alt Hacker NewsThis is well put and something I think a lot of us struggle with.
The internet itself seems filled with the AI maximalists who have no end of hype for the latest prompt 'technique' or AI doomers that would skin you alive if you mention you used AI to make a photo once.
Quietly among peers I talk to there seems to be a very different group that exists: those that recognize AI is super valuable for getting a lot of work done but also feel that suddenly the work is so much less exciting than it was before.
Sure, there's the obvious "I enjoy the mechanics of programming" component that's gone but then there's also this general feeling that is hard to shake which feels a little deeper. I've wondered about it. Is it all the layoffs? The suddenly shaky economics for a lot of our companies? The uncertainty of the career's future in general?
I think the author has put their thumb on it well to describe it as a lack of intellectual community. That feels like at least part of it.
Replies
> "Is it all the layoffs? The suddenly shaky economics for a lot of our companies? The uncertainty of the career's future in general?"
I'd say that those make up the majority of it. During the dotcom bust, there were waves of bankruptcies and layoffs, tech stock valuations crashing and staying stagnant, and people struggling to find jobs for months, etc. too and there was industry-wide doom and gloom and pundits proclaiming that software was no longer worth getting into. So all this angst seems very familiar. People would probably not be as bothered about AI if the the career outlook was positive.
Maybe it's that to some people, earning something or creating something is more satisfying than stealing it, while to many other people it doesn't matter where it comes from. This is true in all walks of life. I never cheated on a test, but plenty of kids I knew did. Those people have no problem taking shortcuts because they don't understand the satisfaction of doing something right.
When a whole civilization falls victim to that mentality, we end up with zero responsibility and intellectual collapse.
> Sure, there's the obvious "I enjoy the mechanics of programming" component that's gone but then there's also this general feeling that is hard to shake which feels a little deeper. I've wondered about it. Is it all the layoffs? The suddenly shaky economics for a lot of our companies? The uncertainty of the career's future in general?
Internet town squares have polarized. Not just by capital P politics, but just according to the poles that inhabit them. The highly energized maximalists and doomers spend all of their time posting online about it, not really caring about whether the community or even reality conforms with their thoughts. The rest of us roll our eyes and leave the town squares. We laugh at them in our group chats, sneer at them at our parties, but we don't talk in the town squares about the absurdity anymore.
I don't really know what to do about this. When the SaaS boom was happening in the late 2000s/early 2010s, there was a tranche of cautiously optimistic and cautiously pessimistic bloggers, along with the highly motivated zealots. The middle is hollowed out now.
> a lack of intellectual community.
The issue may be simpler than that. The technical cohort that's on the chopping block of automation right now uses seemingly sophisticated words to basically describe what the coal miners and human calculators felt in the past. When you compound this with the general struggle on the social skills dimension that defines the majority of this group, you can see why the idea of stepping out of their respective narrow field and getting a hobby would seem ludicrous.
> then there's also this general feeling that is hard to shake which feels a little deeper. I've wondered about it.
I had an instance of the feeling (and also what the OP is describing) when writing a post about a technical question recently.
Previously, I'd have posted the question to HN or Stack Overflow - and, in addition to hopefully getting a solution, it might also become a resource for other people who had the same question. Finally, maybe there would have been some interesting discussion around the question.
Now: Ask the AI. Instant answer, question solved, but also, nothing else.