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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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baazaa ◴[26 Mar 25 22:57 UTC] No.43488436[source]▶
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.

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Art9681 ◴[27 Mar 25 01:40 UTC] No.43489570[source]▶
You're just getting older and looking at the past with rose colored glasses. No one is going backwards in capability. It is about how accessible and cheap the thing is. In the 90's, a license to install Maya or 3D Studio Max, or Lightwave was extremely expensive, those products were not promoted nor available to the general public. They would cost tens of thousands of dollars, for the software alone, not to mention the hardware.

Today it is a commodity. So we are flooded with low effort productions.

With that being said, we have more capability than ever, at the cheapest cost ever. Whether businesses use that wisely is a different story.

There will always be outliers. I see many comments with people who derived value from whatever they perceived as something uncommon and unique they could do. Now AI has made those skills a commodity. So they lose their motivation since it becomes harder to attain some sort of adoration.

In any case, going forward, no matter what, there will be those who adopt the new tools and use them passionately to create things that are above and beyond the average. And folks will be on HN reminiscing about those people, 30 years from now.

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johnnyanmac ◴[27 Mar 25 12:35 UTC] No.43492946[source]▶
If it's a commodity why is everything worse in quality? Commodification doesn't explain drop in objective metrics like performance, security, and complexity. It doesn't even explain the decline in stuff like customer satisfaction.

I don't think talent is the problem either. There's a lot more talent now than in the 90's.

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1. dkislyuk ◴[27 Mar 25 13:24 UTC] No.43493367[source]▶
I think commodification is directly tied to a perceived drop in quality. For example, if the barriers to making a video game keep going down, there will be far more attempts, and per Sturgeon's law, the majority will be of low quality. And we have a recency bias where we over-index on the last few releases that we've seen, and we only remember the good stuff from a generation or two ago. But for every multitude of low-effort, AI-generated video games out there, we still get gems like Factorio and Valheim.
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2. johnnyanmac ◴[27 Mar 25 13:55 UTC] No.43493707[source]▶
Surgeon's paw was true in the 90's and is true in the '20s. There's not much point in comparing the crap to the crap. The only big difference is that it is easier to see the bottom of the barrel in your most popular storefronts with a click l(even on "curated" ones these days woth PSN and the eShop) instead of going out of your way to find some shareware from a Geocity that barely functioned.

Thing is those high profile disasters are still supposedly the "cream of the crop". That's why they get compared to the cream of before.

Popular examples are easier to exemplify as well instead of taking the time to explain what Blinx the Cat or Midnight Club are (examples of good but not genre-defining entries)