Jobs are not generally meant to be enjoyable (although that is a benefit if so), they are meant to get work done. It's funny seeing office workers here on HN have this sort of opinion and contrasting that with blue collar workers, ask a miner or house builder how fun their job is.

Don't many blue collar workers (miners & house builders) do actually take immense pride in their work? There are woodworkers out there whose hobby is also woodworking.

> ask a miner or house builder how fun their job is

The average person on a residential job site I've talked to has looked and sounded like they're having as much fun as the average software dev. And none of them have said stuff like "people on my team have confided that they cry every night because the higher-level management keeps screaming about the project not being done" like I've heard at from folks, say, certain big social media places...

That's because Software as a job has become a joyless death march to poop out casino flavored adware for 99% of the industry? Go launch the Temu app and imagine being on the team that builds it.

I could imagine a desperate person with a family writing that app. I can't imagine anyone else with light behind their eyes doing it.

This has even been the startup world (even downstream of LLMs!) for some time.

The people in deep morning tend to be the people who have managed to avoid this outcome, or deceive themselves about its inevitability.

Food is not meant to be enjoyable, it's meant to nourish. But by a fortunate coincidence it may also be tasty. Now imagine replacing ice cream, or steak, or fresh berries, or whatever you enjoyed eating, with something like Soylent or Huel with a side of puréed kale. Your nutrition may actually improve, but something would be lost, won't it?

> Food is not meant to be enjoyable, it's meant to nourish. But by a fortunate coincidence it may also be tasty.

Im pretty sure the taste is an evolutionary indicator of nutritional value (we now know how to cheat to make food that tastes really good but isn’t really healthy). But it’s not really an accident that some food tastes good.

The fact that certain aspects of work feel enjoyable is also not random. It usually indicates an elevated level of fitness for the job, a higher chance of success for a given phenotype / genotype. I can imagine that Mr Ludd had been enjoying the process of forming a complex pattern on fabric before Mr Jacquard's automatic loom made his skill irrelevant.

You said that food is not meant to be enjoyable and that it's coincidental that it's tasty -- this is flat out wrong, so your attempt to argue by analogy (always a suspect process) was bogus. And your "something would be lost" is a strawman from left field that actually undermines your argument. (BTW, I enjoy Huel and they make an effort to make the taste and texture pleasurable. And people often combine kale with fruit to make tasty shakes.)

Work, unlike food, is a social construct, and while it's no doubt a bit more complex, the statement that "Jobs are not generally meant to be enjoyable (although that is a benefit if so), they are meant to get work done" is factually correct. Because work generally is "work, not fun", people get paid to do it, with competitive salaries and perks.

I won't respond further to your very bad arguments (or the absurdly out of touch elitist arguments from others here that miners enjoy their work as much as software developers do ... I'm retired and still do software development for fun; no miner does the same).

So does that mean we should make work even less enjoyable still?

Then they should take up less of our lives.

you can’t climb to the moon, you need rockets for that. In the hands of great researchers, AI will accelerate and propel human knowledge far beyond what we could achieve with pencil and paper alone.

> In the hands of great researchers, AI will accelerate and propel human knowledge far beyond what we could achieve with pencil and paper alone.

Who needs researchers when you have great AI.

Soon we will all be Wall-E fat people with AI that's there to do anything we can be bothered to think of.

True, but many of us have grown identifying ourselves with the kind of work we do, the discoveries that follow from our hard work. Even in the case of rockets, we designed the rockets! Here, I've to let the oracle take care of things while I'm robbed of that delight of discovery.

> you can’t climb to the moon, you need rockets for that.

We don't live for rockets or the moon, but for ourselves. Anywhere we can go to only at the price of our despair we have no business going to.

I think you replied to the wrong comment.

No, they obviously didn't.

> In the hands of great researchers, AI will accelerate and propel human knowledge far beyond what we could achieve with pencil and paper alone.

Did you ever think that the pursuit of knowledge might be not just producing it but discovering it as a collective human effort? Putting to much mechanization in it kills the joy of it.

> There is a reason artists hate AI, its because they enjoy the actual act of painting

"AI" never stopped a painter painting.

Just selling.

Some painters can't paint if they can't sell.

This the problem. The need to make money in order to justify your right to survive is the problem.

Painters shouldn’t be mad at AI, they should be mad at the system.

AI IS the system; the speed with which the rich and wealthy have embedded it into every aspect of our lives and the way it has been trained off the stolen work of millions without care is only possible because it is directly entwined.

Nah, capitalism is the system.

AI is just another tool that’s being applied to it. But you have to think beyond the old transactional nature to get passed that. Capitalist realism is extremely hard to overcome, but it doesn’t have to be like this.

>Painters shouldn’t be mad at AI, they should be mad at the system.

AI helps enable the system. It makes it easier for the haves to justify a lack of sharing—or need to share—with the have-nots.

"There are more tools available for you to do more work faster than ever! I'm not a greedy hoarder partying while others suffer because of my choices, you're just not dedicated enough to learning and using those new tools! The tools take away your excuses for not being economically valuable to me!"

I mean, those people are right in a way.

Capitalism is dog eat dog, the system is dog eat dog. In the jungle you have to adapt or die.

If we want to change that, we must change the system, because nobody is going to stop using these tools.

It might be a philosophical kind of "can't". You need to believe that what you do is valuable.

No, you don’t.

You do not need to believe what you do is valuable. That’s capitalism talking, infesting your head.

For the vast majority of us, we are imminently replaceable at the drop of a hat. We aren’t the special unique and individually “important” people we imagined ourselves to be.

There are 8.5b of us! How could we be? We aren’t special, we will be replaced when we’re gone. That’s OK!

If we can be replaced when we are gone, we can replace “work” while we are still here too.

Do you not have values, and evaluate the things you might choose to do, by light of those? Do you not seek local importance, and meaning, as you strive to do your best by those values?

Here I'm deliberately conflating (1) monetary value and self-worth, (2) social status and emotional importance. I do this to annoy you, but also because I think it's somewhat correct. Cash is hard-earned, so persuading somebody to give you some cash for your art does indeed signify that they care about it, just the same as if they had run a mile in order to collect it: and social status, if it means genuinely mattering to other people for good reasons, is likely to be part of what matters to you in your heart.

So in summary, oh yes you do.

> Taking a helicopter to the top of Everest is not as rewarding as climbing the mountain.

If you’re on the top of mt. Everest and you need medicine, would you care if it reached you via helicopter or via some guy climbing while having a lot of fun?

This has nothing to do with the content of my comment.

> You are completely discrediting the joy humans derive from actually -doing- the work

This sort of intellectually dishonest ad hominem is so tiresome. They did no such thing.

> There is a reason artists hate AI, its because they enjoy the actual act of painting

AI hasn't stopped anyone from painting.

> You are completely discrediting the joy humans derive from actually -doing- the work, and not just, telling someone else to do the work.

But humans (or at least some of them) get joy from that too. A lot of people enjoy being supervisors, team leaders, managers, executives - even though that’s largely deciding what to tell other people to do rather than directly doing it yourself

"like... programmers enjoy the act of typing lines of text into a file on their computer"

ehm, no!

Yes exactly, that jumps out as a strange thing to say. The enjoyable part of programming is the puzzle, the act of figuring out how to solve the problem elegantly and well.

Although I can't speak for artists, surely the joy of painting is in the creation of a piece of art they can be proud of?

Enjoyment in work is generally about taking pride in the end result, not in the repetitive mechanical part.

Not exactly, no. What is "the problem" - is there really only one problem? - and where does the creativity go? This depends on what you're doing and how you're going about it. Maybe every little mark you make on paper or canvas or a text file is a puzzle, with associated meta-level questions, and the interest is in hundreds of intimately small creative notions, and when it all approaches the end you have mixed feelings because the (very much non-mechanical) process has stopped.

> Taking a helicopter to the top of Everest is not as rewarding as climbing the mountain.

I don't think this is a fair comparison. New tools take you higher. I'll never climb Everest. A good comparison is:

- Climbing your local mountain

- Helicopter to the top of Everest

- Spacecraft to the moon

If a helicopter just saved you a trip up, you'd be right, but it can take you places you wouldn't otherwise go.

I created a new field of mathematics just yesterday, coincidentally. It wasn't a very good field of mathematics, though.

> Taking a helicopter to the top of Everest is not as rewarding as climbing the mountain.

Flying from Atlanta to New York is not as rewarding as walking there. You are right, but if we would be walking everywhere, we would still be stuck somewhere in ancient times.

But you can still try to climb Everest even if helicopters are available, and likewise you can still try to do maths even if LLMs can do it quicker.

Absolutely you can, just don't expect to make a living out of it anymore.

You wanted to say: Removing the last bit of joy, anything humane from creating.

People also take joy and pride in model building and model babysitting too.

Funny thing about diffusion systems: they can't paint.

You're not talking about the joy of painting, because no machine is here to take that away. That still exists, it is still joyful. Likewise, exploring mathematics for oneself will still exist. It will still be joyful and surprising.

What you are discounting is what the article actually admitted with all the job talk. What you're saying here as well: "if we structure society around compensated labor and machines are better at the labor than my high status job is about to be farmed out to a machine."

Firstly, yes. Welcome to the proletariat? Secondly, maybe this isn't a reasonable principle to organize society around. Maybe if the only jobs left are "one of the 95 ultra wealthy tastemakeres" or "spiritually destitute model babysitter" then we should consider an alternative organizational strategy.

This is not to say I'm yearning for neo-Stalin to unmake the data center. I'm yearning for a world closer to one where labor for survival is a historical lesson.