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Comment by margalabargala | Hacker News Reader

> Also, none of these companies will actually give you your purpose in life, your dream job will not make you whole:-)

Some people really do find a whole lot of personal meaning from their work. And that's okay. It's their life.

If someone is the sort of person who might find meaning working for Anthropic, they would find that meaning at a lot of other jobs as well. I think that's a better emssage; not that "you shall not find purpose in your work", but "the purpose you may find from work is not limited to a single or even small number of AI companies".

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The blue-collar version of this, which I think distills the essence well: "Does life start when you clock in, or clock out?"

Very critical difference in mindset and the reason a lot of these conversations end up talking past each other.

That is fair. I suppose what I meant is, the idea of working at one of these companies can be really exciting, almost a fantasy, but in practice: it might actually hurt you in many ways. 'Look what they make you give', as a certain character once said. With that said, obviously I think it's cool and worth doing, but there are significant and painful downsides, too.

If the past 25 years of tech companies is any indication of the future of these new AI endeavors, working there will be directly contributing to the enslavement of mankind in ways we can't even begin to imagine yet.

The greenfield projects arising from this leap look benign now, but I can almost guarantee that won't be the case in the next decade once these technologies optimize their revenue generation engines and enshittification takes hold. Humanity will be at the whim of the AI compute overlords much more so than we are now, and that's an inevitable nightmare dystopia that I'm not looking forward to. The gilded age will look like child's play by the time we figure this out as a society.

I suppose that if your ambition is to be on the winning end of that hellscape, then by all means, go for it.

I mean, if there's going to end up being a hellscape it'd be better to be on the winning end than the losing one, right?

I get it, we all want to be somebody, but is the juice worth the squeeze?

They may find a candidate that succeeds, they may not. In the end, it’s up to you to decide whether that kind of environment is for you. I also interviewed at a few AI startups and while difficult, I wasn’t impressed with them. They seem to be too high maintenance with little to no experience.

This is key: the OP seems to be putting them on a pedestal, but if Sturgeon's law holds (and I think it does) then a sizable percentage of what's happening there doesn't smell very good.

I totally agree. My work is a major part of my life. I do my job well and that's important to me.

But I don't care about any particular company. I'm just as happy automating refineries as I am factories or chemical plants. I just want to be a valuable member of a team that gets stuff done.

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