People are bad at predicting the impact of technical changes. Particularly when that change is exponential. When it comes to AI, we've of course got a century plus of science fiction material made by people who tried really hard to imagine the future. It ranges from very dystopian to very utopian. And recently, HN and the rest of the internet has been obsessing over AI a lot.

My personal view is that we're probably all missing the point in some way. And of course I'm probably missing it too. It's like predicting that a few hundred main frame should just about cover the whole market in the nineteen forties. That's where we are with AI today. We have a handful of companies capable of building somewhat useful AI models. And a lot of under resourced tinkerers trying to do stuff with it.

However, a point I like to make regarding work is that we already live in the future. People are worried about losing their jobs not realizing that they've already lost that. By that I don't mean they are out of work. But both the nature of and the amount of work we do to survive has changed massively since the industrial revolution. We keep ourselves busy and it earns us a living. But it mostly isn't all that relevant or important what we do.

Most of us here on HN are doing jobs in software, investments, or related things that have relatively little to do with providing food, shelter, or safety for people. It's all interesting and fun and probably a little bit hedonistic. If I look in the mirror, I can't say with a straight face that what I do is particularly important or relevant. It's more about me doing something interesting (to me) that happens to convert into a weird thing called money that I can convert into stuff I need or want. People are now having serious discussions about having a four day work week. And we just came out of a pandemic where startlingly large percentage of people vastly reduced their economic activity without our economy grinding to a halt. A lot of busy people that suddenly weren't so busy. It did not matter.

It used to be that people worked until they were to old and broken to work. If they didn't they'd starve. For most people meant 6 day work weeks, long shifts, not a lot of leisure time, etc. You'd start work as soon as you learned to work people died young on average. It still means that for some people in developing markets and even some developed markets that maintain a class society (like the US). However that's increasingly less true for a lot of people. There are a lot of people working in the services industry. More than in things like farming or manufacturing.