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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: 0.645s | 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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1. bamboozled ◴[26 Mar 25 23:30 UTC] No.43488730[source]▶
I wonder...what sort of world changing apps do you think we're expecting to see?

I think about it quite often and there is a LOT of apps out there, and really, humans don't need that much to be happy.

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2. UncleOxidant ◴[26 Mar 25 23:42 UTC] No.43488822[source]▶
And human attention is a limited resource that just might be tapped out at this point.
3. Bukhmanizer ◴[27 Mar 25 02:06 UTC] No.43489714[source]▶
> there is a LOT of apps out there, and really, humans don't need that much to be happy.

There’s more music out there than there’s ever been. More tv shows and movies than I could possibly watch, but I still find new things to watch and listen to.

But tech? Maybe other than my Robot vacuum, I don’t think there’s anything in the last 5 years I’ve seen that I’ve felt is going to make my life easier or better. Which seems odd because the pace that technology seems to be improving only seems to be accelerating. We can do more than we ever could before, but it feels like the appetite to improve things is no longer there.

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4. YetAnotherNick ◴[27 Mar 25 08:06 UTC] No.43491341[source]▶
It takes lot more than 5 years for people to recognize the need and the product to deliver. It took desktops and smartphones and internet decades before it got out of "I don't need it" zone. Now you need it. Even robot vacuum was there for decades.
5. bamboozled ◴[27 Mar 25 22:29 UTC] No.43498947[source]▶
Driver assist technology has been a pretty amazing improvement, but it's also getting "old".