What happens if an entire class of workers loses faith in their careers • Hacker News Board

Re: What happens if an entire class of workers loses faith in their careers

#371

Post by Eridrus » Fri, Aug 07, 2026, 9:49 PM UTC

tehnub wrote: post #271

If you're excited about AI, doesn't that mean you're actually less AI-pilled? You don't believe it will replace you fully.

I am a fundamental believer that technological efficiency is the reason life is better now than it was hundreds of years ago, and will be the reason that life in hundreds of years is better than it is now.

There may be disruption to me as a producer, but I think the results for people as consumers will be great.

There will be change, there is already change in our careers here, but I do not fear the need to change and do something different.

On net for humanity, I am certain the change will be positive even if some people including myself will experience disruption.

Re: What happens if an entire class of workers loses faith in their careers

#372

Post by dwedge » Fri, Aug 07, 2026, 9:49 PM UTC

Xirdus wrote: post #300

elmer2 wrote: post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"If there’s a robust public healthcare and UBI type system in place to pad the fall, people will bounce back and adapt when industries break down." This would be great, in theory. The reality is that people would live on it and never work, have kids, and the same thing would happen with a new generation. As it expands, you run out of tax payers and the system collapses. A 'robust' healthcare system that the governmen…

> A 'robust' healthcare system that the government runs is a pipe dream. That "pipe dream" has already been achieved by most EU countries decades ago. Sure, you might argue it's worse in quality than American healthcare and that wait times are horrible, but I guarantee you most Americans would see it as an improvement over their current situation.

The American system existing is a travesty both because of the struggles it gives Americans but also because it's used as a comparison to make the European systems look good. The NHS in the UK is an expensive bureaucratic nightmare and doesn't come anywhere near to performing as it should (for instance a recent government boasted cutting the waiting list by a high number, but they accomplished it by removing people that had been waiting for too long). It costs a lot of tax but any criticism of it generally gets met with "would you prefer the US system?" as though it's the only other option.

I live in Eastern Europe now where they also have free health care, and it's so bad that almost everyone pays for private medical insurance - essentially we pay twice because the first system is mostly not fit for purpose.

Re: What happens if an entire class of workers loses faith in their careers

#373

Post by dsign » Fri, Aug 07, 2026, 9:51 PM UTC

I personally have been trying to get a financial security cushion for the last ten years or so (and failing) so I don't take my own feelings into account; AI hasn't made me more frustrated. On the contrary, it's a tool I now use in my escape-the-rat-wheel adventures, and there's nothing sweeter than seeing Opus dismantle in ten minutes a problem that would have consumed two full days of my time in this world. But when I speak with colleagues and friends, all of them, now and not before, in all age groups, and with only in common to be knowledge workers, are searching for a way out.

Re: What happens if an entire class of workers loses faith in their careers

#374

Post by mrguyorama » Fri, Aug 07, 2026, 9:51 PM UTC

jknoepfler wrote: post #220

marginalia_nu wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As an experiment, completely stop consuming news and social media for a few weeks. People have lived their entire lives without these information streams, you'll survive unplugging a bit. Now I can't tell you what you will experience if you go through with this, but I can promise it's very enlightening.

No thank you. I had ICE flood the streets where I live with poorly trained thugs with assault rifles recruited from the ranks of neonazis illegally assaulting, detaining and abusing citizens of my country because they had brown skin. They shot dead two citizens (Renee Good and Alex Pretti) doing what I was also doing - relentlessly recording and documenting their behavior and addition to protesting. I don't think you…

ICE killed a completely random person, who had every legal right to be here, in Biddeford Maine. There is again video evidence that ICE's claim of self defense is complete horseshit.

You can be 99% sure that the people currently saying that wasn't such a big deal are also saying you should not pay attention to the media because it is just about making you angry.

They say this as they've been consuming Conservative AM radio for decades, which was entirely about making up stories to make people angry.

Meanwhile the local legal immigrant community is terrified, many people have been literally kidnapped and are missing, and this idea that they would somehow be fine if they just didn't pay attention is absurd.

It's insane. These conservatives are acting like it's no big deal real harms are happening, like this is just some sort of game. My brother visited and talked about his complaints about what is happening as if it was a milquetoast yelp review of a local burger joint. Asshole doesn't care that his voting choices has literally killed hundreds for no reason.

Predictably, he's the kind of person that talks about sports teams as if he is a member. "We did so well" in reference to the bruins winning a game for example.

Re: What happens if an entire class of workers loses faith in their careers

#375

Post by darepublic » Fri, Aug 07, 2026, 9:51 PM UTC

I'll never consider my time with programming to be useless. Even if we got sent back to the stone age and programmable computers no longer existed. The way of thinking to me is very valuable

Re: What happens if an entire class of workers loses faith in their careers

#376

Post by brushfoot » Fri, Aug 07, 2026, 9:51 PM UTC

"Knowledge work is mostly pointless" is the author's view, so his article (the fruit of knowledge work) should be measured by it.

Amd that sentiment is hardly surprising, coming as it does from a Director of AI Operations (his title on LinkedIn).

Re: What happens if an entire class of workers loses faith in their careers

#377

Post by krapp » Fri, Aug 07, 2026, 9:53 PM UTC

jakebol wrote: post #367

pj_mukh wrote: post #316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>>"optimistic and enthusiastic about the new messiah" I mean that's you agreeing with Elon Musk, I disagree, I think AI is just normal technology [1], there's a lot of us. Like tech revolutions before, it'll have huge effects on productivity alleviating major scarcities. That's boring to the algorithm, not enough conflict , but it's exciting to a lot of tech workers. No messiah's and no Jihads, just excited about goi…

Advancement of normal technologies can bring about profound conflict, I feel that is one of the main takeaways from the history of the Industrial Revolution.

The conflict in that case (and, I think AI) came about not from the technology or its advancement, but the use of that technology for class warfare by capitalists.

I can imagine an alternate future where AI advances without all of the social, environmental and economic harm that it does, where there isn't a literal cult of neo-reactionaries using it to advance their authoritarian political agenda, where mass copyright theft isn't an issue, where the internet isn't consumed by slop and businesses aren't trying to put their workforce out on the streets as fast as possible. Where people don't literally believe it will evolve into some kind of techno-God whose judgement we should fear. Where we're not shoving it into every nook, cranny and orifice of our society, even when it doesn't work, because it's "inevitable" and we "just have to learn to live with it." A world where AI is just technology and not whatever this insanity is that it breeds in people.

I wish I lived in that world, because the hacker in me finds the technology fascinating, and I'd like to be able to use it without abandoning my morals or supporting the infrastructure of fascism.

Re: What happens if an entire class of workers loses faith in their careers

#378

Post by Foobar8568 » Fri, Aug 07, 2026, 9:53 PM UTC

Animats wrote: post #221

Addressing the question in the title, "What happens if an entire class of workers loses faith in their careers", look at what happened to printers. That was a good skilled trade for centuries. Then it just went away. Phototypesetting took the high volume end. Desktop publishing took the low end. Computer-controlled presses took press operators. And then the newspaper business died. I've heard homeless former printers…

Fuck, there has been a class of workers who had faith in their careers? Beside Charlatans and Billionaires?

Re: What happens if an entire class of workers loses faith in their careers

#379

Post by kilroy123 » Fri, Aug 07, 2026, 9:54 PM UTC

bojan wrote: post #304

pzo wrote: post #288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe I'm too pessimistic but i doubt how this can work out worldwide. It can work out maybe for some few wealthy countries but in this AI revolutions most likely we will have only 2 winners: USA and China. Smaller EU countries cannot even today introduce a fair revenue tax on big tech so that they pay any tax without being threatened about retaliatory steps by US administration.

Which is why I still think that the only way forward is that the EU becomes a country of its own. I'm aware that's deeply unpopular, partially due to The forrogn influence, but thr alternative is catastrophic - stagnation and letting US, China and Russia dictate our way of life.

I, too, have come to this realization. But boy, oh boy, do Europeans get disgusted by the idea. (My partner is European)

Re: What happens if an entire class of workers loses faith in their careers

#380

Post by woopah » Fri, Aug 07, 2026, 9:54 PM UTC

pixelready wrote: post #246

Animats wrote: post #221

Addressing the question in the title, "What happens if an entire class of workers loses faith in their careers", look at what happened to printers. That was a good skilled trade for centuries. Then it just went away. Phototypesetting took the high volume end. Desktop publishing took the low end. Computer-controlled presses took press operators. And then the newspaper business died. I've heard homeless former printers…

The answer to this is always the one we don’t want to talk about: a robust public safety net. This is the balance to “move fast and break shit” technological disruption. It’s great to have an adaptive overall system, but disruption has a human cost. If there’s a robust public healthcare and UBI type system in place to pad the fall, people will bounce back and adapt when industries break down. If instead we stick our…

Definitely agree with this! Given the pace of technological development, we should basically expect entire groups of people to constantly drop out of the competitive labor market. Don't get me wrong, new jobs will be created as well, but it's also very possible many people will also not be able to reskill into those new roles without some sort of structural support. People have faith that technology will create new markets and roles, and while that's historically been true, I think people also tend to forget that this happens in aggregate, and that someone's personal career trajectory can be largely luck dependent. You may happen to find the role of the future or you might get stuck with depreciating skills, hard to say which unless you can predict the future!

I think we've largely been able to avoid large scale disruption in society for the past several decades because the groups losing their careers were small enough, but we can see negative effects in things like health data. I think Deaths of Despair by Deaton and Case does a pretty good job at talking about this. However, AI now threatens a much more visible work segment, the upper middle class, so I do agree that now is a very interesting time to see what happens.