. The point is not to build something to compete with Ableton. The point is to build something and make music with it. If it is a good tool then I should be able to make good music with it and release the music. Actually, the DAW should be the secret sauce of the music and something I wouldn't want to give away.
This feels a lot more like computing in the 90s after taking an odd 25 year detour of an obsession with the tools themselves instead of what the tools can actually do.
> This feels a lot more like computing in the 90s after taking an odd 25 year detour of an obsession with the tools themselves instead of what the tools can actually do.
Like, professional electronic music artists spend 10s of thousands of hours in a DAW, but at that point it just becomes second nature and the tool disappears so they can focus entirely on the music.
But it's not just tech – my lack of interest in learning and creating is starting to generalise with the models. Music, writing, coding, maths, etc...
I need to get used to switching my head off and asking the AIs to think for me whenever I need to engage my brain. It still feels very unnatural.
The brain loves these kinds of shortcuts.
I don't need to think about the fine motor skills of hitting a baseball, it's just a motion now, and the game is still fun.
Because that's how creating software is starting to feel.
Now it feels like whatever I learn will be obsolete in 2 months.