Create value for others and don’t worry about the returns

sudo_cowsay

Just join the right "communities" or else it might have very different results. A toxic community can exploit you (even if you make more value than you consume).

beanshadow

> it will continue to improve, but it won’t “go recursive” or whatever the claim is. It’s always been recursive. I suspect "going recursive" often colloquially means that AI systems achieve their exponential growth without human software engineers in the mix. This is a moment whose sudden apparent nearness does justify some of the ramping rhetoric, in my opinion.

FlyingSnake

People keep rediscovering the Bhagavad Gita in new ways https://vedabase.io/en/library/bg/2/47/

kjgkjhfkjf

> if you have a job where you create complexity for others, you will be found out This explains the panic. It describes most roles in big tech.

bob1029

> The trick is not to play zero sum games. This is what I have been saying the whole time. Go create value for others and don’t worry about the returns. This strategy is highly effective but it's also difficult to tolerate as an ordinary advanced ape. Watching others play less noble games and obtain easier wins can be discouraging over time. I have found that the less you care about money the easier it is to acquire. Risk aversion, greed and interpersonal drama will kill a good idea way before anything else. I sometimes like to reframe this one as "100% of $0 is still $0".

7777777phil

Most of what's getting "automated" was never really work, it was headcount that existed because nobody had a good reason to cut it yet. AI gave the reason..

keyle

That was my contracting philosophy for 15 years. Create more value than what I cost, otherwise why are you paying me?

pu_pe

Even if your goal is to go out and create value for others, your contribution is proportional to what everyone else can offer. If others with AI will deliver that value cheaper, or if what I am good at can be easily automated, it's getting harder and harder to deliver more value than I consume.

minmax2020

Can anyone explain the rent seeker paragraph? Which companies are playing 0 sum game and which are not? Are all big players not rent seekers?

dzink

To refer back to the trite business book section - making something new is a Blue Ocean Strategy approach. Fighting for existing market share is a bloodied Red Ocean approach that Thiel called “competition is for losers”. So both benevolent and be greedy approaches recommend the same. Make a new puddle for everyone to swim in and you can focus on empathy instead of defense.

rvz

Two things. > If you don’t use this new stupid AI thing you will fall behind. If you haven’t totally updated your workflow you are worth 0. When I see this on any social platform, that is a sign that a VC / investor already invested or likely over-invested in said product and is manipulating emotions to shill their portfolio companies. This is a tired tactic repeated and recycled tens of thousands of times over and over again and the first sense is to ignore them. > That said, if you have a job where you create complexity for others, you will be found out. The days of rent seekers are coming to an end. But not because there will be no more rent seeking, it’s because rent seeking is a 0 sum game and you will lose at it to bigger players. This is why many here are realizing the uncomfortable truth about why complexity over simplicity was celebrated. Of course job security. But it turns out that the low hanging fruit at those companies that added close to no value LLMs were enough to achieve "AGI" internally; (meaning layoffs in this case). The jobs of knowledge workers will still be there, but the big money just went into data centers (and not overpaying for more knowledge workers). The truth is in the middle.

vintermann

There are zero-sum games you can't realistically escape. They're really common. Credentials is a zero-sum game. Political power, influence of all sorts, are zero sum games: if you have more of it, someone else has less. Land ownership is basically zero sum, too.

simianwords

> They just say it’s AI cause that makes the stock price go up. slightly naive take when the author recognises that AI will cause productivity increase.

avaer

It's easy to create value for others and not worry about returns when you have enough money to not worry. Unfortunately for most people, there's plenty of companies willing to take the returns and leave you paycheck to paycheck. That's literally what they are optimized to do. I don't even disagree with the ideal, but I think a prerequisite step to this philosophy is UBI.

xodn348

It's better to be a happy optimist than a smart pessimist.

nathancroissant

As others have said, it's a very optimistic view that can be infuriating to read when you are struggling to pay your bills. I'd also argue it's not very effecicient : we are at our best when we have deadlines and clear targets to reach, and making money to pay the bills can be a very motivating one to stop procrastinating !

burnt-resistor

The surest recipe to becoming a sucker and being left with nothing is leaving ownership and properly valuing your contributions to chance rather than respecting essential details. Anyone advising others they should just shrug and ignore it is either a moron or trying to play them. Workers should generally aim to unionize and seek to capture more of their value through worker-owned co-ops.

arisAlexis

This reads as a typical anti hype article that attracts the people that are fed up with reality. But this framework never works because it's detached from current reality. AI is a big thing and it will eat most jobs weather you call it stupid or you like it.

p697

The whole world is obsessed with openclaw. Some companies are now even evaluating their employees' built agents, the tokens consumed, and the money spent on AI. It's really gotten out of hand.