Has the decline of knowledge work begun?

> My personal theory is that this is the result of an incompetent management class where no self corrections are happening.

This is really a cultural problem that has infected management along with everyone else.

It used to be that you were expected to be able to fix your own car or washing machine, and moreover that one you couldn't fix would be rejected by the customers. It was expected to come with documentation and be made of modular parts you could actually obtain for less than three quarters of the price of the entire machine.

Now everything is a black box you're expected to never open and if it breaks and the manufacturer doesn't deign to fix it you go to the store and buy another one.

The problem with this is that it poisons the well. Paying money to make the problem go away instead of learning how to fix it yourself means that, at scale, you lose the ability to fix it yourself. The knowledge and infrastructure to choose differently decays, so that you have to pay someone else to fix the problem, even if that's not what you would have chosen.

The result is a helplessness that stems from a lack of agency. Once the ability to do something yourself has atrophied, you can no longer even tell whether the person you're having do it for you is doing it well. Which, of course, causes them to not. And in turn to defend the opacity so they can continue to not.

Which brings us back to management. The C suite doesn't actually know how the company works. If something bad happens, they may not even find out about it, or if they do it's through a layer of middle management that has put whatever spin on it necessary to make sure the blame falls on the designated scapegoat. Actually fixing the cause of the problem is intractable because the cause is never identified.

But to fix that you'd need an economy with smaller companies, like a machine with modular parts and documented interfaces, instead of an opaque monolith that can't be cured because it can't be penetrated by understanding.

I think a way to sum this up is simply metric optimizing. As organizations and companies grow larger the need to evaluate people at scale becomes necessary. And so metrics are used, and people then naturally start to optimize around those metrics. But it seems to invariably turns out that any sort of metric you create will not effectively measure progress towards a goal you want to achieve, when that metric ends up being optimized for.

The traditional term for this is cobra effect. [1] When the Brits were occupying India they wanted to reduce the cobra population, so they simply created a bounty on cobra heads. Sounds reasonable, but you need to have foresight to think about what comes next. This now created a major incentive for entrepreneurial Indians to start mass breeding cobras to then turn in their heads. After this was discovered, the bounty program was canceled, and the now surging cobra farm industry mostly just let their cobras go wild.

I think the fundamental problem is that things just don't work so well at scale, after a point. This is made even worse by the fact that things work really well at scale before they start to break down. So we need a large economy that remains relatively decentralized. But that's not so easy, because the easiest way to make more money is to just start assimilating other companies/competitors with your excess revenue. Anti-trust is the knee jerk answer but even there, are we even going to pretend there's a single person alive who e.g. Google (or any other mega corp) doesn't have the resources to 'sway'?

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perverse_incentive

This crisis, which it is, is caused by the unrecognized necessity for effective communications within science and technology and business, which is not taught. Not really, only a lite "presentation skill" is taught.

Fact of the matter: communications is everything for humans, including dealing with one's own self. Communications are how our internal self conversation mired in bias encourages or discourages behavior, communications are how peers lead, mislead, inform, misinform, and omit key information - including that critical problem information that people are too often afraid to relate.

An effective communicator can talk to anyone, regardless of stature, and convey understanding. If the information is damningly negative, the effective communicator is thanked for their insight and not punished nor ignored.

Effective communications is everything in our complex society, and this critical skill is simply ignored.

While I suspect the root cause is managerial dysfunction ultimately the disease spreads everywhere. I've stopped honing my technical skills because I don't expect to ever work in an organisation sufficiently well-managed for it to matter. So then you end up with the loss of genuine technical expertise from generation to generation as well.

Sounds like hypernormalisation has now hit the West

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HyperNormalisation

I would caveat with its not affordable to be passionate anymore. The top engineers (mech, chem, civil, etc) I know work in finance or consulting instead of doing things they care about.

Closer to tech, I feel we have had a big influx on non-tech joining the tech workforce and the quality has suffered as a result of a lack of fundamentals and passion

The cause of an incompetent management class is a subservient worker class. Now a subservient worker class is either that they are incompetent or they don’t have access to capital, meaning that they can’t strike out on their own and leave management to suffer the consequences of their incompetence.

This started when companies decided that labor is fungible.

The moment you admit failure as an employee, you are out of the company. And no for most people it is not easy to find a job that will not disrupt their lives (aka move cities, change financial planning, even health insurance).

So employees do what they have to do. They will lie till the last moment and pretend that the initiatives they are working on are huge value add for the company.

In the past you knew you would retire from your company, also the compensation differential was not that huge across levels, so there was little incentive to BS.

Today everything is optimized with a horizon of a financial quarter. Then a pandemic hits, and we realize that we don't even know how to make freaking masks and don’t even have supplies of things for more than a week.

But for example Toy Story (1995) had a budget of 30 million. Today's Disney box office flops have budgets closer to 250 million.

This is a tangent, but I don't think the cost of things like 3DS or Maya were ever major barriers to entry. They were widely available for 'free' download. I think the companies involved were basically using this as what would eventually become the modern 'free for entities with less than $xxx annual revenue' license as there was seemingly less than 0 effort to ever enforce their copyrights. To say nothing of the countless commercial books available for both, which simply would not have had a market if it was only selling to people who had real licenses for the software.

If it's a commodity why is everything worse in quality? Commodification doesn't explain drop in objective metrics like performance, security, and complexity. It doesn't even explain the decline in stuff like customer satisfaction.

I don't think talent is the problem either. There's a lot more talent now than in the 90's.

Boeing calls to say hello...

I'm glad I'm not the only one noticing appliances getting worse across the board. I don't buy enough of them to really know if the trend holds overall but the correlation is pretty much perfect between how new an appliance is and how much I hate it. For example the controls on my new LG washer and dryer are incredible bad. They've made it hard to impossible to just set the run level manually to push you into set programs for bedding or whatever. But they never work right! We've given up on using those programs entirely because they are terrible.

The main culprits I've seen are cheaping out on quality, replacing traditional controls with touch screens or "AI" magic buttons, and squeezing in more monetization streams or adding gimmicky features that actively make the product worse.

Maybe things will turn around someday. There are a few rays of hope, like the touchscreen fad in cars gradually losing its luster, but it seems like we've been on the wrong path for a long time and I'm not sure it will ever correct.

> I can't compare exactly but I feel like today the business pays more, the customer pays more, the drivers get paid less and it's all subsidized by investors to boot. Am I totally wrong on this?

It is exactly that! Food delivery is an excellent example of 'things just got worse'.

In 2019, 'delivery' was a specialty a restaurant would have to focus on to offer. Pizza places (Papa Johns, Pizza Hut, etc) and other specific delivery-focused restaurants (such as Panera Bread, Jimmy Johns, or your local Chinese restaurant) would have actual W2 employees who did delivery driving, as part of their job. The restaurant would want deliveries to go well (for both the customer, as well as the driver), so would make sure their own staff had reasonable access to food, some light training, and would ensure they could deliver it somewhat well. (They would reject orders too far away, they wouldn't serve food that wouldn't survive a delivery trip well, etc)

In post-COVID 2025, "every" restaurant offers delivery, but almost no restaurant still employs their own delivery drivers (locally, Jimmy Johns might be the only one left). Everyone else just outsourced to DoorDash. DoorDash drivers are employees who are 'legally-not-employees' (1099 employees), so they no longer have any direct access to the restaurants, and they can't train well for any specific service, because they might have to visit any-of-50 restaurants on any given day, all of which have entirely different procedures (even if they are the same brand or chain). Restaurants have zero incentive to ensure deliveries go well (the drivers aren't their employees, so they no longer care about turnover, and customers have to use DoorDash or Uber Eats or equivalent, because almost every restaurant uses it, so there's no downside to a DoorDash delivery going bad).

Prices to consumers are double-to-higher than what they were in 2019, depending on the restaurant. Wages are down, employment security is entirely eliminated. Quality and service have tanked.

Presumably, investors make slightly more money off of all of this?

> They include some common appliances that use water, due to water use regulations. No reason my dishwasher should take over 2 hours to run

I don't think this is a great example, because saving water (and thus the energy needed to heat the water) is both a social good and a private good.

Your new dishwasher program might take longer because, for example, (a) it's more efficient to soak residues than keep blasting away at them, but it takes longer and (b) if you alternate between shooting water at the the top and bottom drawers (but not both at once) then you can get away with using half the water, in twice the time.

Most dishwashers have an 'express' programme that uses more water and energy to finish faster, so if that matters you can still have it. If it doesn't matter to you (e.g. because you're running the dishwasher overnight, or while you're at work), you and everyone else benefits from the greater efficiency.

So I think this is an unambiguous improvement. :)

The average quality of appliances is a separate question. Anecdotally, I finally had to replace a 22-year-old Neff dishwasher. I got a new Bosch one (same firm, different logo), and have been pleasantly surprised that the new model is still made in Germany, seems pretty solid, washes well, and is guaranteed for 5 years.

Not sure about price comparisons but what I can say is that many experiences feel worse. Paying 50-60$ for 3 tacos to be delivered, going out to basically any restaurant, pricing models on almost any subscription service(Adobe good example).

It’s led me to learn to DIY as much as possible, making my own fun and experiences so to say.

> Am I totally wrong on this?

You are probably getting more, and the difference more than goes entirely into rent.

Real state is destroying the world's economy.

The money is going to the driver's rent.

Donald Trump made appliance water use regulations an issue in the 2024 presidential campaign. Of course his opponents mocked him for it, and it probably was a little silly, but the messaging was effective in getting voters fired up about government overreach.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/biden-allies-call-tr...

AFAIK the reason that newer dishwashers (new more than a decade ago) take a 2 hour cycle is that it's a more efficient cycle in both energy and water, but not in time.

I don't think that's the reason.

If it were necessary to have seen something to know it's possible, nothing would ever improve, and nothing new would get made.

Actually I think your examples show that it is you who may be incorrect.

Stardew Valley is 9 years old.

Minecraft is almost 16 years old. The current version of the game has not dramatically changed in terms of the experience of most players of the game in over 10 years. (Hardcore players of any game will always make a big deal of any minor changes).

I was born in the 1990’s. I was playing games regularly in the 2000’s and the 2010’s although I don’t play as much today.

Hardly anyone in 2005 was playing 1996 games or 1989 games regularly.

Even in 2015 not many were playing 2006 or 1999 games regularly. (I think World of Warcraft was the only very popular old game in 2015)

But now in 2025 you bring up a 2016 game and 2009 game to argue with that other guy?

Hell what happened to the major big budget games? I remember playing Witcher 3, Red Dead Redemption 2 and Cyberpunk 2077…but even those games are ancient now. Witcher 3 is 10 years old, RDR 2 is 7 years old, Cyberpunk is 5 years old…

In 2015 I was playing games more often but I was playing games that were more recently released…. Not really games from 2010, 2008 and 2005….

Hell the most popular game for kids now is Fortnite which is 8 years old and came out in 2017! I wasn’t playing Mass Effect (2007) too much in 2015. The difference between Mass Effect 1 or Elder Scrolls Oblivion and The Witcher 3 is the same time difference as when Fortnite was released and 2025!

Is that a change? George Lucas certainly brought his politics around Vietnam to Star Wars. The 70s were a very radical and political time for movies

> Even more glaring is TV shows, where you now get an 8-episode 'season' every 2-3 years rather than the old days of 20+ episode seasons every year, often non-stop for 5 or more years.

That's often a good change. Less filler for the sake of having another full season.

I once found some old price catalogues (early 20c) for shoes etc. and estimated the items there are barely any cheaper today in real terms. Now obviously that's partly because we have cheaper substitutes today, so we've lost economies of scale when building things the old-fashioned way and the modern equivalent has to be made bespoke... but it's still pretty alarming given we should be ~10x richer.

But consider an example which can't be blamed on that. My city (Melbourne) has a big century-old tram network. The network used to cover the city, now it covers only the inner city because it hasn't ever been expanded. We can't expand it because it's too expensive. Why could we afford to cover the whole city a century ago when we were 10x poorer? With increasing density it should be even more affordable to build mass-transit.

Obviously people blame the latter example on declining state capacity, but I'm not sure state capacity is doing any worse than Google capacity or General Electric capacity.

State the terms! Maybe come up with the US gdp % growth bump you would imagine we get for each of these companies being broken up?

Break them up along functional lines or just break them into multiple smaller entities that are each still doing pretty much what the larger one was doing?

Maybe Microsoft

It’s easy to have happy employees when you have infinite money and no pressure to ever build a sustainable product. Personal experience. Things do take a very sudden and powerful turn when the bubble bursts

Yep. This is part of the core of the unspoken reality in this article--there were/are way too many people, even in nominally "technical" roles, for a well-adjusted market. A large portion of this employment is a direct result of the "prosperity" of the ZIRP era, which has now ended.

Starting in 2022, US companies could not deduct SWE salary expenses in the same year, only over 5 years like hardware CapEx. For big companies, this will roll over in 2027. Meanwhile, LLM expenses can be written off immediately as OpEx.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37494601

It seems like we're in kind of a lull that's being caused by expectations of what AI is about to be able to do. And these expectations could be completely wrong. But it's already causing changes in corporate planning and spending.

Agreed! Uncertainty to do with short term economic issues, medium term geopolitical risk (Trump, China, Russia, etc.), and longer-term issues (national debt, Medicare, etc.) also shouldn’t be underestimated.

Not only get rich, but do so in the least productive, most destructive way imaginable.

> there is a LOT of apps out there, and really, humans don't need that much to be happy.

There’s more music out there than there’s ever been. More tv shows and movies than I could possibly watch, but I still find new things to watch and listen to.

But tech? Maybe other than my Robot vacuum, I don’t think there’s anything in the last 5 years I’ve seen that I’ve felt is going to make my life easier or better. Which seems odd because the pace that technology seems to be improving only seems to be accelerating. We can do more than we ever could before, but it feels like the appetite to improve things is no longer there.

And human attention is a limited resource that just might be tapped out at this point.

To a broader extent isn't this kind of the history of silicon valley ever since the dot com bubble?

For every small startup trying to build innovative robotics to solve a healthcare or agriculture problem, there's 10 startups getting 100x funding because they figured out how to put jpegs on the blockchain and the last guys that figured out how to do that had a nice exit...

I forgot what the economists call this but it's the characterization of housing market. The value of your current house is determined by the last few local sales and little else. All of the startups using the current in Vogue technology feel like that...

Well it was a scam. The ultimate scam. Literally, they only supported scams and suppressed projects with real potential. I say that as someone who worked in the space and saw it turn into a scam... Started back in 2017.

There’s a lot of B2B stuff.

How much easier is it to manage and operate technology in 2025 than it was in 2005 or 2015? I have three core tech teams with 12-18 people. I’d need 500+ to do what I do today in 2005, assuming the tech could do it.

Breakthrough B2C products don’t appear annually. But everything is better. Apple Maps can estimate my travel time for a 300 mile drive with 5 minutes. I bought a last minute flight to Rome last summer knowing nothing about Rome or speaking any Italian and I did fine, thanks to iPhone and the mobile app ecosystem.

I think this is the cycle. Take a look at the S curve, things move in jumps with leveling out/adaption periods in between.

Slack, Zoom, TikTok

And those are just off the top of my head

Tiktok was released in its current form in 2017, I believe. Is that before the period you're asking about?

Sad to say: Tiktok, Only Fans, Discord

As they said in The Wire, “We used to make things in this town. Now, everyone just sticks their hand in the next guy's pocket.”

They also don't pay taxes because of a supreme court decision in favor of MIT for being a "Charity" and reducing tuition for some. Then every Uni piled on and decided to use a lot of that money on sports.

So what is more efficient for this? : 4 years going in debt to get a well rounded education with a concentration in learning maybe 1.5 years of welding (in theory): or 2-3 years as an apprentice learning your specific trade and focusing on your one task (not in how many credits needed to graduate)?

We had this structure with apprenticeships. Companies were the ones to say "we need x people with Y mindset". And they can pay to foster those people and mindsets.

But they abandoned that because they didn't want to fit the bill for their own workforce. They instead put up with mediocre welders they kinda sorta train for 6 months and maybe the good ones stay. Great model for society.

The massive sports funding is mostly only a thing for D1 schools and it doesn't take much funding away from academics. The sports mostly pay for themselves through ticket sales and media licensing, with the big chunks of revenue coming from men's football and basketball. Sports also drive a lot of alumni donations.

It's a worldview that necessitates only teaching what leads to a job. It is anti beauty and anti human.

We are not machines of production. We are human beings, we deserve to learn stuff that doesn't help us produce.

What is economy of scale? What is induced demand? What is return on investment? What is increased total innovation?

I think an undervalued aspect of college over self learning for most is that college requires you to learn a broader array of things. If I was allowed just pick the classes I wanted to take for four years, they would have all been computer related classes. I would never had taken Chemistry, Physics, Drama, Psychology, History, International Relations, or anything that makes me a more educated and well rounded thinker.

I don’t necessarily disagree with you but kind of a poor example considering copywrite work seems to be having a severe identity crisis because of AI at the moment. At least the English major still has their education to fall back on while the copywrite might have their entire skillset made obsolete with no other credentials to utilize.

It doesn't have to be though. In Europe the vast majority of people attend public universities that don't require having to end up with a degree and crippling debt.

I left uni almost 20 years ago, but one year of my tuition was about 1000USD at the time, something I could easily afford with a part time job. I'm sure the cost is higher now, but I would have thought it is still orders of magnitude cheaper than in the UK or the US. Germany subsidizes university tuition fees for a huge percentage of students, and adds a monthly stipend for expenses and free public transport while enrolled in uni.

Your point is valid, challenging the worth/cost of higher education. But I think it is the cost part what is broken in some parts of the world, not necessarily the worth part.

A higher education/degree teaches you how to think, not what to think. I’ve never used the knowledge from my physics degrees directly, but they taught me problem solving skills that I have applied to my career.

Here’s a pointed take on it from one of New Zealand’s successful businessmen: https://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/education/the-art-of-business-...

I mean we can reform it without necessarily throwing out the baby with the bathwater. In Europe a bachelor's can often take 3 years, and maybe we can even shrink it down to 2 years; this is already kind of a thing in the US with some schools offering a 5 year bachelor+master's program.

Realistically maybe we reform community college to be the required thing instead of traditional undergrad, since the cost and length is more comparable.

[dead]

The populace making poor decisions isn't just economically illiterate, they are increasingly fundamentally illiterate. Teaching economic literacy in school won't matter one bit when an increasing number of people are graduating unable to read even at a basic level.

But in order to solve this problem you would have to overhaul our educational system and right now we have a party invested in destroying it so that it produces voters more aligned with their groupthink.

What is your definition of economic literacy?

And Japan before that. My mom told me that many years ago "Made in Japan" had the stigma that "Made in China" has (or used to have). But growing up with Nintendo and Sega and with Hondas and Toyotas being the best, I always thought of Japan has a high tech manufacturing hub.

> china can innovate just fine on their own now.

If China could turn democratic and open, the World would have such a bright future.

Alas, I think we're headed into some distopian future because China is not going that way but indeed, they're very likely to surpass the USA in every other way.

It's not necessarily the fault of the company. The government created the environment to make it the only way to stay competitive for a lot of companies. Some bucked the trend, and I respect them for it. There is a push to bring things back now, but it's going to be ugly. It's much better to avoid the issue in the first place like most countries, but it's too late for that.

They definitely not, and there is no safe valve for it.

Can't blame them though, this is what Capitalism teaches all of us. I'm short sighted too, but the thing is I won't be able to go wherever I want when SHTF while fund managers can probably do so.

I think GDP is a biased indicator when states are competing with each others. Industrial output makes more sense IMHO.

It did happen in the Muslim world. There are "slave" dynasties in many parts of that world (Egypt, India) which were robust dynasties borne out of freed slaves.

Denzel also delivers this lesson in Gladiator 2.

Retro enthusiast solution in this case is a 3d printed can you attach to your lens and its on you to revert and grade the color in lightroom. Better hope the camera is perfectly aligned to the negative that is perfectly flat and you have a lens that can focus a flat field free of distortions. It is a far cry to the engineering that went into these pro lab scanners. Just the color science alone people struggle to replicate, resolution and sharpness throughout the frame as well, speed of handling for lab setting is second to none. People still pay a premium for these scans on these particular machines.

Kodachrome homebrew efforts don’t get close either. The process is too bespoke and reliant on instruments that no longer exist. Even proper c41 chemistry is down to just when the full kodak kit is in stock and not backordered by desperate developers: those instagram brands kit contains blix and are inferior as a result to a separate bleach and fix kit. Fuji press kit the old alternative is hard or impossible to find.

And no one is making new cameras. Only fixing old ones and only popular models able to be fixed and worth the time creating a secondary market of parts for (so basically Leica and pay for that or be relatively SOL to varying degrees for most else).

The biggest issue is this stuff was created when film was a global industry. tens of thousands of engineers were working on every step of the process for decades. That is gone now. All that old knowledge and learnings mostly gone because these companies kept poor records and destroyed old obsolete notes and material. Not just how the camera works but how to manufacture it and everything else at scale or at least in a way that it is actually profitable. And perhaps it could never become profitable without efficiencies brought on by scale and massive investment in manufacturing. And it would actually be forever be lost once all this equipment we still have falls apart.

The problem with the German automotive industry is in my opinion different: they developed cars which are not different from the kind of cars that many people in their market want.

Shareholders in the 70s made a lot of money. They'll be OK to rinse and repeat that history.

That list doesn't seem exhaustive in the least. A modern example is Fogbank, a classified nuclear weapons material that we recently had to reverse engineer to successfully rebuild certain warheads.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fogbank

Edit: I see someone beat me to the punch with Fogbank. For another example, look to the F1 rocket engine that took us to the moon. Despite having the actual engineering documents, we just don't have the manufacturing skill to rebuild one: https://apollo11space.com/why-cant-we-remake-the-rocketdyne-...

Fogbank was a famous case where we forgot how to make it: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fogbank

Similarly expertise in plutonium manufacturing has been lost, and now that countries have run out they are re-learning how they did it 40 years ago.

There's also the still open question on how the pyramids of Egypt were built, and AFAIK NASA lost the knowledge how to build some stuff as well. And the recipe for Roman concrete was also long lost, with researchers being able to reverse-engineer what it likely was only a few years ago [1].

[1] https://news.mit.edu/2023/roman-concrete-durability-lime-cas...

I don't think the world where a mob of people can gang up on a person and take their stuff is as idyllic as you think it is. If the person who has figured out how to earn a lot of food doesn't get to "hoard" it, it'll just get hoarded by a person with the biggest stick.

What's worse (for the society), is that in this world nobody has an incentive to create wealth, because they know it'll just be taken away. When rich people aren't in power, people with political capital and big guns are. I don't think that's better.

If AGI takes over, that changes things, somewhat. If it creates unlimited abundance, then it shouldn't matter who has the most (if everyone has plenty). Yes, it would create power disparity, but the thing is, there'll always be SOMEBODY at the top of the social hierarchy, with most of the money and power - in the AGI scenario, that is someone who is in charge of AGI's actions.

Either it's AGI itself (in which case all bets are off, since it's an alien god we cannot control), or the people who have developed AGI, or the politicians who have nationalized it.

Personally, I'm uncomfortable with anyone having that much power, but if I had to pick the lesser evil - I'd prefer it to be a CEO of an AI company (who, at least, had the competence and skill to create it), instead of the AGI itself (who has no reason to care about us unless we solve alignment), or one of the political world leaders (all of whom seem actively insane and/or evil).

There is no sequence of steps that takes us from where we are to the society depicted in Star Trek, or at least none has been outlined so far. If it were to happen, the world would need an abrupt phase change (e.g., First Contact). You may be tempted to call me a pessimist, but I am a realist. To convince a realist, one must show a sequence of steps.

>> My ideal future resembles Star Trek: a world where money is obsolete (at least on Earth), and people pursue exploration, science, and the arts purely out of passion and curiosity.

The problem with the Star Trek fantasy is that it's a lie even within the show. There are still people with obligations. There are still treaties and trade. There is still a hierarchy where some people have more important jobs and report to others. The only thing that seems different is that no money changes hands.

If we actually automated everything so no one had to work, there would still be a gradual progression and a time when some people have to work while most don't. I'm not sure how you get through that phase, not to mention what it looks like on the other side.

One thing I think should be considered is not so much how to pay everyone "enough" but how to reduce cost of living so more people can work less, or eventually not at all (somehow without owning everything and amassing control).

I like that ideal, but it only comes about in abundance. Unfortunately, I think humans are programmed to rarely feel a sense of abundance because we innately desire social status. Social status is a relative metric, meaning it only exists in relation to others. This, combined with a greed impulse, renders a constant need for more. In other words, the human state often runs counter to a sense of abundance, and this seems incompatible with that ideal. I think that’s why capitalism, warts and all, has been an engine for progress.

Worse yet, we are moving away from money but towards power being the goal. Automation stands to fundamentally upend the whole cart , destroying capitalism as we understand it today.

Money exists fundamentally to motivate people to perform some action. In the end, it comes down to paying labor. No one pays the earth, the forest, the sun.

Automation stands to make human labor too expensive to compete, since our needs far exceed the energy it takes to operate and manufacture us.

Without human labor, you don’t need money. You just need more anthropoid robots to make more anthropoids and to execute on whatever it is you want to do, own, or construct. You don’t buy a yacht, you build a one-yacht factory to make a yacht.

Capital will become human-sparse, needing only resources and energy and will exist to serve a small group of beneficiaries, if anyone.

I agree with your points over all, but lacking a complete "rational argument", I'd just like to outline a few ideas that I'm still working on, and while not a complete fulfillment of your desire for a map from here to there, might be a starting place for ideas. Like you, I see the seeds of a potentially dark future--but maybe it isn't our fate just yet.

I'd start with changing what and how we measure. A move away from single-dimension variables like GDP and simplistic closed-form calculations like the Black-Scholes formula and all it led us to believe.

If we agree simple-but-wrong metrics are bad, then we can (I believe) move towards simulations--not "my simulation" nor "your simulation", but ways to talk about beliefs and outcomes. I think the future will involve AI-assisted computable discussions, where multiple variables and the ability to dynamically incorporate or exclude assumptions from opposing perspectives will lead us to some shared agreement and mutually beneficial outcomes (while allowing for many areas where people will continue to disagree).

I'd propose next that we continue to raise the prominence of evidence showing how cooperation is often better than competition. Nobel prize winner Elinor Ostrom spent her life identifying systems and methods of cooperation. She proposes, "We are neither trapped in inexorable tragedies [e.g. of the commons] nor free of moral responsibility."

Robert Axelrod ran simulations on the iterated prisoner's dilemma and concluded, "forgiveness, cooperation, and reputation" are a stable strategy in most real-world conditions.

Strong ideologies that promote extreme individualism, marketed as scientifically sound, deserve great skepticism IMO, and should be treated with the same wariness as two missionaries knocking on your door.

I agree with all of this, and frankly it has me terrified for the future of humanity. With enough AI and automation you don't even need other humans, just the resources to hoard more means of production. The only rational argument I have for how we get somewhere else, is eventually once we start hitting the end game of resource accumulation someone's going to start launching nukes and the destruction of technology will send us back to a time when other humans actually mattered. A bit optimistic, I know.

If you accept the statement: "poverty causes violence", and "wealthy people (ultimately) cause others to be poor (which I can admit is a tenuous claim, but I think many people would agree, at least in certain cases), then all "violent revolution/rebellion" is is a redistribution of suffering, bringing it back to those who caused it.

It's an incredibly murky train of logic though. Most wealthy people have done nothing directly to cause the poor to suffer. But if you examine it closely, you can find links from greed <---> suffering everywhere.

The book you referenced appears to be about the rise of Marxism. I'm neither agreeing nor disagreeing with the GP when I say this, but I think it's worth pointing out that you can democratize ownership under capitalism, e.g. a worker cooperative [1] is a business owned by the workers.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worker_cooperative

> unless you consider those a subset of your items above

It is the same just with extra steps which put politicians and such in control of it all. Which is why something like these really are the only viable tactics to the overarching strategy. Politicians won't allow change that excludes them from power

Automation tax sounds sketchy. How would that work? All computers have DRM and programming becomes illegal? Unregistered physical automation becomes banned? Man the toolmaker can no longer make tools? What use are a bunch of depersonalized hominids?

> a co-op version of these apps could exist

There are a bunch of white-label ride share apps. When Austin banned Uber and Lyft in 2016 it took about a day before new services popped up to replace them.

The problem with building Uber and Lyft isn’t the process of writing the software — that’s been done many times over.

The hard part of course is investing the money in marketing and support to match the user recognition and experience that Uber and Lyft, subsidized by VC wallets, can provide to their customers.

One of the things you have to take into account is that a lot of these tech companies grew in the gaps of regulation, while legacy companies were forced to abide by standards and regulations; for a lot of tech companies, they broke the markets and thrived in the infrastructure paid for by taxpayers.

Uber, Airbnb are good examples of this. When regulation caught up with them, the damage was done for better or worse. To this day, some regulators still struggle to keep up due to the lack of resources, and the tech does achieve this... and now you have tech oligarchs dismantling the government bodies responsible for regulation.

So I don't think it's just a matter of people upskilling to generate more value, because people pay taxes for the work they do - they can't afford the lawyers and structures to avoid this. The people who have the luck and the opportunities to generate this kind of value are already doing it, or will do it, or don't want to do it.

So while I agree with you, and people should have access to the opportunities to upskill and to generate value, I also think there's a massive gap in income and taxes in a lot of democratic countries. These things can go, and should go, together.

I don't see why it can't be written possessively since he stipulated it. It makes more sense.

You would write it Jevons' paradox. Six sources on its wiki page write it as such in their title.

I don't subscribe to this narrow view of economics. The AI fallacy is that whatever they do cheaply just stops being valuable. We pay a little for it, but we spend most of what we have on other things. What that is shifts over time. Pre-industrial revolution it was food and agriculture. Then it shifted to manufacturing. Today it's people doing stuff for other people (aka. services). Over time, we work less and less and we earn more and more.

You mention UBI. You could actually argue that we already have some notion of that. It's just a terribly inefficient, poorly administered, and very costly, and not very good version of it. People don't starve, they mostly have access to health care (the US being an exception to this relative to most countries, including most developing nations). And shelter too (people freezing to death because they can't hide from the elements is pretty rare). Many people live on what they get for free. It's called charity, social security, unemployment, pension, childhood, etc. But one way or another, somebody provides for them. And being dependent on just the free stuff is something that would horrify most normal people. But it's there for pretty much everyone.

Feudalism is cyclic. It comes and goes. We had a lot of it early last century. And then we got communism, socialism, unions, etc. And a surge in economic wealth for the middle class after things were rebalanced. The post WW II economic boom in the US was powered by Roosevelt's new deal. I don't think there's much respect or loyalty to the current batch of trillionaires. They can exist only because people allow them to. Future governments could find themselves empowered and tasked to do something about the economic wealth distribution. Such things have happened before. Often after some kind of revolution.

Progressive taxes

How can you be so sure?

I found this document: https://web.archive.org/web/20210126040017/https://ribevikin... It asks the question "How long would it take to make a Viborg shirt?". The answer seems to be 354 hours per their experiments. This is from seed to shirt. (linen)

I'd be surprised if we had that many man-hours, let alone 3 or 4 times that (this is a single piece of clothing), in our wardrobes. Conservatively assuming a man-hour in the wardrobe costs us $5 (while people are often paid less, their salaries are also but one expense), you'd need at least around $1500 to equal just that shirt.

100 years ago is 1925 - people were already buying cloth in stores at that time. You need to go further into history.

> Imagine AI can do none of those things, but the people who control the capital believe they can.

I don't need to imagine, that's the reality we live in right now

Yeah and not unlikely.

There are trends in both directions in manufacturing. On the one hand, we had amazing fountain pens with forged gold nibs hand-tuned by a nibmeister that can do things you can't replicate now. The trend was toward really crappy pens that could be mass-manufactured and required less skill by the consumer to operate, but are demonstrably inferior. People chose to buy the cheaper, barely passable option more often by orders of magnitude.

On the other hand, we have automotive manufacturing. Modern cars are more reliable, safer, more comfortable, more performant, more featured, capable, (and expensive?) than ever.

With knowledge work, it's clear that certain things will get "optimized" into disfunction. (Look at the complete lack of agency corporations have taken away from the people operating the public interfaces to the company.) Be it help/support centers, resolving unusual issues, or dealing with automated bans/account deactivations.

It's hard to say what direction it will go...

How much time, energy, and resources went into developing your language of choice? How much datacenter energy is burned recompiling GCC every night for the last 30 years?

Totally feel this.

It sucks, because so few things in tech _are_ meaningful, and exist for a reason other than to enrich whoever owns the company making it.

There is nuance to the two separate ideas of "doing the bare minimum" and "taking pride in your work". I agree with you that taking pride in your work is important; I wish it were more highly valued nowadays, honestly.

The flip side is that "taking pride in your work" nearly always results in being taking advantage of from your employer, at least in salaried positions. And if you can spot the social patterns and games played such as valuing employees that work overtime (without pay), on weekends, etc, it is clear that employers love getting more value from employees without compensating them. Work extra hard for 6 months to maybe possibly get a promotion? People are generally waking up to this reality, hence the 'quiet quitting' mindset.

One can both take pride in their work, and respect their time by adhering to their employer-employee contract as written.

Lastly, in the baker example, they have a direct reason to put in their best effort (assuming the baker owns their bakery): they will gain goodwill and repeat customers if they bake very well. A salaried worker is so far removed from being directly compensated for their work. I predict the situation would be very different if salary work got commission based on sales and overtime pay.

There’s also the case that the regulations don’t exist.

And what’s more worrying is things where the negative impact is higher order.

If the bread has some poison that will kill you in 5 years time etc.

Currently we maintain a bar partially with human ethics and processes, whether that is directly preventing bad outcomes because of liabilities or reflecting on bad outcomes once they happen to improve regulations (a lot of which relies on introspectability).

Once AI starts replacing the decision-making layer, we lose the collective understanding of how processes fail. Once you start needing to constrain the space of machine error, you’ve basically arrived at almost solving the problem again.

Quiet quitting is realizing that you want to move on in your career but every interview process takes 2+ months for beauracrit reasons instead of actually judging your ability to do the job.

Quiet quitting is having no safety net when you're no longer satisfied with your job for any reason but your Healthcare is tied to your employer as ransom.

Quiet quitting is realizing you are going to be terminated in the next wave of layoffs 3-6 months later and that your efforts will not save your job anyway, so focus on jumping ship.

Greed has always existed, this was just a new name companies tried to gaslight with. I don't want to hear about "lazy workers" in a time where layoffs (that aren't performance based) are only increasing in a society thst decides it lawful to treat an employment contract as as a toy to be thrown away at any whim.

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