There's no way under our current economic system that the result of a tool that makes some work easier/faster would be anything other than filling the gap with more or other work.
> In fact, AI is increasing the speed, density and complexity of work rather than reducing it, according to an analysis of 164,000 workers’ digital work activity.
Isn't this obvious? This is exactly what I would expect!
One thing I haven't seen mentioned much, in AI coding and other AI-assisted work, is the sheer needless verbosity of models, the walls of text they spew out for us to read through. This alone adds to the workload & fatigue.
There's a thing in writing, "pity the reader" - respect your audience's time, get to the point. In The Elements of Style, "omit needless words."
You can prompt models to be succinct, but the latest ones - GPT 5-series especially - ignore your requests and spew paragraphs upon paragraphs of noise. Maybe it's the incentives of charging per token?
If you want, I can expand on this topic and generate a lengthy comparison chart.
Cory Doctorow calls it becoming a reverse centaur: instead of you using machines to automate the boring parts, machines use you to do the messy parts - which includes taking liability(!) for the spicy autocomplete's semirandom output that you totally reviewed 100%, right?
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[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 26.7 ms ] threadIsn't this obvious? This is exactly what I would expect!
There's a thing in writing, "pity the reader" - respect your audience's time, get to the point. In The Elements of Style, "omit needless words."
You can prompt models to be succinct, but the latest ones - GPT 5-series especially - ignore your requests and spew paragraphs upon paragraphs of noise. Maybe it's the incentives of charging per token?
If you want, I can expand on this topic and generate a lengthy comparison chart.
The risk of AI isn't making us lazy, but making "lazy" look productive
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47555081
ftfy?