←back to thread

Ask HN: Is it just me or techno-optimism died in the past few years?

36 points shubhamjain | 2 comments | 07 Dec 25 14:06 UTC | HN request time: 0.442s | source

I see people all around me who have this bleak, pessimistic view of where everything is going. That art/originality is fading, that technology is causing more harm than good, and that most jobs now exist to feed some mindless machine where sole goal is to get people addicted. Tech roles feel drained of purpose, and non-tech roles are being eaten away.

This outlook is a stark contrast to the era I grew up in. From 2010 to 2020, tech optimism was at its peak. Despite the flaws, companies like Airbnb, Uber, Amazon, and countless SaaS startups felt like they were genuinely improving things—breaking old monopolies and building better systems.

Now we have AI, arguably the most transformative technology of our lifetime, yet a lot of times the reaction seems to be exhaustion rather than excitement. Sure, people love using it, but unlike the early Internet, AI doesn't seem like a medium for creativity. The core value feels just about compressing the time it takes to do what we were already doing.

Maybe it’s age. Maybe it’s just me. And maybe I am bitten by false nostalgia. But I’m curious: how are others seeing this shift?

Show context
techblueberry ◴[07 Dec 25 14:31 UTC] No.46181914[source]▶
I like to read about the Industrial Revolution a lot, and I think a thing that’s lost in the the way we talk about luddites was the change from guild/skilled labor to factory labor. Software engineering is a lot like that old guild labor, you understand the whole of your craft (at the time called “mysteries”) and work to build things understanding that entirety.

When things changed to factory / assembly lines, sure, products got a lot cheaper and more plentiful for everyone else, but if you were a blacksmith or stone mason or etc. you lost both your middle class income, status in society, and day to day joy from being an expert with autonomy — we talk a lot about how engineers value autonomy when building engineering cultures. With AI that’s starting to slip away.

I actually think the twentieth century is a global culture-tech inflection point, and while I’m reluctant to say things will just continue to get worse (there are a lot of years ahead of us and lots of eras and changes to go through). The one thing I’m sure of is that for all the benefits technological change brings they’re not evenly distributed.

So as many I think have pointed out, if you like spending 8+ hours a day on the nuts and bolts of software engineering, and you’re really invested in the sort of late nineties to early 2020’s technological paradigm, subjectively —- things are probably getting worse from here on out.

replies(2): >>46183370 #>>46199698 #
1. gobeavs ◴[07 Dec 25 17:29 UTC] No.46183370[source]▶
Do you have any books to recommend to understand more about the luddites and industrial revolution? I want to learn more about historical analogues for our current moment and my current understanding is at the level of high school history class and popular knowledge.
replies(1): >>46191693 #
2. giaour ◴[08 Dec 25 12:58 UTC] No.46191693[source]▶
Brian Merchant's Blood in the Machine is a good overall history of the Luddite movement (though be aware it does not strive to be ideologically neutral).