[piloto_ciego]

Look, so... I'm going to tell you a little about my life and infodump here, but I've already lived chaos and loss of career, existential risk, and fear of death. I've "been there." I'm just some rando on HN, but yeah, here goes.

I was a pilot before I got into this tech stuff. For literally ALL of my life all I wanted to do was operate flying vehicles. I built my life around it. I got a summer job in school and paid for my first lessons by washing airplanes. I solo'd at 16, and got debt immediately out of HS to learn to fly. I lived flying, I thought about flying, I dreamt about flying. The only thing I wanted to do was keep flying (particularly smaller single pilot airplanes) and bop around Alaska and the world doing strange technical flying work. My college education? Based on leveraging my flying experience into eventually (you know, probably one day) flying in space doing the same thing - highly technical stuff with a tight crew. By the way, I didn't take a few years off flying to do it, I did it RIGHT alongside my flying career. I had to take time off to go take my last test for my first Bachelors and fly from my base to a place where I could get that last proctored. I was somewhat obsessed with aviation.

And for a long time I did that lifestyle and loved it. I met my wife, we started a family, and still flying was the main thing I thought about other than them. Sometimes that was surely to their detriment but thankfully my wife is a saint and could look past my hyperfixation. Along the way I had some other hobbies and passions too, but none of them came close. I mean, I liked computers, so I built some toy apps and learned some stuff, but it was never my passion. Then one day, I got sick and it eventually resulted in blindness. I recovered much of my sight - I can use a computer, etc. but barring borderline miraculous technical and medical advances, I'll likely never operate a flying vehicle again.

It wrecked me - ruined me even. I was a disaster for a couple of years. I didn't do anything wrong and yet the universe punished me anyway! I lost my identity completely, almost all of my friends were pilots - gone. Almost all of my technical skills were part of this one niche domain and suddenly they were worthless. Almost all of my life had been built into this and it was over now. And worse, there was nothing I could do to get it back. I was quite suddenly obsolete and unnecessary. Nobody cared about me anymore either - I was a has-been, a flight-less bird, etc. I very suddenly went from being "the promising guy in his late-20s early 30s with a bright future ahead of him" to "unusable burden." Not only was I physically battling illness and quite unwell, but mentally and emotionally the loss of identity because of my loss of my career had left me completely broken.

But... I somehow did crawl back from that. From the ashes I rose up and began again. I learned that I had kind of been an idiot before - I mean, I was good at flying, really good even, but so what? Now it was over! And I hyperoptimized a lot of stuff that didn't matter! I hadn't been caring for myself along the way, I hadn't been being a good husband and father. And a sort of key revelation I got out of this became clear: "someday" will come. Someday, you'll take your last X. Someday, all this will be over and it'll be done." That's how the universe works. Someday, you'll do your favorite thing for the last time. I flew medevac during my pilot career and I'd seen people die in fiery airport wreckage. Sometimes entropy wins. You need to make sure you enjoy the things you like doing along the way, because someday you won't be able to do them anymore, and it might not be through any fault of your own. You need to enjoy it while it lasts and enjoy your life! You have no idea when it might disappear.

So, I went to gradschool and pivoted into AI stuff. I really enjoyed it! My undergrad was in math and it was so fun to work on these projects! It was great even and gave me some modicum of the satisfaction I got from being a pilot. I studied computer vision because maybe I could get the robots to see for me; even with my vision messed up I could still use my mind. And I fought this terrible ailment! I underwent treatment every month during grad school. I spoke at the engineering department's graduation ceremony. I DID IT! I got a new career! I made it. Despite adversity and pain and suffering, I WAS ON TOP AGAIN! LOOK at ME and bask in my glory! "Look upon my works ye mighty and despair!"

But something was amiss, chatGPT came out while I was in grad school and despite people telling me I was a fool for thinking these things were worth anything, I had already had a life I'd lived where automation is prevalent. I already knew how to think about automation. I could tell from the moment it came out that it was going to be big. I remember a heated argument with a friend about this, "dude, I think we're kind of in the singularity, this thing is going to change everything!" "WTF are you talking about it can't even run a decent DND campaign for me? How is it going to figure out how to write code decently?!" And now here we are. At my thesis defense, I talked about how important these tools were going to be in the near future and how they were going to change everything. It was met with mixed emotions and incredulity. But in retrospect I was right. Not that it makes it better for people losing their identity now.

It turns out that like 13 years in an industry that heavily uses automation gave me some context that other people didn't have. And I'm watching people deal with the shock of this now. I'm watching people deal with losing their identities in real time, and I am sitting here like the meme of the man about to be hanged, "first time huh?"

And after school, I went to work and was almost immediately miserable. I could not stand the bullshit meetings. I could not stand the incessant and bureaucratic grind of working for a large 15k employee org. I couldn't get anything actually done. It took me months to do stuff that should have been an email. Not only that, here I am pointing at this tsunami that's rapidly rushing towards us and people shrug it off or call me an idiot. I get on the AI steering committee and even there, with the other AI people, the ramifications of this are not clear. The very clear end-state seems too fantastical to them and they don't really want to hear "you guys are all going to lose your jobs." So I quit after a couple of years.

I started my own business doing consulting and building tools for small businesses around the local area. And I'm much happier though this is much more volatile. But here's the thing you should know: all of this is transient. All of this is ephemeral. It'll all evaporate one day, wealth, youth and beauty won't last forever. I had to learn about impermanence in my early 30s, most people aren't forced to learn it until they're in their 40s or 50s. Things won't last forever, so enjoy it right now, and the things you think you want? Stability and a fat paycheck, etc. are kind of illusions. Your family and your health and satisfaction and enjoyment in your life are much much more important.

The bright side of this is while we will mostly all be unemployed in a decade or so (probably in practically every industry), we'll be able to actually spend some time enjoying life. Try to start that now. You're not going to outrun, out optimize, out perform the autopilot. You have to steer it. Give up some control and learn to ride the wave, you'll enjoy it much more.

[tavavex]

You have some benefit of hindsight, but I feel like your predictions for the future are a bit too set-in-stone. For all the parallels to your first inflection point, you weren't automated away in aviation. By and large, flying today is the exact same it was 10 or even 20 years ago. Some supporting infrastructure and technologies have changed, but the variables of needing pilots, ATCs, maintenance techs and all the other staff have remained pretty much the same. You were unlucky to get hit with one of the most unfair things that can happen to someone working in that industry, but that factor had been a constant for many decades, and the fear of it is quietly lurking in every pilot's mind.

So, how do we apply this to the current situation? When the first crisis hit you, you were able to pivot. But what now? Are you going to move to doing something else again? What are you going to do? If we assume the AI-maximalist view, all mental work is potentially on the chopping block at some point, which is what you're doing right now. This isn't something that only affects one industry where you can scoot over someplace else and enjoy the normality - this could influence a whole class of labor. And what happens if you don't have reserves of money, experience and connections, like everyone who's starting out now? If the most optimistic AI views come to pass (and you seem to be convinced in that), for the rest of us it's a one-way ticket to a lifetime of hauling sand on construction sites for pennies, or doing a similar type of work while competing with millions of people who used to do menial jobs.

Luckily, the maximalist future isn't here yet, and I think the odds of it unfolding fully slowly fall over time. But either way, it will be a massive gut punch to most kinds of mental work. So what do you do now? It feels like you're accusing those other people of denial, like everyone has obviously come to the same conclusion as you but can't accept it, but you have also created a mental way out for explaining why the current situation is good. What gives you the idea that we'll be happily out of work? The way I see it, the automation of mental tasks will force everyone to do hard labor while competing with everyone else in an effort not to die on the streets. Productivity will surge, but we've transferred so much power to the top of society that we've all but ensured that we're not ever getting it back, and those people will never have a reason to have that extra wealth trickle down to the unemployed. If this future becomes real, things will be very, very bad.

[piloto_ciego]

>You have some benefit of hindsight, but I feel like your predictions for the future are a bit too set-in-stone. For all the parallels to your first inflection point, you weren't automated away in aviation. By and large, flying today is the exact same it was 10 or even 20 years ago. Some supporting infrastructure and technologies have changed, but the variables of needing pilots, ATCs, maintenance techs and all the other staff have remained pretty much the same. You were unlucky to get hit with one of the most unfair things that can happen to someone working in that industry, but that factor had been a constant for many decades, and the fear of it is quietly lurking in every pilot's mind.

I mean, it's not set-in-stone, but literally, all good things come to an end. We're all getting older, we're all gonna die some day, and the things you love today you might not love tomorrow. It's just a matter of time. You gotta roll with it - and largely, flying has been disrupted immensely just in my unexpectedly foreshortened career. At my first job I flew all over AK VFR with no transponder, my thumb on a sectional, no GPS, out of radar contact, no ADS-B, etc. I mean, it wasn't quite "four-course-range" stuff, but things have changed immensely. Some aspects of the system are slower to change, but the changes...were... wild. In my early 20s I was flying in JNU using the capstone phase 2 synthetic vision systems the FAA was tinkering with. It was basically like experimental science fiction stuff - now glass cockpits are fairly standard in new airplanes and there's tons of aftermarket systems. Still, go back 50 years, and there were way more flight engineers, navigators, radio operators, etc. Those jobs are essentially "gone" now. Like not, "oh they pivoted" except for a few niches, they're gone.

So, I'd argue that (as an insider) the disruption I saw during my time in the cockpit was astounding. The end of Flight Service Stations and iPads on the yoke of 50 year old airframes was kind of wild. So, sure, "a lot of things remain the same" but learning how to use an autopilot and go from a manual handflying freight dawg to a button-pushing FMS programmer had a learning curve. Just as I had to adapt to changes in airframes that gave me more possibilities at the expense of some manual control, I expect the same sort of learning curve to occur during this transition into a new way of designing software.

> So, how do we apply this to the current situation? When the first crisis hit you, you were able to pivot. But what now? Are you going to move to doing something else again? What are you going to do? If we assume the AI-maximalist view, all mental work is potentially on the chopping block at some point, which is what you're doing right now. This isn't something that only affects one industry where you can scoot over someplace else and enjoy the normality - this could influence a whole class of labor. And what happens if you don't have reserves of money, experience and connections, like everyone who's starting out now? If the most optimistic AI views come to pass (and you seem to be convinced in that), for the rest of us it's a one-way ticket to a lifetime of hauling sand on construction sites for pennies, or doing a similar type of work while competing with millions of people who used to do menial jobs.

You roll with it. You do what you have to do to make it through the day, and keep on pedaling. You do what you have to do to survive and you reinvent yourself. But, my intuition is that by the end of this, there will be literally no need for human labor between AI and robots except for really tight niches, and weird things where we just don't want robots to be doing it; we're going to have to reinvent ourselves as a society. We have to start from the point of view that "oh, this is just all something someone made up" and decide to change. I've reinvented myself once, I'm about to have to do it again, it'll be fine, I can do it 20 more times if I need to. You have to have some optimism and hope otherwise it all falls apart. You have to believe that the future will hold some sort of joy and adventure and fun for you. To be clear, it won't always be fun, but it'll be fine in the end regardless. Having a mindset of "ok, I'm going to enjoy this while it lasts and pivot as necessary" is kind of integral to making it through "weird" times. Having hope for the future gets you through the times when it stops being fun.

>Luckily, the maximalist future isn't here yet, and I think the odds of it unfolding fully slowly fall over time. But either way, it will be a massive gut punch to most kinds of mental work. So what do you do now?

Do you mean what to I do? If so, I write software for small local companies, I am building my cabin in the woods (that's more for fun than anything), I'm taking some classes here and there, and raising my kids. I'm all over the place - and I recognize that I'm in a privileged place to be able to do that now? And it is going to be a gut punch to many people. I'm sorry that that's going to happen to those folks - but look, I lived through a massive gut punch once already, I can do it again. If I can make it, I reckon you probably can too. Seriously, it'll suck, but you'll make it if things get weird. And no, I realize that not everyone will, but you have to believe you'll make it? I am not entirely sure how to articulate this. You have to have faith in yourself.

If you're asking what you should do? Or someone should do in general, I'd say, "enjoy what you're doing, have fun, go on adventures, and build things that you think make the world a better place" that and "roll with it." That's not a very satisfying answer, but it's my answer, "you'll be fine, just roll with it, and accept how things are, not lament how things ought to be."

That doesn't mean "don't try to work towards making things how they ought to be" - but if you get too sad about how things oughta be you'll never have the motivation to push things towards that ideal.

> It feels like you're accusing those other people of denial, like everyone has obviously come to the same conclusion as you but can't accept it, but you have also created a mental way out for explaining why the current situation is good.

I'm not saying that. Of course some people have come to different conclusions, I just think they're wrong, lol. You're allowed to be wrong, and so am I. But I never said that the current situation is "optimal" - I'm saying, just keep pedaling and enjoy things while they last, and be able to pivot. Keep yourself flexible to an uncertain future.

> What gives you the idea that we'll be happily out of work? The way I see it, the automation of mental tasks will force everyone to do hard labor while competing with everyone else in an effort not to die on the streets.

I don't think everyone agrees with me, but I think that largely, people are totally underestimating what this is going to do to knowledge work. You don't have to agree with me, you do you, but we'll come out of this one way or another.

We'll be happily out of work because if we're not happy hundreds of millions of people will revolt. That won't be pretty either, to be clear, but it's pretty obviously that it's not a stable state to have a handful of rich people running the world and then literal billions of angry others. That might be possible for a little while? But not indefinitely - even with AI powered armies or whatever. It's not stable.

> Productivity will surge, but we've transferred so much power to the top of society that we've all but ensured that we're not ever getting it back, and those people will never have a reason to have that extra wealth trickle down to the unemployed.

I mean, I volunteer at a local mutual aid group, I grow hydroponic veggies in my garage and feed my family and neighbors, I give away what I can without any expectation in return. Dual power and all that. You want to fix the future, be the future you want to see happen but right now. Just start doing it. There's no rules to this thing, there's no cosmic score-card as best as I can tell. Just go start making things better for people in your immediate area and don't ask for permission. Build the solar punk future you want and stop asking for rich guys to give it to you.

Now, yeah,it's plausible that the super wealthy could somehow manage to control all of society? Maybe we get techno feudalism? I don't know, I'm not super convinced that this will happen though. Maybe they can drone strike every human being with a net-worth of less than $1m on the planet. I doubt it though. There are a lot more of us than the are of the rich. I think the rational equilibrium point is probably a "correction" in the distribution of power in society in the near term future though. Not like tomorrow? But if a few hundred million people are suddenly unemployed I doubt it ends up well for the people running things.

> If this future becomes real, things will be very, very bad.

Possibly, yes. I don't think so though. I think we'll muddle through it. All things do come to an end, nothing lasts forever, and then we have to figure out how we're going to live in the new world.