Comment by observationist
6 hours ago
It's kinda cool to see a whole lot of otherwise intelligent people who are so dogmatically and ideologically opposed to anything AI that they're going to willfully dismiss anything that AI produces regardless of utility.
It's not great for them, but it's a definite advantage for people who are already in the mindset of distinguishing and discriminating information and sources on merit, instead of running an "AI bad" rubric as part of their filter.
AI has already won. It's taking over. It might be a year or two, or five, or ten, but AI isn't slowing down, nobody is going to pause, and there's a whole shit ton of work people do that won't be meaningful or economically relevant in the very near term. Jevons paradox isn't relevant to cognitive surplus - you need a very different model to capture what's going to happen.
It's time to surf or drown, because it doesn't look like any of the people in charge have the slightest clue about how to handle what's coming.
> AI has already won. It's taking over. It might be a year or two, or five, or ten, but AI isn't slowing down, nobody is going to pause, and there's a whole shit ton of work people do that won't be meaningful or economically relevant in the very near term
Maybe it was linked from a comment somewhere on HN but just today I saw a post saying “Microwaves are the future of all food: if you don’t think so, you better get out of the kitchen”
Microwaves have already won. There will be a microwave in every home over the next few years.
It’s time to start microwave cooking or drown
Re: kitchen appliance analogies, I stand by my "AI is a dishwasher" analogy.
It's annoying that the dishes still have some pooled water in them when the cycle finishes; it doesn't always get everything perfectly clean; I have to know not to put the knives or the wooden stuff or anything fancy in it. But in spite of all of that, I use it every day, it's a huge productivity boost, and I'd hate to be without it.
And other people choose to wash dishes by hand and they're fine with it and not significantly less productive. The use of a dishwasher wasn't forced on everyone.
19 replies →
I get where you're coming from but dishwasher is definitely a "could live just fine without."
Fridge OTOH, not so much.
This is a great analogy, because just like AI, microwaves are good for quick fixes, tasks where you don't really care about the quality and would rather minimise the effort.
I think the analogy is a bit inaccurate here when people are talking about automation.
Microwaves do one thing, but they do it reliably. Microwaves didn't affect the culinary industry because cooking is far more than just heating food, and many tasks are very difficult to automate. LLMs are more general-purpose - the average Joe is now relying on them as a source of truth, advice and mental work across the board. However, LLMs can't be guaranteed to always be reliable, it's all probabilistic. The threat of automation here is in taking away a lot of the less important or less complex work. Low impact + high precision (microwave) vs. high impact + low precision (AI)
But a microwave does exactly what it says on the tin, every time, without fail.
LLMs require a lot more effort.
4 replies →
how is it a great analogy? do microwaves improve as fast as AI has been?
1 reply →
A better analogy might be computers, self-driving cars, or humanoid robots, since unlike microwaves, they can actually improve. Meanwhile microwaves were more or less the same since their invention.
They cannot improve; humans can improve them. To what extent can they improve them? No one really knows.
1 reply →
I know it's not the point of the comment but it's a bit of a flawed analogy. Microwaves have wone to a large extent, such that people without them are a bit of an oddity, and cooking with an oven is more of a special occasion thing than the default cooking method that it was before.
> cooking with an oven is more of a special occasion thing than the default cooking method that it was before.
This is an incredible self-report. If you consider microwaved meals to be your default method of cooking and not something primarily for reheating leftovers or defrosting frozen meat, I sincerely hope you've gotten your cholesterol and blood pressure checked recently. That is not normal.
8 replies →
Interesting point! Is this an Americanism?
I’m from northern Europe. I might use the micro to heat up leftovers or a cup of water for tea or whatever in a pinch, but in this household (and at all my friends’), the stove and the oven cooks the food. I know literally no-one who could say they cook most meals in the micro.
I didn’t have a microwave oven before we bought a house. It took up too much space to justify, for such a relatively rarely-used appliance.
2 replies →
Definitely not going to dinner round your house
Most houses still have ovens. Microwaves are pretty widespread as well. But, their main job is to warm up food which was cooked in an oven (either locally or at a centralized oven in a food manufacturing factory). Microwave and ovens are mostly complementary tools.
Although, the analogy seems sort of useless, in that the food preparation ecosystem is really not any less complex than the program creation ecosystem, so it doesn’t offer any simplification.
1 reply →
Microwaves are for heating, ovens are for cooking. Obviously it’s possible to live on only microwaved food but it sounds pretty miserable.
Seems like a lot of people are dunking on this comment with anecdata.
Thankfully there is real data if we want to know how microwaves are used. Survey below says they are used a bit more than ovens, but half as much as cooktops/stoves. Varies by cohort and meal.
Source: https://indoor.lbl.gov/publications/residential-cooking-beha...
1 reply →
You don’t use pots or pans?
Ovens are a special occasion thing in my house because our oven is huge and I can usually do the same thing in the air fryer, which is just a small convection oven.
> and cooking with an oven is more of a special occasion thing than the default cooking method that it was before.
That really only makes sense if for households with a toaster oven, single adults, childless couples, and retired people. A toaster oven makes a lot more sense for small meals, in part because it can heat up much faster than a full oven.
Otherwise, a daily family meal isn't a special occasion.
Your social circles must be very different from mine if everyone you know uses their microwave for cooking, rather than just reheating leftovers.
4 replies →
They won at automating a task and becoming indispensable in the larger ecosystem of related tasks.
> [...] and cooking with an oven is more of a special occasion thing than the default cooking method that it was before.
Not true in my household, in my parent's, in my in-laws, or any of my closest friends'. And none of us are cooks, so it's not a niche thing.
I'm sure in a lot of households the microwave oven is the primary form of cooking, but it's important to look outside the bubble before reporting trends.
This was a real, unironic mindset for a while: https://a.co/d/0iYb8mlz
Microwaves are the trend of the past! It sounds like you don't own an air fryer.
What is the argument here? Someone had a wrong take on something completely unrelated, so it somehow applies to this?
You think "there's a whole shit ton of work people do that won't be meaningful or economically relevant in the very near term" is wrong?
[flagged]
It’s a great analogy because it is something that is everywhere, that everyone does use from time to time, but the idea that it magically displaces everything forever (with no downsides) is naively optimistic
(The original phrase was not just made up, it was sourced from actual news articles and marketing about microwave ovens, that’s why it feels relevant to a hype cycle like this)
You also see this kind of naive optimism if you go look at illustrations from the early 1900s. People believed everything would eventually be a machine: that a machine would feed you, wake you up in the morning, physically move everything within your home etc. And yeah those things are possible to do, but in reality they aren’t practical and we do not actually use machines to do everything because it has costs
3 replies →
AI being bad isn't in conflict with AI winning or taking over. I think all of those things are true. I think what we currently call social media is bad. And it's won. No conflict there either.
> AI has already won. It's taking over. It might be a year or two, or five, or ten, but AI isn't slowing down, nobody is going to pause, and there's a whole shit ton of work people do that won't be meaningful or economically relevant in the very near term. Jevons paradox isn't relevant to cognitive surplus - you need a very different model to capture what's going to happen.
No, AI has not "already" won. And phrasing it as you do, "It's taking over. It might be a year or two, or five, or ten" is an admission of that.
People may indeed not pause, but there's never any guarantee that the next step of progress is possible; whatever we reach may be all we can do, and we'll only find out when we get there. Or it might go hyperbolic and give us everything.
I'm not certain, but I suspect Jevons paradox is probably the wrong thing to bring up here, that's about cheaper stuff revealing more latent demand, and sure, that's possible and it may reveal a latent demand for everyone to build their own 1:1 scale model of the USS Enterprise (any of them) as a personal home, but we may also find that AI ends the economic incentives for consumerism which in turn remove a big driver to constantly have more stuff and demand goes down to something closer to a home being a living yurt made out of genetically modified photovoltaic vines that also give us unlimited free food.
(I mean, if we're talking about the AI future, why not push it?)
What I do think is worth bringing up is comparative advantage: Again, this is just an "I think", I'm absolutely not certain here, but if AI can supply all demand at unlimited volumes*, I think the assumptions behind comparative advantage, break.
> It's time to surf or drown, because it doesn't look like any of the people in charge have the slightest clue about how to handle what's coming.
Yes, and I think they've also not even managed to figure out the internet yet.
* and AI may well be able to, even if all models collectively "only" reach the equivalent of a fully-rounded human of IQ 115; and yes I know IQ tests are dodgy, but we all know what they approximate, by "fully rounded" I mean that thing their steel-man form tries to approach, not test passing itself which would have the AI already beat that IQ score despite struggling with handling plates in a dishwasher.
> It might be a year or two, or five, or ten
Ah, the classic, forever-untestable "it's just around the corner" hypothesis.
I've lived through multiple "it's gonna be over in 12-18 months" arguments since November 2022. It's a truism for any technology to say that it's going to get better over time. But if you're convinced that "AI has already won", why not make a specific prediction? What jobs are going to be obsolete by when?
If what you state comes to pass there will be no "surfing" when it comes to cognitive work.
shhh just surf that deadly tsunami bro
> Jevons paradox isn't relevant to cognitive surplus - you need a very different model to capture what's going to happen.
Jevons paradox was never relevant to cognitive surplus. That isn't what it's about.
Cognitive surplus only strengthens Jevons paradox. Humans are a competitive advantage for businesses in a world dominated by human needs
A surfboard is no use in a tsunami. You will drown. The author will drown. Do not celebrate the tsunami.
Amen. Well said
OP comment is not clever
I don’t doubt the intelligence of the OP though I question their wisdom and I doubt they know how to surf. They are more or less correct in their assessment of the current state of things and where things are heading, but this would entail a significant existential risk. Having an natural aversion to our own destruction is probably a sensible approach going forward.
1 reply →
The raw anti Ai hate for anything that even mentions it makes me think of the early days of the internet where it was considered just a fad.
In the early days of the internet, there were roughly 3 categories of views I remember:
1. Brick and mortar is dead.
2. The internet will die.
3. What is the business model? (this one still seems to exist to this day to some extent, lol)
Reality fell between 1 and 2.
The internet did die, and was reborn as something else.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September
If dead Internet theory is coming or is already here, then reality is 1 and 2
2 replies →
skepticism is so shamed around here.
just because it was wrong once doesn't mean its never wrong. And was it really that wrong? The internet is great but would it be the worst thing in the world if we didn't live our lives around it?
There are a lot of things that people were saying were fads that ended up being fads. There are also a lot of things that people were saying were fads that weren't. Nobody knows. Anyone who confidently says "AI is inevitable" or "AI is just a fad" is full of shit. They don't have a crystal ball, and they don't know what the future holds.
I would say that it is closer to an Internet to which you are not invited to.
[dead]
>It's kinda cool to see a whole lot of otherwise intelligent people who are so dogmatically and ideologically opposed to anything AI that they're going to willfully dismiss anything that AI produces regardless of utility.
You'd probably put me into that bucket, although I'd disagree. I'm not at all against using AI to do something like: type up a high level summary of a product featureset for an executive that doesn't require deep technical accuracy.
What I AM against is: "summarize these million datapoints and into an output I can consume".
Why? Because the number of times I've already witnessed in the last year: someone using AI to build out their QBR deck or financial forecast, only to find out the AI completely hallucinated the numbers - makes my brain break. If I can't trust it to build an accurate graph of hard numbers without literally double checking all of its work, why would I bother in the first place?
In the same way, if you tell me you've got this amazing dataset that AI has built for you, my first thought is: I trust that about as much as the Iraqi Information Minister, because I've seen first hand the garbage output from supposedly the best AI platforms in the world.
*And to be clear: I absolutely think businesses across the board are replacing people with AI, and they can do so. And I also think it'll take 18+ months for someone to start asking questions only for them to figure out they've been directing the future of their company on garbage numbers that don't reflect reality.
Asking an LLM to analyze data directly doesn’t work. But they’re great at writing scripts to analyze (and visualize) data. Anthropic just figured this out last week and gave Claude a mode that does that for you.
This. I only ask LLMs to summarize non-critical stuff, i.e. just give me a general summary of all the work done over the past week.
If I were in need of hard analytics you can be damn sure I'd have it build a tool with a solid suite of tests following a rigorous process to ensure the outputs are sound. That's the difference between engineering and vibing.
1 reply →
I have found:
Published AI generated code is a mild negative signal for quality, but certainly not a fatal one.
Published AI generated English writing is worthless and should be automatically ignored.
> Jevons paradox isn't relevant to cognitive surplus
Could you elaborate on this? Is it just a claim, or is there some consensus out there based on something that it doesn't/shouldn't apply?
Ah HNs favorite strawman the "dogmatically and ideologically opposed to anything AI" person who, from my experience, largely doesn't exist.
However I was completely unimpressed with this tool when I saw it this weekend for two reasons:
The first is directly related to how this is built:
> These are rough LLM estimates, not rigorous predictions.
This visualization is neat (well except for reason number two), but it's pretty much just AI slop repackaged. There's no substance behind any of these predictions. Now I'm perfectly open to the critique that normal BLS predictions are also potentially slop, but I don't see how this is particularly valuable.
And the second, like 8% of male population I'm colorblind, so I can't read this chart.
For the record, I do agentic coding pretty much everyday, have shipped AI products, done work in AI research, etc.
Ironically, it's comments like yours that keep me the most skeptical. The fact that an attack on a strawman is the top comment really makes me feel like there is some sort of true mania here that I might even be a bit caught up in.
Uh huh.. but the data in Andrej's visualizer is showing software development growth outlook is at 15% (much faster than average)
Over the past year (where Opus has supposedly changed the game), we're seeing ~10% more job postings for software developers compared to this time last year [1,2]
A huge amount of our work is not easily verifiable, therefore it's extremely hard to actually train an LLM to be better at it. It doesn't magically get better across the board.
AI HAS WON. SURF OR DROWN. YOU DONT KNOW WHATS COMING!!!?!?!
Stop with this doomer drivel. It's sick. It's not based in reality and all it does is stress innocent people out for no reason.
1: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/IHLIDXUSTPSOFTDEVE
2: https://trueup.io/job-trend
Assume I want to believe exactly what you're saying. What is that, though?
a. "Has already won"
b. "Might be a year or two, or five, or ten"
You’re playing chess. You see that you have a forced mate in several moves. You’ve already won, but it will happen in 2, or 5, or 10 moves.
(This isn't how chess mate-finding works.)
The best predictor I can find of a segment being green in median wage is if it's red in digital AI exposure.
So... What exactly are you talking about?
He is talking about the same thing as you, no? As you point out, the more AI exposure (red), the more likely to have higher wages (green). Which suggests that those who are embracing AI are those who are thriving the most. Same as what he suggested.
No, those numbers don't mean that.
Whether people are adopting AI or not, everybody doing the same kind of job gets the same number for exposure to AI.
You can claim that AI is creating a Jevons paradox situation and making companies hire as crazy the people it nominally replaces. But then you would have to point any instance of that happening, because it's clearly not there either.
1 reply →
I think a lot of the pushback comes down to your attitude. The way you're talking about AI is like how the crypto bros talked about bitcoin. Just being very insistent on your point of view is a red flag. Either you can present new data to convince people, or your insistence will just look like it's emotional rather than rational.
I use AI every day as part of my work, it's very unclear to me where it's going and we have no idea if we're on an exponent or S-curve. Now, normally people talk with conviction because they have more data. But one of the breakthroughs of crypto was this social convention of just have very strong opinions based on nothing. A lot of that culture has come over to AI.
Your comment typifies this, it's all about I need to get on board, AI has already won, you've got an advantage over me because you realise this.
Go back, look at the actual article you're commenting on. Did the AI analysis of job exposure provide anything of value. I'm not totally convinced it did, and you didn't even think about it. What critical thinking did you do about the data that came out of this dashboard.
>opposed to anything AI
AI is great for searching. I ll give you that. And that itself is a big deal. In software development, there is also real value provided by AI if you use it for code reviews. But I am not sure how much worth it would be if you have to retrain a model with new information just to give better search results and for code reviews..
Maybe that will be subsidized by all the people like you who want everything to be done by AI, for the rest of us to use it as a better search tool and use it for quick reviews..who knows!
> AI has already won. It's taking over. It might be a year or two, or five, or ten, but AI isn't slowing down, nobody is going to pause, and there's a whole shit ton of work people do that won't be meaningful or economically relevant in the very near term.
I think AI is not going anywhere.
I also don't think the future will play out as you envision. AI is a very poor replacement for humans.
And I say this as a misanthrope who doesn't have a particular beef against AI.
What doesn’t make sense to me about the AI Inevitabilism Embrace Or Die trope is how there’s going to be a sudden trap door which will eliminate all the naysayers which can be avoided by Embrace. Because that doesn’t cohere well with how autonomuous AI is or will be.
I could understand if all the naysayers doing old fashioned stuff like work all of a sudden have no more work to do. But the AI Embracers will have what, in comparison? Five years of experience manipulating large language models that are smarter than them by a thousand fold?
Wishful thinking. AI is useful, but it’s far more niche than militantly pro-AI people like you want to believe. It’s a useful tool, nothing more.
I immediately turn off when I read extreme points of view. It tells me they are people that lack traits such as nuance - essentially time wasters.
> AI has already won. [...] It might be a year or two, or five, or ten
brainbroken by chatbots lmao
Eh, idk about this. One nice thing about humans is that they still feed themselves when the economy collapses.
> definite advantage for people who are already in the mindset of distinguishing and discriminating information and sources on merit
This cuts both ways...
> there's a whole shit ton of work people do that won't be meaningful or economically relevant in the very near term
What work do you think AI is going to replace? There are whole categories of people who are going to drown in the hubris of "AI being able to do the job" when it cant.
The moment one stops pretending that its going to be AI, that were getting AGI and views it as another tool the perspective changes. Strip away the hype and there is a LOT there... The walls of the garden are gonna get ripped down (Agents force the web open, and create security issues). They end lots of dark patterns, you cant make your crappy service hard to cancel... because an agent is more persistent to that. One size fits all software is going to face a reckoning (how many things are jammed into sales force sideways... that dont have to be). These things are existential threats to how our industry is TODAY, and no one seems to be talking about the impact to existing business models when the overhead of building software gets cut in half (and how it leads to more software not less).
It is free for you to say this, because if you're wrong, there will be no consequences. Words are cheap. No different than various CEOs saying "AI will replace these workers" and now having to hire back those they laid off. Klarna, Salesforce, etc. Will be a great comment to reference in the future to capture the exuberance of the times.
Companies Are Laying Off Workers Because of AI’s Potential - Not Its Performance - > The AI premium isn’t even reliable. By late 2025, Goldman Sachs group Inc. found that investors were actually punishing AI-attributed layoffs, with shares falling an average of 2%. The analysts concluded that investors simply didn’t believe the companies. But Block’s surge shows the incentive hasn’t vanished. It’s just a lottery instead of a sure thing. And executives keep buying tickets.sublinear
5 hours ago
j3k3
5 hours ago
> The broader data confirms the gap between narrative and reality. A National Bureau of Economic Research study published in February surveyed thousands of C-suite executives across the US, UK, Germany and Australia. Almost 90% said AI had zero impact on employment over the past three years. Challenger, Gray & Christmas tracked 1.2 million layoffs in 2025, and AI was cited in fewer than 55,000 of them. That’s 4.5%. Plain old “market and economic conditions” accounted for four times as many.
So! Sophisticated capital market participants don't believe this; why do people here?
AI is making CEOs delusional [video] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q6nem-F8AG8
I'm very confused how you can put up such an obvious strawman, say all these wildly unsubstantiated things, and yet still get engagement. Who are you even talking to?
It's been several years and nothing has changed except the AI grift is crumbling as we get out of the post-covid slump.
"AI has already won. It's taking over. "
Man.. I suggest you touch some grass. You are living in a bubble.