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.

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.

Boeing calls to say hello...

This is an excellent example. The 737 used to crash a LOT MORE than it does now, and even the version with MCAS is a safer airplane than your average 1990s jetliner (which was also probably a 737, which is kind of my point)[1].

So it's a slightly less safe (in the grand scheme of things) airliner that's vastly more fuel efficient and cheaper to run than any in the past. Obviously this is of no comfort to the families of the people who died in the crash!

But to suggest that Boeing has somehow regressed decades in technical capabilities is just plain wrong.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_accidents_and_incident...

It wasn't that the 737 MAX isn't (or can't be) a safe aircraft, but that Boeing prioritized making it fly like its predecessor over all else - including safety.

The fact that two brand new MAX's crashed killing all aboard within 2 years of its commercial introduction (out of only ~600 models flying at the time) is a brutal safety record for the jet age, especially as the cause of the crash was the plane itself. That list you post includes any and all reported incidents that merely involve 737s (and involve incidents that were caused by factors that aren't necessarily related to the safety of the place itself).

> It wasn't that the 737 MAX isn't (or can't be) a safe aircraft, but that Boeing prioritized making it fly like its predecessor over all else - including safety.

It's misleading to say they prioritized making it fly like its predecessor over safety.

In theory there was absolutely nothing wrong with a system LIKE MCAS. In fact the 737 MAX is still approved to fly with it.

The flaws were in the specific implementation and documentation around it, not with the idea of the system itself.

> The fact that two brand new MAX's crashed killing all aboard within 2 years of its commercial introduction (out of only ~600 models flying at the time) is a brutal safety record for the jet age, especially as the cause of the crash was the plane itself.

If you want to be pedantic about it, the reason for the crashes is that the pilots failed to recognize trim runaway during takeoff. The trim runaway was caused by MCAS, but this is not a new failure mode for ANY aircraft and pilots get extensive training on how to manage it [1].

MCAS failing was not an unrecoverable error [2]. It failed several times in the US, as well, but American pilot training standards are very high compared to the places where there WERE disasters and the pilots recognized and recovered quickly.

I say this not to deflect blame from MCAS. Its original implementation was unsafe and should never have been approved.

A large part of why modern jetliners are so safe is exactly because of flight control augmentations like this - both Boeing and Airbus have been implementing these for decades and they have made flying much safer. Your suggestion that any system like MCAS is always unsafe (or that Boeing was somehow doing something wrong by adding it) is totally wrong.

1: https://www.aopa.org/news-and-media/all-news/2017/july/pilot... 2: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/18/magazine/boeing-737-max-c...