AI Makes Me Sad
A Georgia Tech student and teaching assistant watches classmates chase $500k OpenAI jobs while he dreads an industry that feels like Charlie Chaplin being swallowed by the machine in Modern Times. He mourns the loss of craft and the startup era, but finds unexpected hope: institutions like Twitter and LinkedIn are young enough to rebuild, and the coming AI bubble's burst might bring a satisfying clarity.
It sounds like people around me are throwing themselves at the machine, volunteering to make themselves obsolete for $500k a year.
- schneems
> I think I could have been a pretty formidable startup founder had I been born five or ten years earlier.
I used to think that. I came to the realization that I could have technically built Facebook the product, but would never in a million years have built Facebook the company. But having just finished "Careless People" I feel kinda good about that.
I also just got back from a vacation to Alaska. Lots of gold rush stories from Skagway. One of my favorites was a lady who became massively wealthy by starting baking apple pies for the gold rushers. The classic "sell the shovel" story we hear. And one that also tells me not to lament not being first.
I see people who chased that with crypto or whatever hot trend. None of them struck it rich and feel burned out and have little to show for it. But instead to focus on your values and delivering value. Explorers at the time were suffering scurvy from too much canned and salted food so a pie served not just the soul but the body. She didn't have to be there first even.
I also think that the person I am today might not have even had the skills or gotten into the industry if it were 5 or 10 years earlier. It's the mighty ducks "a half inch and it would have gone in" but a half inch in the other direction could have also completely whiffed it.
- munificent
> Right now, we have (most of) my undergrad classmates' dream industry. They drink constantly [1], skip lectures, scrape by on their homework with AI, complain about classes, grind Leetcode to get internships, and eventually get their diploma. It must feel like walking around in a literal dream, where your footsteps have no weight, like Wile E. Coyote near a ledge.
There is a name for this in sociology: anomie [1].
In times of great change, the set of norms and rules that we take for granted as an organizing principle of our lives get uprooted. It's as if all of the pieces and tokens and rules of the board game we played our whole lives are swept off the table to make room for a new game, but the new game has not been set up yet. In that interim, we all feel a sense of unease. It is our turn to move, but we don't know the rules of the game or what moves to make. We feel intense pressure to play the game well, but don't know how.
In the past, these transitions have ended and society has generally returned to some sense of stability. A new board game gets set up, new pieces doled out, we learn to play the new game. I hope we get to that point with AI soon, but the revolutions seem to keep coming faster and faster.
It's a psychologically difficult time.
- yawnxyz
Mac's liquor store must be making a killing
(it's right outside GT's campus)
- jjcm
AI makes me happy
But it makes me happy in such an immediate serotonin spike it’s akin to a drug. It used to be that I’d sit there dreaming every night of new things I wanted to build. It was fun to think, “what if I devoted the next year to this idea?”, but that was always met with the realities of a 9-5 after.
Now I can build those ideas as fast as they hit me. They’re fleeting fancies though. A game here, an app there. It’s fun to see but there’s so much more digital waste.
It does make me happy though. I’d rather be able to live my dreams than let them pass me by. I do wonder about the addictiveness of it though - that hit it gives you is very, very real.
- dofm
Indeed. As much as I should find it fascinating, it does indeed often suck, emotionally.
But I gather from reading this that you are young.
The time value of money and the changing nature of our industry tells you a different thing than it tells me, I think.
If you are young enough that you have any period of commanding multiple-hundred-thousand-dollar-per-year jobs: TAKE ONE OF THEM.
This is your opportunity to earn enough money to make you safer in the future. It will be a shitty miserable job but if you keep as much of the money as you possibly can, you give yourself a bit more security in the future (which is bleak, not positive). Just try to keep that in mind as you do a job you might not enjoy. Look for the things you do enjoy and try to keep your soul together.
Jobs paying that kind of money are going to disappear: salaries will have to plunge within two years. There is no way that salaries will stay stable on the other side of this transition. The tech industry is absolutely destroying itself.
(As to what it tells me: get used to cheaper food and think about maybe dying sooner.)
- jrflo
I feel like the thing a lot of people are missing about the AI explosion is that there will be new opportunities that didn't exist before. Sure, things will look a lot different than they used to, but we're going to be able to create systems that are far more complicated than anything we could make before. We're not going to simply automate 2022 levels of producing software and stop there, we're going to leverage this new technology to move faster and build more complicated things that wouldn't be realistic with hand-coding. I don't know what that will look like yet, but human history has shown that when we get some advanced technology, it's leveraged to create more than was ever possible before, not just stopping at making what existed in the past automatic.
- tapoxi
I do think a lot of startups, especially on HN, are in for a reckoning that your new vibecoded product/service or one with an AI feature or two added will survive. Everything you do is going to feed the model, that's the training data now. That's why Claude is so cheap for what it does.
You cannot prompt Claude better than your customer can. There is no realistic moat there. You will not survive.
- woah
3rd year undergrad at Georgia Tech is going to make $500k starting salary at OpenAI if he just vibe codes a couple apps for his LinkedIn, but has foregone this for philosophical/emotional reasons