The thing you describe was perfectly addressed, as far as I can tell, in a piece of short fiction about AI that was written in 2021.
https://m.fictionpress.com/s/3353977/1/The-End-of-Creative-S...
Ask HN: Does anyone else feel like nothing matters anymore?
21–30 of 195 posts
Re: Ask HN: Does anyone else feel like nothing matters anymore?
#22I’m actually incredibly excited for the future!
Individuals are now a lot more empowered to work effectively with computers (including us in the tech industry). Would you honestly wanna go back to pre-LLM?
I now have more fun learning CS concepts and the side projects I can work on now were previously impossible.
On the other hand, if you only got into CS for the money… then I take your point.
Re: Ask HN: Does anyone else feel like nothing matters anymore?
#23I think one aspect of this relates to extrinsic vs intrinsic motivation. I'm intrinsically motivated to work on my software projects because I want them to exist, and I enjoy exploring the problem space and working my way to a good solution. AI is great because it accelerates my abilities in this regard. If I'd had only extrinsic motivations of credit and money, I can see that AI would affect them negatively. But I'd…
>Is it that I want it to be done? Would it have been done if I didn't? (Additionality)
>Is it that I want to have done it? Would I be happy if someone else did it? (credit)
>Is it that I want to be doing it? (achievement/process)
>I want to have a mix. I want to do some things for the experience and some things for the accomplishment. I want to do some easy things and some hard things. Some fun things and some unfun things. Some things just for me and some things for others.
Amit Patel, via https://digitalseams.com/blog/amit-patel-on-making-things
Re: Ask HN: Does anyone else feel like nothing matters anymore?
#24I still think there's some junction between software and the physical world that's the next exciting frontier. There's a whole new world opening up that we've never been able to tackle before. Imagine a world where we can shift all these bright folks from working on ads and SaaS to working on new materials discovery, fundamental sciences, healthcare access, climate change, etc. Working to make the world around us a better place.
We can now build apps with a TAM of 1 or 2 viable at scale - I still have hope there's a lot of good we can do for the world with that new reality. Purpose-built tools for super niche, high-impact problems, where software isn't the end goal, it's just a means to an end.
What do you think? Still meaningless?
Re: Ask HN: Does anyone else feel like nothing matters anymore?
#25Corollary to your complaints: Another downside that I haven't seen on anyone's AI hatelist yet is that it crowds out all other discussion. What happened to everyone talking about languages, protocols, algorithms, architecture, etc.? We can't have those conversations anymore because we're not even sure they matter now. In fact, we probably suspect they don't, hence the not bothering. Also, anything we do write will ju…
why write programming languages if LLMs are fast enough to talk plaintext everything to eachother with perfect memory
Re: Ask HN: Does anyone else feel like nothing matters anymore?
#26Indeed it feels so uninspiring, no talent/skill needed and my experience of 17 years feels a bit pointless. In the past few months I have used Codex to build apps, so it's not like Im not using AI it just makes my/the career seem dumb. Also, the LinkedIn recruiter semi flood of messages offering potential jobs has dried up completely(anyone else experience this too?). Linkedin is now just a sad and depressing place a…
As a backend/full-stack engineer I still receive at least a few linkedin recruiter messages a week.
Re: Ask HN: Does anyone else feel like nothing matters anymore?
#27Doing what matters has become essential; discerning what that is, less clear.
Re: Ask HN: Does anyone else feel like nothing matters anymore?
#28> enable cheats in a game
Great analogy. Life does not have cheats though. Things are changing fast but the limits of physics still apply and reality has a surprising amount of detail[1].
I find myself feeling the way you are feeling when I stop making things. When I'm making things it is very clear where the limits and frontiers have moved to, and that's where the fun is. I would say just start exploring and making things and you'll soon see that "you can do anything" is not true. There is still enormously fun work to be done and puzzles to be solved, with the help of AI or without it.
[1] http://johnsalvatier.org/blog/2017/reality-has-a-surprising-...
Re: Ask HN: Does anyone else feel like nothing matters anymore?
#29I was fired a while ago and hit my "why am I waking up today?" point.
Took me a while but turns out the best reason I found to exist was taking cool pictures of bugs. Fuck me are spiders cool. Dragonflies are incredible. Look at that springtail!
Do something ai can't take from you.
I set myself a goal to find all 3 species of a particular spider genus in my state. Got it! Moving on to finding a bolas spider.
idk. There really is a lot to enjoy outside the collapse of the things I used to enjoy and define my existence by.
Re: Ask HN: Does anyone else feel like nothing matters anymore?
#30Anyone can do it? Is everyone you know making a million dollars a year with their software startup? Are you?
[deleted]