In general I take your point, but in an attempt to steelman OP:

Perhaps they're using "surrender" in its meaning of "hand over something you didn't want to hand over", "give up under duress"?

If you've ever worked with talented, but younger, colleagues, you'll see this. Something about our industry, or maybe the kind of person in it, where individual brilliance seems always to be more prioritised than collective endeavour and progress.

For software or IT folk to be doing this would be indeed worrying (and I bet some are, and I'm worried about them!)

For civilians though... They've been told it's AI, it can do stuff for them. And one thing they do is log in to stuff. I don't think they're stupid. Just that what's obvious to IT folk is simply not at all obvious to the average person. Maybe that's on us not on them?

Would they delegate these things to another person, too???

I mean the answer is clearly yes! People in my family have for sure shared round logins to various things, I guess they think that's ok too

Some people just don't have enough to do and setting up "quick chats" makes them feel busy.

ornthey think they have a lot of questions and think they will be less disruptive by having a call. You also didnt give them the response they wanted to hear, which is that you own the problem and they can tell somebody else that its being handled

I have this even on slack. I prefer text because it gives me time to thi k before responding but I think some people just don't have very good reading comprehension. Or writing skills.

So they force everything to "let's set up a chat about this".

Ok but... You aren't planning to get paid to be a software engineer? Or you are? Surely this is the way in which the futures are entwined, for most of us?

What if what we call "white collar work", for the most part sitting at a desk, interacting with a computer, isn't really the sort of work suitable for human flourishing at all?

When you think about it humans were never really well suited to such a lifestyle. Of course the transition may be bumpy but maybe the end point, of machines doing these machine-like tasks, isn't so bad for us.

What work does suit humans? Anything involving interaction with the world or other humans, perhaps.

But working is a necessity of life, how can one find meaning without being stuck in an office doing useless stuff for money?! /s

That's the take many have been educated against: maybe one day a category of bullshit jobs will be gone and it's fine.

Is roofing a useless task? I think not, we all need roofs. Have you ever personally replaced a roof in the middle of summer? I have. After that, I never thought of a climate controlled office as a place I was "stuck".

This is the old comfort/friction/happiness dichotomy isn't it.

Each incremental reduction in friction and improvement in comfort feels good. But is the net effect happiness? I think it's anomie, in the limit.

Ah but I'd take roofing in the summer over septic tank cleaning any day. The existence of even shittier jobs does not make any particular job not-shitty.

I did quite a few summers doing carpentry in the heat, and yes, I appreciate AC but what's your point?

Also if roofing was a non-problem anymore (we solved it somehow), would you want to have people doing it just for the sake of doing a job?

We've made money a necessity of life and working the only way billions of people can get money. If we think a big chunk of jobs can be automated away, how are those people going to fulfill their needs?

You make it sound like we invented work. When was work ever not necessary? All we invented was division of labor, and money as a way to translate between different kinds of labor. I think that's an improvement?

Modern work is certainly an unnatural invention. As is the phenomenon of rent seeking and allowing wealth accumulation to the point of absurdity.

I'd rather not go back to hunting and gathering. Though I would like to go back to trust busting, collective action, and rule of law.

Now you do it in your time off instead.

I'm an absolute doofus in the physical realm. No hand eye coordination of any kind. No common sense. No social skills or ability to read and understand humans.

In any other era I would have been a useless drain on society and yet I happened by an incredible stroke of luck to be born at a time when the few skills I do have perfectly aligned with a career niche. It's been a good few decades. Now I just go back to being a useless nobody but at least I have my memories and my investments.

I'm staring down the barrel of this particular prospect lately. I struggled through my twenties living with family until I finally managed to get my bachelor's degree and a job with a really solid company/team/product line. That silo of the business was then sold off to private equity, and it was fine for a while, but now the owners have been ensorcelled by the song of a C-list "rock star CEO" who has no respect for the team or the product line and very definitely has no sense of where the inertia lies when he keeps jerking the steering wheel of this particular vehicle. It's fucking exhausting to have to hold my tongue in meetings when I so badly want to say "it's late because you decided to delay it when it was about to be done, and then a couple months later you decided that it was urgent and had to be done ASAP, and then you decided to reassign staff to an initiative that you just made up with no actual product definition. But that would get me fired.

Remember, class, because this will be on the test: capitalism is the superior economic system because it elevates people who allocate capital efficiently. Just don't ever look too closely at the input and output functions of any such definition of "efficiency" (hint: they conveniently tend to elevate people who are skilled at flattering capital owners).

Does this advice still hold once 99.99% of people are invested in index funds?

It’s not clear yet. Index funds are now an enormous part of the market and players are starting to play them (see SpaceX, and given the door they opened OpenAI and Anthropic to follow).

And big tech is a large part of most indexes

I mean probably? It's still a much lower-risk strategy compared to investing in individual stocks.