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Has the decline of knowledge work begun?

(www.nytimes.com)
388 points pseudolus | 2 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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Macha ◴[26 Mar 25 21:51 UTC] No.43487813[source]▶
Honestly even before it was AI, it felt like everything was blockchain or "Uber for X". The majority of startups have been trend chasing for a while.
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baby_souffle ◴[26 Mar 25 22:18 UTC] No.43488095[source]▶
To a broader extent isn't this kind of the history of silicon valley ever since the dot com bubble?

For every small startup trying to build innovative robotics to solve a healthcare or agriculture problem, there's 10 startups getting 100x funding because they figured out how to put jpegs on the blockchain and the last guys that figured out how to do that had a nice exit...

I forgot what the economists call this but it's the characterization of housing market. The value of your current house is determined by the last few local sales and little else. All of the startups using the current in Vogue technology feel like that...

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bradlys ◴[26 Mar 25 22:50 UTC] No.43488377[source]▶
This is exactly how Silicon Valley works because this is how investors work. Investors aren’t really looking for true innovation - they’re looking for an idea that will let the next sucker take the hit. When one company is doing very well, clearly there’s some suckers out there buying the stock. Therefore, if we have a stock that is similar then maybe we can also get suckers to buy the stock.

That’s all it is. That’s part of why Silicon Valley is so clout chasing and cargo culty. It’s entirely due to investor pressure to get immediate returns. Immediate returns mean you have to follow whatever the current hype is.

Is it IoT, crypto, nft, Uber for X, self driving, etc. etc.? That’s what you do. You follow whatever the hype is and bail after you get your desired return.

There’s no desire for a sustainable business. There’s a desire for other investors to be a sucker that holds the bag at the end.

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1. maccard ◴[27 Mar 25 00:01 UTC] No.43488952{3}[source]▶
> You follow whatever the hype is and bail after you get your desired return.

> There’s a desire for other investors to be a sucker that holds the bag at the end.

I agree with everything you said except for these two sentences. If you take VC funding to build a sustainable business frankly you’re doomed from the get go. That’s not what a VC wants and it won’t get you funded. There are other routes to that.

What VCs want is if 99 of those startups fail, to be holding the Airbnb, uber, Anthropic at the end. Because holding that from the beginning will make you more money than any other option.

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2. bradlys ◴[27 Mar 25 00:41 UTC] No.43489199[source]▶
The stock market is mostly based on the greater fool theory. You can’t really escape that.

Most VCs doing 99 investments for the 1 big are akin to YC. They’re not doing series C for $100m and expecting 99 of those to fail. They’re expecting to get a return somewhat shortly back.

Holding the stock isn’t helpful for a VC unless they’re going to be using some financial mechanism for leverage - which means they’ve given it up for the other institution who now essentially owns it. A lot of these stocks aren’t giving you meaningful dividends. You have to sell or give up some form of control on them to be a successful VC. How else would you continue to invest?