Ask HN: What's the Point Anymore?

Sure, if you don't like reading, then it's great you don't have to. But personally I like to read, and be taken on an adventure by writers, that's why I read, I don't read just so I "know what happened".

So everything remains the same, nothing has changed. Nothing been destroyed by AI, it only seems to have destroyed your own perspective.

90% of everything is AI-generated, of the 10% which is left, 90% of it is crap, leaving just 1% of articulate, interesting, well-crafted content.

So, either work to create that 1% of interesting content, or filter/curate to find it.

I will note that there is a _lot_ of interesting old work which has dropped off the radar --- Hermann Hesse's _Magister Ludi_/_The Glass Bead Game_ was a book which greatly inspired me in my youth (arguably, it's why I use programming tools such as: https://github.com/derkork/openscad-graph-editor ) --- read it?

If we taxed land ownership a la Georgism and then taxed negative externalities like pollution, we could give everyone UBI and probably kick back and take it easy for a bit.

Of course this would require a global democratic mandate bigger than the world's ever seen, so I'm not waiting up on it.

AI will do the same thing. Summaries won’t replace books, generated music won’t replace artists, and assistants won’t replace doing things yourself. They’ll replace the lowest friction default. Everything else shifts from “mass” to “intentional”

That doesn’t mean fewer humans have value, but instead it means value becomes less generic. The question isn’t “what’s the point anymore” , it’s “what survives when optimization stops being the only goal?"

Answering the second question - I can find 48hours worth of things to do in a 24 hour day and none of them would be about work or just lazying around (nothing wrong with it). Life has so much to offer!!! Yeah AI can produce things. But theres a reason id consume human generated art. And thankfully real deep mastery still takes effort and passion!!

It can’t raise your kids, explain your choices to your parents, apologize and mean it, or face consequences when things go wrong. And most importantly—it can’t take responsibility or go to prison for you.

So maybe the point isn’t productivity anymore. AI does the work. Humans carry the liability.

Some people crave the connection to the human experience through your examples. And personally, I wouldn't care in the least about any "work of art" created by a model. A model could produce the sequel to Grapes of Wrath, but I wouldn't care, because what experience did it have to motivate it towards it?

That can work for some things. Some things don't actually need reliability. That automated tool that's going to help a dozen people in accounting? Yeah, it's got a buffer overflow, which also can be used for a DOS attack, but who cares? (Unless someone like an AI exposes it to the internet...)

For things where reliability does matter, AIs may be a fad for a couple of years, but it won't last, for exactly the reasons you mention. For a bunch of things, reliability really matters. For those places, you cannot be replaced by AI. Migrate to those places.

That leaves the problem of the next couple years. You may need to look for places that understand, today, that reliability matters more than fast slop.

> Why read a book, when you can just get AI summary of it?

I mean... for books (and movies) that I'm mildly interested in but don't want to take N hours to wade through, I've been reading the Wikipedia summaries for a while. AI is here now, but I still go to Wikipedia, because I actually trust it more than the AI summary.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VT-bIYFdq9I

I don't draw to do better than the AI, I do it because I like drawing. You have more free time to do what you want.

But maybe the goal was never to build the thing, it was to impose your individuality and uniqueness upon others.

Whenever tech has replaced jobs like agriculture when machinery came in people found things to do but probably couldn't foresee working as programmers or influencers or what have you.

It's probably heading for sci-fi type stuff which should be interesting.

There are lot of maintenance chores that ClawdBot can't do. It's not going to cook for you, rake the leaves, shovel the snow off your sidewalk, or pressure-wash your steps. You can still find some satisfaction in doing these things.

[0] https://rutgerbregman.com/books/humankind

Because the summary is often wrong, and the summary might not even be the point?

> Why read a book, when you can just get AI summary of it?

You've been able to read a good summary by a human for most books on Wikipedia for decades now.

Perhaps communities will sprout up following that rule?

Regarding money, one needs to ask themselves what will be the impact of tokenized assets?

Perhaps being able to take ownership of kibbutz-like places will give them a sense of belonging and purpose. Doesn't matter how much technology there is, people need to live somewhere and will adapt by finding a place they can optimize for happiness. It'll be like starting a game of Civilization from scratch but with all the advanced technologies intact.

People may also go back to the early-human modes of survival of the first-nations groups. Digital and electric technologies aren't healthy things to be around. Do you want to live in the range of a 10G antenna or near a massive solar array? The naturalists may end up happier and healthier than the tech-heads. It's about taking/using what works for you and leaving the rest.

Worth noting that if someone really had an answer to your questions, would they state the truth here?

How do you know the robots won't come and just kill us all when they can because we have no power/influence/value? Where will people migrate to in order to avoid that? Antarctica? The moon? Underground to avoid weaponized satellites?

Conscience and consciousness really needs to grow with technology, really that's the challenge of today. Always has been.

How will people support the sick, old, disabled and retarded? Start there and work backwards, or how does one avoid those things altogether somehow and go beyond Homo Sapiens?

A gramme is better than a damn

Then I was told about some electrical chisel that was supposed to make my life better. Sure, I made more money, but the work was gone. It just shakes; it doesn't vibrate. I get numb, not proud. I have to take breaks, because my hands can't handle it. It's awful. What's the point, I asked?

But then I started talking to my colleagues during those breaks. I even discovered I had a relative in common with one. While chipping away at stone, no one ever wanted to stand close to me, and I had spent all this time proudly creating stone chips all day long! I still chip away at stone sometimes, but only when there's no one else around to talk to at breaktime.

---

You are not going to be able to stop change. The world never stood still, it's just that changes happen step-wise, and it's unlikely any one step affects _you_ profoundly. This time, the step affects you (and me.) You are standing in front of a steamroller and shouting "stop!"

We'll find a new way to be humans. It won't look like the Instagram times. It won't look like the Myspace times. It won't look like the Rolodex times. It'll be new. What can you do with it that makes you happy?

Oh what I wouldn't give to push one out, you entitled pos -- AI.

For great books and music, there is probably never a need to read anything published after 2020, or even after 2000. There's more than you will want to read in your lifetime. There's more than you can ever listen to. You'll get tired of music as a whole before that.

Here's some things AI can't do for you: Relationships and interacting with good people, every kind of sports and physical endeavour including any adventure you can think of, enjoying the perfection of nature. Psychedelic experiences and spiritual experiences. All of these require very little or no money.

Human art has always been an imperfect imitation of the creation, and the same is true for anything AI makes.

My main critique is that we don't do everything merely for the "end" of it, we do it for the "why" or the journey.

No IA system will ever provide the "why".

Also, the humanity will develop an immune system for slop.

You have to find out where the winds are blowing, especially your winds.

Retrieve your kite and find another hill. <3 is what I am doing. Not leaving industry exactly, but reshuffling my sources of meaning

I'll still program. I'm barely touching current "AI" other than certain bits of code completion that are on by default in VS and are the right mix of occasionally useful (saving a few tens of keystrokes) and easy to ignore when not. When it gets to the point where I can't compete without using LLMs heavily, I'll have to do something else. Perhaps wait tables somewhere with Spanish customers as I'm trying to learn the language, it won't be much or a pay cut because by the point where someone of my years can't compete at all, almost anyone will be able to do a shite job with LLMs so programming will be heading towards being a minimum-wage job anyway.

> Everything else is being destroyed by AI: art, music, books, personal websites.

Yours doesn't have to be. I started writing bits to go online again after many years not bothering. It isn't intended for public consumption, I'm deliberately doing nothing that would be called SEO in fact I'm going anti-SE in some ways, though it isn't hidden should I chose to pass a link to someone or if they decide to pass it on further. It is intended for me and a select few, if someone else finds it somehow and likes it then good the them, and much of the point of making it is the joy of making something. Everyone else using LLMs isn't going to take that from me.

> Why read a blog post, when Google AI Summary can just give you the summary?

Because the summary may be wrong, or technically correct but with entirely the wrong tone or missing key details a summary should have. Or because you want to read the post - you don't have to use the summary.

I don't read the summary generated as part of most searches these days, reading them is optional. I don't make effort to stop them being made though (using porn mode, adding “fuck”/“fucking” to search terms, etc.) - hopefully making them waste resources on generating things that are never used will et noticed and they'll ramp that down a bit at least for accounts like mine.

> Why read a book, when you can just get AI summary of it?

Before AI, did you just skip to the last few pages to see what happened? If not, then just keep reading like you did before.

Avoiding the slop books that are flooding the market ATM might be more of a concern, but there was plenty written before the LLM bubble started to keep you in things to read for a lifetime.

> The only thing you are left to do is to eat and take a sht throughout the day.*

Other hobbies. I like trail running (or if in a slower mood, country walking), AI isn't going to stop me doing that. HEMA and other activities with friends too.

> How should people make money? No idea, as in the "prosperous future", everything is replaced by AI.

That is a completely different question to the rest where you are asking about things that you would do for enjoyment, and is a bigger societal and philosophical concern than I have time to chew on right now…

> What's the point anymore?

Same as it was before: do what you need to do to survive, then do what you need to do to enjoy any remaining time after that. Perhaps I'm helped here by being back on the up after a couple of years recovering from proper burnout: I know the way things are going won't make me feel worse than that, and I survived that. Current politics and other social issues away from tech on the other hand…

> Why keep going?

When all hope feels truly lost, at least keep going out of spite.

> Why keep going and where to?

To paraphrase The Wild One: Where have ya got?!

Just remember that AI can not create art, it can only remember art. AI is not a human, AI is a probabilistic function.

Were you only interested in technology so you could be one of the chosen elders holding a rare and valuable skill? Bummer if so, I think that ship has sailed. If not sunk altogether.

Otherwise? I guess learn plumbing? I think we're still a few years away from Claude telling me "You're absolutely right! Let me unclog that toilet for you" :D