If I was made to lamp street lamps 5 years after incandescent street lights were invented, while not working on any way forward, I'd probably fall into a deep existential crisis.

[1]: https://www.npr.org/2025/12/31/nx-s1-5660752/why-americans-d...

Contrary to popular opinion, IT workers aren't interchangeable and there exist a large swath of jobs that very few people qualify for (HN should know this) because of the specialization required.

America is at near full employment [2]. Replacing American workers with lower paid foreign workers is already illegal and frequently enforced[3].

This is such a deep distraction but a virulent virus of a narrative, surgically designed to needle our reptilian minds.

[1]: https://www.goodreturns.in/news/tech-layoffs-2025-oracle-cut...

[2]: https://www.statista.com/statistics/269959/employment-in-the...

[3]: https://www.dol.gov/newsroom/releases/whd/whd20180501-2, https://www.dol.gov/newsroom/releases/whd/whd20180501-2

Isn't this the point of this mission? If your point is "it shouldn't take this much money", then I agree. But also point to almost everything else.

I remember having to pay a pretty penny to have a 3 minute conversation with my dad working half way across the world. Now I can video call my nephew for 45 minutes without blinking an eye. What happened?

Why will Intelligence be like Oil and not Broadband?

I've never understood this: If I replace a single home with 20 apartment homes, I've raised the value of the whole property at purchase time no? You're already dealing with home valuations that have faaar outstripped wages, the only way you go any higher is to build more homes on the same property.

Counterintuitively, the "I don't want to live next to apartments" line of thinking actually seems more potent in the regular NIMBY headspace? Like people will forego higher valuations to keep their suburb a suburb.

The chaos and noise (especially the car noise) are just an explicit choice American cities have made.

I really hope you get the irony of being a suburbanite complaining about there being too many cars in cities when most of those cars are suburbanites who’ve given up on improving the public transit in their cities.

It's rent, the answer is almost always rent. Its my rent, its my child-care workers rent, it my kids school-teachers rent. It's always rent.

Great, let's just apply that logic to Waymo as well and call it a day (see how silly that sounds?). Waymo has engineers..so does the Department of transportation.

No. That's gaslighting, and totally misplaced political activation.

Why are cops not treated the same way? OP is right, AI is totally irrelevant in this story.

If the point is "cops can't be trusted". Why do they have GUNS?! AI is the least of your problems.

I feel like I'm going crazy with this narrative.

FYI, parent engagement is also heavily proportional to parent income/property prices.

Very hard to be engaged at school with double/triple working class jobs.

The problem is childcare not knowledge.

Tale as old as time itself.

“But on balance it’s a negative!!”

By what measurement? That’s simply a measurement of your own personal information bubble.

That’s what I’m disagreeing with. “Legitimate uses” isn’t something just hanging out in the ether to attach itself to useful technology it happens via a grinding sales process and big industry wide cultural changes.

People don’t like change.

I think AI and its knock-on effects in robotics will have massive productivity boosts in industries where productivity has been lagging for years. It will take decades and multiple boom-busts to happen to drag the population into change but it’ll happen.