9 ms·

What are the best coping mechanisms for AI Fatalism?

• SirensOfTitan 7mo ago
  Christopher Lasch in Culture of Narcissism: > Our growing dependence on technologies no one seems to understand or control has given rise to feelings of powerlessness and victimization. We find it more and more difficult to achieve a sense of continuity, permanence, or connection with the world around us. Relationships with others are notably fragile; goods are made to be used up and discarded; reality is experienced as an unstable environment of flickering images. Everything conspires to encourage escapist solutions to the psychological problems of dependence, separation, and individuation, and to discourage the moral realism that makes it possible for human beings to come to terms with existential constraints on their power and freedom. I do believe that our materialist reductionist culture has neglected the mystical, spiritual nature of human existence to our own detriment, and re-engaging with those factors that no one can take from you is a powerful way to weather a new kind of storm. I don't think you can just decide to become spiritual though. Opening up to the long neglected forces within yourself and the world is a delicate and vulnerable motion. You're not really searching for "faith" in this arrangement, you're looking for surrender. It's wu-wei, or kenosis, or equanimity, or whatever you want to call it. Feel free to email me, I've gone on quite a journey myself over the past couple years spiritually, and as a tech person would love to share. Here's a general list of moving works or ideas that have opened me up over the past couple years: - Singing lessons: I never expected it, but singing opened me wide open. I'd find myself crying during songs I love, feeling a whole different appreciation for life and beauty through my voice. - James Hillman: Hillman (I think) coined the term "soulmaking," (special shoutout for Burbea's Soulmaking Dharma too: https://hermesamara.org/teachings/soulmaking-dharma https://hermesamara.org/teachings/soulmaking-dharma) and sees the symptoms and the hurt as expressions of the soul, as parts to be discovered and expressed. - King, Warrior, Magician, Lover: about the male archetypes that make up the generative male https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/91781.King_Warrior_Magician_Lover https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/91781.King_Warrior_Magic... - Jacob Needleman's "Money and the Meaning of Life" - I also wrote about my experiences with meditation and explorations into esoteric Christianity after burning out on many years of westernized meditation here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46919809 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46919809
• andsoitis 7mo ago
  Humans are curious so we will try things. Don’t let the things you cannot control upset you. Manage risk by increasing your optionally across important dimensions like finances, citizenship, friends, etc. Don’t try to save the world. Enjoy simple things in your day to day.
  • pineaux 7mo ago
    I feel this is wrong. Especially the dont try to save the world part. You should enjoy the simple things. As Emma Goldman once said: a revolution without dancing is not one worth fighting for. But she did not mean the procedural ceremonial dances as we haven seen at protests by liberals, she meant that life should still have fun things or else the tiranny after the revolution will be similar or worse. If the cintrini report is true, one of the only good ways to solve this crisis would be a butlerian jihad. It would be necessary to destroy all autonomous agents and ban them. With good, i mean a way that is good for the most of mankind. If everyone is not trying to save the world this jihad will not happen.
  • worldsayshi 7mo ago
    > Don’t try to save the world. "The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man." - George Bernard Shaw
    • andsoitis 7mo ago
      Trying to save the world isn’t the root of all (most?) progress.
  • NikolaNovak 7mo ago
    Probably the most reasonable, specific, and hardest to implement advice on this thread the the time of reading. Suggestions 1 and 3 are hard though!
• lm28469 7mo ago
  Drive an hour outside of any large city hub, switch off your phone and rediscover that 99% of all this shit does not matter. The hype around llms will collapse soon enough, it already started, it'll follow the same curve as ar/vr and cryptos, from 24/7 news cycle to "yeah I guess that's kinda neat sometimes, maybe"
  • baal80spam 7mo ago
    > 99% of all this shit does not matter. That something is not immediately visible doesn't mean that it does not matter.
  • Noaidi 7mo ago
    Touch grass? Really?
  • ErroneousBosh 7mo ago
    AR/VR, cryptocurrency, fractal compression schemes, transputers, VLIW, "low code" in various forms for 40-odd years. You know what remains? Thumping great Unix boxes running relational databases, same as they ever were. I'm currently advising some rainbow-haired alphabet soup group annoying children with strong views about neopronouns about what they can base the software backend for their startup - which looks good incidentally - on because they've chosen to go with a thumping great Debian box running Postgres, and to do that they've sought the counsel of some grumpy old Gandalf-beard 50-something with boringly conventional pronouns, mostly grey hair, and strong opinions about real ale. There's no AI in it, they're just doing it with all good old-fashioned analogue stupidity, and it works well.
    • wcoenen 7mo ago
      Those "Thumping great Unix boxes" (or indeed even integrated circuits) didn't exist before the sixties. So it seems that technological revolutions do occur from time to time.
      • ErroneousBosh 7mo ago
        Yeah, but everything since then has been evolutionary. There's nothing really new in computing at the moment. We've made transistors smaller so memory is denser and processors are faster. We've made better batteries. Really the big step change was flash memory and Li-Ion. What's the Big New Thing going to be, what's the 21st Century's PDP11 going to be?
• AJ007 7mo ago
  Every stage of human history was transitory, here comes the new one.
  • throwaway27448 7mo ago
    Ah quit the histrionics, this is just adding fuel to the fire and we all know it's bullshit. There's more to life than white collar paper shuffling.
• andrewstuart 7mo ago
  All those folks -respected well known technical people - yelling for years about how AI was going to end humanity. Remember all that? Yeah none of it happened, humanity didn’t end. They stopped embarrassing themselves eventually when they realised their imagined fictional futures were false. Same thing. Cope by not imagining fictional futures.
  • 5o1ecist 7mo ago
    [flagged]
    • stuaxo 7mo ago
      LLMs are not AI so don't worry about it, they also never will be.
      • simonw 7mo ago
        How would you define real AI?
      • Bombthecat 7mo ago
        That might be the worrying part? LLMs do as told. Like a super smart toddler. No matter how stupid or how bad it might be for humans
    • andrewstuart 7mo ago
      False prophecies always have a reason why it didn’t happen as predicted. But it will, really! Just keep waiting..
  • derwiki 7mo ago
    We are going to get ads in ChatGPT soon though, so at least it wasn’t all for nothing.
• this-is-why 7mo ago
  Vote for progressive democrats. All of this AI is a choice. We don’t have to let it be forced on us by the parasite billionaire class.
  • adamsb6 7mo ago
    Oh you say you’ve got a panacea? Yeah, right. I really do have a panacea though.
  • throwaway27448 7mo ago
    Nobody is forcing AI on you. Data centers, sure, but nobody has mentioned data centers. Progressive democrats shouldn't waste their time talking about software.
    • this-is-why 7mo ago
      Nobody is forcing AI on us? How can you be on HN and even make that claim? It’s literally everywhere.
      • bubblewand 7mo ago
        In the last week or so my company has enabled some kind of Microsoft spam bot in Teams that posts several useless messages nobody wants in meeting chat-channels, burying messages from humans and generally making everything worse. It's astonishingly useless.
        • throwaway27448 7mo ago
          That's at work, though. Presumably most people aren't willingly using teams—you might as well say "teams" is being forced on you as "ai" is.
    • blibble 7mo ago
      seems to be forced on me every piece of software seems to have gained useless AI features my employer is rabbiting on about it constantly if I go out socially people bring out their phones and ask ChatGPT everything it's just horrible and I hate it
• throwaway27448 7mo ago
  Ignore it? Who cares what's got their knickers in a knot.
• inigyou 7mo ago
  [dead]
• Thanemate 7mo ago
  Drop out of tech, grab a cup of coffee, and enjoy the view of seeing the top 1% drive everything you loved about software development and creativity fall off a cliff. Then, maybe when I'm on the verge of death due to old age, the entire society will adapt around using their creative juices in proompting the next big LLM model version, while schools teach about the years where people talented were allowed to study and make a living out of their talent.
  • co_king_5 7mo ago
    [dead]
  • Aurornis 7mo ago
    Person asks for help with a doomscrolling problem and the top comment is more doomerism? I’m going to add “stop reading Hacker News comments” as advice for addressing this problem.
    • morkalork 7mo ago
      >stop reading Hacker News comments Basically it. Don't look up. Read some books, go offline, chug along and try to be zen. If the doomers are correct, there is exceedingly very little I can do about it today.
• jameskilton 7mo ago
  Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or drink; or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothes? Look at the birds of the air; they do not sow or reap or store away in barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not much more valuable than they? Can any one of you by worrying add a single hour to your life? And why do you worry about clothes? See how the flowers of the field grow. They do not labor or spin. Yet I tell you that not even Solomon in all his splendor was dressed like one of these. If that is how God clothes the grass of the field, which is here today and tomorrow is thrown into the fire, will he not much more clothe you—you of little faith? So do not worry, saying, ‘What shall we eat?’ or ‘What shall we drink?’ or ‘What shall we wear?’ For the pagans run after all these things, and your heavenly Father knows that you need them. But seek first his kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well. Therefore do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own. - Matthew 6:25-34
  • jdthedisciple 7mo ago
    Absolute perfection. The Lord be praised!
  • _alternator_ 7mo ago
    Faith is a fascinating approach here, though it has some flaws. It works on an emotional level if you believe that there is a god that takes care of you as this quote suggests, but if you look for material evidence that there is such a god, there is none to be found. In the medical sciences this usually goes under the name “placebo effect”.
    • JKCalhoun 7mo ago
      C'est la vie, then.
    • hnthrow0287345 7mo ago
      Praise the Omnissiah
    • 7mo ago
• skdbsbsb 7mo ago
  Actually use the tools and critically engage with those who are boosting the extreme takes. You’ll see they’re not a panacea. You’ll find Anthropic started pursuing an IPO right when the hype cycle took off. You’ll discover Shumer is a known liar and grifter. LLMs are here to stay, but we’re in a trillion dollar hype cycle right now.
  • judahmeek 7mo ago
    Yes, critical skepticism is required for processing hype & propaganda. Keep in mind that predictions of the worst & best outcomes very rarely come true, due in large part to the fact that people react to credible predictions. For example, the predictions of the worse outcomes of global warming did not come true, in part due to restrictions on greenhouse gas emissions. The substack article I've linked to below makes a solid argument that you should expect serious information truncation of any sort of widely transmitted belief, so if a widely transmitted belief makes you anxious, the best solution is to go find the truncated information. https://thestrategiclinguist.substack.com/p/the-rule-that-never-was-what-7-38 https://thestrategiclinguist.substack.com/p/the-rule-that-ne...
• Avshalom 7mo ago
  >key leaders of the AI labs struggle openly with the morality of what they are building they definitely are not.
  • steego 7mo ago
    They do. I suspect that you are not only ignoring the existing safeguards that have already come of those discussions, but I suspect you’re also ignoring or pretending like those public discussions never happened in the first place. Furthermore, I suspect you’re also trivializing what is and is not in contention with moral issues as these companies are trying to compete against each other. I also think you’re probably assuming the slower options are the safer options because you haven’t really considered the risks of ceding power/investment to a less scrupulous competitor. I’m not claiming any of these men are moral upstanding people or that they’ve done enough. I think people should be very critical, but they should at least make the effort to ENGAGE in the moral issues and consequences. Your cheap four word response only adds cheap rhetoric to the conversation. If you really care about the moral issues, start typing.
• simonw 7mo ago
  I suggest leaning into the joy a little. I know a lot of people - serious, thoughtful people with impressive careers behind them - who are having the time of their lives right now. I've spoken to multiple people who have come out of retirement because the challenges and opportunities of this new space are irresistible to them. All those side project ideas from the past few decades have suddenly become much more feasible. There's so much new to explore and build. We get to reinvent how software is written. The field is wide open - anyone can be the first to find a new pattern that works, or figure out a new way to apply this tech to real world problems. There are a thousand reasons to be negative about the implications of this technology, and many of them are legitimate. Don't let that distract you entirely from the parts of this that are genuinely inspiring, enabling and fun.
  • justonepost2 7mo ago
    > serious, thoughtful people with impressive careers behind them > I've spoken to multiple people who have come out of retirement because the challenges and opportunities of this new space are irresistible to them. > side project ideas from the past few decades This joy seems to apply to a lot of people who don't need to worry about silly unimportant things like money anymore.
    • simonw 7mo ago
      Yes, it does. It's a lot easier not to be scared of the impact this stuff could have on your career if you are already financially secure. (I'm still personally optimistic that software engineering careers will have a bright future, for what that's worth.)
      • bigtex88 7mo ago
        How do you expect this plays out when 99% of people have no money and no hope? Do you think they'll just sit back and take it?
        • cstoner 7mo ago
• jareklupinski 7mo ago
  build build build im hoping to see over the top of the haze / level the curves by building a platform for everyone to climb
• stuaxo 7mo ago
  Disengage from the hype - just the autocomplete isn't going to eat the world, but it is marginally useful.
• joshmarinacci 7mo ago
  This too shall pass. Seriously. I've been through too many hype cycles to count. In a few years we will look back on this and see three things: * Both the downsides and upsides were exaggerated * A lot of VCs lost money and many of the trillion dollar buildouts didn't happen * after the hype died down we figured out what AI was actually good for, and what it wasn't.
  • bsaul 7mo ago
    i've been through a few hype cycles as well, but this one looks just as big as the invention of the internet, at the very very least (IMHO it's much much more than that). My way of coping with it is to just go with the flow and learn all the new technics there is to learn, until the machine replaces us all.
    • lysace 7mo ago
      My mom (in her 80s) used to ask me "what do you think comes after the internet?". It seemed nonsensical, but here we are. From her perspective: 1. Radio 2. TV 3. Internet 4. ?
      • listic 7mo ago
        Interestingly, I (in my 20s back then) also asked the question in the early 2000's. I had a CS background.
  • mathgladiator 7mo ago
    AI is getting really good at too many things, so this feels very different. I have a claude "skill/program/mega-prompt" for health: https://github.com/nexivibe/md/blob/main/DOCTOR.md https://github.com/nexivibe/md/blob/main/DOCTOR.md I gave it absolutely everything, and praise be to the machine I get the best debate and recommendations I've ever seen. I check what I know to be true, and it's there. I check the logic, and it is sound. I check the medication recommendations and they are legit. I bet in 2030, AI will be able to prescribe medicine.
• atemerev 7mo ago
  This is fatalism? Citrini is an _optimistic_ best case scenario narrative fantasy. -30% markets value, that's Tuesday.
• krzat 7mo ago
  Imagine ideal future, and consider if it's achievable without AI. Being forced to work is not much different from slavery, I would rather roll the dice than keep the status quo.
• blibble 7mo ago
  I'm waiting for the end of the tax year then I'm leaving my employment of 15 years and having a career break away from computers if it's not over in a year or so I'm finding an alternative career, or retiring early
• Aurornis 7mo ago
  There’s a term for this behavior: Doomscrolling People who doomscroll rarely recognize it as doomscrolling because they only think of the term as something that happens to other people. They see their own consumption as accurate and important. They don’t see their sources as doomerism, they think they have identified the real truth that others don’t see yet. They have a short memory for the gross inaccuracies of their doom bubble, such as when everyone thought the AI2027 project had accurately predicted the arrival of evil AGI next year. Remember when that was everywhere and the doomers cited it in every topic until suddenly it became useless to their cause and disappeared? Much has been written about doomscrolling and you can find some good sources for help. Conceptually it’s simple: You need to greatly reduce your consumption of these sources and, very importantly, replace time spent doomscrolling with something healthier for you. Try reading a book, visiting the gym, going outside and walking, or even playing video games or watching movies.
  • Thanemate 7mo ago
    I don't think job search is doomscrolling, because all job openings I see ask for mandatory LLM familiarity. This is where the use of a tool goes beyond "just a tool" and becomes just as important as your own knowledge. In fact, if someone were to tell me that a mediocre candidate was chosen over a widely appraised candidate (open source contributions and all) because the former was more familiar with prompting while the other wasn't... I'd fully believe it. This is how cooked the job market is, and everyone telling me it's not due to LLM usage is in denial.
    • deleted 7mo ago
      [deleted]
    • Aurornis 7mo ago
      Job listings are not full of doom and dread. If you look at a job listing and all you can think about is doom and anxiety, that’s the doomscrolling in other domains coloring your perception of life. It’s amazing how quickly we forget how this works. Only a few years ago you could doomscroll your way into believing COVID was the end of the world and life would never be the same again.
• rsynnott 7mo ago
  Honestly, worry about it if it happens. For every fifty things that the media said was going to change everything, _maybe_ one has.
• mathgladiator 7mo ago
  At core, I'm no longer a "former senior principal engineer", I'm now an "AI wizard" that tells a machine to build and it builds. I get software exactly to my spec without having to compromise, so that's nice. Sure, I have no idea if the code is good, but it is no longer a reflection of my ego. I'm going to start raising cattle since I effectively burnt out of having a career, and AI was the finishing move. The thing is, if you enjoy making things, then this is a great time. I'm currently teaching the machine how to code the language I invented, and it is surprisingly working. Coding is... a bit of a meta skill.
• yomismoaqui 7mo ago
  Grass. Touch it. Seriously, turn off the screen, go into the real world and try to mingle with humans you like.
• ontouchstart 7mo ago
  I am watching ACM A.M. Turing Award Laureate Interviews to set the perspective. https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLn0nrSd4xjjaSLBSzmno-3Ods6FJE9nlO https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLn0nrSd4xjjaSLBSzmno-...
  • ontouchstart 7mo ago
    For example: Allen Newell, 1975 ACM A. M. Turing Award Recipient: “Desires and Diversions” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hCe0ZPGap_k https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hCe0ZPGap_k Wisdom from the previous AI era.
• bubblewand 7mo ago
  Read the Attention Is All You Need paper. Did it for me. "Oh, that's all it is? OK, cool, that'll be nice to have around once the hype-morons move on to the next thing."
• deleted 7mo ago
  [deleted]
• orangecoffee 7mo ago
  Ive been wondering as well and it seems acceptance is the only way. The evidence keeps piling with every successful larger and larger GitHub project we see
  • luckymate 7mo ago
    Can you link some of those projects? I'm genuinely curious.
    • orangecoffee 7mo ago
      pi, openclaw, vinext, browser, ccc compiler, the scope is only growing. Look for the claude icon in the trending GitHub repos https://github.com/trending https://github.com/trending. It's like on all of them. It's hard. :( .. Those who are not accepting this are in cognitive dissonance.
      • wibbily 7mo ago
        I'm taking the bait whatever. All those projects are just more fucking AI tools. It's all Claude seems to be good for - writing agents, skills, harnesses. Just a big fat ouroboros. (Going down the /trending page - 13 of the 14 are some flavor of context manager or agent or smth) Let me know when someone uses Gas Town or openclaw to write something that isn't "the next Gas Town or openclaw" and then we can talk
• nananana9 7mo ago
  We'll see. I'm leaning on "it's all a big joke" until I see at least one impressive result from these supercharged 1000x builders. Be that a useful, novel piece of software that enables me to do something I couldn't before, an interesting book, a good song, anything.
• aaron695 7mo ago
  [dead]
• vuggamie 7mo ago
  AI is another step up the ladder of abstraction, another tool like linters, compilers, IDEs, code completion. Can Claude replace you? Have LLMs altered the software developer productivity equation? In 1987, Fred Brooks wrote [1]: "But, as we look to the horizon of a decade hence, we see no silver bullet. There is no single development, in either technology or in management technique, that by itself promises even one order-of-magnitude improvement in productivity, in reliability, in simplicity." Most companies do not measure software developer productivity. I have never been part of an organization that does. Will it collapse the economy? The last innovation to collapse the economy was credit default swaps. This says more about the economic systems we have built than technology or progress. No one knows what is going to happen. But humans are still necessary for every stage of labor, and software developers are still necessary for making software. [1] https://www.cgl.ucsf.edu/Outreach/pc204/NoSilverBullet.html https://www.cgl.ucsf.edu/Outreach/pc204/NoSilverBullet.html
• alecco 7mo ago
  Focus on "Deep Work" and "Deep Life". Style, quality, and deep knowledge will always be worth a premium.
• piloto_ciego 7mo ago
  Look, so... I'm going to tell you a little about my life and infodump here, but I've already lived chaos and loss of career, existential risk, and fear of death. I've "been there." I'm just some rando on HN, but yeah, here goes. I was a pilot before I got into this tech stuff. For literally ALL of my life all I wanted to do was operate flying vehicles. I built my life around it. I got a summer job in school and paid for my first lessons by washing airplanes. I solo'd at 16, and got debt immediately out of HS to learn to fly. I lived flying, I thought about flying, I dreamt about flying. The only thing I wanted to do was keep flying (particularly smaller single pilot airplanes) and bop around Alaska and the world doing strange technical flying work. My college education? Based on leveraging my flying experience into eventually (you know, probably one day) flying in space doing the same thing - highly technical stuff with a tight crew. By the way, I didn't take a few years off flying to do it, I did it RIGHT alongside my flying career. I had to take time off to go take my last test for my first Bachelors and fly from my base to a place where I could get that last proctored. I was somewhat obsessed with aviation. And for a long time I did that lifestyle and loved it. I met my wife, we started a family, and still flying was the main thing I thought about other than them. Sometimes that was surely to their detriment but thankfully my wife is a saint and could look past my hyperfixation. Along the way I had some other hobbies and passions too, but none of them came close. I mean, I liked computers, so I built some toy apps and learned some stuff, but it was never my passion. Then one day, I got sick and it eventually resulted in blindness. I recovered much of my sight - I can use a computer, etc. but barring borderline miraculous technical and medical advances, I'll likely never operate a flying vehicle again. It wrecked me - ruined me even. I was a disaster for a couple of years. I didn't do anything wrong and yet the universe punished me anyway! I lost my identity completely, almost all of my friends were pilots - gone. Almost all of my technical skills were part of this one niche domain and suddenly they were worthless. Almost all of my life had been built into this and it was over now. And worse, there was nothing I could do to get it back. I was quite suddenly obsolete and unnecessary. Nobody cared about me anymore either - I was a has-been, a flight-less bird, etc. I very suddenly went from being "the promising guy in his late-20s early 30s with a bright future ahead of him" to "unusable burden." Not only was I physically battling illness and quite unwell, but mentally and emotionally the loss of identity because of my loss of my career had left me completely broken. But... I somehow did crawl back from that. From the ashes I rose up and began again. I learned that I had kind of been an idiot before - I mean, I was good at flying, really good even, but so what? Now it was over! And I hyperoptimized a lot of stuff that didn't matter! I hadn't been caring for myself along the way, I hadn't been being a good husband and father. And a sort of key revelation I got out of this became clear: "someday" will come. Someday, you'll take your last X. Someday, all this will be over and it'll be done." That's how the universe works. Someday, you'll do your favorite thing for the last time. I flew medevac during my pilot career and I'd seen people die in fiery airport wreckage. Sometimes entropy wins. You need to make sure you enjoy the things you like doing along the way, because someday you won't be able to do them anymore, and it might not be through any fault of your own. You need to enjoy it while it lasts and enjoy your life! You have no idea when it might disappear. So, I went to gradschool and pivoted into AI stuff. I really enjoyed it! My undergrad was in math and it was so fun to work on these projects! It was great even and gave me some modicum of the satisfaction I got from being a pilot. I studied computer vision because maybe I could get the robots to see for me; even with my vision messed up I could still use my mind. And I fought this terrible ailment! I underwent treatment every month during grad school. I spoke at the engineering department's graduation ceremony. I DID IT! I got a new career! I made it. Despite adversity and pain and suffering, I WAS ON TOP AGAIN! LOOK at ME and bask in my glory! "Look upon my works ye mighty and despair!" But something was amiss, chatGPT came out while I was in grad school and despite people telling me I was a fool for thinking these things were worth anything, I had already had a life I'd lived where automation is prevalent. I already knew how to think about automation. I could tell from the moment it came out that it was going to be big. I remember a heated argument with a friend about this, "dude, I think we're kind of in the singularity, this thing is going to change everything!" "WTF are you talking about it can't even run a decent DND campaign for me? How is it going to figure out how to write code decently?!" And now here we are. At my thesis defense, I talked about how important these tools were going to be in the near future and how they were going to change everything. It was met with mixed emotions and incredulity. But in retrospect I was right. Not that it makes it better for people losing their identity now. It turns out that like 13 years in an industry that heavily uses automation gave me some context that other people didn't have. And I'm watching people deal with the shock of this now. I'm watching people deal with losing their identities in real time, and I am sitting here like the meme of the man about to be hanged, "first time huh?" And after school, I went to work and was almost immediately miserable. I could not stand the bullshit meetings. I could not stand the incessant and bureaucratic grind of working for a large 15k employee org. I couldn't get anything actually done. It took me months to do stuff that should have been an email. Not only that, here I am pointing at this tsunami that's rapidly rushing towards us and people shrug it off or call me an idiot. I get on the AI steering committee and even there, with the other AI people, the ramifications of this are not clear. The very clear end-state seems too fantastical to them and they don't really want to hear "you guys are all going to lose your jobs." So I quit after a couple of years. I started my own business doing consulting and building tools for small businesses around the local area. And I'm much happier though this is much more volatile. But here's the thing you should know: all of this is transient. All of this is ephemeral. It'll all evaporate one day, wealth, youth and beauty won't last forever. I had to learn about impermanence in my early 30s, most people aren't forced to learn it until they're in their 40s or 50s. Things won't last forever, so enjoy it right now, and the things you think you want? Stability and a fat paycheck, etc. are kind of illusions. Your family and your health and satisfaction and enjoyment in your life are much much more important. The bright side of this is while we will mostly all be unemployed in a decade or so (probably in practically every industry), we'll be able to actually spend some time enjoying life. Try to start that now. You're not going to outrun, out optimize, out perform the autopilot. You have to steer it. Give up some control and learn to ride the wave, you'll enjoy it much more.
• butterbomb 7mo ago
  Same as with any other: delusion
• logicprog 7mo ago
  Here's my take: https://neonvagabond.xyz/articles/manifesto-for-survival.html https://neonvagabond.xyz/articles/manifesto-for-survival.htm...
  • nicbou 7mo ago
    In other words, live below your means and decouple your happiness from your income.
    • logicprog 7mo ago
      Practically speaking yeah! There's psychological / libidinal aspects to it that I think are also almost just as important, but yes.
• tim333 7mo ago
  To quote Python """ Always look on the bright side of life... Life's a piece of shit When you look at it Life's a laugh and death's the joke, it's true You'll see it's all a show Keep 'em laughin' as you go Just remember that the last laugh is on you """ I'm optimistic that AI will fix some of the shittiness, and something like uploading may fix the last laugh on you bit. Anyway no harm looking on the bright side...
  • suttontom 7mo ago
    "Python" or Pynchon?
    • tim333 7mo ago
      I was thinking this https://youtu.be/SJUhlRoBL8M https://youtu.be/SJUhlRoBL8M Monty Python's Life of Brian.
• mrdependable 7mo ago
  I'm honestly surprised how most of HN seems to react to it, though I think a big part of it is people not wanting to feel left behind, wanting to think they could be buddies with Sam Altman. Another part of it is that these AI companies push a vision of the future that is attractive to people. Curing cancer, releasing people from the need to work, the world at your fingertips. They need the public's permission to keep doing what they are doing until they reach the point that public opinion doesn't matter anymore. It is honestly scary watching people willingly be led to the slaughter. A lot of people have been too comfortable for too long and don't realize how bad things can get. If the Renaissance was about humanism, we are entering an anti-Renaissance period. My answer is don't cope, do something about it. There are already enough people around trying to cope when we need organized action.
• nicbou 7mo ago
  I might not be writing code forever, but it's only a small part of my job, and an even smaller part of my identity. I will eventually lose my business to AI, too, but even if that happened tomorrow, it would still have been worth it. It filled my coffers, provided me with a wonderful lifestyle and helped thousands of people. Perhaps the gravy train will come to an end. I might have to wake up to an alarm, commute to an office and tighten my belt a bit. Or perhaps I can spend less time building things, and more time understanding the people I build them for. My business always hinged on empathy, not technical prowess. Besides, no matter how bad things get, I will still enjoy riding my bicycle, having tea on my balcony, tending to my garden and painting watercolours. Even if the online spaces I once inhabited are drowned out by AI noise, we can still grill and have potlucks. We can retreat to the cozyweb, or just log off entirely.[0] There's this whole big world I know zero percent off. I might have to go check it out. I guess what I'm trying to say is that my coping mechanism is to go touch grass. [0] https://maggieappleton.com/cozy-web https://maggieappleton.com/cozy-web, https://www.fortressofdoors.com/ai-markets-for-lemons-and-the-great-logging-off/ https://www.fortressofdoors.com/ai-markets-for-lemons-and-th...
• zzgo 7mo ago
  > The key leaders of the AI labs struggle openly with the morality of what they are building Can you provide examples of this? As far as I can tell, they have long pushed past any moral quandaries and are speeding towards implementing their visions while pushing off any problems of societal upheaval onto our politicians.
• tricorn 7mo ago
  Serious answer to the base question: learn as much as you can about how it all works, learn how to use it in its current state, keep up as it changes, be prepared for sudden leaps in the technology. Do not underestimate it. Yes, there is a lot of hype, wailing, gnashing of teeth, but if it is good enough to be a worry, it is also good enough to empower the individual to survive it. Ultimately, if it is all hype, it will soon crumble; if it is not then productivity will increase by leaps and bounds. The only key issue is to make sure that all the gains aren't taken by a small group of people (whether the current rich and powerful, or those that displace them using new paradigms). I suggest getting comfortable with the idea of a UBI.
• ArtDev 7mo ago
  Lean into it. Work on that side-project you never had the time to complete! The more broad your skillset, the more you will be able to transform your role in your company. I have been having lots of fun with Claude Code but recently got in to Cursor too. Vibe coding with frameworks and languages I am already familiar with is wild. However, I want to vibe code with languages I don't know next! Anyone who works with technology knows that it is inherently transformative. It's true that we need tech-worker Unions, UBI and AI regulations.. and without those the future is potentially very dark. I like my scifi dark but I don't want to live in a dystopian Cyberpunk future. I think it is possible to both be an AI-optimist AND an AI-doomer at the same time. In fact, it is important to see both these sides.