Has the decline of knowledge work begun?

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.

I think people need to get used to the idea that the West is just going backwards in capability. Go watch CGI in a movie theatre and it's worse than 20 years ago, go home to play video games and the new releases are all remasters of 20 year old games because no-one knows how to do anything any more. And these are industries which should be seeing the most progress, things are even worse in hard-tech at Boeing or whatever.

Whenever people see old systems still in production (say things that are over 30 years old) the assumption is that management refused to fund the replacement. But if you look at replacement projects so many of them are such dismal failures that's management's reluctance to engage in fixing stuff is understandable.

From the outside, decline always looks like a choice, because the exact form the decline takes was chosen. The issue is that all the choices are bad.

I was thinking about examples of where things got worse over time. They include some common appliances that use water, due to water use regulations. No reason my dishwasher should take over 2 hours to run. But then there's other things like food delivery.

I used to deliver pizzas in the early 2000s. I would get paid

$4/hour (later bumped to $5 per hour)

$1/delivery (pass through to customer)

+ tips

I had good days / times where I was pretty much always busy and made around $20/hour by the end.

So delivery cost the customer $1 + tip (usually ~$3), cost the business maybe $40 a night (~2.5 drivers for 3 hours), and I made out pretty well.

I can't compare exactly but I feel like today the business pays more, the customer pays more, the drivers get paid less and it's all subsidized by investors to boot. Am I totally wrong on this? But I feel like delivery got so much worse and I don't know where the money is going.

I'm glad I'm not the only one noticing appliances getting worse across the board. I don't buy enough of them to really know if the trend holds overall but the correlation is pretty much perfect between how new an appliance is and how much I hate it. For example the controls on my new LG washer and dryer are incredible bad. They've made it hard to impossible to just set the run level manually to push you into set programs for bedding or whatever. But they never work right! We've given up on using those programs entirely because they are terrible.

The main culprits I've seen are cheaping out on quality, replacing traditional controls with touch screens or "AI" magic buttons, and squeezing in more monetization streams or adding gimmicky features that actively make the product worse.

Maybe things will turn around someday. There are a few rays of hope, like the touchscreen fad in cars gradually losing its luster, but it seems like we've been on the wrong path for a long time and I'm not sure it will ever correct.