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 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?

It is exactly that! Food delivery is an excellent example of 'things just got worse'.

In 2019, 'delivery' was a specialty a restaurant would have to focus on to offer. Pizza places (Papa Johns, Pizza Hut, etc) and other specific delivery-focused restaurants (such as Panera Bread, Jimmy Johns, or your local Chinese restaurant) would have actual W2 employees who did delivery driving, as part of their job. The restaurant would want deliveries to go well (for both the customer, as well as the driver), so would make sure their own staff had reasonable access to food, some light training, and would ensure they could deliver it somewhat well. (They would reject orders too far away, they wouldn't serve food that wouldn't survive a delivery trip well, etc)

In post-COVID 2025, "every" restaurant offers delivery, but almost no restaurant still employs their own delivery drivers (locally, Jimmy Johns might be the only one left). Everyone else just outsourced to DoorDash. DoorDash drivers are employees who are 'legally-not-employees' (1099 employees), so they no longer have any direct access to the restaurants, and they can't train well for any specific service, because they might have to visit any-of-50 restaurants on any given day, all of which have entirely different procedures (even if they are the same brand or chain). Restaurants have zero incentive to ensure deliveries go well (the drivers aren't their employees, so they no longer care about turnover, and customers have to use DoorDash or Uber Eats or equivalent, because almost every restaurant uses it, so there's no downside to a DoorDash delivery going bad).

Prices to consumers are double-to-higher than what they were in 2019, depending on the restaurant. Wages are down, employment security is entirely eliminated. Quality and service have tanked.

Presumably, investors make slightly more money off of all of this?

And on paper the idea for services like Doordash was good - 3rd party delivery company so the restaurant doesn't have that liability, staff, or investment, delivery people aren't working for just one store so they have more work if the one restaurant is quiet, etc.

But since it's all investor and profit driven for the bigger company, costs get cut on every side.

> But since it's all investor and profit driven for the bigger company, costs get cut on every side.

These services basically don't work with Western level wages. The economics are just not there.

But it worked 20 years ago. That's the issue. We didn't get worse at driving and (apparently...) we didn't get poorer over the last few decades to pay for stuff.

Cost of living from the fallout of '08 simply skyrocketed and most of the country didn't not increase compensation to make up for that. Despite that company simply charged more while cutting costs at the same time. So the driver and the customer lost out.

I think by "these services" they mean apps like Doordash, not delivery as a concept

And they're saying: Why couldn't Doordash work when pizza delivery worked 20 years ago? Doordash is just pizza delivery scaled up, right? If pizza delivery had continued, it should work the same way as doordash for the same price as doordash but limited to pizza restaurants (by definition), right?