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Has the decline of knowledge work begun?

(www.nytimes.com)
388 points pseudolus | 9 comments | 25 Mar 25 17:02 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source | bottom
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Bukhmanizer ◴[26 Mar 25 19:14 UTC] No.43485838[source]▶
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.
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prisenco ◴[26 Mar 25 21:37 UTC] No.43487649[source]▶
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?

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morkalork ◴[26 Mar 25 21:43 UTC] No.43487720[source]▶
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?
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AbstractH24 ◴[26 Mar 25 22:02 UTC] No.43487923[source]▶
Slack, Zoom, TikTok

And those are just off the top of my head

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1. singpolyma3 ◴[26 Mar 25 22:12 UTC] No.43488035[source]▶
Neither slack nor zoom did anything new or interesting. Just a clone of stable tech that worked out in marketing
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2. baby_souffle ◴[26 Mar 25 22:19 UTC] No.43488108[source]▶
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...

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3. zombiwoof ◴[26 Mar 25 22:36 UTC] No.43488268[source]▶
Slack was skype
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4. entropicdrifter ◴[26 Mar 25 23:28 UTC] No.43488701[source]▶
Right, so iterations that ate up the old-school competition, not revolutions
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5. brookst ◴[27 Mar 25 04:45 UTC] No.43490464{3}[source]▶
What was the last major tech company that was a revolution and not mere iteration?
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6. samrus ◴[27 Mar 25 08:53 UTC] No.43491567{4}[source]▶
Maybe Netflix?
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7. brookst ◴[27 Mar 25 13:25 UTC] No.43493378{5}[source]▶
That’s a good one. Which suggests Amazon as well; similar revolution in distribution and scale.

But there were companies shipping DVDs before Netflix, and also companies streaming movies online before them. So really a marketing / operations / distribution revolution.

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8. kulahan ◴[29 Mar 25 05:01 UTC] No.43512883[source]▶
Absolutely not.

Skype figured out how to build an integrated login experience. Every morning using slack I keep having to remind myself it’s not early FOSS!

9. entropicdrifter ◴[31 Mar 25 20:07 UTC] No.43539300{6}[source]▶
Netflix and Amazon were the first to effectively scale their revolutions up to mainstream accessibility that made them clearly superior to the competition. You could say they brought already-simmering revolutions to boil.

Google was initially revolutionary just because their search engine actually worked incredibly well back before people started trying to game their rankings