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Has the decline of knowledge work begun?

(www.nytimes.com)
388 points pseudolus | 5 comments | 25 Mar 25 17:02 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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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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KoolKat23 ◴[26 Mar 25 22:12 UTC] No.43488038[source]▶
Sad to say: Tiktok, Only Fans, Discord
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1. forgetfreeman ◴[26 Mar 25 22:35 UTC] No.43488253{3}[source]▶
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.
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2. daedrdev ◴[26 Mar 25 23:00 UTC] No.43488462[source]▶
No, they are product development wins. Discord is far more popular than alternatives because they provide a far superior product that also has many normal features that their competition somehow fails on, like voice chat, video chat, steaming, images and videos in chat that don't disappear, spam protection and good moderator tools, etc.
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3. prisenco ◴[26 Mar 25 23:13 UTC] No.43488565[source]▶
| The underlying technology ... had been stable

That's my point. There are still creative ways we can use or improve stable technology to build new consumer applications.

I'm not seeing much creativity lately.

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4. forgetfreeman ◴[27 Mar 25 00:00 UTC] No.43488944[source]▶
No argument there. Compared to Xerox-Parc's heyday the Bay Area has felt like a case study in cargo cults since before the dotcom implosion.
5. kulahan ◴[29 Mar 25 05:04 UTC] No.43512903[source]▶
It’s an incredibly buggy experience with a user interface that fails many basic design cues (like not hiding things until you mouse over, not making the friends list icon inexplicably identical to a server icon and also the add server icon, etc.)

It’s popular because they figured out and unbelievably low-friction method to get users into the ecosystem. Being able to do everything online without installing anything was huge at the time. You had an account in like 2 clicks. THAT was a thing of beauty.