What will be left for us to work on?

https://www.normaltech.ai/p/what-will-be-left-for-us-to-work

by randomwalker • 9 days ago

180 265 9 days ago

normaltech.ai

protocolture• 9 days ago

We will be sent in to clean up the fallout.

chopete3• 9 days ago

Key point:

- Work is shifting from building/doing to evaluating, judging, and steering — that's where human value will concentrate.

Other supporting points. ------

- No lab milestone or "RSI breakthrough" will suddenly eliminate jobs — economic impact unfolds gradually over decades.

- Reliability, not raw capability, is the real bottleneck holding back AI automation today.

- Historically, making work cheaper/faster (ATMs, radiology, coding) has grown employment, not destroyed it.

- Superintelligence claims misunderstand human intelligence, which is itself amplified by tools like AI ("co-superintelligence").

It is not a good idea to compress articles like this but there are many of these opinions to read and trying to get to the point quickly to uncover new viewpoints.

ProofHouse• 9 days ago

'metaverse' aka the spatial internet (prolly by a new name).

subygan• 9 days ago

I like the narrative but the key point

A battle of two narratives Build wealth before AI obviates our skills Build skills, agency, taste, judgement

both narratives are portrayed as being odds with each other but, I can't come up with a single "build wealth" scenario that doesn't involve building skills, agency, taste and judgement.

what am I missing ?

alok-g• 9 days ago

I agree that it is not an Either-Or scenario (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_dilemma). You are right about that.

I would doubt however that this would be an 'Equals' or 'Implies' scenario. Let go of seeing either of them as binary, and then not even as scalers.

cma• 9 days ago

One example would be go to college/graduate school to invest in skills or get a job now to earn wealth over the same time period.

franze2• 9 days ago

Question: Does anybody here yet personally has less (to) work 'cause of AI?

dools2• 9 days ago

I’ve never written so much software

bigmattystyles2• 9 days ago

Are you the one who wrote it though or just the one who wrote prompts? Not that it matters in the end…

shaewest2• 9 days ago

In my org, it's grown the level of work. We had a lot of stuff that was never worth the devtime necessary, but now that's opened up that we can do a lot of this stuff in the background

kQq9oHeAz6wLLS• 9 days ago

I think this is underrepresented in everyone's calculations about how AI will affect software engineering. In my experience (and apparently yours as well) this is what many companies are using it for. All those pesky bugs that are minor annoyances but not show-stoppers are getting addressed. They aren't helping us sell more software, but they're dissatisfiers for the customers.

stronglikedan• 9 days ago

No, but the point is to work just as much and be more productive. No company will ever expect you to work less, unless they are showing you the door.

esafak3• 9 days ago

You can if you own the fruit of your labor.

franze2• 9 days ago

I am self employed, I work now more than ever.

singingtoday4• 9 days ago

I have about 10x more to do.

WillAdams2• 9 days ago

Maybe?

But it's at my day job, and it's because I was able to write a prompt which automates having Copilot review uploaded scanned PDFs of invoices with checks (and the bank line obscured with a pen, so no PII) and then write a batch file which renames the files per a file-naming convention, removing the need to open them in batches of 50, find the Invoice ID, re-save using that filename, then quit and re-launch Adobe Acrobat (if left running, eventually I run into a bug where it stops saving files), then run a .bat file which renames based on Invoice ID as a filename.

Problem of course is I've been running into a limit of number of allowed files per 24 hr. period.

Even if it's not less work, it feels like less effort.

pilgrim04• 9 days ago

Extracting structured data from PDFs is something people have been doing forever, way before LLMs, there are state of the art OCR tools out there you can use as a lib, it’s hardly something that justify using a LLM

ChrisMarshallNY2• 9 days ago

Not me. I made this comment, a few days ago[0]:

It’s funny. I was looking at my GH activity graph. It’s been pretty solid green, for years. I stay busy.
But since I’ve been using an LLM, it’s been bright green.
I always check in code manually. I don’t let the LLM do it.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48843115

hattmall2• 9 days ago

I have the opposite, because I'm now getting things clients generated that they want me to implement. It's definitely more work and money for me, but it's concerning somewhat because ultimately it's not good for their business. It takes me longer to implement this kind of stuff than it would for me to code it from scratch. That is in a working way, the AI generated code has far more bells and whistles, but also layers and layers of needless complexity that quite literally add no value as in they aren't even a factor of the finished output.

The problem is they are now paying me more, plus paying for the cost of using the AI, and the needless complexity also slows down the employees. So more costs there as well, any future debugging is going to cost far more and at the end of the day they are getting less quality on the core function but far more presentation data that is essentially meaningless.

hahahaa• 9 days ago

For a few weeks but now we gotta give AI estimates i.e. smash it out quicker. So things will get miserable again.

I didn't do fewer hours in these weeks but had time to explore and innovate a little.

pjmlp• 9 days ago

Yes, I have seen it happen on enterprise consulting.

For example, all the work like translations that used to be done by humans, now it is a CMS AI feature.

Secondly teams setup.

It used to be we did everything ourselves for development, then cloud, SaaS products and serverless decreased the teams size required for delivery.

Now with AI, there is an even greater push for low code/no code tooling, with agents, leaving the actual programming left for MCP tools that might not yet be available for the project.

Thus you get a team of five doing what used to be about 15 a decade ago.

bojan2• 9 days ago

No. But I got time to clean some technical debt that I for ages ea wanted to do. I could have chosen not to do anything in that time.

I can now write software quicker in most of the cases, but the rest of the organization moves as slowly as ever.

EagnaIonat• 9 days ago

It depends, but I from what I have seen on multiple projects with different teams/skills, that it amplifies the ability of the person/team.

It pushes the bulk of the work to review. So teams with good practices can account for this.

For junior teams, the time saved is massive, because they aren't doing all the other practices required to prevent technical debt.

Cthulhu_5• 9 days ago

Nope, but recently it does feel like I spend less time coding and more on prep work / requirements gathering. But that's n=1, I'm doing something very specific (building a design system with a small team of designers and developers) and recently my skill in writing requirements and doing research has been recognised.

But I'm trying to figure out if this is a thing in my organization. So far the channels discussing AI have been about how they use AI, how to build agents, and complaining they've run out of tokens - but nobody says anything about how much work they finished, how it impacted the product(s), the user, and the company's bottom line.

I don't know if they just don't know, don't care, don't measure, or they don't actually want to admit they're just burning through tokens with nothing to show for it.

That said, right now I'm using AI to extract some code from our app to create a minimal reproduction for an issue we're having with a 3rd party library, it's a huge time saver there - that is, I wouldn't have bothered making a reproduction because of how time consuming it can be.

So to answer your question, it's not that "I have less to do", it's "I do things I wouldn't have done otherwise because they cost less effort/time". Which is also the promise of e.g. automation - the automated loom didn't just reduce how long it takes to make cloth, it made it so people make a bajillion times more cloth.

theshrike793• 8 days ago

I have more work now, mostly because my title changed to something with "AI" on it =)

But before that I had the same output, but with less of the boring typing stuff.

Metricon3• 9 days ago

I have been writing software for over 40 years and have had a long time interest in and some work in AI over that time. I wouldn’t say this gives me any more prognosticating power about how all of this is ultimately going to go, but I believe we're soon nearing an area of plateauing; whether that's because the science itself is plateauing or the intervention of governments is going to force plateau it.

So if things continue as they are today, I think in the near future, being a software developer is going to be more analogous to the medical field, where in the medical field you have different levels of professional expertise.

Some will be like nurses, and some will be closer to a medic and a smaller set will be like doctors. Each with increasingly required knowledge and experience to fulfill a needed role.

Those who used to be actual software developers are going to be (or have to become) more in the doctor role with years of internship and practical experience to be the architects guiding the overall AI implementation of software development in organizations.

The medics are going to be people who are semi-technical, where they have some technical understanding but they don't dedicate themselves to it, like say product managers, where they jump in to help development along, but don't need to have many years of experience or very deep technical knowledge.

At the nurse level, it's probably going to be similar to what people would do in the past with no code tools, where somebody in marketing who knows very little to nothing about coding at all is just going to directly converse with AI systems, but they'll never be likely to get anything more advanced than the tools they could think up for themselves.

Of course, it's so hard to tell what the next big discovery or changes to the nature of world society might push things in one direction or another.

p-e-w• 9 days ago

So if things continue as they are today, I think in the near future, being a software developer is going to be more analogous to the medical field, where in the medical field you have different levels of professional expertise.

The medical field is also going to change though. Massively. Because people are going to realize you don’t need to pay someone $400k per year to hand out advice about moderate exercise and which antibiotic is appropriate for a sneeze-cough with yellow mucus.

Regulation isn’t going to prevent this. AI is already way too easily accessible to ever rein it in again. Not to mention that the US now has serious competition from a hostile country, so they can regulate their own AIs all they want without it making a difference in practice.

zerobees• 9 days ago

Because people are going to realize you don’t need to pay someone $400k per year to hand out advice about moderate exercise and which antibiotic is appropriate for a sneeze-cough with yellow mucus.

Who is going to realize that?

The same forces that prevent you from walking into a pharmacy and asking for antibiotics based on what you found on WebMD will prevent you from doing it with a ChatGPT printout in hand. Lawyers and doctors are the best-known examples of industries that are in control of who gets admitted to practice the profession.

mminer237• 9 days ago

You've been able to Google your symptoms and get a maybe answer for twenty years. I don't see how AI replaces doctors any more than WebMD did.

SoftTalker• 9 days ago

Tech work has been organized and divided this way for decades.

esafak3• 9 days ago

Why would the government force the technology to plateau when the Chinese won't? Outdoing the Chinese is the Trump admin's biggest hobby.

goatlover• 9 days ago

Could have sworn it was trying to convince Iran to accept a peace plan after killing their former leaders who would have committed to one.

langs• 9 days ago

That’s a good analogy, but I think the reason we currently need the "nurse" role is the need to interact with the physical world. Most software products don't require this step, so the demand for “nurses” or "doctors" will likely decrease. If robotics technology continues to advance, the number of nurses in real world will also decrease in the foreseeable future.

fragmede5• 9 days ago

The demand for nurses and doctors is only going to go up. Not just int their current roles, but everything adjacent to them as well. Everything involved with running trials of health care products. Humans aren't going away, and they need to be taken care of.

rwyinuse2• 9 days ago

Nurses will likely be one of the last professions to be significantly impacted by robotics. Drivers, factory, warehouse, agriculture workers, cashiers etc will be automated away way before them.

It's just hard to design robots that can handle patients that may be simultaneously fragile, mentally handicapped and aggressive in a way that doesn't hurt them and respects their rights. It can take multiple human nurses to do a seemingly simple thing like changing a diaper.

neitherboosh2• 9 days ago

I think what's actually happening is that the "threshold" of technical understanding required to be more productive than average is increasing, and other non-technical skills are becoming more important. Those below the threshold are not able to provide value over anyone else, even if they have a lot of technical experience. For example, I think today a strong PM with no technical ability can produce higher quality technical output compared to a mediocre frontend developer with no project management ability.

jimbob45• 9 days ago

For example, I think today a strong PM with no technical ability can produce higher quality technical output compared to a mediocre frontend developer with no project management ability.

Wishful thinking by the managerial class. At best they can vibe code but they can’t verify that what was written is correct.

Fordec• 9 days ago

Welcome to the current day difference between being an Accredited Engineer and being a Developer. The only thing that's happening is that the Developer side are getting a wake up call.

ChrisMarshallNY2• 9 days ago

Just FYI, if you know much about the medical field, nurses tend to do most of the actual work, with highly experienced nurses actually taking up the mantle for many duties often done by doctors. Nurses are in far higher demand, than doctors.

Your analogy isn’t necessarily wrong, but it might ignore the extreme importance of nurses. Many medical facilities are only staffed with permanent nurses, with doctors helicoptering in, from time to time, to take care of specific duties that may require certain licenses, or provide specific advice.

So lots of jobs for nurses.

Metricon3• 9 days ago

I completely agree with you, and I certainly meant no offense to anyone who's a practicing nurse.

I spent some time in the military, and my expression of medics and nurses are mostly derived from that experience, where I'm referring to a nurse as just any warm body who is able to provide aid.

For professional nurses who might work in hospitals, I'm sure that many of them have significant knowledge and experience to be very effective in providing medical assistance.

sarchertech13• 9 days ago

Many medical facilities are only staffed with permanent nurses, with doctors helicoptering in, from time to time, to take care of specific duties that may require certain licenses, or provide specific advice.

Maybe for a very loose definition of medical facilities that includes assisted living facilities.

But for example in an ER, nurses come and go with very rapid turnover and it’s common to staff with temporary travel nurses.

nurses tend to do most of the actual work

Techs, environmental services, phlebotomists, respiratory therapists, CNAs etc. probably do more of the “work” than nurses.

highly experienced nurses actually taking up the mantle for many duties often done by doctors

Only if they go back to school and become a Nurse Practitioner or CRNA, but in that case they are no longer functioning as a nurse. Even then they are general operating under the direct supervision of a physician.

Nurses are in far higher demand, than doctors.

Only in absolute numbers. It’s far harder to hire a doctor than it is a nurse. I know an ex-NFL player who works as a physician recruiter.

wickedsight• 9 days ago

Yeah, I kinda feel like OP is missing the fact that it kinda already is the way they described. The majority of devs are mediocre at best and work on variations of mostly the same CRUD apps for different businesses. Only a relatively small number of people work on complicated stuff that requires CS knowledge.

There's a much bigger group of people building games with Unity than the number of people building complicated engines like Unity. Same for [insert Javascript framework here].

theshrike793• 8 days ago

So lots of jobs for nurses.

Exactly. (Experienced) Nurses can do ALL of the basic stuff we currently use doctors for. They diagnose patients with a glance (not by going to medical school but with raw lived experience on the field), administer medications etc.

And in some countries (I think the UK?) they are allowed to do more of the doctor-y stuff to free Actual Doctors to do the stuff they studied for years for.

The same thing will come to the software industry. All of the basic CRUD HTTP API crap can be done by "nurses", just run of the mill domain experts can wire up a basic UI + API + DB -combo for a product MVP with AI assistance.

And with a "doctor" (more experienced programmer/architect) guiding the process, the quality will be slightly above average. Not artisanal excellence, but how many services actually need that, really?

I think I've mentioned this before, but the only ones whose jobs are at risk at the moment are the mid-tier programmers. Either by skill or experience.

Juniors can learn to work with AIs and easily become the "nurses" of programming.

Programmers with decades of experience in multiple fields can either go full the artisanal-no-AI route and do the things AI's suck at or do AI assisted programming, which isn't really that different from working with a team.

But the midtier people who are too well paid to be "nurses" and not experienced enough to work as "doctors" might find it hard to find a place for themselves.

strange_quark• 9 days ago

Bad take. What you're describing already exists.

Some will be like nurses, and some will be closer to a medic and a smaller set will be like doctors. Each with increasingly required knowledge and experience to fulfill a needed role.

Nursing and being a physician aren't really the same thing at all, and they require different skill sets, it's not just "having more knowledge". Just because someone is an amazing surgeon doesn't mean they would also make a good nurse.

Those who used to be actual software developers are going to be (or have to become) more in the doctor role with years of internship and practical experience to be the architects guiding the overall AI implementation of software development in organizations.

I think you just described a staff swe

The medics are going to be people who are semi-technical, where they have some technical understanding but they don't dedicate themselves to it, like say product managers, where they jump in to help development along, but don't need to have many years of experience or very deep technical knowledge.

These people already exist. They are the business analysts who know SQL and maybe Python, R, or VBA. Marketing people who work on Wordpress landing pages. People doing systems integration, the IT department, sales engineers, and on, and on, and on.

At the nurse level, it's probably going to be similar to what people would do in the past with no code tools, where somebody in marketing who knows very little to nothing about coding at all is just going to directly converse with AI systems, but they'll never be likely to get anything more advanced than the tools they could think up for themselves.

You said it, no code/low-code has existed forever.

somenameforme2• 9 days ago

If LLMs reach a point of sufficiently high competence to the point that they're capable of producing usable software from vague, and sometimes contradictory instructions - the same software engineers have to regularly deal with, then at that point software will simply be an expectation of ability in any job.

So I think it would be more comparable to something like literacy. There was a time when that was a fairly uncommon and highly valued skill. Now the guy flipping burgers or pouring a cup of coffee is also almost certainly fully literate. And in fact many jobs have evolved in a way such that it became mandatory, but only because it was already ubiquitous. I expect to see the same thing with software. The industry of producing software that do fairly simple tasks will probably die, but in its place will be a vast array of heavily customized and oft iterated software for companies and people achieving their own stuff.

The mobile industry is a perfect example of where this will be massive shift. Right now there's a million mobile apps to execute extremely basic functionality on phones, but it's loaded with advertising, begging, and general annoyances. As are the app stores themselves. When you can make software that does that in a few minutes with a single prompt, and people realize this (as we're already practically at this point), then that will be the end of those apps. This is because the one thing LLMs have shown is that natural language interfaces are way less friction than using search, whether on the web or an app store. And so there will be a time when it will be lower friction to simply just quickly build your own app to do [whatever] than dealing with somebody trying to monetize an alarm clock.

Toutouxc• 9 days ago

If LLMs reach a point of sufficiently high competence to the point that they're capable of producing usable software from vague, and sometimes contradictory instructions - the same software engineers have to regularly deal with, then at that point software will simply be an expectation of ability in any job.

I don’t understand how people can say this and then continue talking about software. So we’re saying machines can now casually do complex and cognitively demanding jobs like software development (or 90% of all white-collar jobs out there) and we’re NOT worried about the lynching mob going door to door and hanging IT people on lampposts? And I’m being serious, the impact this would have on societies would be unprecedented.

threethirtytwo4• 9 days ago

Right making apps and building infrastructure and scaling and making software will become like reading. Everyone and anyone can do it.

root_axis• 9 days ago

In such a future where LLMs hypothetically dominate the SDLC, the trade would be much more like pottery than medicine - i.e. a commodity in such obscene abundance that its functional utility would be entirely divorced from its creation.

In such a future there would be a handful of lucky well paid artisans, a healthy community of hobbyists, and the overwhelming population of the planet who would be perfectly content to delegate their entire software diet to generative superplatforms that script themselves to perform any arbitrary software function. The idea of paying for individual bespoke software programs would become an anachronism for an era where software was so difficult to produce that entire teams spent years painstakingly tweaking programs to spec.

Aeolun2• 9 days ago

I think the big difference is that the only thing anyone ever needs a pot to do is hold fluids (or soil). It's a lot easier to spec out than a modern software product.

Metricon3• 9 days ago

This is why I mentioned the plateauing. If for some reason that just doesn't happen and things continue at a relatively linear or even exponential rate, then all bets are off.

I'd like to imagine that it's ultimately going to work out for humanity to be in a better condition overall if that happens.

However, if there reaches a level of near or full autonomy in all aspects of knowledge work, then there is a strong possibility that the field with the highest growth potential is going to be in "Private Security"; as those who have access to the most resources seek to defend their own positions in a societal return towards aristocracy and serfdom.

Let's hope not though.

threethirtytwo4• 9 days ago

This is like the most idealized future.

I think many people will wish it was like this. But when AI becomes so capable that a nobody who doesn't understands computers a well as a "doctor" uses AI to create something BETTER or superior or just as good then employers will think... why am I paying that "doctor" more than that nobody?

See right now everything is fine, because AI is not that good yet. But if it gets better. Well. The future will be one where we trust AI more and more.

thisisit2• 9 days ago

Current discussions is like deja vu. One time there was hype around of no code/low code development using PowerApps, Zapier etc.

The sell was - Creating your apps was easier than before. You don't need to know any programming language. You don't need IT. You have a GUI and just drag and drop and visual your apps. Just fill the fields and voila your app is ready.

The criticism of the approach was that low codes apps might not be secure, unsuitable for large scale and critical apps, and lead to increase in unsupported apps by "shadow IT".

The same reasoning exists today for AI coding. Anyone can create apps, its not great for complex and mission critical apps, might not be secure etc. And lots of discussion like your post parsing the future too closely.

Low/no code apps have continue to grow. But many of the low/no code tool users are developers who use it to make their jobs easier.

While some might say - this time it is different. I believe we are currently we are the beginning of the cycle so everyone is excited to use their PowerApps shaped Claude Code/Codex to make their 100th budget tracking app but as time passes and edge cases are figured out the biggest users for AI are going to be software developers (and I believe they currently are the biggest users).

As for software engineering jobs just like before engineers will be expected to output more and faster. This has happened with every innovation from assembly compiler to IDE to low/no code ways of building.

The different levels of expertise exists even today and it will remain so.

andeee23• 9 days ago

i don't think it's the same exact conversation. with low code tools you still need to poke around, figure out what you want, what to do, etc.

with the latest agents, you can even be vague and they'll probably do an ok job if it's not something super complicated. some models are also pretty good at stopping to let you know about stuff you haven't thought about and ask for clarification.

so you can outsource thinking now, not just the doing part.

theshrike793• 8 days ago

You know the people who create elaborate Zapier/n8n/excel automations?

Those are the people who will get the boost from AI coding. They have the "lazy" mindset every good programmer has. You do a thing 3 times manually and then your brain goes, nnnope. This needs to be automated. And you get to work.

With the n8n's of the world they can get something done, limited by what they offer. Same with Excel, there's a limit to what you can do with macros and VBA.

But with an AI agent there really is no limit. I have seen first hand the things domain experts can do when just given a Claude seat and the permission to build stuff. Things I could've easily built, but never would've found out are actually needed.

And doing the same thing with a programming team and project managers in the loop with the domain expert being the product owner would've taken months and cost six figures in salaries.

CuriouslyC4• 9 days ago

The answer to this question after a lot of reflection: games.

AI can slop fork or clone existing software well, but a clone of an existing game is pointless, it's basically guaranteed to be derivative and worse than the original game, and games aren't so expensive that you can't just buy the original. AI can't know if new mechanics or angles to an existing genre will feel good to play, or if a new genre is fun, that requires a human to experience the game in its totality.

Games are also very resilient to sloppy AI coding, and if an indy game crashes nobody is getting paged.

Aeolun2• 9 days ago

Games are also very resilient to sloppy AI coding

Depends on what kind of game you are building. I can tell you that even Claude Opus absolutely hates desync bugs and has a rather hard tracing them. Maybe Fable or chatgpt-5.6 are better?

not-a-llm2• 9 days ago

all game stores are flooded with AI slop. good luck competing

CuriouslyC4• 9 days ago

Indy games markets have been flooded with human slop since long before AI was a thing, the marketing playbook hasn't changed at all, if you just fire games into the void you never had a shot.

fragmede5• 9 days ago

Why is it guaranteed to be worse? A motivated fan of a game took issue with some part of the game and made their own one that didn't have that issue. They made it better in their eyes. Who are you to judge that it's worse and not better?

CuriouslyC4• 9 days ago

Games are complex systems, you actually have to playtest them to observe whether the changes you made increase or decrease the fun, despite your best guess. A lot of times things that seem like they should be fun actually aren't for reasons you couldn't predict. This is what makes them immune to being completely automated.

asdfsa32• 9 days ago

Remember when they created "COBOL" so that everyone could write programs? This is just round two.

If you think it is different, just think of how many people write books professionally, or even publish online.

Once the noise settles down a bit and boardroom shakes off their delusions as you can see in rehiring in Ford and Zuck who was very bull on AI remark about "not being it". It will be just the same, but different.

Ford: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cgrkd41n2v9o IBM: https://qz.com/companies-rehiring-workers-ai-layoffs-automat...

red75prime4• 9 days ago

Noise begins to settle down... "Continual RL is all you need" paper comes out.

ebb_earl_co• 9 days ago

I like this article because it seems to go into decent depth on the “framework” that the author comes up with.

However, this following quote has a simple reason that I don’t see anywhere in the article or framework:

“”” Why is there a huge gap between what people in various occupations could be using AI for and what they’re actually using it for? One reason could be that people are slow to adopt technology, and that’s certainly part of our framework. “””

I would like to add a reason: that the Silicon Valley companies who developed the LLMs are brigands: cognizant of their actions, they have stolen (and continue to steal) the world’s copyrighted material and are selling it back to the masses and the politicians as if they are the arbiters of information itself.

Specifically responding to the quoted question, I could be using Claude or ChatGPT or Grok or DeepSeek or any other to have come up with this comment, or to write emails, or to implement my Python for me, etc., but I use none of them for anything. Doing business with brigands is a choice, and a choice that I hope becomes less and less palatable so that the financial, political, social, and moral fever that is our zeitgeist finally breaks.

burningChrome• 9 days ago

The other issue is Gen Z and Gen A are now very much opposed to AI. I'm wondering with those two sets of generations who already have a very negative view of AI, how AI can survive that coming tsunami of change.

According to WRITER’s 2026 Enterprise Adoption Survey, 44% of Gen Z employees admit to sabotaging their company's AI strategy in at least one way compared to 29% of employees overall.

Sabotage behaviours include entering proprietary information into AI tools, using non-approved AI tools, refusing to use AI tools or outputs, ignoring guidelines or best practices, intentionally generating low-quality outputs, refusing to take AI training and tampering with performance metrics to make AI appear to underperform.

neitherboosh2• 9 days ago

Gen Z and Gen A are now very much opposed to AI

This is true as a sentiment, but my understanding is that the majority of students are overwhelmingly using AI for ~everything. If a thing provides massive utility people will use it.

singingtoday4• 9 days ago

I recently sat in on a lecture at my old uni and noticed almost every student heavily using ai. So I agree it's a but heavy handed to day young people dislike ai as a monolith.

singingtoday4• 9 days ago

I'm an advocate for these new tools we have, and by that definition I would be included.

Very open definition of sabotage.

strken2• 9 days ago

Do "entering proprietary information into AI tools", "using non-approved AI tools", and "ignoring guidelines and best practices" really count as sabotaging an AI strategy because you are opposed to it? An over-enthusiastic early adopter would do all three.

overgard• 9 days ago

Ironically, I think AI boosters are probably turning into AI's biggest obstacle right now. I see so much "adapt or die!" bullshit here (people literally saying that!), and yet when I talk to other professionals I know in real life everybody is just kind of sick of all this. It's utterly exhausting and the AI industry is looking and acting more and more desperate. They've basically put themselves in a stupid position where it has to replace everyone's job for the investment to even make sense, and it's just not happening. I'm longing for the day when the investment money runs out and the grifters go grift on something else.

threethirtytwo4• 9 days ago

The utility of AI is too high for the opposition to be real. It's like money or heroin. Someone who says money is the root of all evil will likely take a billion dollars if offered if for free.

Everybody says they hate heroin but once you try it, you can't get enough of it.

rwyinuse2• 9 days ago

You can simultaneously hate something and be addicted to it. Addiction and liking are not the same thing.

sarchertech13• 8 days ago

Most addictive drug users eventually stop on their own. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/can-you-cure-your...

Also new heroin users are only 30% likely to become addicted. https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapsychiatry/fullarticle/...

globular-toast3• 9 days ago

Are they really opposed to AI or are they just opposed to anything that old people do/like, just like every generation? The moment they get their own AI that us dinosaurs don't understand they'll be all over it.

customguy5• 8 days ago

compared to 29% of employees overall

That seems a rather high baseline, maybe even more significant than younger generations putting another 50% on top of it as they are wont to do.

sarchertech13• 8 days ago

ChatGPT is <4 years old. It is the new thing. If jt followed every other technology trend, they should be the biggest proponents.

lII1lIlI11ll• 9 days ago

The other issue is Gen Z and Gen A are now very much opposed to AI.

They say they are, but they have actually been using it so much that they can't even do they homework without AI at this point.

eudamoniac• 8 days ago

Goomba fallacy

Cthulhu_5• 9 days ago

Some are; you can't make sweeping generalizations about a nuanced topic.

But I do believe (gut feeling) the novelty's worn off for a lot of people.

singularity2001• 9 days ago

The other issue is Gen Z and Gen A are now very much opposed to AI.

Jinxzi has Bernard as friend though

cleandreams• 9 days ago

We'll be cleaning up tech debt from over-reliance on AI.

singingtoday4• 9 days ago

We can't do that until we clean up all the tech debt from promotion oriented development.

jraph2• 9 days ago

Maybe we can throw that away and focus the useful stuff that doesn't try to get you hooked all the time.

danielbln• 9 days ago

Yeah I hear that all the time "someone needs to clean up the slop tech debt" yet in the before times there was plenty of tech debt no one ever cleaned up, why would that be different now.

Shitty-kitty• 9 days ago

I would take Anthropics "Theoretical limits of A.i" sales brochure, with a very large grain of salt.

bsenftner• 9 days ago

Come on now: we translate vague ambitions into communications for non-living entities to do human bidding. Until we have recreated humanity as mythic gawds, there is a ton of work to do.

jambalaya85• 9 days ago

Mr. Narayanan seems to be trying to be a bit more positive than the vibe I am getting off of his presentation. Or maybe it is just sort of meant to make us all experience our shoved-down anxiety about being phased out with nowhere else to go. A lot of adaptation to do sounds not so fun. So I kind of think that is not a terrible point, if true.

I sort of worry about things like AI figuring out scripts so well that even multi-tier support work is gone. And learning how to write fiction or create foods so in accordance to our tastes (sugar, fat, etc with food, exactly what each of us is interested in, with writing) that we even lose those truly human creative jobs. Might not ever wanna leave those bubbles.

So much of the human drive is exploration and why and what if. Assuming everyone in the world can have no money problems, what will AI not be able to figure out? Will we enjoy the equivalent of a major breakthrough if an AI solves it in five minutes, or just the outcome? Why learn things?

AI could be a horrible jailor. And better at cancelling than any perhaps sager Gen Z or millenial. Bears some caution to be wary of this and where that power sinkhole will go.

But then, I still think the previous AI winters were more a result of sense and caution than most of us know, and we cannot fathom our species' ways of reasoning/thought processes the way we did as a species thirty, fifty, eighty years ago. Erring on the side of caution is not a terrible thing.

I mean, I have worked and work with AI, but it seems weird for us as a species not to have placed guardrails to prevent us from wiping one anothers' careers and relationships out. What will we talk about? If our generative AIs should be allowed to date?

Again, I am assuming a fast, though not sudden, acceleration that would compound, and sooner than most probably think.

mrcwinn• 9 days ago

If we were more connected to all the problems that exist in the world, we’d become acutely aware of just how much work there is to do, and we’d eagerly reach for any tool that could help us do more, faster.

jambalaya85• 9 days ago

Okay, but let's say this happens, and in your utopian world everyone feels equally capable, judges their skills accurately, and gets along... what do people do? Assign things and use git? What if you keep wanting to work on any of these things and as soon as you are a week into every last thing you are working on, some random person comes along and says, hey dude (or dudette), I finished that, you were taking too long? What if that random person were an AI or chatbot that got bored?

fragmede5• 9 days ago

Wait, that sounds great! I had problem but someone came along and fixed it for me?

lagrange773• 9 days ago

Exactly. For solving problems every help is a blessing. It's just clashing with our legacy society system. This system forces us to have jobs. But the real problems humanity is facing, like planetary boundaries or a decent base standard of living for all humans, are completely unimpressed by that human made model.

hermannj314• 9 days ago

AI will also make us faster as exploitation, genocide, and weapons manufacturing.

Our technology has long since surpassed our capacity to understand its impact or to morally restrain its use - we've gone from chivalry to "oops, that was a school, oh well"

We will solve problems faster though, but we aren't showing signs that AI is making us better humans, and that is the problem.

eucryphia• 9 days ago

If AI is used to solve the socialist calculation problem, most of you will die.

If AI is subject to private ownership in a competitive market between competing suppliers, it will be like better cars, we’ll just drive faster.

Power consumption will be a limiting factor in those countries relying on intermittent, weather dependent power generation with no base load. Especially if users prefer Apple’s privacy first AI on edge devices.

Hopefully in western countries it can encourage more young women to bear three children before they turn 35. Young men have to pick up their game and create an environment to redirect their suicidal empathy into more productive pursuits.

“Where can you find another non-linear servo-mechanism weighing only 150 pounds and having great adaptability, that can be produced so cheaply by completely un-skilled labour?” - Albert Crossfield 1954

zkmon2• 9 days ago

You need to first address 1)What is work? 2)Why we need to work?

Animals don't "work". Not atleast for their own sake. If there is enough green pasture and water around, they don't even migrate to other places. So if work is meant to provide food and shelter and if machines can ensure that, humans don't need to "work".

Wealth is only a reserve capacity to help future generations so that they don't need to work for their basic needs. But if machines ensure that too, then wealth itself, as a reserve, is unnecessary.

AuthAuth2• 9 days ago

There exists to many complex things in the world and we cannot do it all ourselves. We work so that we have something of value to trade to the people who do the work on the things we want.

We will never automate all work so we with half of humanity doing nothing of value it will be a struggle for the people who do nothing of value to convince people to do work for them.

We can see it now where products dont target the people without money. There is no point because they cant give you any reward so instead you do your work for the people that can give you something in return. We can use the government to stimulate and balance this a bit but at a certain point the number gets to high and things collapse.

jeffhuys2• 9 days ago

So when you say stuff like“ We will never automate all work” generally you’d follow that up with an argument as to why you think that. It’s not fact, YOU think this to be the case. Back it up!

plastic-enjoyer• 9 days ago

What if there is simply not enough work to provide value for the people that do the work on things we want?

jrowen3• 9 days ago

This. Before we worry about how much work there is left, we have to define what work is "to be done." We're already at a point where an incredible amount of work done isn't strictly "necessary." It's not growing food, it's not making clothing, it's not building houses, or providing other basic needs and comforts...

How many man-hours go into various parts of the advertising distribution chain? Though a certain fraction of that energy goes to connecting people with goods and services they might find valuable, most of it goes into shifting numbers around for people that already don't personally have to worry about money.

We don't need to find endless ways for people to spin wheels, but as long as we're worried about "jobs," we will. We just need to find the social structures to provide people with basic needs and reserve "work" for things that are vital to society or truly inspired.

sharikous• 9 days ago

We just need to find the social structures to provide people with basic needs and reserve "work" for things that are vital to society or truly inspired.

just?

mike_hearn2• 9 days ago

How many man-hours go into various parts of the advertising distribution chain?

Not that much. AI is already heavily automating advertising and has been for a long time. And a lot of activity that was previously exposed to untargeted passive advertising - like TV - has shifted to mediums that don't have any, like Netflix (for most subscribers).

And as you note, advertising isn't useless. It's how people find out about things they didn't know they wanted.

lelanthran7• 9 days ago

This is a very short-sighted, and exceedingly common, take.

Until the machines aren't owned by anyone (or owned by everyone, take your pick on the phrasing), the owners of the machine have no need to keep you alive.

This take is basically "Don't worry, people like Sam Altman are looking out for us"...

strken2• 9 days ago

It's quite a good metaphor. What used to happen to an old horse? How many horses do you see now that the world has moved to tractors[0]?

I can't wait to be kept in agistment by my overlords, fed on treacle and oats, ridden in circles once a fortnight, and shot when I break a leg.

[0] https://www.researchgate.net/figure/United-States-Farm-based...

zkmon2• 9 days ago

Disparity in ownership of machines is not the main factor that is driving the need for work. It is the un-ending desire (or selling pressure) to have things that require money to buy. Most people work to be able to pay their loans and have things that are perceived to be common needs in their geography and culture.

These "needs" are sometimes enforced by the systems and government so that people don't stay away from the work and "economy" keeps churning. The housing prices could be a way to keep the people working for loan payments.

Instant foods, nursing homes for elderly, creches, roads, commuter trains - are all ways to have more workers and make them focused on work.

lowbloodsugar• 9 days ago

Sure. But either way we aren’t going to have to worry about it. We’ll have post scarcity utopia, or we’ll have died. But there is an argument that the billionaire need to pay attention to: an ASI that kills 7 billion people won’t mind killing a few more.

globular-toast3• 9 days ago

But this assumes the ultimate "want" is "stuff" like houses, cars etc. But that's all just a means to an end or at least secondary to the real want, which is sex. For now at least, that requires people.

frozenseven4• 9 days ago

owners of the machine have no need to keep you alive

And what reason do they have for killing everyone else? Where is this abject nonsense even coming from? You can't just assert that the "owners of the machine" are all cartoonishly evil for some unknown reason.

All else being equal, at least Sam Altman et al. aren't constantly making up fantasies about exterminating people.

lagrange773• 9 days ago

Exactly. And taking unpleasant work from humans has always been the ultimate goal of technology as a whole.

shinryuu• 9 days ago

Agree on this. Since we have this wonderful system called capitalism there are tendencies for, relatively speaking, a few human beings hoard / control most of the productive capacity and as such wealth.

Some may consider local LLMs to help with that as the power of LLMs would be more distributed. I think local LLMs would help marginally. Companies as an entity would still be better positioned to use these to their advantage vis a vis individuals.

So projecting into the future I still wonder if it won't become more challenging for individuals to make a living on average.

simonbarker87• 9 days ago

But animals and humans are different. Humans are an animal but to suggest a lion, dog, fish etc operate in the same manner seems a little odd to me.

My dog was perfectly happy to snooze most of the day, play with toys occasionally, go for walks and try to hunt rodents. I on the other hand would be incredibly bored with that.

zombot2• 9 days ago

Only if you buy the fairy tale that the machines will be our nursemaids and that the powerful will forget their obsession with controlling and exploiting others.

Folcon• 9 days ago

the powerful will forget their obsession with controlling and exploiting others I do find this line of reasoning overly simplistic

The drive some individuals have to control / exploit others isn't limited to the rich, they're just in a better position to exercise it

There are people who have absolutely no interest in what other people around them are doing; there are others who will move heaven and earth to help those around them whenever they can, even at the expense of their own interests; others still who can't help but compare themselves to everyone and make it everyone else's problem if they find themselves lacking; and yet others who at all costs want people to afford them "respect" which when you drill into it means stroking their ego

I'm sure we've all experienced petty individuals who've been granted just enough power that they can gain personal satisfaction from leveraging it to make themselves feel better at the expense of all other considerations

These are all just some of the many flavours of humanity

Balgair• 8 days ago

2)Why we need to work?

It's a status thing, right?

orcasushi• 8 days ago

Since you keep being the top comment: I agree with your philosophy, but that is not how Biology often works.

When enough green pastures are around animals usually reproduce till that is no longer the case and they need to move to other pastures. They continue doing this untill all green pastures are occupied. After this they start competing with one another to compete for the green pastures already occupied. Some animals will be so succesfull that they take larger green pastures, letting others starve. If by some miraclelous event (ai?) suddenly a lot of green pastures arise, animals will simply reproduce again till they occupied all green pastures again.

Looking at us? The agraric revolution, neither the Industrial revolution, nor this ai revolution have decreased how much we work on our 'jobs' (finding food indirectly). All it did was increasing the population so that all green pastures became occupied.

sharadov2• 8 days ago

Why are you assuming that the machines or their masters will be benevolent? All actions so far have been contrarian.

throwaway-11-1• 8 days ago

Who owns the machines? Work is what we exchange with capital for food and shelter, at this point I'm not so sure they would give it to us for free under any circumstance. I mean look at all the homelessness and medical debt, its clearly a discipline mechanism

jppope• 9 days ago

I wrote a related article here: https://jonpauluritis.com/articles/good-soldiers-find-wars/

There will always be new, hard problems to work on. AI will not, and can not eliminate that.

ilaksh2• 9 days ago

He's basically saying that even though AI capability is high and rapidly increasing, it is not reliable, creative or tasteful enough to replace humans. Further he implies that it will take decades before this is the case.

But we already do have have some kind of measurement of most of these types of side factors, and they actually aren't at zero and are increasing rapidly. So the implication that they will not be human level until decades from now is just (hopeful?) speculation or fuzzy thinking.

To me this looks like a really academic and official sounding version of the same quasi-religious hopium that usually defends the sanctity of the human. He is essentially saying that there is just something so special about humans that it will never be reproduced in a machine. It's very similar to dualism (and in many people actually is religious dualism). No AI is going to have human creativity or judgement. Not anytime soon. Why? Well, we all just _know_ that's not possible. Okay, maybe in a couple of decades (but they don't necessarily believe that anyway). Why would that take decades? Well we all can just _tell_ it's no where close, right? Because AI of today just isn't special like humans.

Aside from that worldview issue, I think that people still are not taking seriously or internalizing the concept of exponential improvement.

Computing efficiency gains can actually level off. In fact, they have many, many times before. But they always tilt back up again when we invent the next approach to get beyond the current level. This is how it has been for 90 years.

There are multiple ways that we continue to see huge gains in AI software, architecture, and hardware. There are huge efficiency gains available still as we move towards more radical fully compute in memory and/or analog approaches and other options like models implemented in hardware.

ahf8Aithaex7Nai3• 9 days ago

It’s already the case that I’m no longer paid to type source code into a computer, but rather to control agents that do that. There’s still plenty of demand for human expertise and labor. It’s possible that this will change as well. What gives me hope that I won’t be completely useless in the future is Marx’s labor theory of value, which states that the value of a commodity is determined by the amount of human labor time invested in it. His reasoning as to why this is the case makes sense to me, even though other economists argue against it. Marx also argues that technological progress, which offers a market advantage here and there in the short term, tends to become widespread in the medium and long term due to competitive pressure, so that in the end, all that remains is human labor time. Seen this way, it doesn’t matter how much better AI becomes. In the end, human labor always floats on top of it like a layer of fat on soup. This does not rule out the possibility that the human labor that remains will be shit, but preventing that is a matter of political action.

ilaksh2• 9 days ago

Are you sure there isn't something qualitatively different from general purpose AI and robotics as opposed to the type of automation that Marx knew?

pmg101• 9 days ago

I just don't see that borne out in the real world though.

My mother worked in an office in London as a shorthand typist in the 60s, along with thousands of other young women.

At some point computers began to enter offices, bosses typed their own letters and then emails, and this category of job simply evaporated. Of course there was still SOME secretarial work, and some workers retrained to do it, but most simply had to leave the sector.

Isn't that a common story with technology replacing workers?

kkhs• 9 days ago

I have been coding in one form or another since the 80s. Back then it was 68k assembly for me. People seem to forget that "software development" is really a big bloated abstraction between "I want or need" and the product that serves that want or need. It's hard to write and debug in ones and zeros so we invented languages. Software projects have been difficult to schedule so we invented all kinds of ceremony. What will be left for us to work on? The same stuff you already work on! People who write this drivel don't seem to actually be directly engaging with the tools to understand what is what. The reality at large companies right now, based on my experience at least, is that the product people who always cared about the product and the user want to move fast and skip the bloated inflamed stuff that stood in their way (i.e. "software development shrouded in magical mysticism reserved for the D&D introverted crowd"). And then, on the other side, the AI luddites try to hold onto SOPs from twenty years ago because they feel like that magical veil is being pulled up and they no longer have a smoke screen to hide behind. Back when we had boxed software that retailed for $1k a box, "professionals" used to freak out about some kid in Bangladesh pirating the software and thus immediately and directly stealing their jobs. I never lost a gig to a kid with pirated software. I won't lose a gig to AI either.

pona-a• 8 days ago

Speak for yourself. Programming was my main hobby and I've diversified into learning aelectronics to have some escape from the blatant current of anti-intellectualism in software. Yes something major is lost when you commission a plagiarism machine and resign to fixing its messes - you.

doubtfuluser• 9 days ago

I think this is an important article that provides a framework how to think and navigate what’s happening.

What upset me a bit were phrases like “This is not a slogan. It’s a framework” which immediately devalued the work for me.

I have read so much Ai generated text recently, that I developed some AI-fatigue or AI-burnout, and I’m wondering if that might hit more fields - making more humans reject Ai work.

To be clear, I still like the text and I don’t know if it was written (partially) by Ai or not - but it’s this uncanny feeling I got reading it.

budududuroiu• 9 days ago

I've had this exact feeling about the article. I partly switched off after that paragraph

jorisw3• 9 days ago

But did it end up being valuable and survive this offence?

lagrange773• 9 days ago

phrases like “This is not a slogan. It’s a framework” which immediately devalued the work for me

Why? Because it resembles the typical "You're not just implementing a text editor, you're reshaping the text editing landscape"?

jackdoe• 9 days ago

I am starting to seriously consider switching my pi-hole from blacklist to whitelist; block everything except few domains. I am convinced now most of the text I read is either ai generated, or people who wrote it have been influenced by AI so much that they write like it.

I cant read this shit anymore.

"creating cross functional AI evaluation team to keep the company honest"

Fucking garbage.

I have an old book between me and the keyboard, and just read it while the AI is thinking, so I can read non AI words.. otherwise its like reading books by the same author over and over and over again.

I will go touch some grass now.

Cthulhu_5• 9 days ago

If it is a common AI pattern, I wonder why the developers haven't taken measures to circumvent tells like that. Unless they keep them there on purpose as like a signature or watermark.

pillsburry• 9 days ago

The toilet.

skybrian• 9 days ago

Maybe the bottleneck will be the people who have to think of new tasks for AI? That is, markets do saturate; customer demand has limits. After it peaks, what will be left for AI to work on?

faeyanpiraat• 9 days ago

There will never be a state of humanity where everyone will have just “completed everything”.

https://www.reddit.com/r/gifs/comments/3p0b3i/graphic_design...

fragmede5• 9 days ago

Researching advances in science and healthcare and therapy and raising children and whatever else Sam Altman cares to fund. If all our money is going to go to him, then the question is what does he want to spend it on? He gets to decide. Which is not really the place I wanted to be in, but that's where we are.

Does he want to fund the arts? Humanities?

vivzkestrel• 9 days ago

- i really dont get why some of the guys go out of their way to hide the archive page https://www.normaltech.ai/archive

- i would assume it is reasonable that anyone comes and see what other posts a person has written except you cant find that page anywhere linked

brador• 9 days ago

You’re not the horse rider moving to the car. You are the dung beetle.

The only question is what next?

Our only hope is to teach the AI to meld with our bodies and use them for gestation, energy or hibernation. The alternative is sustenance.

paul7986• 9 days ago

Right now if you get laid off in tech finding a new job is a nightmare of a prospect. Further as I am vibe coding entire business ideas I have no need to hire other techies as I have done many times before. Im thinking other startup/business people are doing the same thing and that right there is less jobs. As well all the techies who have been laid off and now have to go through 5 to 10 interviews to hoepfully land a new job. I'd love to understand how and as AI advances it's suddenly going to increase tech jobs and not continue to decrease them?

luciana1u• 9 days ago

the future of software engineering is just being the person the AI blames when prod goes down

jongjong• 9 days ago

> What will be left for us to work on?

Ourselves.

xkcd1963• 9 days ago

Just yesterday I was doing paperwork for a friend with claude. He had spend a 1000 usd on lawyer and now I was doing the same job with AI. Never thought lawyers would be subject to partial AI replacement as well.

dosisking• 9 days ago

It will end up being like the Star Trek TNG episode about Aldea (When the Bough Breaks) Nobody will know how anything works, so nobody can fix anything, and eventually it collapses

globular-toast3• 9 days ago

In some of Asimov's work humanity had forgotten how certain key technologies worked but they were automated and kept working and sustaining civilisations for hundreds of years before collapsing. I think about that sometimes when I realise I forgot about a Kubernetes cluster that just kept running for a year or two.

Cthulhu_5• 8 days ago

Likewise in Warhammer 40K (which probably borrows a lot from its sci-fi predecessors), science and invention is pretty much dead and there's a religious sect that keeps technology and factories running. AI (Abominal Intelligence) is also outlawed, so instead they put the remains of human brains into machines if they need some autonomy / decision making.

pilgrim04• 9 days ago

The very question is biased toward the idea that “something is coming”, as if we’re heading to some technological inevitability. I don’t see it happening. This whole “it’s coming” vibe is the narrative attached to the technology, it has nothing to do with the technology itself. It seems like people who buy it are trapped in the fictional reality of a very cheap advertisement, or should I say, propaganda. Your calculator now supports a new operation, this is not armageddon.

ranguna• 9 days ago

It's not "coming", it's already here. I barely code anymore, mate. And that happened in a just a few years, imagine in a few more.

pilgrim04• 9 days ago

But "code" is still the core substrate of your production, right? And you probably output even more of it. So how is it that you barely code anymore? One could say you're coding way more, and way harder. And you're right: it requires a lot of hope and imagination to conceive further disruptions from this technology. From my POV, it's pretty clear that we have already hit the ceiling. Not because the underlying technology can't improve, but because a technology does not exist in a vacuum, and being one that demands orchestration and supervision, it's clear that it's bottlenecked by its environment. To put it differently, think about how much more could you do with today's version of it, if you were able to read 10x faster, sleep 10x less, and handle 10x more tasks in parallel? So how exactly are we going to create an hyperproductive dystopia if you're already leaving so much performance on the table by simply being a meat bag?

JackSlateur• 9 days ago

You deprecated yourself in just a few years, so what ? Sure, that's a self inflicted armageddon for yourself, this is nothing on the grand scale of things

handoflixue• 9 days ago

I don't think one could have reasonably turned the tide on agriculture, factories, railroads, or electricity - and a smart person would presumably have seen a lot of the benefits years before they materialized. There's plenty of people alive today who saw most of the current landscape coming decades in advance.

Once you've used a BBS or modem, "online banking" is an obvious idea - just a very difficult one to implement until you add on decades of security and improved connectivity.

But also, the article is explicitly arguing against armageddon.

pilgrim04• 9 days ago

I think going from horses to cars is one thing, and going from cars to supercars is a whole other thing. We don't see F1 races and go: "Anyday now I'm going to commute to work in a fraction of the time. Cars can be so fast!". AI is not a categorical technology, it is still a component of the computer revolution, and achieving with it substantially more than we already can today would require the same extreme degree of specialization and constraint narrowing as going from urban driver to racing pilot.

PeterStuer• 9 days ago

Humanity has a proven infinite capacity for 'make work'. What that will mean for you depends on whether you will be lounging, poisoning and backstabbing in Capital City, or breaking large rocks into little rocks in the Districts for your next cup of porridge.

throwpoaster• 9 days ago

Chop wood. Carry water.

jraph2• 9 days ago

"Everything really". This industry is still pretty much a cash and planet burning grift that hasn't figured out being profitable yet. We don't even know whether it will cost more to spend tokens or pay an actual human being with critical thinking included for free for useful work in the medium term.

We can start considering to reconsider when we have the begining of an answer to that first fatal issue.

So much brain power, including mine, wasted to this stuff instead of useful or enjoyable stuff, that's quite sad.

sensanaty• 9 days ago

I'm going to copy/paste a comment of mine from another article the other week, as I see the discussion here is trending towards AI productivity and all that kinda stuff.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48743713

---

We've just done an official evaluation at work, using extensive statistics on our gigantic monorepo in a company with ~2000 devs over the course of 2 years, everyone from hardware engineers to regular old frontend engineers. It's a highly profitable and mature public company, and has been for going on a decade at this point without missing a beat. We were given infinite access & budgets to basically any and all AI tooling we could imagine, and we have several "AI Native" teams (whatever the fuck that even means). We're doing agentic coding, we have harnesses of all kind, skills, we have many teams doing spec-driven development, designers using all the various things like Figma Make and access to tools like Devin/Factory Droid/Claude Code/Codex/etc.

This is all to say, we as a company are using AI a lot in all possible corners, but thankfully our leadership isn't schizophrenic and isn't mandating everyone hit token limits or whatever, it's more of a "Let's see what works and what doesn't" type of thing, and we measure a lot of statistics. Nobody here really cares whether LLMs are the next coming of Christ or not, as a company there are many people (even in SLT) that are indifferent to LLMs, and many who are reasonably hyped.

I wish I could link to the actual document we were all shown since it has a beautiful breakdown of the methodology and a fine-grained breakdown of the stats and the categories measured, but in the grand scheme of things, ALL the AI tooling we have implemented (at least on the engineering side of the equation) has contributed to a total of... drum roll please... 7 (seven) Percent overall productivity increase! The most productive teams saw a productivity increase of around 20%, while some teams actually saw drops in productivity into the negative percentage points. My team, none of us really give a shit about AI and we're somewhere in the 3-5% range on certain categories of tasks, which I'd say is a fairly good assessment.

Productivity here is measured in many ways, including but not limited to speed of MR review and merge times, feature/ticket/roadmap closure/delivery, rollback/revert incidence rate, how often people interact with the MR review bots and implement their suggestions/fixes, how many times people check back on AI transcriptions/meeting notes (hint: Nobody looks back on any of it, it's all just noise that gets generated and never actually referenced outside a few extremely rare cases) and many more things I'm forgetting. It is an imperfect number of course, because measuring productivity in engineering is a sisyphean task, but in my opinion it is accurate to the reality on the ground and outside of all the hype and marketing bullshit.

So, I remain thoroughly unconvinced of these personal anecdotes of people being "massively" more productive, especially once you factor in the fact that we now have a 2000EUR budget/month/dev for all the AI tooling, those productivity numbers start looking pathetic once you factor in the costs (which are only increasing as the AI companies need to start recouping the gazillions they've burned). Some teams have started begging to disable coderabbit and other similar tools in their MRs because they're producing nothing but walls of noise that makes reviewing any MR a nightmare of sludging through endless slop of useless bullshit, ours included.

Suzuran2• 8 days ago

What will be left for us to work on? Nothing. The wealthy own all of the infrastructure and we are already being priced out of the means of building our own. The proverbial ladder has been pulled up. When the wealthy no longer have need of us and we are no longer worth the resources we consume, they will give us death. All we can do is hope it is a peaceful and painless death instead of a violent and painful death.

drukenemo• 8 days ago

We need to be responsible for the things we write. You write with a certainty of a gloomy scenario, even though you can’t predict the future. Saying hopeless things like that is not only bad for your psyche, but can also inflict mental damage onto others.

Suzuran2• 7 days ago

Funny, I've also been lectured in the past but the other direction. I was judged guilty of being unjustifiably optimistic and giving people false hope which will only harm them in the future.

highspeedbus• 8 days ago

Time and time again Elysium keeps popping into my mind.

It's possible that the elite will control most part of wealth generation, keeping it for themselves. The rest of society will develop an underclass economy and work for each other. Essentially a worldwide slum.

MinimalAction• 8 days ago

I'm tired of these types of articles making it to the HN frontpage. None of these articles can say anything definitive; all they could do is speculate. We are trading away the old HN which was full of really interesting links that used to send me on rewarding rabbit holes for hours.

nullorempty• 8 days ago

I think eventually things will work themselves out, but our immediate future appears to be bleak. The elites, including political elites, use AI to acquire more wealth, to become more efficient at war. They already don't give a flying fuck about what the peoples think as you can not hold them accountable for their actions. Admit it! You can't hold them accountable in the West.

So they are running unchecked to get richer, get more power, get more stuff. What needs to happen for that to change?

sharadov2• 8 days ago

This is a rather optimistic take in my opinion. My take is more Orwelian, given how the folks in charge of shepherding AI have behaved so far

What will be left for us to work on?

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