Item — HN Reader

> Technology was supposed to make room for life but instead for more and more people life is slowly being rearranged around AI. People fear being replaced by machines and respond by giving those machines more of their judgment, attention and time. And for what? Every “saved” hour is returned to a race with no finish line.

I think this is true. I've recently heard Tim Ferriss say: Just because you can do something well doesn't mean it's worth doing.

This is so true with AI. You can do a lot of things with AI, but that doesn't automatically make them worth doing. Anything multiplied by zero is zero. If the benefit of something is (effectively) zero, it doesn't matter how low the cost is.

AI isn't useless and there are beautiful, enriching use cases for it. But the idea that AI must consume our lives so we don't get left behind by those who brag on LinkedIn about operating 12 concurrent agents in self-perpetuating loops seems faulty to me.

1 comments

> Just because you can do something well doesn't mean it's worth doing.

I'm not sure if there's more context to this quote, but on the surface: what a dismal take! Letting some measure of worth dictate what you do feels pretty limiting to me. I understand that he's not saying "make sure you attach worth to everything you do," but there's an implicit judgement process in what he's suggesting.

If you do something well, and you like doing that something, maybe you should enjoy doing it just for the sake of doing it.

I read it the opposite though; that it's the act of doing, not the (perfect) result, the thing that is valuable. e.g. it's better to paint a canvas badly because it's fun, than to have an AI generate a perfect image. It's not the image that is "well" that is worth it, it's you having fun while doing it that it's worth it.

I feel like you're conflating "having worth" (value) and "being worth doing" (it's good to do it) in here?

I know a few people who refuse to get jobs even though they are suffering financially because they can't find something they think is "worth" doing with their skill set.

I tried to tell them that having a job would mean they get to meet new people, they get to escape their financial despair, and that it would add structure and organization to their disheveled and disorganized lives. I explained that work itself has value for the worker outside of the simple return of the paycheck, the activity of being engaged completing a task having direct psychological impact on the task completer.

Both of their responses, taken months apart, boiled down to that if a day of work didn't make them so wealthy that they never had to work again it wasn't worth it for them.

So I gave up.

>and you like doing that something

I think your attempt at a counterpoint accidentally reinforced the main point: there are more criteria beyond simply being able to do something well that determine whether it's a good idea in the first place. I can make lead balloons faster and cheaper than anyone else but that's not enough to make it worth spending my one and only life making lead balloons.

Yes, and I even think this applies to generally valuable skills.

I can be really good at organizing projects, but I shouldn’t channel that into spending hours creating the perfect Jira template with 18 integrations just because I can do it well because that’s a lot of energy spent on something nobody may ever use.

Meanwhile that skill may very well be extremely valuable elsewhere.

True! And the point isn't that you shouldn't base whether you do something on how much economic value it produces.

I think the judgment is more that if you're doing something to produce some kind of outcome (e.g. work), don't get stuck on things that don't impact that outcome.

The point isn't that you shouldn't do things well. It's that just because AI makes it effortless to ship some random new thing nobody asked for, that doesn't mean you should ship it.

I think that calculus changes completely when you do things for fun, where the only outcome you're trying to produce is doing more of the activity.

If you're doing something for fun, the doing is itself the reward.

I don't think he's talking about personal fulfilment. His take is more simple. He's saying don't do the following: "I created a piece of software, and it works pretty good, but I have no customers. Should I work on coding to get it to work 5% better, or try to do some marketing? Well, I'm really, really great at coding, so let me do more of that."

Okay, what if you're good at arson?