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Has the decline of knowledge work begun?

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388 points pseudolus | 1 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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1. Spooky23 ◴[26 Mar 25 23:08 UTC] No.43488518[source]▶
There’s a lot of B2B stuff.

How much easier is it to manage and operate technology in 2025 than it was in 2005 or 2015? I have three core tech teams with 12-18 people. I’d need 500+ to do what I do today in 2005, assuming the tech could do it.

Breakthrough B2C products don’t appear annually. But everything is better. Apple Maps can estimate my travel time for a 300 mile drive with 5 minutes. I bought a last minute flight to Rome last summer knowing nothing about Rome or speaking any Italian and I did fine, thanks to iPhone and the mobile app ecosystem.