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Comment by alexambarch | Hacker News Reader

It’s been hard for me to overcome the feeling that anything I can do, the machine can do better and faster.

I know people have been saying “If you’re worried about it replacing you, you weren’t a good engineer to start with,” but it doesn’t make it hurt any less. I had a lot of fun solving problems and thinking deeply, but now my time is much better spent reviewing the plans and code of a machine that’s done that part for me.

Yes it’s still a hobby I can do on the side, but at my day job it’s just sucked all the energy out of me.

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Unless you were literally the best engineer on the planet, it was always the case that someone could do what you do better and faster. Now, we're either at or approaching a world where even the best engineer on the planet has the same reaction as you. The playing field has been reset. The question for your future is which of you can make better use of the genius engineer in your pocket. Perhaps that involves a different set of tasks than you imagined yourself doing, but fundamentally, all good knowledge work is just creative problem solving. If you were good at that at one level of abstraction, I would bet you will be good at it at another.

I think that’s going to be one of the biggest impacts of AI in society. We will need to find new ways to occupy our time and find meaning in life once machines can do everything better, faster, and cheaper.

What will it look like? Will everybody spend their time playing sports and games? Or on art? Perhaps exploring the solar system or beyond if our technology advances enough?

Quite a time to be alive to even have to think of such things outside of science fiction.

Super optimistic take, unfortunately. Even I as an economic conservative, have serious reservations about our economic system going into this revolution.

It's not that capitalism, money, etc. is a broken system or something. But I think we're foolish if we assume that our current framework can simply adapt to absolutely any eventuality and any massive change in assumptions. I do believe that it's like the best possible train, where the rails are scarcity and human nature. But massive changes to scarcity will have weird-ass effects on the train, and we've unfortunately gotten here in a time where the West has so much dispute going on that I just can't see an organized and smart reorganization of our lives, or even smart adjustments being made. Two political factions are instead going to be screwing around trying to seize maximum power and sabotaging everything to make the other party look bad.

Large swaths of the population have more free time than ever before and they spend most of it scrolling. I am pessimistic

Well that’s because most people work all day and come home tired. It’s tough to self actualize when you’re too tired to think.

And I don’t even know if it’s true that people have more free time. A lot of people have side hustles like Uber or whatever to make extra money.

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