He is specifically talking about AI, and saying (in my understanding) that you shouldn’t worry too much about whether your specific thing will be overwritten by AI, as long as you focus on actually creating true, real value with your work.

I agree with that completely and can see it happening in my own field (marketing/tech writing.)

Yes, theoretically AI can replace every writer and marketer. The functionality is there.

No, this isn’t actually happening, because what’s mattered all along isn’t a generic marketing skill set; but the mental effort to actually provide value. No one wants to read a blog post by an AI because it’s boring, and the writers that actually have something of value in their writing are doing just fine.

No one knows what he is actually saying (see comments) but at least he managed to compress the entire discourse on AI impact into a blog post.

If you don't worry about the returns, you won't get any.

There are circumstances where that is fine. Be sure you're in one of them first.

I don't remember ever learning a theorem stating that computers cannot surpass humans.

Unfortunately for most people, there's plenty of companies willing to take the returns and leave you paycheck to paycheck. That's literally what they are optimized to do.

I don't even disagree with the ideal, but I think a prerequisite step to this philosophy is UBI.

https://vedabase.io/en/library/bg/2/47/

If you must hold the context for 8 agents in your head at once, your expertise as an engineer is wasted.

See https://emsh.cat/one-human-one-agent-one-browser/ - One man + one agent in 72 hours, did better than thousands of agents over weeks.

Staying focused on one or two important tasks still works. You won't fall behind.

Workers should generally aim to unionize and seek to capture more of their value through worker-owned co-ops.

This strategy is highly effective but it's also difficult to tolerate as an ordinary advanced ape. Watching others play less noble games and obtain easier wins can be discouraging over time.

I have found that the less you care about money the easier it is to acquire. Risk aversion, greed and interpersonal drama will kill a good idea way before anything else. I sometimes like to reframe this one as "100% of $0 is still $0".

> If you don’t use this new stupid AI thing you will fall behind. If you haven’t totally updated your workflow you are worth 0.

When I see this on any social platform, that is a sign that a VC / investor already invested or likely over-invested in said product and is manipulating emotions to shill their portfolio companies.

This is a tired tactic repeated and recycled tens of thousands of times over and over again and the first sense is to ignore them.

> That said, if you have a job where you create complexity for others, you will be found out. The days of rent seekers are coming to an end. But not because there will be no more rent seeking, it’s because rent seeking is a 0 sum game and you will lose at it to bigger players.

This is why many here are realizing the uncomfortable truth about why complexity over simplicity was celebrated. Of course job security.

But it turns out that the low hanging fruit at those companies that added close to no value LLMs were enough to achieve "AGI" internally; (meaning layoffs in this case).

The jobs of knowledge workers will still be there, but the big money just went into data centers (and not overpaying for more knowledge workers).

The truth is in the middle.

I suspect "going recursive" often colloquially means that AI systems achieve their exponential growth without human software engineers in the mix. This is a moment whose sudden apparent nearness does justify some of the ramping rhetoric, in my opinion.

I agree with what is being said: AI will consolidate otherwise nonsensical jobs/roles/companies into fewer (probably more profitable?) ones, so if there’s a time to jump ship from one of these (assuming worst case scenarios), do it while you’re employed and you can land somewhere else that’s hopefully more stable.

This to me is a fairly no-nonsense piece over all. AI itself and tools like LLM are damn good though, limitations aside. We get to do a lot of things we haven’t had time to do before.

Create more value than what I cost, otherwise why are you paying me?

Case in point: how many here have heard of Mick Ronson?

Few perhaps. However most have heard of David Bowie.

See, Ronson was silently creating value for Bowie. Didn’t even get credited although songs like Life On Mars are what they are thanks to his contribution.

Mick was creating value while everyone one else was getting rich.

If that stops being the limiting factor, then we’ll be in a post-scarcity world.

This explains the panic. It describes most roles in big tech.

Reminds me of Manfred Macx' attitude in the novel Accelerando by Charlie Stross

Anybody have examples?

I'd also argue it's not very effecicient : we are at our best when we have deadlines and clear targets to reach, and making money to pay the bills can be a very motivating one to stop procrastinating !

In Europe we like to sit there and eat breakfast like a pleb. After enjoying that, we build a million Euros company. Maybe or maybe not. Who cares if the breakfast is good.

The barrier to being able to add any value along the supply chain is shriking daily, meaning that very few people can actually add value.

The people that have managed to get on top of the system by these mean rarely aknowledge that their methods don't scale, which is a terribly irresponsible and ultimately narcissistic way to use their ideological influence.

If you give advice to a group, it should either scale to most of the group or aknowledge up front it's exceptionalistic.

Better advice would be stay hungry, stay curious, keep learning.

To be mean, I’d say no—those zero-sum games are always 'positive' for the players, because the people actually foot pay the bill aren't even at the table.

Come on, we live in a globalized reality. Those insulated by the 'Dollar Illusion' don’t even realize that the true costs are being extracted from the rest of the world. These so-called zero-sum games are nothing but a sophisticated machinery of power, meticulously designed to obfuscate the truth.

But those words are just too cynical; it doesn't really make any sense.

slightly naive take when the author recognises that AI will cause productivity increase.

https://theoatmeal.com/comics/exposure

Tomorow datasets.

Keep publishing !

A better mantra is to create value for yourself and then compound it by sharing it. Then you can't lose, yet can win even more.

    Under heaven all can see beauty as beauty only because there is ugliness.
    All can know good as good only because there is evil.
    
    Therefore having and not having arise together.
    Difficult and easy complement each other.
    Long and short contrast each other:
    High and low rest upon each other;
    Voice and sound harmonize each other;
    Front and back follow one another.
    
    Therefore the sage goes about doing nothing, teaching no-talking.
    The ten thousand things rise and fall without cease,
    Creating, yet not possessing.
    Working, yet not taking credit.
    Work is done, then forgotten.
    Therefore it lasts forever.

On the question of whether Hotz knows what AI can or cannot do, the answer is demonstrably "no".

The bottom line is that the majority of people alive today have to take whatever deal they are given in a sense, as they absolutely do not have the "Luxury" of not "Playing zero sum games."

Must be nice to be rich enough to get to spout philosophical BS and not worry how you're going to pay for groceries, but most people alive these days are a lot closer to being homeless than they are to being millionaires, and quitting a job that pays their bills so they can "Provide value to a community" and not worry about how they are going to get paid just isn't even a remotely viable option.

No. This is the time to abandon naive dogooderism.

The capitalists said that they don’t need labor any more. Fine. Prepare for that potentiality by not giving jack shit away for free. That includes permissively licensed open source software. But it goes way beyond that.

In the long term maybe we can get rid of the labor-employee relation so that people who do honest work don’t have to worry about their work becoming automated. Let the ones who engage in dishonest pseudo-work (capital accumulation) worry about their pseudo-productivity becoming null and void.