[HN Gopher] Has the decline of knowledge work begun?
___________________________________________________________________
Has the decline of knowledge work begun?
Author : pseudolus
Score : 94 points
Date : 2025-03-25 17:02 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.nytimes.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.nytimes.com)
| fullshark wrote:
| Bachelor Degrees need a complete rethink, it was basically
| modified finishing school for rich capital owners, needing to
| make their children of proper class before they could take over
| their businesses.
|
| It then became a vocational degree for the working class, despite
| being completely detached from useful skills for a wide swathes
| of degrees. The only value is that you could talk the talk and
| become a member of the professional managerial class if you
| impressed the right hiring committee/individual.
|
| In spite of this, we decided the working class should take out
| crippling loans to pay for this degree, and be in debt for the
| rest of their working life.
|
| It's not sustainable, and just forgiving the debt only will make
| it all more expensive and less aligned with actual results we
| desire (useful workers).
| dkkergoog wrote:
| Education can't be standardized because business is not
| standardized. It's about relationships and every shop does
| things their own way. Teachers should just go contract and
| provide their own courses. The degree is really can't designate
| what the person knows.
| kelseyfrog wrote:
| That's right. Education should be universalized, not
| standardized.
|
| The commodification of education will eventually make it
| useless. Universal, bespoke education is the ideal, but it's
| usually prohibitively expensive.
| bluGill wrote:
| I strongly disagree. Commodification of education is very
| important. I want everyone to have the commodity reading
| writing arithmetic education. It might be faster for the
| student to give one on one teaching, but everyone needs
| this and I want it such a commodity that we give it to even
| the poorest "third world" kids who have nothing.
|
| As you get beyond those basics you have to become an expert
| in something that there are few experts in. McDonald's
| success is mostly based on their ability to take you from
| zero to a productive crew member fast. It takes many years
| to make a brain surgeon, in large part because we haven't
| commodified it - if we needed more we should (but since the
| world doesn't really need many it isn't worth it)
| kelseyfrog wrote:
| Commodification denies a universal pedagogy. We've known
| this since the 1970s.
|
| If you want a system that appeals to a plurality, and
| leaves the rest behind, commodification will deliver just
| that.
| bluGill wrote:
| There is a lot of value to standardizing things though. Most
| of what people need to learn is standard. 2+2, i before e...
| There is the more nebulous step of can you solve problems,
| but even that is taught at the lower levels in a standard
| way.
|
| Eventually you get to a level where the answer hasn't been
| taught much and so there is no standard, but that only
| happens late in your education.
|
| Of course education itself needs more research. "learning
| styles" was debunked last I heard, but is there some
| variation that says some people need different teaching? Is
| there a better way to teach things? However if you are not
| involved in this research you should be teaching in standard
| ways that have been proven to work.
| a2tech wrote:
| I before e isn't even standard.
| whateveracct wrote:
| This is a bit black and white. Or maybe just cynical :)
|
| It's inarguable that bachelor's degrees had real vocational
| utility in the last few decades (despite the memes).
|
| A variety of degrees from a state school (with in-state
| tuition) would lead to good, white collar employement along
| with modest loans (if any) so there was clear ROI.
| borntoolate wrote:
| Maybe lower education should just have a different schedule
| with other activity years? I'm not particularly impressed with
| the average American's ability to be a positive element of
| society and despite all the problems, I think liberal arts
| students are probably better than the rest when considered over
| their lifetime. But why should each individual take loans to
| have the critical thinking to vote in the interest of larger
| institutions?
| JamesBarney wrote:
| Does liberal arts teach critical thinking? Do students who
| study liberal arts vs a mathematics/engineering show greater
| improvements on critical thinking tests?
|
| I get the idea we want a more educated population that can
| better make decisions. But the biggest way the populace makes
| poor decisions is they are economically illiterate, and they
| don't really understand how the government works. We should
| probably spend more time teaching this in high school and a
| typical degree spends very little time teaching these
| subjects.
| fzeroracer wrote:
| The populace making poor decisions isn't just economically
| illiterate, they are increasingly fundamentally illiterate.
| Teaching economic literacy in school won't matter one bit
| when an increasing number of people are graduating unable
| to read even at a basic level.
|
| But in order to solve this problem you would have to
| overhaul our educational system and right now we have a
| party invested in destroying it so that it produces voters
| more aligned with their groupthink.
| KPGv2 wrote:
| > despite being completely detached from useful skills for a
| wide swathes of degrees
|
| It's a nice suggestion, but it's one that isn't supported by
| the evidence. Even controlling for other factors, a college
| degree makes more productive workers. And given that it's
| controlling for other factors, "selection bias" becomes a hard
| argument to make. STEMbros get real arrogant about their
| degrees (I have one; I've seen it first hand), but like it or
| not the person with an English degree still learned a lot of
| useful skills.
|
| Going to uni to major in a specific career is how you get
| screwed when available careers change.
| HPsquared wrote:
| I don't think there is any doubt spending 4 years studying a
| subject will increase skills in some areas. The question is
| whether the benefits are worth the cost (and that question
| applies both to the individual student and society as a
| whole).
|
| Remember the cost of all this is absolutely massive. Mostly
| the 4 years of lost time.
| 18766hahsbc767 wrote:
| It doesn't have to be though. In Europe the vast majority
| of people attend public universities that don't require
| having to end up with a degree and crippling debt.
|
| I left uni almost 20 years ago, but one year of my tuition
| was about 1000USD at the time, something I could easily
| afford with a part time job. I'm sure the cost is higher
| now, but I would have thought it is still orders of
| magnitude cheaper than in the UK or the US. Germany
| subsidizes university tuition fees for a huge percentage of
| students, and adds a monthly stipend for expenses and free
| public transport while enrolled in uni.
|
| Your point is valid, challenging the worth/cost of higher
| education. But I think it is the cost part what is broken
| in some parts of the world, not necessarily the worth part.
| wat10000 wrote:
| The cost is there regardless. If the ROI is negative then
| it's making somebody worse off even if the state is
| paying for it. If the state pays, it's even worse,
| because people may take the option based on a positive
| ROI for themselves while it's overall negative. If the
| ROI is positive but people aren't taking advantage
| because of the cost to themselves, then you want to look
| at subsidies.
| delusional wrote:
| Sometimes "ROI" isn't measurable. What's the "ROI" of a
| well rounded populus that gets along and doesn't want to
| kill each other? What's the "ROI" of creating beautiful
| works of art, or producing great culture? What's the
| "ROI" of happiness?
|
| Sometimes the purpose of central government is to make a
| negative ROI into a positive one, because there are
| greater purpose than the return
| wat10000 wrote:
| It may not be measurable but we still need to think about
| it and do our best to figure out what things cost more
| than the benefits they provide.
| bobthepanda wrote:
| I mean we can reform it without necessarily throwing out
| the baby with the bathwater. In Europe a bachelor's can
| often take 3 years, and maybe we can even shrink it down to
| 2 years; this is already kind of a thing in the US with
| some schools offering a 5 year bachelor+master's program.
|
| Realistically maybe we reform community college to be the
| required thing instead of traditional undergrad, since the
| cost and length is more comparable.
| monknomo wrote:
| associate degrees exist
| bobthepanda wrote:
| they exist, but at least employers do not seem to think
| they currently cover enough to accept them in lieu of a
| bachelor's.
|
| in fact i would say I don't know how much additional
| value an associates' holds in that context, and maybe we
| just merge the two concepts. I haven't ever really seen a
| posting that is okay with just an associate's.
| JamesBarney wrote:
| > Even controlling for other factors, a college degree makes
| more productive workers
|
| I'd like to see this study. Most of the data I've seen that
| is pro-college still has massive confounds.
|
| Two twins graduate high school. One gets a crappy copywriting
| job, and spends her free time reading books on how to write
| better, and specifically how to do copywriting. The other
| gets an English degree. I'm not nearly as confident as you
| are the one with the English degree is going to be a better
| copywriter.
|
| I don't disagree you can learn skills, but cognitive science
| literature solidly shows far transfer is not a thing, and
| when it is it's incredibly inefficient. i.e. Reading the
| great works of Russian literature might make you a better
| copywriter but at a vastly slower pace than writing copy, or
| reading a book on copywriting.
| Clubber wrote:
| I think an undervalued aspect of college over self learning
| for most is that college requires you to learn a broader
| array of things. If I was allowed just pick the classes I
| wanted to take for four years, they would have all been
| computer related classes. I would never had taken
| Chemistry, Physics, Drama, Psychology, History,
| International Relations, or anything that makes me a more
| educated and well rounded thinker.
| JamesBarney wrote:
| We look at that positively becomes it's a sunk cost, but
| if someone were to put the circumstances in front of us
| would we still be happy about it?
|
| If your job told you that you had to pay 10k to study
| French poetry for 6 months without pay, would you happy
| for the opportunity to a more well rounded thinker?
| Clubber wrote:
| >If your job told you that you had to pay 10k to study
| French poetry for 6 months without pay, would you happy
| for the opportunity to a more well rounded thinker?
|
| That's unrealistic. 1. That's just one
| subject. 2. Semesters and/or quarters are not 6
| months. 3. Most colleges don't charge $10K for one
| subject for 6 months.
|
| Having said all that, yes there were some annoying class
| requirements that I didn't particularly care for, but I
| still learned something from it. If nothing else, it
| allowed me to have more conversations with a broader
| array of people. Make no mistake, being an educated
| conversationalist impresses people. Being able to
| intelligently converse with more people because of a
| broader knowledge base has significant social and
| economic value. Imagine if you met your perfect mate by
| being able to talk about French poetry. Imagine your
| perfect company has a hiring manager who also loves
| French poetry. We are ultimately social creatures.
| tayo42 wrote:
| 15 years later do you think these classes matter?
|
| Im not totally sure I could tell you most of what I even
| took let alone what I learned in those classes.
|
| Maybe right after college there's a window of a couple
| years.
| NoMoreNicksLeft wrote:
| >It then became a vocational degree for the working class,
|
| This may have been _some_ policymakers ' intent, but it never
| really became that. Universities and colleges resisted being
| seen as mere vocational schools, and refused to modify
| curricula for that purpose. You'd see all sorts of academic
| arguments about how teaching them to do a job would be wrong,
| that they should still be teaching them to "think" and have
| heavy course loads of liberal arts.
|
| So parents and guidance counselors may have thought of it as
| vocational school, while getting the high-class university
| experience (as best someone of middling academic achievement
| can manage that) along with the high-class university tuition
| bills. Well, the guidance counselors didn't get the bills. Nor,
| in many cases, the parents.
|
| >It's not sustainable, and just forgiving the debt only will
| make it
|
| It's ok. We don't have to sustain it. The demographic implosion
| is well under way. We are at the point where elementary schools
| are closing (and everyone's making up excuses for this, so we
| can pretend that it's for any other reason than a demographic
| implosion).
|
| >and less aligned with actual results we desire (useful
| workers).
|
| At any point in history, most of the output from workers went
| (indirectly) back to the workers. If 98% of the workforce did
| agricultural work, this was because 98% or nearly enough of 98%
| of food was needed to feed those workers. Same for any product,
| no matter how tangible or abstract. Sure, there are
| exceptions... if people worked in a diamond mine it wasn't so
| diamonds would go to diamond miners.
|
| If they don't need workers for the relatively small amount of
| food that is consumed by some small group, if they don't need
| workers for making garments (or building buildings, or any
| other thing) for the relatively amount of those products
| consumed by some small group, then they don't much need useful
| workers at all. Most of humanity is obsolete, or at least would
| be considered so if you belonged to a small group like that.
| ransom1538 wrote:
| Well, these days you will need a non repetitive physical skill.
| ER doctor, electrician, comedy tour guide, painter, etc. If
| your job required you to sit in front of a computer, your job
| will be the first eliminated. Humans are quite cheap for
| physical labor compared to a full humanoid drone. Software
| costs are about to go to zero. Bachelors degrees would turn
| more into guilds.
| jltsiren wrote:
| The liberal arts model was intended for the elites, and the
| idea of education as means of producing useful workers is
| straight from a totalitarian planned economy. But there is also
| the Humboldtian model of higher education, which focuses on
| educating informed citizens who are free to make their own
| choices. Learning vocational skills is easy enough if you have
| good education, and it's also necessary to be able to do that
| outside school, as careers rarely last a lifetime.
|
| American higher education is expensive, because you chose to
| defund public universities. And because you have an unhealthy
| obsession with rankings and top universities. Those are the
| things you need to change more than education itself.
| jselysianeagle wrote:
| > American higher education is expensive, because you chose
| to defund public universities. And because you have an
| unhealthy obsession with rankings and top universities. Those
| are the things you need to change more than education itself.
|
| There's this and also the massive budgets for college sports
| and fancy student housing that make it worse.
| gruez wrote:
| >the idea of education as means of producing useful workers
| is straight from a totalitarian planned economy
|
| ???
| delusional wrote:
| It's a worldview that necessitates only teaching what leads
| to a job. It is anti beauty and anti human.
|
| We are not machines of production. We are human beings, we
| deserve to learn stuff that doesn't help us produce.
| chermi wrote:
| Another reason they're expensive is because the government
| basically guarantees they'll pay for whatever tuition the
| universities set, so they raise prices. There's lot of other
| factors, including administrative bloat, and maybe partially
| from less funding... But they're still funded in large part
| by the government via loans. I don't know the right answer,
| but I know it's not simply more government funding.
| AtomBalm wrote:
| Now that we have AI tutors that cost <$1/Mtok, why not do on-
| demand standardized testing for academic credentials and
| eliminate compulsory (dejure or defacto) education beyond
| working age. Universities can focus on research, and normal
| people get off the credentialism treadmill or focus on as-
| needed training at minimal cost. Need the social environment?
| Libraries or community centers can lend vacant space for
| "college" classrooms.
|
| Everyone wins, right? You know, except university
| administrators and lenders.
| poincaredisk wrote:
| Great, let's make the average person even dumber. Or rather:
| dumb again. Universal education is a big win of the modern
| times and you want to destroy that for on-demand job
| training? Mass producing replaceable workers should not be
| humanity's goal.
| MITSardine wrote:
| Or is it not a more recent trend that people should educate
| themselves, rather than an employer doing that? Internships
| have become very short and secondary, when they used to be the
| main vocational training. It's curious that this has remained
| only at the two ends of theoretical studies: artisanship and
| scientific research (PhDs). Otherwise, job training has become
| the employee and, where university is public, society's burden.
| Maybe it's employers that need a complete rethink, not so much
| universities?
| neonate wrote:
| https://archive.ph/59uSH
| bryanlarsen wrote:
| At least for the moment, AI still needs knowledge workers to spec
| and prompt and check. AI makes knowledge workers more productive,
| but it doesn't eliminate the need for them.
|
| And if knowledge workers are more productive, then knowledge work
| is cheaper. Cheaper knowledge work increases demand for knowledge
| work. So the number of workers required might actually increase.
| It also might not, but first order analysis that assumes
| decreased knowledge workers is not sufficient.
|
| C.f. garment makers. Partial automation of clothes making made
| clothes cheaper, so now people have closets full of hundreds of
| garments rather than the 2 sets our great-grandparents likely
| had. There are now more people making garments now than there was
| 100 years ago.
| bitxbitxbitcoin wrote:
| I wonder how the ratio of people making garments relative to
| the total world population has changed though in this example.
| bryanlarsen wrote:
| No easy answer since most garments > 100 years ago were home-
| made. But I can confidently assert without data that the
| number of man-hours of labor in the average closet is
| substantially up.
|
| garment makers chosen because of this recent discussion:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43450515
| MITSardine wrote:
| How can you be so sure?
|
| I found this document: https://web.archive.org/web/20210126
| 040017/https://ribevikin... It asks the question "How long
| would it take to make a Viborg shirt?". The answer seems to
| be 354 hours per their experiments. This is from seed to
| shirt. (linen)
|
| I'd be surprised if we had that many man-hours, let alone 3
| or 4 times that (this is a single piece of clothing), in
| our wardrobes. Conservatively assuming a man-hour in the
| wardrobe costs us $5 (while people are often paid less,
| their salaries are also but one expense), you'd need at
| least around $1500 to equal just that shirt.
| bryanlarsen wrote:
| I'm talking 100 years ago, not 1000. We've had mechanized
| fabric production for > 300 years.
|
| From your document, weaving and spinning are > 85% of the
| labor in your shirt. Those would be almost 0% for a shirt
| made 100 years ago. And those wouldn't be the only steps
| mechanized 100 years ago.
| watwut wrote:
| 100 years ago is 1925 - people were already buying cloth in
| stores at that time. You need to go further into history.
| bobthepanda wrote:
| the more obvious recent example is that we employ more bank
| tellers than we did before the ATM, because the ATM reduced
| the amount of labor hours needed to operate a bank branch and
| made a lot of marginal bank branches pencil out.
|
| Only the recent trend of online banking services is really
| actually turning this around.
| gopalv wrote:
| > Cheaper knowledge work increases demand for knowledge work.
|
| This is Jevon's paradox.
|
| > So the number of workers required might actually increase.
|
| The increased demand for work turning into new jobs for
| existing workers, that is where the question is more complex.
|
| This has gone the other way too in matters of muscle - people
| who wouldn't have been employed before can now be hired to do
| an existing task.
|
| When you go from pulling shopping carts to an electrical
| machine that pulls carts for you, now you can hire a 60 year
| old to pull carts in the parking lot where previously that job
| would be filled by teens.
|
| This is all a toss-up right now.
|
| In an ideal world, I will be paying less for the same amount of
| knowledge work in the future, but as a worker I might get paid
| more for the same hours I spend at work.
|
| My hours are limited, but my output is less limited than
| before.
| fabfoe wrote:
| It's actually the Jevons paradox, non possessive, named for
| William Stanley Jevons. I thought it was possessive too
| because many people write it that way.
| MoonGhost wrote:
| According to this cheap food is good because people just start
| eating more. Actually cheap imports can be really bad for local
| businesses.
|
| Now imagine dystopian world where AI can solve most data /
| engineering / science problems for cheap. Or even for free,
| just ask.
| delusional wrote:
| AI working isn't the dystopian option. Imagine AI can do none
| of those things, but the people who control the capital
| believe they can.
|
| That's the dystopia.
| zombiwoof wrote:
| Free after it took a trillion in energy to train
| mystified5016 wrote:
| How much time, energy, and resources went into developing
| your language of choice? How much datacenter energy is
| burned recompiling GCC every night for the last 30 years?
| 7qW24A wrote:
| Corporations that over-hired over the past 10 years needed an
| excuse to cut the layers of fat and bureaucracy out, and AI came
| along at just the right time. It doesn't matter if AI is
| increasing productivity; what matters is that people think it
| might be.
| bee_rider wrote:
| Maybe...
|
| I dunno. Anyone who's been at a big company (the kind that are
| inclined to over-hire) can attest to the massive population of
| folks who don't seem to have any productive job. Does AI spell
| doom for those people? I have no idea, their job wasn't to be
| productive in the first place. Being a warm body to expand the
| size of some middle managers fiefdom--that is not a job that
| can be taken by AI, right?
|
| I guess maybe just engineering jobs are on the chopping block.
| Doomed, by the nature of their productivity actually being
| tangible, to be replaced by an AI that does their job worse.
| mrweasel wrote:
| > Being a warm body to expand the size of some middle
| managers fiefdom--that is not a job that can be taken by AI,
| right?
|
| If you over-hired and now need to layoff people, because
| founding and cheap loans aren't available, then AI provides a
| convenient excuse. You don't have to admit that you paid
| people to do nothing/very little for the last ten year.
| mywittyname wrote:
| Maybe in '23 & '24 that argument made sense. But presumably the
| past two years they've spent laying everyone off has been
| enough to trim the fat.
|
| Honestly, any company that's still laying off people that they
| "overhired" during the pandemic needs to take a hard look at
| their leadership teams, because they've had _ample_ opportunity
| to be rid of such people.
| riku_iki wrote:
| The problem is that overhired personal created lots of extra
| process/org/code/infra complexity, so just by firing X% of
| people may produce significant damage because rest won't be
| able to handle that extra complexity or have enough
| institutional knowledge.
| carabiner wrote:
| If you look at fields like mechanical engineering, no, it hasn't,
| because there isn't much training data for that type of work
| available on the internet. (CAD isn't engineering.) It's locked
| up in corporations like Ford, SpaceX, Toyota. There isn't open
| source mechanical analysis work available at a professional
| level, which might be an FEA output that references 5 messy
| spreadsheets that gets written up in a 20 page report with
| charts, and that references 20 other internal docs, specs. And
| every company does analysis differently so I'm not sure you could
| adequately train a model that can generalize it well.
| mywittyname wrote:
| I think this is a flawed outlook.
|
| My wife works in healthcare and they just announced that AI
| would generate 50% of their documents. According to my wife,
| every in every review she's done of the work, there are
| critical errors in logic or reasoning (hallucinations), but
| leadership doesn't care because they a "grading" the AI on
| things like grammar and spelling. So, yay, it spelled
| "fusospirochetosis" correctly, but unfortunately it attributed
| that to a 23 year old woman who came in for a broken arm.
|
| I think we need to be prepared for "vibe coding" taking over
| every industry. Leadership is going to blindly implement broken
| AI to replace workers.
|
| Now, you might think that threat of lawsuits, regulations, and
| ethics standards will save your industry. And maybe that's
| true, but I personally don't think so. I personally think we
| are going to see country-scale enshitification of everything as
| lazy people use AI to generate everything which is then
| reviewed by lazy people who also use AI to review everything
| and no one notices or cares until it's too late (and maybe not
| even then).
|
| I hope you're right, but I'm not convinced.
| mrweasel wrote:
| > I personally think we are going to see country-scale
| enshitification of everything as lazy people use AI to
| generate everything which is then reviewed by lazy people who
| also use AI to review everything and no one notices or cares
| until it's too late
|
| Sound about right to me. A large quantity of documentation is
| written solely to be written, not read. If it's your job to
| write reports, article, memos, whatever, and you deep down
| know that this isn't being read, then why not have to AI do
| it?
|
| I think that we're producing way to many
| documents/reports/content in general and we need to slow
| down. Humans can't keep up, neither on the production side,
| nor the consumption, so we employ computers to "help", but
| it's all busy work.
| eulers_secret wrote:
| This reminds me of my first internship, I was running a
| test suite and filling out a web form every week. It was
| never mentioned in any meetings or other comms.
|
| After about 3 months of doing this, I asked my manager why
| I was doing this if no-one cared or noticed. He told me to
| stop and see if anyone said something. I stopped, interned
| another 15 months and it wasn't ever mentioned.
|
| Hell of a lesson to learn as a newbie
| thechao wrote:
| Idiocracy was supposed to be _funny_ , not _terrifying_.
| carabiner wrote:
| Profit and a competitive market are powerful incentives that
| keep people from dying in the industry of human transport,
| that don't exist as much in hospitals. Also, if you think
| "threat of lawsuits, regulations, and ethics standards" don't
| encourage safe cars or airplanes currently, what do you think
| does? In engineering currently there are 1,000 ways to cheat
| (and sometimes they do, like Volkswagen dieselgate), but
| reports are _actually checked rigorously multiple times_ by
| other engineers at a company and by federal regulators (who
| are also engineers). Things get rejected and changed based on
| these reviews. Why would AI engineering make this different?
|
| If AI could cause a fiasco on the level of Toyota's
| unintended acceleration debacle from 2008, which caused the
| largest auto recall in history, that is something that would
| give pause to using AI, no? If AI leads to bad products that
| kill people, companies will lose money and they will not want
| to use AI.
| pianoben wrote:
| "Medical (vibe) Coding"
|
| Oh lord, that is a phrase I did _not_ need to think about
| today
| MrMcCall wrote:
| It's the natural result of having more and more of our population
| being complete morons. The truth never goes away, but societies
| can shift closer to or futher away from being willing to learn
| and accept new concepts, attitudes, and behaviors.
|
| History is rife with examples: Galileo, St. Francis of Assisi,
| Boltzmann, Einstein, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Eugene Parker,
| Bernie Sanders ... the list goes on and on.
|
| Most every tradition in Earth's various societies consists solely
| of excuses to keep doing the same stupid crap, for the same
| stupid reasons, with the same willfully ignorant disregard to
| better ways of doing things.
|
| Only compassion gives us the clear perspective on how we can best
| apply our energy to lift everyone's boat, without harm or misery
| to either ourselves or our blessed Earth.
|
| "Same as it ever was." --Talking Heads
| nopelynopington wrote:
| I flip flop daily on whether it has or not. Even the best AI
| engines write truly awful code, and it might not improve. But it
| also makes it easier for people to coast, and turn in half assed
| work, which is certainly a pathway to the decline of knowledge
| work
| nzach wrote:
| > it also makes it easier for people to coast, and turn in half
| assed work, which is certainly a pathway to the decline of
| knowledge work
|
| I understand your sentiment and I partially agree with it. But
| this kind of phrasing implies that "doing the bare minimum" (to
| put it in another way) is a strictly bad thing.
|
| Sure, its easy to condemn someone "half-assing" a job by
| labeling him as lazy or something like that. But the reality is
| that most of the time we don't need the best nor we are willing
| to pay properly for this effort.
|
| Imagine your baker, for example. Do you really need 100% of his
| effort and care to be put into every single bread he makes? For
| me this answer is "no". All I care is that he comply with all
| regulations and that his bread tastes good, I don't really mind
| if it's not best bread in the world. And even if it was the
| best I probably would find it too expensive to buy in a daily
| basis.
|
| Another example would be blacksmiths, at some point they we our
| only option to make something out of metal, and they would put
| quite a lot of care and attention to every piece they made. But
| at some we created some machines that can create things out of
| metal. These machines, at first, weren't really good and the
| products they made were of inferior quality. But they had
| enough quality to be useful, were cheaper and were able to
| produce immense quantities of goods.
|
| What I'm trying to say is that sometimes the "low effort"
| option is the correct choice. And I don't think this means the
| decline of knowledge work, this just means we will see a change
| in what is considered "relevant skills" for knowledge work.
| deadbabe wrote:
| The truth many will not want to admit is that knowledge work is
| essentially the "rentier income" version of labor.
|
| You secure an asset (specialized knowledge), and then you just
| live off of it while doing the minimal work you can, by turning
| yourself into an asset.
|
| Even though this affords many people a comfortable life, much
| like being a landowner of a vast portfolio of properties, it
| contributes to the inequality and degradation of society,
| splitting people between those who must labor physically and
| those who look down at them comfortably from high balconies.
|
| Society will not be worse off with most people doing physical
| labor. It was that way for thousands of years and humanity
| flourished. People may not like it, but humanity can only truly
| relax and do nothing when it has reached its peak and _every_
| problem is solved, and we are just not there yet. Back to work.
| lisper wrote:
| > turning yourself into an asset
|
| How is that any different from any other skilled labor? Recall
| the old joke about the plumber who charged $1 for banging on
| the pipe and $1000 for knowing where to bang. Even purely
| physical labor like digging ditches requires that you have
| certain physical traits (strength and stamina) that you can
| look at as assets.
|
| > Society will not be worse off with most people doing physical
| labor.
|
| Like what? There is virtually nothing that used to be done with
| human labor that can't be done by machine nowadays. Even ditch-
| digging is mostly done with backhoes, not men with shovels. For
| the moment we still need (some) humans to run the machines, but
| that's knowledge work too.
| goatlover wrote:
| > Society will not be worse off with most people doing physical
| labor. It was that way for thousands of years and humanity
| flourished.
|
| What's the evidence that humanity flourished? The elites
| flourished off lots of slave and peasant labor. The standard of
| living was much lower while inequality was a lot higher. You
| would need to go back to hunter and gatherers, and it's hard to
| compare those lifestyles with today. For one things, billions
| of people don't live in nomadic tribes. Not everyone wants or
| can do physical labor. As a hunter gatherer, you had little
| choice but to pitch in.
| c0redump wrote:
| This is an astoundingly bad take. Knowledge workers don't
| passively gain money by holding a productive asset - they WORK.
| It's in the name.
|
| The fact that you do not understand anything besides physical
| work as work is perplexing and, honestly, pathetic. It smacks
| of someone who has failed to make a life for themself, and is
| lashing out at anyone who is a viable scapegoat.
| caradine wrote:
| Nonsensical take. Quick question: What scarce resource is it
| that knowledge workers hoard? If a knowledge worker acquires
| knowledge does that mean they've reduced the pool of knowledge
| available to others? It's not at all the same as hoarding
| capital or property, is it? Anyway, all labor is knowledge
| work. The plumber has specialized knowledge that the software
| engineer does not, and we all sell our bodies and minds.
| talkingtab wrote:
| One could wonder if perhaps, as is usual, We people have it all
| wrong about this new technology.
|
| Perhaps AI is the death of corporations. Corporations are
| designed to extract money by charging as much as possible while
| spending as little as possible. That seems fair to me, right? We
| do not expect a corporation to understand the concept of common
| good. What AI does is to make it appear as though people are not
| needed, you can just replace them all with AI & machines. Profits
| go up, yes? Corporations make more and more money. What could go
| wrong.
|
| The first thing that is going wrong - currently - is that if you
| do not pay people enough money to buy things, then guess what
| happens to your business? Goodbye Apple. Goodbye Google. Goodbye
| moon. Oops, sorry. This is already happening. If the wolves on
| Isle Royale get too good at catching and eating deer, guess what
| happens?
|
| Secondly and perhaps most importantly is that corporations are
| good at exploiting. If you know how to make a car, a corporation
| can make one so easily that you do not need to pay any people.
| Exploit. If you see a corporation pursuing lock-in (here's
| looking at you Apple, Walmart, etc) then you see a corporation
| that has no good business model. This does not mean they are dead
| or not going to be around, it just means they are a dinosaur
| waiting for some event. But the question is whether they can
| invent the next car? And what if the thing in short supply is not
| in the category of commodities. We still do not _really_
| understand what we can do with computers, the internet or block
| chains. Corporations know how to exploit those technologies.
| After all we still have windows. But is that the best we can do?
| Track people? Wow.
|
| So if you are a person who can actually think, and do. If you can
| figure out how to cross a stream in the winter, or make sour
| dough bread or even just raise chickens, there is going to be a
| massive new opportunity. For you. Because AI cannot create new
| concepts that are people based and even if they can, then
| corporations will fire them if they do.
|
| If your job is however a corporate pablum thing, like for example
| if you write pablum pieces for the NYT, then my advice is to run
| for the hills. And run fast.
| Bukhmanizer wrote:
| I'm surprised not many people talk about this, but a big reason
| corporations are able to do layoffs is just that they're doing
| less. At my work we used to have thousands of ideas of small
| improvements to make things better for our users. Now we have
| one: AI. It's not that we're using AI to make all these small
| improvements, or even planning on it. We're just... not doing
| them. And I don't think my experience is very unique.
| nickff wrote:
| De-scoping is also a commonly-cited result of higher interest
| rates. We recently lived through a prolonged episode of zero-
| interest-rate-policy (ZIRP), which encouraged long-term and
| risky projects. When interest rates go up, the minimum
| acceptable return-on-investment (ROI) required to lure
| investment money away from low-risk investments like government
| bonds also increases correspondingly.
| Bukhmanizer wrote:
| Yeah I think there are a bunch of different reasons that
| corporations are doing less, interest rates are a major
| factor, but the point is that it isn't exactly the "AI is
| taking our jobs" narrative that people want it to be.
| nickff wrote:
| Agreed! Uncertainty to do with short term economic issues,
| medium term geopolitical risk (Trump, China, Russia, etc.),
| and longer-term issues (national debt, Medicare, etc.) also
| shouldn't be underestimated.
| echelon wrote:
| I'd be willing to bet that the biggest reason is that there
| hasn't been any antitrust action against the big tech
| companies. They just sit at the top, siphoning value from
| every other market in the world. If you need to use the
| internet in any way, FAANG taxes you.
|
| None of these big tech companies really need to grow bigger.
| The smartphone is essentially done. AWS just prints money.
| Social/consumer apps are "done". What more is for them to do
| but collect rent?
|
| The US government needs to break them all up. That'll
| oxygenate the entire tech sector, unlock value for investors,
| and kickstart the playing field for startups.
|
| Google, Apple, Amazon, Meta, and maybe Microsoft. Break them
| up.
| zombiwoof wrote:
| Maybe Microsoft
| echelon wrote:
| Apart from their gaming department absorbing every big
| competitor, I can't think of ways Microsoft is abusing
| monopoly power like the rest of the mentioned companies.
| autoexec wrote:
| How about turning Windows into an advertising and data
| collection platform. Sucking up vast amounts of people's
| personal data, even corporate data, to leverage against
| their customers so that MS can profit.
| dnissley wrote:
| State the terms! Maybe come up with the US gdp % growth
| bump you would imagine we get for each of these companies
| being broken up?
| mrweasel wrote:
| Isn't there also the possibility that the US job market simply
| isn't doing to great at the moment and businesses are
| adjusting, or preparing for a downturn. In the case layoffs
| would be across the board, not just entry level or in the
| service industry. Perhaps the service industry and blue collar
| jobs have already been trimmed to the limit and knowledge work
| has simply been lacking. As pointed out, it easy enough, at
| least for a limited time, to simply not do stuff and just
| attempt to coast for a few quarters/years.
|
| If it was truly a decline in knowledge work in general, it
| should be visible in other economies as well, but I don't think
| that's the case, at least not here in Denmark. Arguably we
| typically trend a bit behind the US, so it could be looming on
| the horizon.
| carlmr wrote:
| I think we'll have to start asking "AI, and...?", i.e. the
| question "what's your idea, besides AI". Everybody seems to
| talk about AI at this point as if it magically solves all
| issues we have. Even if it does, which I currently still doubt,
| it won't be a differentiator for your company. We have to ask,
| beyond AI, what's your idea?
|
| If your idea is only "use AI for X" your company doesn't have
| anything really. At least if AI isn't its core business like
| OpenAI.
| prisenco wrote:
| The AI takeover of the startup space makes me feel a bit crazy
| because there are still thousands of world-changing app ideas
| that have zero to do with AI but nobody's funding or building
| them.
|
| We can't possibly have run out of consumer app ideas in a
| decade or two, right?
| morkalork wrote:
| It feels like we ran out in the first decade since the iPhone
| (2007-2017) and have been running on fumes since. Can you
| name some world changing consumer app or company outside of
| AI fluff that came to be in that post 2017 to end of 2022
| period when chatgpt was released?
| AbstractH24 wrote:
| Slack, Zoom, TikTok
|
| And those are just off the top of my head
| robenkleene wrote:
| Those all predate 2017:
|
| - Slack: 2013
|
| - Zoom: 2011
|
| - TikTok: 2016
|
| Based on "Initial Release" on Wikipedia.
| singpolyma3 wrote:
| Neither slack nor zoom did anything new or interesting.
| Just a clone of stable tech that worked out in marketing
| baby_souffle wrote:
| Maybe they didn't have innovative functionality initially
| but the user experience was certainly better.
|
| Microsoft fumbled Skype and nobody was putting together
| convenient apis on top of IRC...
| zombiwoof wrote:
| Slack was skype
| KoolKat23 wrote:
| Sad to say: Tiktok, Only Fans, Discord
| morkalork wrote:
| According to Wikipedia, Discord is 2015, Only Fans and
| TikTok are 2016.
|
| I'm as surprised as you are, I'd like to be proven wrong
| here!
| forgetfreeman wrote:
| But these are all marketing wins. The underlying
| technology (let people post shit and talk to one another)
| had been stable for like a decade before they came along.
| quantified wrote:
| Tiktok was released in its current form in 2017, I believe.
| Is that before the period you're asking about?
| pedalpete wrote:
| I think this is the cycle. Take a look at the S curve,
| things move in jumps with leveling out/adaption periods in
| between.
| Macha wrote:
| Honestly even before it was AI, it felt like everything was
| blockchain or "Uber for X". The majority of startups have
| been trend chasing for a while.
| baby_souffle wrote:
| To a broader extent isn't this kind of the history of
| silicon valley ever since the dot com bubble?
|
| For every small startup trying to build innovative robotics
| to solve a healthcare or agriculture problem, there's 10
| startups getting 100x funding because they figured out how
| to put jpegs on the blockchain and the last guys that
| figured out how to do that had a nice exit...
|
| I forgot what the economists call this but it's the
| characterization of housing market. The value of your
| current house is determined by the last few local sales and
| little else. All of the startups using the current in Vogue
| technology feel like that...
| bradlys wrote:
| This is exactly how Silicon Valley works because this is
| how investors work. Investors aren't really looking for
| true innovation - they're looking for an idea that will
| let the next sucker take the hit. When one company is
| doing very well, clearly there's some suckers out there
| buying the stock. Therefore, if we have a stock that is
| similar then maybe we can also get suckers to buy the
| stock.
|
| That's all it is. That's part of why Silicon Valley is so
| clout chasing and cargo culty. It's entirely due to
| investor pressure to get immediate returns. Immediate
| returns mean you have to follow whatever the current hype
| is.
|
| Is it IoT, crypto, nft, Uber for X, self driving, etc.
| etc.? That's what you do. You follow whatever the hype is
| and bail after you get your desired return.
|
| There's no desire for a sustainable business. There's a
| desire for other investors to be a sucker that holds the
| bag at the end.
| sho_hn wrote:
| Honestly, as a guy working in open source at the time, the
| massive brain drain when crypto came along and young people
| wanted to get rich instead of solving problems was
| increadibly dispiriting and frustrating. Seen in comparison,
| the AI stuff has a much bigger application space, is building
| tools, and is far less frustrating to me.
| softwaredoug wrote:
| Well in a ZIRP environment every department head imagined the
| thing they was building was a massive growth opportunity. Even
| if they were basically refactoring a part of the app the
| instinct was to build an empire. Now it's do the minimum a
| lowest cost.
| Spooky23 wrote:
| [delayed]
| baazaa wrote:
| I think people need to get used to the idea that the West is
| just going backwards in capability. Go watch CGI in a movie
| theatre and it's worse than 20 years ago, go home to play video
| games and the new releases are all remasters of 20 year old
| games because no-one knows how to do anything any more. And
| these are industries which should be seeing the most progress,
| things are even worse in hard-tech at Boeing or whatever.
|
| Whenever people see old systems still in production (say things
| that are over 30 years old) the assumption is that management
| refused to fund the replacement. But if you look at replacement
| projects so many of them are such dismal failures that's
| management's reluctance to engage in fixing stuff is
| understandable.
|
| From the outside, decline always looks like a choice, because
| the exact form the decline takes was chosen. The issue is that
| all the choices are bad.
| iambateman wrote:
| All knowledge work follows a distribution of skill...lots of
| people are in the middle of the curve when it comes to ability to
| do a varied set of tasks.
|
| If I quizzed someone in the middle of that curve on (1) basic
| keyboard shortcuts, (2) how to VLOOKUP in excel, (3) how to buy a
| domain, (4) how to make a presentation that truly looked good,
| (5) detect if an email is a phishing campaign, (6) make a secure
| password, (7) do research in their industry...
|
| You get my point...The skill of an average knowledge worker today
| is miles and miles away from elite levels.
|
| Knowledge work is not declining, we're just watching the average
| ability of a typical worker go way up, over the course of a
| generation.
| poincaredisk wrote:
| Was this person employed in It? Did you ask them to quiz you in
| return? "How to buy a domain" is exactly something a HNer would
| ask as an obvious question. I wonder how many of us know when
| to plant carrots, the chemical structure of benzene, or can
| show Malawi on a map.
| tootie wrote:
| Everybody is commenting about AI, but that's barely mentioned in
| the article. In particular there is this quote:
|
| > The gap in wages between those with a college degree and those
| without one grew steadily beginning in 1980, but flattened during
| the past 15 years, though it remains high.
|
| I suspect there's a lot of factors at play and the expansion of
| access to college is part of it. The value of secondary education
| is somewhere diluted. There is the end of the zero interest era.
| There is massive layoffs of federal workers which skew heavily
| towards knowledge work. And some of it is was Starbucks cites as
| "removing layers and duplication and creating smaller, more
| nimble teams" which is a pretty normal cyclical thing where an
| era of expansion and promotions makes your org to top-heavy and
| bureaucratic so you trim aggressively and probably end up
| rehiring some as needed. Like a controlled burn of an overgrown
| forest. And if some of those are permanently lost to AI then
| that's a bonus.
|
| I think a lot of business leaders are just expecting a recession
| and want to be on good footing before it hits.
| Glyptodon wrote:
| Yes, but I'm not sure it's entirely related to AI. I think one of
| the real lessons of the pandemic was that you can outsource
| everything knowledge related because paying peanuts for something
| that's somewhere from 1/8 to 1/2 as good is better than not
| paying peanuts. And this effect is deeply multiplicative the less
| skilled and more entry level the role is, a factor AI only
| exacerbates. The precursor to this was tech jobs postings, year
| by year, mostly only being for, first, 3+ years of experience,
| and then 5+, and so on.
|
| That said, AI, as it improves, will only exacerbate. At least
| until it becomes so multiplicative that having an AI + pilot is
| so productive that you'd never not be happy to hire another one.
| coolThingsFirst wrote:
| Yes, it has for a very long time I just got the memo too late.
|
| I will focus on making small startups(will clamor around for
| ideas since I'm not very creative) since getting a job is ALMOST
| impossible. I've GitHub projects, degree, don't expect anything
| crazy since COL is low in EE but it feels like unless you are
| Jeff Dean nowadays is auto-rejection.
|
| Very low number of callbacks. I do have a multi-year gap since
| graduation which I know it impacts but this market is INSANE and
| has been for years.
|
| For comparison, just with HS degree while in uni, I had more
| callbacks for orders of magnitude better companies than I do now.
| It's like instead of progressing my career prospects have winded
| down. Crazy times.
| apercu wrote:
| I'm guessing that the people who most espouse the virtues of AI
| do not "test" the output much and just let LLMs pump out errors.
|
| I use LLM's daily, but as a tool to brainstorm, mostly, or to
| write small parts of scripts (e.g., shell, not TV shows). But
| everything has to be verified.
|
| Last weekend I was using ChatGPT Music Teacher (or, trying to
| anyway) to prep some voice leading practices for guitar. I spent
| almost a half hour trying to get that model, then the base
| ChatGPT model to give correct information about inversions and
| the notes in the chords. It was laughably wrong over and over
| again.
|
| It would misidentify chords, say that a chord had the base
| attributes of a triad (tonic, third, fifth) while giving me a
| chord shape that had the root twice, and a third, and calling
| that a second inversion. Or giving incorrect fret/note
| information.
|
| If I didn't know theory and how intervals work on a guitar I
| would have been pretty screwed.
|
| As it was, I wasted a half hour and never got anything usable.
|
| I'm not saying that the technology isn't fairly amazing, but
| like, don't believe the hype.
| alecco wrote:
| Musk showed 80% were useless hires and AI gave the rest of the
| CEOs the excuse.
|
| So now they are downsizing and moving teams to India. From Google
| to American Airlines. What could possibly go wrong.
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