[LilBytes]

Quotes from the article:

'Work as Identity: The Foundation'

Knowledge workers hold a different relationship to their labor than manufacturing workers did. For a cognitive professional, expertise is not only an activity. It is a large part of the self. A data scientist who has spent a decade building statistical judgment does not experience that judgment as a detachable tool. It is closer to a personality trait. When automation threatens the work, it reaches past the income and touches the identity.'

Excerpt from the article above. It heavily leans on Reddit quotes, articles posted on Reddit and the number of upvotes to backup or sustain certain arguments. But I found the article informative, and publishing a message and a feeling I've been struggling to describe, write or externalise. Hope it's helpful or at least interesting to us here.

Apparently my feelings of disillusionment, confusion, anxiety, failing self esteem and occasionally anger or frustration from AI has a name that's starting to be written and formalised. Though not yet accepted either informally or formally, but it's starting a conversation which I'm thankful for, _Artificial Intelligence Replacement Dysfunction_. From the article:

"In September 2025, two psychiatrists at the University of Florida College of Medicine, Stephanie McNamara and Joseph E. Thornton, published a paper in the journal Cureus proposing a new construct they call Artificial Intelligence Replacement Dysfunction, or AIRD."

I'll be sharing this article with my psychologist when we meet in a few weeks.

[ThrowawayR2]

The article author, according to their site's About page, is a "a performance marketing and paid social media director". While that doesn't necessarily invalidate their opinion, it doesn't exactly inspire confidence in it either, particularly whether it accurately describes what's happening in the software industry.

[emodendroket]

> Knowledge workers hold a different relationship to their labor than manufacturing workers did. For a cognitive professional, expertise is not only an activity. It is a large part of the self. A data scientist who has spent a decade building statistical judgment does not experience that judgment as a detachable tool. It is closer to a personality trait. When automation threatens the work, it reaches past the income and touches the identity.'

I think the idea that coal miners or factory laborers or whoever else in blue-collar work did not identify with their work is just wrong, and there's evidence going back as far as the Tomb of Eurysaces the Baker of people deeply identifying with work we might otherwise be tempted to view as lowly.

[FearNotDaniel]

Absolutely true - witness the enormous upheaval in the north of England’s coal mining communities when all the pits got closed in the 1980s. It wasn’t just individuals but families across generations and entire villages who had defined themselves by the work they did. It was easy for those in Westminster to say it was a sound decision for the national economy as a whole, but apart from leaving the workers high and dry with no other visible opportunities they absolutely failed to reckon with the cultural impact of taking away the very source of people’s sense of identity.

[_DeadFred_]

I like the term AI induced loss of meaning. It covers loss of meaning in work. Loss of meaning in skills. Loss of meaning in art. Loss of meaning in interpersonal communication when you get AI responses back.

[dosisking]

I like the term 'A Pirate Looks at 40'. To me, this is not much different from Jimmy Buffett's song.

[harvey9]

The idea that skilled people who work with their hands don't identify with their work is laughable.

[sudosteph]

Yes, and this is something that is routinely overlooked. Work identities run deep, and they are not easily changed.

Andrew Yang actually made a strong point when he was talking about automation-driven job losses way back in 2019. He said you can offer the best and most expensive retraining programs imaginable to help people displaced from their jobs move to fields like healthcare - but most truck drivers, even if out of work, will never even consider retaining to work as a nurse. Identities are not as malleable to the whims of supply and demand as some might want to believe.

[watwut]

Truck driver to nurse is special kind of issue, because nursing is feminine coded occupation and trucking attracts men who want to prove own masculinity. But they will take jobs that are not that much feminine.

And nursing also require a lot more study then people assume, 40 years old trucker will have hard time spending that much time in school even if it was his lifelong dream.

[amanaplanacanal]

Without throwing the gender stuff into it... There are plenty of occupations I have no interest in and can't picture myself ever doing. People spend their childhood and young adulthood figuring out what they are good at and what they enjoy, and you can't expect them to suddenly move to something completely different.

[ornornor]

> nursing is feminine coded occupation and trucking attracts men who want to prove own masculinity

In your head maybe?

[throwuxiytayq]

Some stereotypes are a useful description of reality. You’ve gotta pick your battles.

In the US, 87.3% of nurses are female and 92.3% of truckers are male.

[ornornor]

Maybe this nomenclature of yours doesn’t help.

A “computer” used to be a job mostly done by female. Now it’s the opposite.

[emodendroket]

The profession is in reality overwhelmingly female, and it is associated with women in basically the entire world. Even from a linguistic perspective, the origins of the English word is gendered (the association with wet nurses is unmistakably feminine), and similar phenomenon happen in other languages. It's no longer considered the polite word to use, but if you read moderately old Japanese texts you'll find nurses referred to as "kangohu," no longer preferred because the "hu" part specifically means "woman." I'm sure if we did a survey of more world languages we'd find other hints. Even high-minded economic writing will describe it as "pink-collar" work. You could quite sensibly argue that it should be otherwise but the world is not as we might wish it were.

[rdtsc]

> In your head maybe?

How do you mean? Trucking doesn’t mostly attract men and gp made it up?

[brianleb]

OP did not say anything about skilled workers who make things with their hands. You are describing an artisan or craftsman, or at the very least a tradesman.

The quote is talking about manufacturing labor. This is the guy on the assembly line who lowers the press, makes his thousandth widget for a day, and then lifts it up. Rinse and repeat.

[esperent]

That person would have been a skilled laborer like a blacksmith a few generations ago. I'm sure many of those people felt the same way when factories started to produce what they had spent a lifetime learning to make.

Now that is happening to many kinds of knowledge workers. Assembly lines mechanized the work of artisans. LLMs are in the process of mechanizing knowledge and creative work, of certain kinds.

[harvey9]

I think you have a very narrow conception of even assembly line work.

[victorbjorklund]

I’m not sure people working on an assembly line in a factory is defining themselves as their work task. Someone working in a factory mounting IPhone screens probably don’t make their job their identity the same way a designer, developer, author does.

(Of course there are manual jobs that people have as their identity.)

[agumonkey]

One tiny nanoscopic nitpick, because i agree with you mostly, programming is often creating wider things (abstractions, frameworks). I think it hits a different part compared to most jobs. Maybe... i'm not sure, but that's how i feel compared to other manual occupations that i loved too.

[somenameforme]

It's also reflective of the author living in a very small bubble. It's quite a shame that chose to include that as I think the article is otherwise relevant and pertinent, but it colors the whole thing.

[smikhanov]

The article says nothing about “skilled people who work with their hands” specifically, so it’s unclear what is being refuted here.

However there are people in the workforce who don’t identify with their work. Those are likely not in professions that Marx thought of when he wrote about alienation, but instead are Uber Eats delivery drivers, call centre workers, flight attendants on low-cost airlines, nurses in mediocre hospitals, and so on.

[emodendroket]

I'm sure there are but I am just as sure some of these people also identify with their work.

[taurath]

Or just maybe it’s heavily economic. Yea there are many people with lots of money who are anxious about being rendered unneeded, but can we talk for a minute about all the people trying really hard to save who are needing to rent at market rates, or maybe they have a mortgage and desperately need their current income in order to not lose their home? Let alone that the people more likely to be replaced are those paid the least!

[throwatdem12311]

Similar to LLM smells in writing, anyone that blogs about Reddit comments to make broad extrapolations about society or psychology or anything really…I just write it off as slop.

They’re low effort takes from terminally online weirdos. The number of upvotes something gets is meaningless. Using it as some kind of appeal to authority or credibility on a topic is a joke.

Like those SEO slop gaming articles about “controversies” because some anonymous account on Reddit complained that a character got race swapped or something.

This crap gets pulled into Google search results and gets repeated as truth by Gemini when it does a web search.

It’s gross.

[eager_learner]

I agree. It is human slop and as soon as it said REDDIT, I was like oh come on, I don't even use Reddit.

[classified]

> Artificial Intelligence Replacement Dysfunction

I take issue with calling it a dysfunction when the symptoms are a completely natural and appropriate response to an irritation. To me, it has a whiff of blaming the victim.

[keybored]

I’ve been critiquing what I’ve called AI Inevitability Soothsaying[1] and this seems related:

> > Not all articles in this AI category are outright positive. They range from the euphoric to the slightly depressed. But they share the same premise of inevitability; even the most negative will say that, of course I use AI, I’m not some Luddite[3]! It is integral to my work now. But I don’t just let it run the whole game. I copy–paste with judicious care. blah blah blah

This looks very similar.

Because what is happening? People are getting laid off. Because of AI. They say. There are many doubters here on this board at least. But what is the first premise of Inevitability? In my book it is to take AI as a given, as the unstoppable force; don’t necessarily praise AI, in fact you can write as if it is hitting us like a merciless meteor. But you have to use that as the premise.

Next find a topic to write about. (It’s really about AI but you need a topic that is about the “externalities”.) Well here you have Reddit Comments. Which you seem to imply to have similar thoughts about as me; Reddit posts can be astroturfed to all hell for all you know. Certainly now that they can hide their comment history.

So, Depression. How human. How thoughtful. What a soft subject. What a Trojan Horse? That someone cares about this Definitely a Thing? Like here[2]:

> > If you're an engineer who uses AI daily - for design reviews, code generation, debugging, documentation, architecture decisions - and you've noticed that you're somehow more tired than before AI existed, this post is for you. You're not imagining it. You're not weak. You're experiencing something real that the industry is aggressively pretending doesn't exist. And if someone who builds agent infrastructure full-time can burn out on AI, it can happen to anyone.

It is very real and we feel your emotions. Right. The meteor has struck us all.

So what’s the point of Inevitabilism? (This is all speculation anyway.) Fear is certainly a factor. Because only investors need to feel good about AI. Workers need discipline more than positivism.[3]

But does that mean this is false? Of course not. But how much of this Shared Depression is because of Interesting Pieces like this one? Just think. You can ruminate yourself into a state of depression (at least lower-d) without anyone giving you even one bad “performance review”.

> > Knowledge workers hold a different relationship to their labor than manufacturing workers did. For a cognitive professional, expertise is not only an activity. It is a large part of the self. A data scientist who has spent a decade building statistical judgment does not experience that judgment as a detachable tool. It is closer to a personality trait. When automation threatens the work, it reaches past the income and touches the identity.'

No, it’s a fucking paycheck my guy.

To the extent that it’s an identity though. Uh what? Never met a pre-computer, non-office worker male put into disability or retirement? A homemaker with no one to care for?

Really you went to Reddit and concluded that only office workers have an identity? Eat shit, TFA.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46935607

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46936012

[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48352526