you never worked more before because considering AI-Based coding you're extremely more efficient in every task you accomplish. Everything is solved faster, and that makes more problems to come. It's like an unevitable escalation. Such putting your pedal on full gas without knowing how to leave it from there.
I feel this. Thinking about the domain, typing a bit, maybe having a new idea while I'm eating on a break now feels like a memory of heaven. Today I'm constantly going over painful "grilling" sessions where I have to read mountains of dense prose where each word maps to some "glossary" from previously generated docs and figure out what is overengineered bullshit and what is actually necessary.
No. Actually some things take longer and lead to worse outcomes. AI tools invent problems and find work for themselves while also failing at their stated tasks in opaque ways all the damn time. It's obnoxious and why so many repos are stupidly large for no good reason.
This tracks with my experience. The other bit that contributes here is that upstream inputs using AI also get faster - so you’re basically speeding up the entire machine but you’re still a human.
Unfortunately this means that you always feel the need to keep building or fall behind (picturing Lucy and Ethel at the chocolate factory) which means you’re pretty much always feeling burnt out and it feels harder to step away than ever before without feeling a certain way about it.
I hate it. It’s the best time ever to build. That excitement lasted about a year - but now it’s a treadmill I can’t escape and companies are not really paying more for the productivity (even factoring in the cost of my AI usage)
They aren’t paying more for productivity because they themselves aren’t earning more for productivity. The elephant in the room is that customers don’t have any more money to spend. Certainly not in this economy.
In manufacturing, an oversupply of finished product quickly leads to overfull warehouses, and the company knows to slow down production until product moves.
In software it’s less visible. Features that nobody is buying don’t physically pile up in the shipping department. Decades of accounting for all programmer time as productivity has left managers with limited ability to recognize time spent building unnecessary bloat as a loss. Maintenance burden isn’t fully recognized as a loss, either. We tend to assume it’s roughly equivalent to profit, the same as all other code the programmers churn out.
And what you are seeing now is that it was always a myth. Not everything you do at work is profitable or productive, and AI is causing that fraction to decrease. So of course they aren’t going to pay you more for it.
While that is true, I find that in a small company / startup environment you are almost always working on something that will contribute to revenue. The list is long. And you don’t have that much time for nonsense if you’re doing it right.
The other factor here is scaling of humans. Without these tools we would need a lot more humans. We don’t need as many but the ones we do have are heavily taxed. That salary savings should be passed on (again, relative productivity to AI spend) but we’ll see!
I once would have said that about startups, but lately I’ve been working at a very small one and I’ve seen with my own eyes how agentic coding rapidly undermined the company’s ability to effectively prioritize. It has basically killed the correlation between initial planning/development cost and ongoing support/maintenance cost. And it had developers implementing things so quickly that the product manager couldn’t keep up, which meant that he was basically just approving everything, including the half baked ideas, just to avoid coming under pressure for stalling the development pipeline.
I’m sure the ship will eventually right itself, but it’s going to take some time for the profession to digest how AI coding has changed things and how to adjust incumbent working norms to account for it.
AI also gives employees much more leverage than before, as they no longer need a large team to compete with BigCos at knowledge work. It's never been cheaper to start a software business.
The side effect of this is also that the value of software itself has never been lower, so starting a new software business isn't very attractive in today's market.
the cost of developing software has never been lower. That is maybe 10-15% of the value in a software business believe it or not. If you can do the other 85% it's a great time to start a software business.
It cheaper to create one-off products. Creating a sustainable business though? Charging money for the product or service? Actually getting enough income to thrive? I think that also just got a lot harder. Sure, you quit and you undermined BigCo with your open source release, but somebody with even less to lose will now undermine you.
Tech is the least important thing even for a tech company. Unless you are a 10x better than anyone else in the game. This did happen once for a while but you can do it without AI anyway — and probably better for you because it’s a lot more difficult to copy yours. However, hardware oriented companies may be the outliers.
The ability to rent cheap AI capacities, the ability to push to a million consumers, the ability to persuade for large contracts, these are the most important ones.
Honestly I think that is more of a symptom of how slapped together the AI software stacks feel to an outsider.
All my dev friends swear this is the future, all my scientist coworkers just say it's a useful tool.
I have heard the pitch and have people explained how it works... But I have yet been handed a guide on how to set myself up properly to get the most out of AI. Like I have both a corporate openai gui agent as well as cli setup with a monthly allotment of tokens. But there is no clear standard guide on how I should be setting things up, like we do for python in books "here are the building blocks for python"/aka learn python the hard way
:D As a person who can do both ( and keeps logs of various interesting mishaps in our little corner of the universe ), neither is easy to do well, both require skill and, well, current literacy rates don't exactly make me optimistic.
edit: It is actually kinda funny. One would think that we would embrace it the full spectrum now as we could have the best of both worlds ( logic and language side by side solving humanity's problems ).
Just remember, it's not how good you are at your job, it's how hungry the person on your way to work is that's willing to split open your head and steal your wallet.
This precisely - AI takes away your leverage as a software engineer. AI models are very well trained at coding today so I'm not sure what further improvement really looks like. But even if humans stick around to guide the AI, I expect the job itself will get more unpleasant because capital/management have no reason to treat this labor class well anymore.
AI needs humans to fill in the gaps at what it's not good at: acquiring and managing large volumes of new information/context. This requires humans to learn faster than ever before, since their projects grow much more rapidly, and to spend far more time managing and switching context, which people generally find unpleasant.
the amount of work I get done increased exponentially, but so did the number of things I have to keep track of in my head. it's tempting to just YOLO everything to the AI, but "the AI did it" isn't really an excuse when production goes down.
The opening premise baffles me. What kind of illusion must one be under to believe that employers would ever pay you the same amount of money to do less work?
Realistically there were only ever two possible outcomes: you do more work for the same amount of money, or you’re one of the ones who were laid off and your work was transferred to the former.
The only way it will result in less work and the same or better quality of life is if you’re self-employed or are employed by a compassionate human. Sadly that does not apply to the majority of people.
You are missing a critical third - people organize and via unions or the polls push back and require less work. There is no reason we aren’t working seven days a week beyond people fighting not to.
I'm pro unions and come from a social county. I'm self employed though, if I start relaxing, my "competitors" outrun me instantly. Bye bye assignments. This seems like primary school level reasoning to me, I also don't understand the premise of the article.
What stops me from working more than others is being smarter than my competitors right now. Not being smarter in any objective, fixed way. To keep it that way I must constantly evolved, learn.
Yes, micromanaging AIs is more intense for me than coding, and feels more tiring, I hope that (or I) will change, somehow.
I started asking for specific example/answers each time a conversation stopped before of the end of the task. I got the sense that frequent checkpointing is baked into Opus 5.5. I then added some language that amounts to “carry this through to completion only stopping if you’re truly blocked” and it really helped lengthen the loop
Both, actually! Nonconformist Christianity was one of several key influences on the labour movement ideologically speaking. At least in the UK the Labour Party is often said to owe more to Methodism than Marx for its original ideological foundations. There's a long history of this, in the aftermath of the English Civil War a group called the Diggers more or less independently invented agrarian socialism out of the New Testament, and a great deal of calls for humane conditions for workers over the centuries were motivated explicitly by Christian teachings. The New Testament is pretty clear in its condemnation of repressing workers, James 5 for example:
> Go to now, ye rich men, weep and howl for your miseries that shall come upon you. Your riches are corrupted, and your garments are motheaten. Your gold and silver is cankered; and the rust of them shall be a witness against you, and shall eat your flesh as it were fire. Ye have heaped treasure together for the last days. Behold, the hire of the labourers who have reaped down your fields, which is of you kept back by fraud, crieth: and the cries of them which have reaped are entered into the ears of the Lord of sabaoth.
This isn't an exclusive or situation, nonconformist religious influence helped create the ideological environment that allowed unions to exist in the first place.
There were church mandated holidays in the Middle Ages. Lots of them.
The current pope chose his name to signal his continuation of Pope Leo XVIII's teachings on worker's rights, particularly the papal encylical Rerum Novarum: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rerum_novarum
During the industrial revolution many people treated their workers better because of their religious belief - the Quaker industrialists of Britain are a prominent example.
Replying to you only since everyone else is making the same points.
I follow a religion with similar edicts (not Christian). I also understand the contributions made by Christianity in this area. But the fact of the matter is that religion was ultimately unable to force actual widespread change on the ground, especially not in secularized European states.
At the end of the day, the only true religion that industrialists and capitalists understand is money. Only unions were able to speak their language at a very large scale, and this is the language they ultimately had to listen to :)
Somebody should do a economic analysis of how technology affects unions. I bet the availability of automation has a lot more to do with the downfall of the unions than the political changes that are commonly described to that phenomenon. Similarly, I bet the availability of AI will have a devastating effect on any white collar unions.
Unions do not exist in a vacuum. They have to operate in the same fundamental power structures as everyone else.
If union A is like "work less let AI take the slack" and union B is like "work the same, use AI to achieve more, let AI help us win" I'm joining union B every time.
Unions also require the right structural conditions.
For example waste management generally has very strong unions in the developed world because 1) capital intensity 2) operations immediately seize on labour withdrawal 3) consequences of strikes are in a golden zone of painful but not existential so are tolerated 4) extract a relatively small proportion of local gov funds, so don’t create that much powerful opposition 5) labour force is locally concentrated and highly socialised.
Those pillars of power don’t rely much on any particular legal or political system.
I think you’re missing the whole picture about pushing back: It doesn’t happen in a vacuum. People have options to organize and push back but it doesn’t automagically make their demands possible. Companies also have options to push back, move the work to other locations, withdraw from markets that aren’t conducive to work, and now, look at automations.
Much of this unionization conversation has lot the plot about how unionization is about collective bargaining, but you still have to bargain. Both sides have options and you can’t come to the bargaining table with a belief that you can get whatever you want by threatening to strike or quit. There are limits to this and they’re decided by markets and technology.
I think even apart from unionizing, if all/ the employees at company aren't AI jockeying, more work isn't necessarily demanded. I realize you have to have relatively decent management too. I consider myself extremely lucky to work for a company that hasn't been beating the drum of AI maximalism and our work load in general has stabalized.
Obviously things can change but in general I feel AI jockeying is the exact opposite of showing solidarity with the people you work with.
That's what German unions did in the 90s. In the end it only undermines productivity of the national economy while competitor countries eat your lunch.
Once companies can just outsource anything from manufacturing to services the only categories that can really unionize with success are those that can de facto block everything at once (port workers are an example).
Unions still work? They exist and do real work for their members. They can also coordinate and cooperate which is, I think, how some unions managed to put pressure on Israel. Was it maybe Italian dock workers?
That globalism has made unions not-work is just Capitalist Inevitabilism. Yeah okay I’ll give up when the billionaires have fully autonomous robot brigades. But not over globalism.
That was a rhetorical question kind of response to you saying that they don’t work, except dock/port workers. By extension I have no trouble believing that those dock worker unions work.
you're fortunate; the power of unions has been decimated since the 80s, and huge efforts have been made by companies (with the support of the government) to prevent new industries from unionizing
The "cushiness" of jobs such as fewer work hours, more benefits, etc. preceded the formation of unions and then slowed down (overall) once unions became popular.
It has little to do with union pressure and a LOT to do with economics, in particular the demand for labor. Jobs get nice when employers are competing over the same pool of employees.
Unions are nice for those in them and bad for everyone else. They are (quite literally) cartels, in an economic sense.
> Jobs get nice when employers are competing over the same pool of employees.
During an all hands where quarterly earnings were presented for a very large American company, the live audience were obviously employees.
The CFO came on stage and was very enthusiastic about the labor market "loosening". Employees were clapping. Unsure if because they didn't understand the meaning of that statement or because just to appear supportive of leadership.
I was thinking: they're talking about us, turkeys.
Yeah not sure you’re right on this one. I’m talking strictly USA here, as that is where I live and my anecdotal experience.
The first official Union was formed in 1794, for journeyman cordwainers, I believe in New York.
The national labor union was formed in 1866 and is the first official call to congress to regulate to an 8-hour workday.
The first example I know of on a national scale that voluntarily promoted an 8 hour day, 40 hour work week was Ford in 1914 and realistically, that is exactly what you stated, an attempt to undercut other automakers / factories of the time for labor. Not because he was being altruistic.
I’m sorry you’ve had bad experiences with unions. I am certainly biased, because I grew up in a Union household and have been apart of them myself, but I’ve only had good experiences. Yeah, there are some bad eggs, admittedly, but I think collectively they have benefited the working person.
> I'm sorry you've had bad experiences with unions
I've actually had personally great experiences with unions! But I try to not let my anecdotal data color my views too much.
I think this is part of the reasons unions are insidious - their benefits are quite visible and concentrated to those who are in them, and their costs are spread out and invisible (until you put an empirical lens on them at scale).
I don't know enough about the US, but for Europe this is 100% false! The first unions date back to the 18th century and they were an important part of the worker's movement in the 19th century. They absolutely played a crucial part in improving worker conditions during the industrial revolution and beyond.
> Jobs get nice when employers are competing over the same pool of employees.
Maybe in high-paying jobs that require high qualifications. For most jobs, especially the low-wage sector, this is absolutely not the case. There is no competition between employees if applicants are desperate and need to take any job they can.
I don't have time to read these papers. What I can say for sure is that your first sentence
> The "cushiness" of jobs such as fewer work hours, more benefits, etc. preceded the formation of unions and then slowed down (overall) once unions became popular.
is demonstrably false.
Sure, unions are not the only reason for better working conditions, but they certainly played a very important role.
The legal restrictions on the max. number of hours people are allowed to work per day or week are only in place because of the worker's movement and the power of unions. Companies certainly didn't lobby for these laws. In fact, certain industries are constantly trying to soften or undermine it.
BTW, in my country, unions are part of the annual negotations between employers and employees ("Kollektivvertrag"), which most notably includes the minimum wages and annual pay raises.
If you don't have time to read the papers, you could at least hand them to your favorite LLM and ask them to summarize the strength of evidence for broader macroeconomic factors vs. unions as the primary drivers of work hours, benefits, pay, unemployment etc.
No, thanks. You should have done more research before making your initial ridiculous claim. Don't throw economy papers at me when it's very clear you don't know what you're talking about.
How do Employees advocate for themselves if not Unions? I've never heard any anti-union person give a good answers other than 'just trust the employer to be a good human' or 'wait until it gets bad enough that the market sorts it out' which is just laughable.
> How do Employees advocate for themselves if not Unions?
The same way you advocate for getting good bananas, good streaming services, or good laptops.
You only make voluntary transactions you want to make. If you don't like what a job is offering, take another job or start your own business.
If you don't like ANY of the bananas being produced by ANYONE, this probably isn't because all banana producers are moustache twirling villains. It probably has something to do with the underlying realities of banana production, supply, and demand.
A rational employer is interested in how much value they can get, not how hard you work. In most cases, in the short term, an increase in efficiency means they can get more value from you working the same amount of the same pay.
The problem is how 'hard work' is defined. Does staying after hours count? Not automatically, but managers everywhere use it as a proxy ( whether it is dumb position or not is an argument in itself ). Does carefully considering your options count? Does being anal when it comes to minute detail count? All of these are small dimensions of hard work, but we throw those vague terms willy nilly, because we hope the audience will accept our 'used key term values' within our message to them.
Keep In mind that developers in Amazon this year was forced to burn as much tokens as possible because their "rational" employer was assuming that productivity == tokens burned. I was in similiar situations on my last project.
This abstract value you mention is the same dictionary that managers use and I believe they often confuse themselves with that.
I wait for the day when the employer, the management, the business analyst, and the customer can get to state expected behaviour. Nevermind using AI. On all my projects programme was never a problem, it was non-competent people going "Make it good, if it makes big bucks and line go up, don't even bother with that. Make what good? Everything.".
If you think LLMs will make irrational people go "Ahhh I get it, I can't throw money and yelling at a shower idea and be the next Xooglebookflix" you will be surprised.
Well they probably do, as driving a dump truck takes more training and skill than driving a taxi. So it's a combination of the value you bring as well as the supply of other people who can provide that same value.
Yeah, everybody wants freedom and flexibility from self-employment, but that's generally speaking not a realistic attainable goal. The most defensible small businesses are ones that are sweaty i.e. require a lot hard work and hours others just wont justify doing, and that's an extremely important facet because without employees its much easier for a business to catastrophically collapse. Pretty much by definition anything that requires low effort is easy to clone and thus become saturated.
Small business self-employment doesn’t care that much about saturation, I think, only the supply-demand relationship. See everything from Fiverr to coffee shops.
What does compassion have to do with it? If the industry requires more output or your business fails what options do you have?
Also, as someone who has been self employed I can tell you that you're working 2x-3x as much as someone who is employed and you have to pay more in taxes.
> The opening premise baffles me. What kind of illusion must one be under to believe that employers would ever pay you the same amount of money to do less work?
I guess the idea that AI will do all the work and either take care of us or kill us all. Which will probably happen, but the transition takes years and in the meantime we work much harder. People were expecting a fast takeoff.
Oh but AI has wiped out some of the most tedious work I have to do. I can now easily work every waking minute, and some sleeping minutes, at a level approximately comparable to my prior 8h workload from 10 years ago.
The amount of mental energy saved, and downright stimulation gained from seeing rapid feedback in a tight loop is making my workday much easier. I have enough left to continue it longer.
I find it enjoyable to have the energy to think, and less cognitive overload by firing off a suggestion to be checked overnight.
You're right that this would be awful if mandatory.
but it often was socially mandatory!
At least when those times come, the work can go much further before I have to actually "check in" vs doing some well-trod analysis via automation I've set up. That's great!
Jeez, great place for discussion about new tech then. What precisely went wrong - me expressing enjoyment at finally being able to try new ideas, statements about my actual work hours, or diverging from consensus?
And what does this have to do with psychosis - is that a general catch-all term for using AI too much?
It's not that simple. In a time of massive flux and shake up you have to be ready to jump to different kinds of roles in different kinds of organizations. Maybe you've been an enterprise and need to jump to a startup or the reverse... or maybe you've been in an internal only role and need to move into a customer facing role or any number of other possibilities. Admittedly one way of interpreting the need for evolving is that it could be exhausting so in that sense the author has a point but it's not as black and white as you imply. At any moment in time there are growth areas in the economy and growth teams within companies and there are atrophying or declining areas of the economy or teams within companies. These macrodynamics are just as important as who you happen to work for and what the tools du jour mean for your work. But they require you to be intentionalable about making changes
>you have to be ready to jump to different kinds of roles in different kinds of organizations.
How did that work out in 1933?
There are limits to how much an economy can shake up before structural problems appear that means when the music stops there is no chair anywhere for you to sit in.
>At any moment in time there are growth areas in the economy
For bread line server?
Worse with the modern world you're not just competing with your neighbor, you're competing with the entire world and if the other parts of the world have lower costs you can quickly find yourself in a trap.
The poverty of the Great Depression was put to use to great effect building so much of the infrastructure that we now rely on. It was bumpy that's true. But it's not accurate to imply that bread line work was the only growth areas then.
> The opening premise baffles me. What kind of illusion must one be under to believe that employers would ever pay you the same amount of money to do less work?
It seems like a pretty common misunderstanding in rank-and-file AI-boosterism. I'm guessing that reflects their initial experience, before their employer adjusts their expectations, extrapolated out to infinity. Your correct understanding makes AI sound like a bad deal for workers (and it is), so my theory AI-enthusiastic boosters have to engage in a degree of reality distortion to keep up their enthusiasm.
On the plus side for us worker bees, this is why I never really bought in to the narrative that our jobs were inevitably doomed. A question I've posed a few times: Consider two reasonably similar competitors with 100 engineers two years ago. Suppose AI really does accelerate development 10x times. It doesn't (at least not yet) but the larger number helps bring the question into focus. One company fires 90 engineers and does the same work with the remaining 10. The other company keeps all its engineers and does 10 times the work.
Who wins in the market?
It's not a uniform answer. There are times and places where the first one wins, as well as a mixed strategy. But I think broadly speaking the majority answer is the second.
I don’t think anyone has figured how to do 10x the work yet as we don’t know what the work is. AI cannot (yet) define the work that needs to be done, for some definition of needs to be done, and we need humans to figure that out for now. They cannot work fast enough so we still build the same stuff but with less people.
Overall US economic productivity has gone up about 6X in 75 years, which included computers and the internet. So we absorb these things, but gradually.
> There is no obvious point where the microcomputer or the Internet made any major difference
I think it lags. There was a sag between the mid-70s and mid-90s, which is when computers and the Internet were being rapidly developed but weren't really hitting the business mainstream. But late 90s through today it clearly ramped up a lot -- my bet is this is because of IT. It just takes a long time, it's not a sharp jump because not every business gets on board immediately and productively.
My guess is AI ends up the same. But then again, I'm not an economist, only a developer, so I just think I can tell anything about that productivity graph.
Are we looking at the same graph? What I see is that there was a huge spike at the onset of COVID, and then it flatlined and even corrected a bit, and in the end seems to have resumed the same trajectory it had before COVID.
If I understand correctly, the spike in 2020 was not any kind of jump in real productivity, either, it is an artifact of how the calculation is made -- there was a sudden drop in hours from low paid workers who typically have a lower than average contribution to productivity (as measured), so laying a bunch of them off skews the per-hour calculation. Then as things settled down companies re-hired, and then over-hired.
The covid productivity spike is because all the low productivity retail workers got laid off. Then as they came back to work productivity went back down
White collar work may have been phoning it in (literally and figuratively), but the drop is probably more likely due to "Labor Productivity (Output per Hour)" being measured using revenue from things like the social, entertainment, and travel industries taking a hit in customer spend (an empty restaurant has less output per hour than a busy restaurant, for example). It's not clear to me from that page/graph alone that an increase in stimulus spending is a cause, vs a correlation, for the drop.
The one who fires 90 engineers, just to see how things go with the 10, and then scales back up with cheaper off-shore talent if they can't keep up with demand.
Most non-commoditized reasonable paying jobs are a product of information asymmetry. Anything that shrinks that asymmetrical surface is a threat to jobs. The company you are missing is the one that fires 99 of their engineers, hires 200 generally lower performing but far cheaper engineers and uses AI to accelerate their output.
Now whether or not that would actually work given the reality of the AI output is a question, but that's the general premise.
Consider two reasonably similar competitors with 100 horses two years ago. Suppose AI really does accelerate development 10x times. One company fires 90 horses and buys 10 cars. The other company keeps all its horses.
10x the work requires exponentially more communication and coordination. At least according to Brooks "Mythical Man-Month" thesis. There's more to creating a marketable product than churning out code. I'm not aware that AI really changes this.
I think this is a better analogy, particularly because it illustrates that the more demanding company might not need to be 10x more efficient. A company that opts to to be lighter/cheaper may lose to the competitor regardless, especially in winner-take-all or discerning markets. Maybe not always, and we're obviously speaking theoretically, but it's an interesting thought.
There is an assumption being made that more engineering leads to more company growth. It just isn’t true though. Sales sure. But doubling the engineering floor does not double sales. You can sell a bug filled product with an unbuilt roadmap still.
There's just one small problem. The AI costs money, and the premise is AI is cheaper than people. If you augment your 100 engineers with AI, they'll cost what, 10% more? That's +10 percent to your cost center, and would be considered very bad. There are tons of tools that make us more productive - think about it, how many of them did we have to beg demand or leave for? You assume they care to maximize productivity, which is your first mistake.
I agree it's not a uniform answer, but disagree that the majority is the second.
Imo the vast majority of companies would be better with a lot less engineers. For the simple fact that they are not setup for producing that much work.
They need time to discuss, decide what they even want to accomplish, just letting your POs throw more features at all your products on a whim is hugely detrimental.
Honest question: Where does the “AI booster” phrase come from? I only ever see it in online comment sections where certain people use it as a pejorative like this and everyone who uses it puts forth very similar ideas. Is this catchphrase something that comes out of a certain online community, political circle, or influencer?
Right. People don't understand the difference between labor and value. The job of a corporation is to extract as much surplus value from its workers as possible while making it as opaque as possible for individual workers how much actual revenue they bring in.
It's very normal to think that the extra revenue growth you bring in should mean you have either 1) a larger share of the pie for every efficiency increase that grows revenue or 2) less expectation from you, as a worker, to labor as intensively since you are continue to bring in surplus value that is being actively skimmed from.
Whenever I read comments like these I feel like people are living in a completely different reality.
Most of the tech companies I have worked at are ridiculously easy and generous, I get to work with smart people, and the entire job can be done in a few hours per week. It's not like we're doing manual labor and digging ditches; half the people on this website are laptop-class workers who occasionally use the slightest bit of energy to write a few lines of code or participate in a meeting.
I show up to work and I often do extra because I like it.
The company isn't "extracting" anything from me except the extremely consentual labor I want to give back simply out of the love of the game. If you don't feel that way, the problem isn't the capitalist system it's probably your own life choices.
I completely agree and I think smart companies also understand this. There is still a lot of leverage employees have, especially in tech. Tech as "adult daycare" isn't a meme for no reason.
None of this changes the facts of the comment you're responding to. Every business must extract surplus value from their employee's work to be profitable. Nobody said every business has to be miserable, or not mask this extraction in fluffy terms. Doesn't mean it isn't happening though
How else would they stay in business if they did not make money off your skill/services? Unless you are a non-profit, why would you hire people just to break even or lose money?
The correct comparison isn’t him working by himself but with a similar sized cohort where distribution of revenue was fairer. Co-ops are a thing as are the productivity benefits of working with others.
Even if you don’t like the concept of co-ops it’s fairly easy to ask yourself if you would you be more or less motivated if you shared more in the success of a company rather than it being sucked up by shareholders?
You think a company can exist with just executive leadership?
Would love to see just one example of a billion+ valuation company with nothing but C-suite and that against the ratio of companies with 1000+ employees who are worth a billion+. The only two sub-dozen workers that come to mind for me are Theranos and Bernie Madoff and I'm not sure they are examples of success.
You’re reading negative valence in technical language that doesn’t mean it. ‘Extraction’ and ‘labor’ aren’t bad, they are technically descriptive. You extract fun and cuteness value from puppies and LeBron labors at basketball. Not an unhappy process in itself, though of course abusive versions exist.
That’s why your happy experience is not inconsistent with this description.
I think the 80/20 rule applies to employees correct?. 20% of employees actually do the work that is making money. So for every 8 sitting around doing nearly nothing there's 2 that are actually directly related to revenue.
It speaks to a lack of understanding of the economy as a complex adaptive system.
Same idea with all these agents that are going to negotiate our insurance down, haggle with our cell phone providers, and find the best hotel deals.
Your counterparty will have its own agent, a larger budget for that agent, and a lot more skin in the game to ensure they retain their advantage (cell phone bills are 100% of the cell companies income but is only 0.5% of your spending). Good luck.
Cell phone provider is funny one here. Effectively most efficient thing to do is to get a deal from competitor and then accept winback offer from them. You can not even properly negotiate for deals very often but somehow those winbacks end up being near best deals. Last time I got negative deal for them. Meaning my mobile and wired internet ended up less than wired internet was before...
At this point I wonder if those aren't simply marketing shills or the usual kind of "pro-business" press articles that always push ridiculously optimistic takes on new technologies.
Reminds me of the old press pieces along "with the new machines, the workers won't have to do this tedious and dangerous work anymore and will have so much more free time!"
What is missed is free time is just one good you can get. People like different "things". Sometimes that "thing" is free time. Sometimes that thing is more expensive food. Sometimes that thing is a bigger house. Sometimes that thing is... There are a lot of options. If you were willing to live like 1950 you could have the male working 20 hours a week and the female never leaving the home. What people forget is in 1950 having a black and white TV was unusual (though not uncommon) and color TV was still several years away. Your phone was a shared party line. You had one car which wasn't reliable by modern standards.
I think in this case, it was rather cynical. The "free time" the workers got was because they were unemployed. The workers who were still employed of course had no additional leisure time, the added productivity went to the employer.
> If you were willing to live like 1950 you could have the male working 20 hours a week and the female never leaving the home. What people forget is in 1950 having a black and white TV was unusual (though not uncommon) and color TV was still several years away. Your phone was a shared party line. You had one car which wasn't reliable by modern standards.
Another way of looking at that is you could own a home and a modern car, and support your entire family and have the latest technology all on a single income.
TV wasn't worth having in 1950 for most people, if they even got reception at all, but by 1955 75% of homes had state of the art TVs. Phones improved over the decade as well, and pretty much everyone had at least one in their home (technically owned by AT&T). What people had seems primitive to us, but it was all new and constantly improving to the people at the time.
Today our experience causes us to expect that greed and enshittification will make everything both worse and more expensive, but back then people were excited about the future and about how technology would make their lives better while getting cheaper because that was their experience.
We know what this looks like, over all of human history, and it’s not 300m people living comfortably on checks from the government.
We do need to do something, and soon, but “tax those guys a lot and send the proceeds to government services or pittance checks” isn’t going to cut it.
Wealth redistribution doesn't have to be 50% tax rate for billionaires for their current wealth you know.
If can be just factually and morally correct step of taxing given company for income from given country and thats almost it. Maybe close few biggest loopholes how to hide income while having massive revenues. None of the faangs operate like that, with such move their revenues and stock prices would fall down since part of valuation is based on continuing this tax scam/fraud.
This would spawn few hundred billions globally to start with. Of course tech bros et al would launch some massive PR counter-campaign also here, thats all fine and expected.
Will it solve everything? No but will set a better path for future while helping also right now massively. If you have kids and cared even a little what world they will inherit from us, this is how you build its foundations. Not hoarding money at all costs and fuck the rest since everybody relies on rest for existence and thriving.
Yeah, I also don't get why people expect to work 2 hrs instead of 8 and receive same salary.
Once you go from horse to tractor the fields increase but work hours doesn't decrease. And if you still use a horse, you are outperformed by the tractor guys who will sell stuff at less the price that you can sustain.
Because that's what they observe the executive management performing for multiple employers simultaneously and the definitional difference between salary and hourly wage.
Maybe so, but the deliverables expected of a full time worker tend to correspond roughly to some estimate of a typical worker's productivity. Or people are hired to perform particular kinds of duties, and expected to be reasonably productive in those duties given the time and resources allocated to them.
And you are one of the reasons why some orgs don't want WFH.
I'm quite amazed how many people actually think they can get away with working for few hours and think they are somehow entitled to it under 9-5 40hr workweek contract.
> If the volume of work goes up, its cost goes down. Supply and demand.
What?! Good to know. When contractor comes to do the kitchen, I will make them do the garden and will reduce the money I’d pay them, because supply and demand!
> Unless you think you should pay more now for more content
We do already! You realize you’re paying by the token? More token -> bigger bill!
I am surprised people don't look at this like hiring a plumber. When you hire a company to do something for you if they are doing less work and/or the work is easy enough you can do it yourself, you would not want to pay someone a lot to do the work.
We had to riot and sometimes people were killed rioting to secure the weekend.
If things are to rebalance again and give some of the productivity gains back to the rest of us, we should be working far less and I hope it comes with less of a fight than it took for us to get 2 days a week off.
Technological progress is multifaceted. Some of it is more value-neutral and tends to be a general accelerant.
In terms of social effect, there's two axes that jump out at me for things that are _not_ value-neutral:
- technology of violence, where the axis is whether it makes it easier or harder for some people to have direct power over others, and
- centralization/decentralization technologies.
I think there's a decent argument to be made that the former category is mostly a subset of the latter anyway.
In a _very_ hand-wavey, un-nuanced take, decentralized systems shift power and profit away from the establishment and are inconvenient to use, and centralized systems tend to be easier to use -- and they support and create establishments, and give them power and profit. Unsurprisingly, a fair number of establishments exist and grow precisely because they found a way to centralize a decentralized technology.
The choices that we make in our lived systems mean these axes are mere tendencies, not predictions. The "old" Internet was largely a decentralization technology. The shift towards platforms (Facebook, Xitter...) made many of the old-internet functionality easier to use by centralizing it. Blockchain is superficially and deliberately a decentralizing technology, but with the choices we've made, it's mostly empowered people positioned to centralize it (initially in the form of fiat currency exchange points).
LLM progress is currently in a centralizing phase, but overall its direction remains unclear; will open-weight models running on cheap commodity hardware (once OpenAI won't or can't clear the aisles of available VRAM) turn the tide, or will the frontier labs retain a permanent structural advantage -- and what market and regulatory choices will we make to nudge that direction?
>What kind of illusion must one be under to believe that employers would ever pay you the same amount of money to do less work?
There's the historical experience with early/mid 20th century unions, the establishment of the 8 hour workweek and worker rights, even Henry Ford's wage increases.
Not necessarily that they'd do it out of their own good heart, of course.
1. Clankers do almost everything for us as ethical slaves
2. Everything costs next to nothing, from raw materials to finished products, and much of it can be done at home, sustainably and even better than we have it today
3. Society transitions towards utopia, basic needs met for all, away from hand-to-mouth, and we spend our time on friends, family, community and personal enrichment
The alternative is a dystopia beyond Orwellian.
People need to get this idea into their heads: our governments work for us and with almost infinite cheap robot labour and national resources the focus should be on society and not enriching some fucking crooks.
Its literally us or them, literally a fight for our lives
And this is where we go full speed, and if anybody voices concern there is 'think about children!' for 'em or just laugh them off as luddites. If you ever wanted to move social layers, yesterday was too late.
But imagine the control - how desperate folks will be for some pocket money if half of population is unemployable. So much control! So many cheap gardeners / sex slaves to choose from! You would have to work outside openai / anthropic to refuse that, for sure you will be one of few on top of the pile, not some trash within it right.
Yes I think it will just be a race to the bottom, however there are several distinct classes of work immune to the concept of AI:
1. Where the market will pay for the privilege or 'quality' of a human (you pay more for a nurse, nanny, server etc., its a status symbol)
2. Where human accountability is required by law, even if that human is just following the recommendations of AI (C-suite, human-in-the-loop safety monitoring)
3. Where personal ownership exists, AI can only serve your small business it cannot own anything
> our governments work for us and with almost infinite cheap robot labour and national resources the focus should be on society and not enriching some fucking crooks.
But also, with almost infinite cheap robot labour (and army), our governments no longer need to work for us.
I'm aware of the incentives, but the premise must remain crystal clear:
OF the people, BY the people, FOR the people, OR death to the tyrants.
We cannot afford to fuck around this time, this tech will enable a power dynamic beyond all previous estimation. Stalin, Hitler, the Stasi - their systems were as sophisticated as piece of chalk compared to this potential for universal cross-referenced real-time surveillance backed up by an army of super-soldiers that would murder their own children without hesitation if they had any.
> The only way it will result in less work and the same or better quality of life is if you’re self-employed or are employed by a compassionate human.
May we take this as an opportunity to recognize what a bad deal we get from most employers and build better companies. It's never been more possible. UBI is unlikely to happen and uncertain it would even be beneficial. If AI can lead to a better world, this seems like the most promising path.
If the overall efficiency of the economy improves, "the same amount of money" can afford more things. You don't get a bigger share of the pie, but the pie gets bigger.
If you also want a bigger share of the pie you need to be one of the people driving its growth.
The real question is: what's the rate of growth for capital returns vs labor returns? If capital returns are accelerating, over 50-100 years, yeah, we will still end up in techno feudalism.
I always plan our capacity based on a % of bugs/support/upgrade vs. new feature development which is roughly at 50%.
AI will be able to reduce this while also increasing quality which will allow us build more features faster which is actually quite fun.
How it will impact budget etc. no clue yet, in best case though i can transfer my team into a new product while maintaining the old one with very little effort.
"if you’re self-employed or are employed by a compassionate human. Sadly that does not apply to the majority of people"
But there might never be a better time to change that now and start building and shipping your products with AI tools (as long as there is a leverage for technical people).
I am having a blast building and playing the game I always wanted and with AI I can do this on the side, while working part time a shit job. Whether it works out, we will see once I ship it.
But people are still willing to pay for good software.
(But there is a strong temptation to me, to make the game logic and physics server only, SaaS style, despite it working very nice locally, but right now it would be it too easy to just clone it otherwise)
The point is work is exploding. Mgmt. until AI could be reasoned with. Trade-offs between different interests and stakeholders were negotiated like investing in features now vs. development velocity vs. long term architecture vs. bug fixes vs. production incidents.
Now with AI and the flood of CVEs, management anxiety makes discussions much harder. Throw in unrealistic expectations about productivity - derived from venture money fueled AI POCs in greenfield hotel california and stress goes up.
The CVE’s drive work, the introduction of AI drives work, the old ci/cd is creaking under the load and architecture really needs a rethink. Add to that the genius manager pronouncing that very soon nobody will be coding fueling the dissonance between what is needed from me today and where we are supposedly heading increasing motivation - not.
In other words, companies capture all the benefits of AI, while the workers get the downsides.
No wonder there's so much animosity towards AI -- it's not the tech itself, it's the fact that it makes the lives of a small minority better while making the lives of the vast majority worse.
It could be used to make most people's lives better, but it's not, and it won't be.
Perhaps is not correctly phrased, but the way I see it:
Because these tools are now available whoever that is up in the management chain (possibly someone that has no idea about code or technology) is now entitled to request the undeliverable in the same amount of time.
I believe a couple of scenarios might unfold in the near mid-term future:
* Programming becomes now a task that anyone can do (assuming models outpace even the highest standards when it comes to certain software qualities). Under this premise wages go to the floor, now even grandma can do it.
* Companies still demand competent people as models plateau and do not offer outstanding software qualities yet the output is good enough that programmers should be able to do way way more than before. The job should then be high-paid but turns out highly-stressful.
* For some years eveything goes "just fine" under the vibe code party until competent people at major companies realize that have disastrous products and basically unfixable. Models start to decay. Then old school competent developers become again highly required and only a minority of "skilled-previous-generation" programmers that decided to keep doing things the old way get desperately required.
Obviously no-one has the crystal ball and anything can happen...
Why would models “start to decay”? I keep hearing people on here extolling that open weight models are now “good enough”. Where do they go in this future?
For years, decades even, employers were straight up offended by the idea of paying someone work 4 days instead of 5 days, while paying them the same. It made zero economical sense to them.
Then companies started testing it out, and have noticed that things like sick leaves plummeted, and that the employees produced the same amount, sometimes even more.
I never really understood that and i think it goes back to factory jobs where time was directly tied to widgets produced which was directly tied to sales. If i had a company and the bank account was increasing at an acceptable rate and my customers were happy with my product/service then i wouldn't care how many hours employees put in. As long as customer satisfaction is high and bank account balance keeps going up then what else matters from a business perspective?
This is the goal of every productivity gain from the worker's side, and owners failing to deliver for long enough inevitably results in revolution (usually after some demand-destroying crisis).
What you call an illusion is reality, and the notion that it's an illusion is absurd.
> What kind of illusion must one be under to believe that employers would ever pay you the same amount of money to do less work?
Because supposedly, the new tooling (in this case, AI) allows them to produce the same or greater output despite doing less work. Workers are under the perennial illusion that they'll ever benefit from productivity gains, but that hasn't been the case since the 1970s.
> Workers are under the perennial illusion that they'll ever benefit from productivity gains, but that hasn't been the case since the 1970s.
Agreed, except that workers have never benefited from productivity gains, those always accrue to the employer.
The wage growth before the 1970s was mostly from the postwar boom, before jobs started to be moved out of the country. After that there was downward pressure on wages.
1970s? More like the 1800s with the industrial revolution. Workers have almost never seen increased pay from more efficient production - it's the business owners and investors who benefit every time.
People can argue that the workers benefit from buying cheaper stuff, but that's on the other side of the equation.
People have this theory about Industrial Revolution and how more productivity improved lives for everyone. The nuances they forget:
1. It took a very long time. Short term effects were that massive amount of rural populations had to move to the cities in search of work and lived in destitution.
2. Things didn’t improve until workers formed unions and forced the capital to part with its profits. We finally had a brief moment in history where increased productivity improved lives for workers but then the decline in union membership (around 1970s) started the reversal pretty quickly.
3. There is a hyper focus on the industrial nations but at global level, it desplaced workers in poor and imperial colonies, who quite literally never recovered.
What can make sense, and what has been my personal experience, is that I have shifted my most draining work to the AI, so I can actually get more useful work done without getting exhausted. Just like 10 hours mining sitting inside of equipment is better than 10 hours with a pickaxe and a shovel, even if we ignore productivity
Um… work is not important. Value is important. Your employer is employing you because they expect your value to be higher than your cost. Moreover, if you are busy, your marginal value is likely declining. You are not taking the time to think about things that will actually have high impact. This to me is the biggest problem I see with AI assisted work, it makes it very easy to feel productive, when in reality you only worked on the easy low value things.
What’s more, is I have a very distinct experience working on a team years ago that decided to do less work. The team actively started turning down tickets and commiting to fewer tasks each week. And the counter intuitive thing, was that not only did that force only the higher value tickets get closed, we actually ended up closing more tickets. Was really wild to watch and experience.
> The opening premise baffles me. What kind of illusion must one be under to believe that employers would ever pay you the same amount of money to do less work?
You do much less work than a farm labourer 200 years ago and get paid more.
I feel like this conflates work with productivity. One can be working more than ever and still be unproductive.
In my opinion what people think is that they will be more productive for the same amount of work, not have more work than previously and still only be approximately at the same level of productivity.
What AI has done to many is create more busywork than it solves in many cases, rather than making me more efficient for the same amount of working hours.
It’s been deployed widely enough that it’s becoming apparent where its lines are from genuine tool that boosts productivity to bolted on and makes things the same or worse, the pipeline for the work simply looking different
I don’t think this was ever the idea. It’s always been pitched as a productivity improvement tool but AI leadership comms has clearly been a complete clusterf*k.
The idea is that each individual employee does more with less and therefore the price of the end product comes down, raising the standard of living for everybody.
Once a total economic conversion happens, which might take a decade, individual employees can definitely upskill and jump revenue bands.
Electric utility workers get paid 10x more than the lamplighters of yore.
> Realistically there were only ever two possible outcomes: you do more work for the same amount of money, or you’re one of the ones who were laid off and your work was transferred to the former.
Workers need an answer to this problem and we shouldn't wait until all the deleterious effects stack up to make the demand.
Let me get this straight: If someone who works for you takes more time but achieves less in that time, you would still pay them more. And if they took less time but achieved more, you would pay them less? That's some sick logic.
I’ve been baffled by how common these illusions about the labor market can be among people who have been isolated from the realities of the world in their career. I most commonly see it in juniors who never had jobs before graduating college, but I’ve heard it from adults who didn’t realize how much of their career fell into a very lucky, cushy track.
One of my strangest memories was a junior hire who decided after a few months that they didn’t like the work they were hired to do (which was exactly the job description, no surprises).
They informed their boss that the job wasn’t working out for them so the company would have to find some different work for them to do. There were a lot of difficult conversations trying to explain that they were hired to do a specific job that was needed, not to become part of a family where everyone belongs no matter what. This was a small company that didn’t have other open roles and wouldn’t have the budget to backfill even if they could move the person.
Yet it didn’t register. The person viewed their job as a jobs program, where they were chosen to join the company like a family and then it was the company’s job to find enjoyable work for them to do. They saw the paycheck as owed for their presence, and work produced for the company to be a nice bonus when it worked out.
It was a difficult situation until the person was finally let go because they could not accept the idea that their job was to do work in exchange for pay, and that the company wasn’t going to pay them if their work was not producing the necessary.
That’s the most extreme example but I’ve run into this a lot more in recent years. It got really bad again for the cohort of graduates who entered the job market post-COVID and thought getting jobs was always going to be this easy. I’ve been helping with resume review on and off and it’s stunning to see so many people who worked for 2-3 years post-COVID and can’t really tell you what work they did, but are so angry and shocked that their employers let them go.
I'm personally more concerned by the entitled goobers who think it's perfectly reasonable to feed the hardworking majority into a woodchipper if it multiplies the money in their brokerage account. Those are a structural problem, unlike kids who need to learn.
I think the market will teach them the lesson, because they have no political power with which to avoid learning it. Unlike the other goober I mentioned, who absolutely has power and is planning to use it to make sure the woodchipper stays fed!
It's a strange critique to personify a structural problem in this way. It neither holds any individual accountable for their actions, nor points towards a better structure.
Would be nice if we lived in a world where if you were getting "[fed] into a woodchipper" you could ... oh I don't know ... QUIT! At will employment. You're free to go and live your life how you see fit. Well, at least until we give the power back to the know-better do-good commissars and bureaucrats who then tell us everything we can and can't do for our entire existences.
"We have no work for you but you must work or you're lazy" is a ripe flavor of bullshit that really outweighs vague threats about how labor policy tweaks today will surely lead to the holodomor tomorrow.
> not to become part of a family where everyone belongs no matter what
I think this isn't helped by the fact that HR in alot of companies in the past decade or so has been going with this narrative. We are all a family together in this, stay late when needed, work extra/after-hours, etc.. Lots of places even have the expectation in this regard.
Of course this all goes away instantly when you get cold-emailed a layoff for example. I think its a systemic problem that originated some decade ago in an attempt to exploit people's judgment by creating self-doubt (ie: work more/harder under the premise that if you dont you are letting your "family" down), got perpetuated around alot, all job postings are worded like that nowadays too ("join our family") and it gives the newcomers to the job market the wrong expectation.
The worst offenders are all under IT companies as far as I can see, but because it's been going for so long it wouldn't surprise me if this is industry wide at this point for non-manual-labor job offers.
The "we're all a big family" narrative is a psychological ploy to try to exploit the need by most people to feel like they belong to some group. This need is deeply interwoven into our psyche. And as more traditional structures of society (extended family, churches, social clubs, etc) erode, it leaves a void that many cannot really understand. IMO, this particular message is almost never true.
Company "mission statements" and such are a similar tactic. Though I think it's a bit less cynical, because the company leadership sometimes (rarely IMO) believes in the mission to a minor degree.
Yeah, the kids are too naive about the job market.
On the other hand, it's not in anyone's interest to tell them the accurate version, right?
If the same kid instead spent their evenings working unpaid overtime for the company, because they would see it analogically to helping a family in need... the boss probably wouldn't tell them that they are making a mistake.
Heck, if someone just started telling those kids "the company owes you nothing, and you owe nothing to the company, the relationship is purely transactional, either side will be replaced when convenient", probably many people would object.
So yeah, the kids are sometimes confused by the confusing messages they get.
So basically the kid bought into exactly the corporate propaganda which has littered almost every workplace for the past two decades. I am not gonna blame the kid here but rather a culture of hyper-capitalism which is creating this illusion seemingly on purpose in order to get workers who are more loyal to their exploiter over their own material conditions as workers.
there is a 3rd option and it involves us organizing and actually exerting some of our power as the critical dependency in basically all of the modern economy.
> The only way it will result in less work and the same or better quality of life is if you’re self-employed or are employed by a compassionate human. Sadly that does not apply to the majority of people.
Even that is unlikely. If you are self-employed in any remotely competitive industry, everyone is continuing to work the same amount and AI is boosting their productivity. If you just start slacking off, your product will become inferior.
This then extends to the employment situation as well.
Only way you can get less work is if you (or your employer) are in a monopoly with a strong moat.
>The opening premise baffles me. What kind of illusion must one be under to believe that employers would ever pay you the same amount of money to do less work?
Work is about the work written down in your work contract. If you manage to fulfill your contract by doing less, you still worked according to your contract so you should be able to expect the same amount of pay.
Oh, but it's very simple. You have elections, you collectively don't vote for the uniparty, you raise the minimum wage and then they will pay.
One can pretend it is very very complicated and invent many excuses. One can pretend not to notice only the uniparty is promoted on the Tee Vee and in the old media. One can pretend it doesn't cost many millions to pull the wool over your eyes.
Surely if increasing the minimum wage was impossible they wouldn't need to do all that? They would keep the money in their pocket. Apparently those with absolute control over everything experience it quite differently? They seem to still believe you can change things.
I think there is a real world space separating people in work experience.
I've never worked a job where 40hrs was even enough, so any efficiency is instantly absorbed. That is the work world as I see it.
However I've run into in people and online and in real life whom's entire work life seems to be on the opposite side. It seems to be a rather large swath of people as well. They have never worked anywhere where they even have 40hrs of work a week.
Even last year I ran into a guy who gets paid 140k to by his own admission, basically update a handful of websites a few times a week. Those jobs are not coming back and those that exist are rapidly drying up. Thats the disconnect.
In my experience, at some places you can also have both: a job where during some weeks there is little to do, but you have to spend 40 hours sitting in the office regardless, and during some weeks there is so much to do that you need to work overtime. You need to be flexible, you see, but the flexibility only goes one way.
Because for salaried knowledge work, the premise is that your impact or output and not the hours worked is the basis for your compensation.
Suppose someone (pre AI) wrote 100k lines in 50 hrs/week of bad code but someone else wrote 10k good lines working 40 hours. In theory the former person would not be the high performer.
I agree many places don’t work that way, but also many do - so it’s maybe a hard discussion to have broadly and not scoped to the individuals limited experience.
Even in the first paragraph the author goes into some nuance about what they mean and it's not at all what you're saying? Years ago, I'd work on one or two things at a time. Now I do maybe 10+ things in parallel. I work more hours, "let me just finish up this one thing" I'll say, and I look at the clock and it's later than I thought. At the end of the day, my brain is cooked. Right now I'm motivated by the novelty of this new tool that gives me superhuman productivity, but a few years from now when that novelty has worn off? Well, probably a few years from now we won't have software in any recognizable sense anyway, so maybe it's not worth thinking about.
By your logic, the quantity of work will eventually expand to the point where 1 person (or less) does everything. I agree with you.
I did a deep dive with AI last night and asked it: if we extrapolate the level of industrialization vs the rate of job loss due to AI, what year does it become cheaper to live off-grid in an independent community?
The AI's answer? Between 2030 and 2035.
Meaning that money will soon require so much productivity to acquire, that it will eventually become easier to produce goods and services independently and provide for ourselves.
The main reason is that currently labor represents 60% of the workforce while owners represent 40%. That is flipping to 45/55, meaning that labor is on the verge of losing its majority stakeholder status and collective bargaining power.
When that happens, we'll only be left with market forces propping up wages. Meaning that AI automation will gradually undermine wages to the point of subsistence.
When that happens, the opportunity cost of exiting the traditional economy drops to 0. Why would anyone work at the behest of an owner when they could be an owner themselves for the same or lesser labor?
Now, we could reject that and pretend that supply and demand curves won't be undermined by a falling cost of production. We could do that, but I'll leave that as an exercise for the reader who won't hear a word I'm saying anyway.
If we stay rooted in history and extrapolate, we're left with at least these options:
a) Allow free market capitalism to regress into authoritarian neofeudalism and create conditions similar to those of the early 20th century when robber baron industrialization caused widespread wage stagnation, leading to revolution and the seising of industry by displaced workers (communism or more accurately state capitalism like Russia's Bolshevik Revolution in 1917).
b) Raise taxes on the wealthy/capitalists (the owners of the means of production) through increased regulation, and use the proceeds to buy back and nationalize those economic inputs to fund public services and UBI (socialism like China's Second Centenary Goal or 2049 Plan).
c) Embrace the rapidly falling cost of technology to get ahead of widespread unemployment and bring about something like solarpunk, where open source tech like AI and 3D printing allow society to reduce the cost of living to nearly 0, so that people have the leisure time to embrace art, culture and the humanities to finally achieve widespread self-actualization (post-scarcity economics a.k.a. Star Trek when it eradicated poverty, hunger and war around 2113, 50 years after Zefram Cochrane achieved warp drive in 2063 and the Vulcans made first contact, as the story goes).
I'm partial to one of these, and have been putting my efforts into a home economics that can provide for at least one other person so that it can go viral. If we dream big enough, we could finally have what the wealthy and powerful will never have: enough.
If the wealthy and powerful continue buying land at the rate they are, through private equity firms for example, then we could end up in the neofeudalist scenario where us peasants can't acquire the capital to buy the land back (like in England before the Black Death around 1350 broke the nobles who could no longer afford essential workers). Then the only options left to us are taxes/regulation or revolution. Since the capitalists would have captured government by that point, the only option left may be revolution.
I could also see scenarios where we go full vanlife, although more vagrancy laws are being passed, and flock cameras could be used to enforce high registration fees to the point where it's no cheaper to live in one's car than to rent.
Admittedly those scenarios are pretty out there. Probably what will happen is something outside of what we expect. For example, the "rabble" may end up being the blue collar workers that we used to think of as the conservatives. They don't take any crap, so would probably requisition land to feed their families and guard it with firearms. If the authorities tried to take it back, armed conflict could very quickly squander any remaining goodwill held towards the capitalists.
We could play all this out with game theory, but I suspect that most scenarios end in revolution. That's probably why billionaires don't talk about the bunkers they're building. If they truly don't see a way out of the end times, then I don't know why they persist in doing what they're doing. At some point it would simply be in their financial best interest to raise their own taxes, or face the wrath of the people they formerly employed.
Technological innovations have never meant less work for the worker. It's the bosses/company that benefit from being able to squeeze you that little bit more.
Want to do less work? Join a union and campaign for a 4-day work week or something. If the productivity benefit from AI is real, there's no reason you shouldn't be paid the same for less time because your output is the same/better.
> there's no reason you shouldn't be paid the same for less time because your output is the same/better.
The reason is economic growth for the company / the country.
This in turn is a more subtle point than it seems at first glance. Not having economic growth isn't really a desirable option for a company, a country, or in (the long run) the people involved.
Outside of that small 20ish year window, workers have never benefitted from increased productivity compared to the capitalists that have stolen $50 trillion from the masses:
That's a separate probem that probably wont be solved by reducing the work week.
That said, ppp adjusted median houshold income has grown fairly steadily even in the US, even with growing inequality... so workers too have benefitted, just not as much as they could of the gains had been spread more evenly
I may not work less, but certainly different and better.
Just this morning I went for a long walk on the beach, barefoot in the water. Using nothing but voice interaction, I handled a couple of outstanding CRM tasks, sorted out some accounting issues and upgraded my search infrastructure (SearXNG) and most of all enjoyed my walk outside. I would not be able to do all this without AI and would be stuck behind my desk, daydreaming about going for that walk instead.
With the power of AI, soon all of us can be doing outstanding CRM tasks instead of wasting time enjoying nature. Imagine the time savings we could recover by removing all quiet contemplative moments!
Yea, it seems that the OP neither did better work, or actually enjoyed the walk (I mean, how do you enjoy walk if you don't allow your thoughts to wander?)..
It may be more pleasant to work outside -or it may not (it's almost winter here in Alaska -that would be a hard pass for me!). but no -it's definitely not the same, as you pointed out.
I’m always a bit puzzled by this kind of comment, which pops up every time someone mentions getting some work done while out in nature.
What it seems to miss is that we get to walk around while doing some work, not the other way around. The alternative would be being stuck at a desk or in a meeting room, not quietly enjoying nature on a day off.
The counterfactual is impossible to prove here, but I think it’s at least plausible that this poster, who I guess lives near the beach, could have enjoyed their morning coffee on the beach
What is the reason you couldnt use your laptop on the beach to do work in 2019? Probably mainly that you are either working or enjoying nature, not both, and if you're working, then an office with reliable Internet, no wind or sun in your face, etc, is more suitable/efficient.
Put another way: if my twin and I are both working at competing firms doing the same job, but I do it via satellite phone while hiking the PCT and he does it from in front of a keyboard, there is no way he's not getting more done, even with AI. The bandwidth of voice/text to speech is a tiny fraction of visual.
Or you would be unemployed and nervous about how you were going to pay your bills, replaced by someone willing to do the same work for lower cost while chained to said desk.
For those of us stuck in an office building, at a desk, AI models have enabled handling multiple tasks as a same time as fast as we can think. I'm absolutely doing multiple times the work I was doing before and the time between tasks is basically zero. Same pay, though, and drastically increased productivity and sense of effort.
For many of us, this would not be a better experience. The physical and mental components of doing it yourself is half the pleasure
Of someone’s carried my ass around all day I’d be a physically atrophied and mentally addled maniac, on obese to boot if I’m stuffing my face the whole ride
Part of the dilemma with modern culture is that most people seem to be striving for and hoping technology will provide pleasure funk laziness and glut. But these things in and of themselves produce bad outcomes. I get why people really stressed out might daydream about that, but this is probably more indicative of being overworked than of the virtues of laziness and glut
Vertically integrated solo business on a Patroni controlled PostgreSQL cluster spread out over multiple dedicated servers with multiple providers.
Shocks Opencomm 2 headset or my Sony xm6 earbuds connected to a custom Android app. Android local Supertonic model for text to voice, private whisper on the server for voice to text. Local Nvidia Glider LLM for PII filtering of CRM related data. The Android app controls codex app server instances (mostly working with latest GPT model on high), switches between projects and threads based on voice commands, a ton of little tweaks to optimize my workflow. Every service except the public facing website runs behind a Wireguard VPN.
Yes of course your employer is fine with you going walking barefoot on a beach instead of being in the office working, and it's happy to pay you the same money. Come on...
Also, you are telling me that you can get only with voice interaction an AI to write well engineered and maintainable code, something I've yet to see an AI be able to do, to me the result that they tend is at best the same of a junior developer, except that the junior developer learns, the AI continues to make the same mistakes (because it's context is limited, when it's full it's full).
What seems better to you, seems a bit nightmarish to me. If I'm going for a walk, the last thing I want to have on my mind is dealing with CRM software in any way.
But it's a purpose built, tailored to my needs CRM, mostly automated. Like I ask, "which outstanding issues need my attention". I tell it what to do next, when to notify again and I'm done. All tedious form entry work is taken care of in the background.
The choice is do you want to walk or sit behind a desk when doing a task that needs human attention.
It doesn't have to replace a nice "offline" outdoor activity.
But isn't the next step where your employer tasks you to codify all these tasks and capture your "process" and "reasoning" and then you can still walk on the beach all you want but you won't have work to do. Isn't the next step for a junior engineer or a single verifier to just add a minor human verification step at a higher level to remove you from the loop? I feel like there is not enough discussion about this mindset shift. Early adoption is taking away the employee moat that some people have but we don't seem to be considering that it is going to be recursive and repeating.
It reminds me of the 7-minute abs scene in Something About Mary.
> But isn't the next step where your employer tasks you to codify all these tasks and capture your "process" and "reasoning" and then you can still walk on the beach all you want but you won't have work to do
No, the next step is the employer to ask "why are you walking on a beach when you could be working?" and won't accept the answer that they are just orchestrating agents.
The only part the employer will focus on is "walking on a beach" and think "I don't pay you to walk on a beach."
(Caveat: OP might be running their own business. That's different. Also makes me rethink my life choices a bit).
For decades tech companies have promised that devices save time....but to do what? The pitch was that they would save time for us to do more 'creative stuff'...but I think that pitch and idea is fundamentally flawed. From doing creative stuff for a couple decades, I can make a few observations:
(1) More tech doesn't save time if it's developed in the direction/dimension of more information flow. Because it seems that the best environment for creativity is a somewhat restricted environment of information. And if one needs to engage with information to take advantage of this new tech, it actually impedes creativity.
(2) A lot of the grunt work that we seem to be automating also encourages creativity. From what I've observed from many artists and programmers (I hang out with both), it seems that creativity strikes best when it's not forced, and the "downtime" doing grunt work actually accelerates it.
So I think that AI breaks these two principles (minimal information and the removal of the crucial grunt work), and actually makes us work more for less.
The only gains seem to be those short-term kinds (a program can be made faster, rewards can be reaped by senior people who have thought about stuff for a while), rather than encouraging a healthy environment of creativity....
The key is the information environment and its reshaping, as you noted.
Every technology, even technologies that are, from the limited and naive perspective of the user, "free" (LLms can do what I used to do a lot faster than I can, and I don't need to maintain them right?) is not actually free. All technologies bring about their own demands and need for maintenance. Often they don't actually eliminate labor, they just shift it to new areas.
Consider LLMs. Even at the user level they have created their own information ecosystem and new grunt work and overhead. Now you have to prompt, you need to organize and manage context, skills, memory. You need to keep up with model releases. You need to be more vigilant reviewing things, the list goes on.
At a higher level they create even more toil, we need to maintain vast electrical supports and data infrastructure, data needs to be amassed continually for training, the information environment needs to be filtered and sorted more than ever as it gets flooded with slop.
This is the grand irony of technology. It's actually pretty rare for it to just be a total labor saving device. More often its real benefit is rearrangement of the world's structure and resources to move labor to more optimal places for certain needs (for example water supply systems).
This rearrangement also often rearranged financial resources and power. The big problem with LLMs today is that this aspect of the rearrangement is one of great concentration, and it's concerning (employers having a lot more power to extract labor from employees is one example)
I use ai as I program every day and I find it useful. I also use it for tech support for myself and my home server. The other day I used it to make some changes in my server and I felt like I accomplished tons. But when I thought about it in the evening I realized I could have got it done with less time if I had just read some documents - the ai advice was often out-of-date and I notice that while programming too - for example, I use the spring-ai framework which has changed massively between versions and the ai always gives old advice....
So on average I would say I'm getting about as much work done now as before ai.
I've been throwing it at a homelab as well as I don't have to worry about production stuff and can revert snapshots fine.
Until the agents decide to start messing with snapshots.
It can help if you can't remember where something is, but then you'll never learn so I try to action everything myself, but again agents like to just blab on constantly and overstep.
I found I was doing bulk changes etc with it, seemed helpful until I realised I could just use dsh as Ive done in the past and basically do the same thing with way less resources and more consistency.
AI is increasing productivity. Companies are positioned to leverage this, employees are not, as they'll still work the same hours, maybe now producing more.
The way to better leverage this is to build your own company, I know this is not as simple as saying it but the gap is widening and it doesn't look good for employees.
As someone with their own company, AI doesn't magically make things better. If anything, it makes it worse since you have far more competition from other people who are not good at programming but are good at sales/marketing.
It's like with the music industry, it got easier for anyone to make music/release music in theory. Meanwhile for the last 100 years there's mostly been more concentration/consolidation.
Yes, but you are in a better position to leverage this technology than an employee, the potential value you can extract from AI is higher. Regarding competition, software was never the moat in most cases, so I don't think more software equals more competition, at least not linearly.
This is a bit of a strawman, as almost all AI-related opinion pieces are on here lately.
"The pitch was that AI would give us our time back. Write less boilerplate, delegate the boring parts, go home earlier."
Who pitched this? Where was this argued?
And for what it's worth, our entire industry was pitched as a way for businesses to do more with less. Our raison d'être is that we would automate and enhance parts of business so you no longer need the rooms of analysts, the constant inventory manpower churn, rooms of typists, mailrooms, and on and on and on.
It's a bit rich for us to clutch pearls now. We exist as an industry to put other people out of work, and many of us have made a lot of money doing just that. There is zero surprise that businesses would like to put us out of work if they could.
And even among our industry, many of us spent much of our time trying to reduce the need for other programmers. Doesn't the website builder maker put web developers out of business? Framework vendors are replacing lots of internal code that could keep big teams employed for decades! Microsoft and other big firms are constantly trying to figure out what the many employers of software dev teams are doing...so they can replace them. I mean, we all do that, trying to automate and simplify the need for other teams to exist.
The "pitch" of AI is that it's a new tool that your competitors are going to be using, so you had better get onboard now too, in a classic adapt or die choice. And...this is largely true! You can't argue it away. You can mythologize a never existed history where software used to be perfect in the pre-AI era. You can't moralize about slop or pretend it's all a mirage. It's all just foolish rhetoric that groups all cluck and upvote to make each other feel good, while the rest of the world moves on.
I think AI has also devalued a lot of work that previously might have been "mundane" but still felt like an accomplishment once you got it done. But now you can do that work to an ±80% quality level of the old, manual way, but in 1% of the time.
So the result is noticeably worse, but you basically must do it, because the efficiency gains are inescapable. This makes the work seem even more pointless, adding to the feeling that you're working more and accomplishing less.
Aluminum used to be more expensive than platinum. Now we crumple it up and throw it in the bin. AI has done the same thing to the cost of a line of code.
> Aluminum used to be more expensive than platinum. Now we crumple it up and throw it in the bin. AI has done the same thing to the cost of a line of code.
And hopefully it will to that to all labor, so we can finally crumple up the workers and throw them into the bin too!
I see this directly. I'm an engineer but part of that is doing non-engineer work like making powerpoints, whitepapers, and generic work that's necessary but that I would delegate to someone else if I were high enough on the totem pole.
AI gives me the ability to do that stuff faster so I can focus more on the 20% and the quality of what I'm doing, not the nuance of formatting a document.
AI makes up for a lot of crap tooling, but is often worse than good tooling. In this case "good tooling" would be a document template or formatting language that is easy/fast to use. What I have seen AI do so far if you try to one shot a PowerPoint deck is underwhelming to say the least. (To say more: it looks like a word cannon was used to splatter text on slides with random positions, colors, and fonts.)
Just skip the powerpoint if you can't be bothered to create it. It's painfully obvious for anyone listening that the presenter didn't come up with or think through what they're talking about.
Not always an option if you're being required to make a PowerPoint. The content doesn't need to be AI generated. Just the organization of slides is a PITA and not a good use of my time.
Khm, ackshually... any documentation work is best not left to LLMs. They are excellent at generating many words with little value. Even sketching a doc and running through an LLM although a bit better than just a prompt "generate docs from this code" still suffers from similar problems. I prefer to write briefly, but doing it myself.
OTOH - formatting and other stuff not related to content, this is great to delegate, even though the results are often mediocre, but I really don't care about that at this point.
And a corollary being that without any time spent on the "mundane", almost every single aspect of the work becomes the genuinely consequential decision-making steps.
I recently made a change because I felt the same way. I think it was primarily my phone. I had my full agent setup accessible via my phone and was able to be as productive as being on my machine wherever I was. This made it so any thought, or tickle of the mind resulted in me whipping out my phone, firing off a prompt, and iterating until it got it right.
I switched to a dumb flip phone as my primary device and now my work mostly only gets done on my computer during work hours. I obviously still have my iPhone and I sometimes take it on walks during the day if I want to have a productive walk, but it mostly stays plugged in in my drawer.
I always thought I wanted to be constantly connected to my dev environment and be able to work from anywhere, but it turns out that adds way too much noise to my life and is a net negative. I was constantly thinking about work and then able to act on those thoughts so the cycle just continued until I fell asleep.
> I obviously still have my iPhone and I sometimes take it on walks during the day if I want to have a productive walk, but it mostly stays plugged in in my drawer.
You and I have different definitions of a productive walk. To me a walk is productive if I get my heart beating fast. Bonus points if I see an unusual bird or insect.
Hm thats great insight. My phone contributes a loit to my phychosis and bursts. I check what my sessions are doing, i spin up new ones etc. If i distance my phone at least i ll stick more to the trad 9-5 schedule.
I’m getting to that point of switching to a dumb phone. One thing I’ve done this week is completely not allow myself to respond to people/do any work even 1 minute after my scheduled end time. It’s wayyy too easy to do that these days.
I've never felt that AI allowed me to do less work. That seems flawed. I have experienced that it allows me to do more work in the same (or less) amount of time.
Honestly, skimming through it, the writing style made it pretty obvious to that it had been written by an AI. Pangram also indicates that the text is "100% AI-generated." The disclaimer isn't even honest, I doubt AI helped to just build a "draft" of this article...
I know, this ship has long sailed, but I just can't get used and accept this kind of writing.
If you're an employee, that's true - but as a founder of a small SaaS (https://arcentry.com/) I genuinely work about 1-2 hours less and get more time walking with my dog through nature. I now have the luxury of concentrating on building the core product and writing articles for the blog and AI handles the things I'm less good at or passionate about, including marketing and content distribution, accounting, building the website (which admittedly looks a bit AI-y, but still much better than my handmade version), answering simple customer requests and escalating complicated ones to me and so on.
Meanwhile, I get to do more of what I enjoy. Of course, it's always tempting to let Codex work on the core product itself - but I resisted that urge so far as I feel a strong sense of ownership and craftsmanship - plus its the thing I actually like doing.
Love this, and it's the outcome I was hoping for. Did you have to deliberately cap your hours, or did it just happen? For me the cheap extra capacity always gets filled with another idea.
> Should tech workers supercharged by AI be able to take more time off? Meta's chief technology officer, Andrew Bosworth, said he doesn't think so. [1]
> A Meta employee asked Bosworth if AI productivity gains could be channeled into more vacation time — specifically, the revival of "Meta Days," a since-canceled holiday program that allowed staff to take a few extra days off. [1]
> In response, Bosworth said that while working at Meta isn't easy, that time should be used to build more products for its users [1]
> "stop asking about Meta Days. It's very dumb." [1]
OP is working for the wrong employer. I’m working less because I don’t work for a Silicon Valley sweat shop.
There’s a life hack for this and it’s called “being paid below market average and your employer having no better options.”
If this even needs to be said, OP’s experience as a Principal Engineer and VP of Technology is not a typical experience. I would expect a VP of Technology to be a very high-stress job.
But I would also expect a VP of Technology to stop doing technical work and start being a strategic leader. Another mistake on OP’s part. The worst leaders at my company are the ones who think they should still be submitting PRs.
I'm running a small software company together with a partner. We've moved from partly working with externals to 100% working with onpremise AI.
Both of us feel the AI fatigue from time to time.
My personal analysis is that the speed went up, with this the bandwith of different topics.
Other factors that weigh in are a not lowering learning curve inside the heavily iterating AI sector and the chattiness of the Agents. If not stopped they produce so much facts that it kills me. I started constantly working on this to stop the waterfall of facts and get ontop of it.
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[ 2.1 ms ] story [ 21.4 ms ] threadUnfortunately this means that you always feel the need to keep building or fall behind (picturing Lucy and Ethel at the chocolate factory) which means you’re pretty much always feeling burnt out and it feels harder to step away than ever before without feeling a certain way about it.
I hate it. It’s the best time ever to build. That excitement lasted about a year - but now it’s a treadmill I can’t escape and companies are not really paying more for the productivity (even factoring in the cost of my AI usage)
In manufacturing, an oversupply of finished product quickly leads to overfull warehouses, and the company knows to slow down production until product moves.
In software it’s less visible. Features that nobody is buying don’t physically pile up in the shipping department. Decades of accounting for all programmer time as productivity has left managers with limited ability to recognize time spent building unnecessary bloat as a loss. Maintenance burden isn’t fully recognized as a loss, either. We tend to assume it’s roughly equivalent to profit, the same as all other code the programmers churn out.
And what you are seeing now is that it was always a myth. Not everything you do at work is profitable or productive, and AI is causing that fraction to decrease. So of course they aren’t going to pay you more for it.
The other factor here is scaling of humans. Without these tools we would need a lot more humans. We don’t need as many but the ones we do have are heavily taxed. That salary savings should be passed on (again, relative productivity to AI spend) but we’ll see!
I’m sure the ship will eventually right itself, but it’s going to take some time for the profession to digest how AI coding has changed things and how to adjust incumbent working norms to account for it.
For example, skills with sales are far more important than actual software engineering.
Just today I was served a clearly AI-generated Halloween ad for Coca-Cola.
The ability to rent cheap AI capacities, the ability to push to a million consumers, the ability to persuade for large contracts, these are the most important ones.
All my dev friends swear this is the future, all my scientist coworkers just say it's a useful tool.
I have heard the pitch and have people explained how it works... But I have yet been handed a guide on how to set myself up properly to get the most out of AI. Like I have both a corporate openai gui agent as well as cli setup with a monthly allotment of tokens. But there is no clear standard guide on how I should be setting things up, like we do for python in books "here are the building blocks for python"/aka learn python the hard way
LLM and harnesses are changing so fast that if I had a guide from 6 months ago I'm not sure how relevant it would be today.
I'm guessing that when things calm down and the landscape isn't changing as much then we will get the guides.
edit: It is actually kinda funny. One would think that we would embrace it the full spectrum now as we could have the best of both worlds ( logic and language side by side solving humanity's problems ).
Realistically there were only ever two possible outcomes: you do more work for the same amount of money, or you’re one of the ones who were laid off and your work was transferred to the former.
The only way it will result in less work and the same or better quality of life is if you’re self-employed or are employed by a compassionate human. Sadly that does not apply to the majority of people.
What stops me from working more than others is being smarter than my competitors right now. Not being smarter in any objective, fixed way. To keep it that way I must constantly evolved, learn.
Yes, micromanaging AIs is more intense for me than coding, and feels more tiring, I hope that (or I) will change, somehow.
But far away enough that we need to look at this again and get more time back to the workers.
I answered one incorrect statement. Why try to pile the world on a single statement.
> Go to now, ye rich men, weep and howl for your miseries that shall come upon you. Your riches are corrupted, and your garments are motheaten. Your gold and silver is cankered; and the rust of them shall be a witness against you, and shall eat your flesh as it were fire. Ye have heaped treasure together for the last days. Behold, the hire of the labourers who have reaped down your fields, which is of you kept back by fraud, crieth: and the cries of them which have reaped are entered into the ears of the Lord of sabaoth.
This isn't an exclusive or situation, nonconformist religious influence helped create the ideological environment that allowed unions to exist in the first place.
There were church mandated holidays in the Middle Ages. Lots of them.
The current pope chose his name to signal his continuation of Pope Leo XVIII's teachings on worker's rights, particularly the papal encylical Rerum Novarum: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rerum_novarum
During the industrial revolution many people treated their workers better because of their religious belief - the Quaker industrialists of Britain are a prominent example.
Just off the top of my head examples.
I follow a religion with similar edicts (not Christian). I also understand the contributions made by Christianity in this area. But the fact of the matter is that religion was ultimately unable to force actual widespread change on the ground, especially not in secularized European states.
At the end of the day, the only true religion that industrialists and capitalists understand is money. Only unions were able to speak their language at a very large scale, and this is the language they ultimately had to listen to :)
If union A is like "work less let AI take the slack" and union B is like "work the same, use AI to achieve more, let AI help us win" I'm joining union B every time.
For example waste management generally has very strong unions in the developed world because 1) capital intensity 2) operations immediately seize on labour withdrawal 3) consequences of strikes are in a golden zone of painful but not existential so are tolerated 4) extract a relatively small proportion of local gov funds, so don’t create that much powerful opposition 5) labour force is locally concentrated and highly socialised.
Those pillars of power don’t rely much on any particular legal or political system.
I am actually pro Union but yikes the left needs to go back and actually read some Marx.
Much of this unionization conversation has lot the plot about how unionization is about collective bargaining, but you still have to bargain. Both sides have options and you can’t come to the bargaining table with a belief that you can get whatever you want by threatening to strike or quit. There are limits to this and they’re decided by markets and technology.
Obviously things can change but in general I feel AI jockeying is the exact opposite of showing solidarity with the people you work with.
Once companies can just outsource anything from manufacturing to services the only categories that can really unionize with success are those that can de facto block everything at once (port workers are an example).
That globalism has made unions not-work is just Capitalist Inevitabilism. Yeah okay I’ll give up when the billionaires have fully autonomous robot brigades. But not over globalism.
Go ask major US port operators whose employees make astronomic figure and if you don't bend they block the country.
the US gov has for almost all of its history been anti-unions
My boss would never dream asking I crank more because I now have AI help.
That guy saying there were only two possible outcomes doesn’t know about the beauty of unions.
The "cushiness" of jobs such as fewer work hours, more benefits, etc. preceded the formation of unions and then slowed down (overall) once unions became popular.
It has little to do with union pressure and a LOT to do with economics, in particular the demand for labor. Jobs get nice when employers are competing over the same pool of employees.
Unions are nice for those in them and bad for everyone else. They are (quite literally) cartels, in an economic sense.
During an all hands where quarterly earnings were presented for a very large American company, the live audience were obviously employees.
The CFO came on stage and was very enthusiastic about the labor market "loosening". Employees were clapping. Unsure if because they didn't understand the meaning of that statement or because just to appear supportive of leadership.
I was thinking: they're talking about us, turkeys.
The first official Union was formed in 1794, for journeyman cordwainers, I believe in New York.
The national labor union was formed in 1866 and is the first official call to congress to regulate to an 8-hour workday.
The first example I know of on a national scale that voluntarily promoted an 8 hour day, 40 hour work week was Ford in 1914 and realistically, that is exactly what you stated, an attempt to undercut other automakers / factories of the time for labor. Not because he was being altruistic.
I’m sorry you’ve had bad experiences with unions. I am certainly biased, because I grew up in a Union household and have been apart of them myself, but I’ve only had good experiences. Yeah, there are some bad eggs, admittedly, but I think collectively they have benefited the working person.
I've actually had personally great experiences with unions! But I try to not let my anecdotal data color my views too much.
I think this is part of the reasons unions are insidious - their benefits are quite visible and concentrated to those who are in them, and their costs are spread out and invisible (until you put an empirical lens on them at scale).
In your opinion, is the 8-hour workday an exclusive benefit for the insiders, or the invisible cost for the outsiders?
> Jobs get nice when employers are competing over the same pool of employees.
Maybe in high-paying jobs that require high qualifications. For most jobs, especially the low-wage sector, this is absolutely not the case. There is no competition between employees if applicants are desperate and need to take any job they can.
1. https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-economic-...
2.https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00144...
> The "cushiness" of jobs such as fewer work hours, more benefits, etc. preceded the formation of unions and then slowed down (overall) once unions became popular.
is demonstrably false.
Sure, unions are not the only reason for better working conditions, but they certainly played a very important role.
The legal restrictions on the max. number of hours people are allowed to work per day or week are only in place because of the worker's movement and the power of unions. Companies certainly didn't lobby for these laws. In fact, certain industries are constantly trying to soften or undermine it.
BTW, in my country, unions are part of the annual negotations between employers and employees ("Kollektivvertrag"), which most notably includes the minimum wages and annual pay raises.
The same way you advocate for getting good bananas, good streaming services, or good laptops.
You only make voluntary transactions you want to make. If you don't like what a job is offering, take another job or start your own business.
If you don't like ANY of the bananas being produced by ANYONE, this probably isn't because all banana producers are moustache twirling villains. It probably has something to do with the underlying realities of banana production, supply, and demand.
Such as the fact that you don't need the banana in order to survive, so they have little blackmailing power over you.
Prior to industrialization the closest you got to this was feudalism.
This abstract value you mention is the same dictionary that managers use and I believe they often confuse themselves with that.
If you think LLMs will make irrational people go "Ahhh I get it, I can't throw money and yelling at a shower idea and be the next Xooglebookflix" you will be surprised.
But yes, self-employment often is a lot of work.
Also, as someone who has been self employed I can tell you that you're working 2x-3x as much as someone who is employed and you have to pay more in taxes.
I guess the idea that AI will do all the work and either take care of us or kill us all. Which will probably happen, but the transition takes years and in the meantime we work much harder. People were expecting a fast takeoff.
The amount of mental energy saved, and downright stimulation gained from seeing rapid feedback in a tight loop is making my workday much easier. I have enough left to continue it longer.
That is not something that should be celebrated.
It is a warning sign.
You're right that this would be awful if mandatory.
but it often was socially mandatory!
At least when those times come, the work can go much further before I have to actually "check in" vs doing some well-trod analysis via automation I've set up. That's great!
And what does this have to do with psychosis - is that a general catch-all term for using AI too much?
How did that work out in 1933?
There are limits to how much an economy can shake up before structural problems appear that means when the music stops there is no chair anywhere for you to sit in.
>At any moment in time there are growth areas in the economy
For bread line server?
Worse with the modern world you're not just competing with your neighbor, you're competing with the entire world and if the other parts of the world have lower costs you can quickly find yourself in a trap.
It seems like a pretty common misunderstanding in rank-and-file AI-boosterism. I'm guessing that reflects their initial experience, before their employer adjusts their expectations, extrapolated out to infinity. Your correct understanding makes AI sound like a bad deal for workers (and it is), so my theory AI-enthusiastic boosters have to engage in a degree of reality distortion to keep up their enthusiasm.
Who wins in the market?
It's not a uniform answer. There are times and places where the first one wins, as well as a mixed strategy. But I think broadly speaking the majority answer is the second.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/OPHNFB
For that matter if we want to talk about percentage increases that should be a log scale. Productivity improvements appear to be slowing down.
I think it lags. There was a sag between the mid-70s and mid-90s, which is when computers and the Internet were being rapidly developed but weren't really hitting the business mainstream. But late 90s through today it clearly ramped up a lot -- my bet is this is because of IT. It just takes a long time, it's not a sharp jump because not every business gets on board immediately and productively.
My guess is AI ends up the same. But then again, I'm not an economist, only a developer, so I just think I can tell anything about that productivity graph.
I noticed this anecdotally; in 2021 it was especially noticeable that people were just phoning it in at work, and “quiet quitting” was a meme.
If I understand correctly, the spike in 2020 was not any kind of jump in real productivity, either, it is an artifact of how the calculation is made -- there was a sudden drop in hours from low paid workers who typically have a lower than average contribution to productivity (as measured), so laying a bunch of them off skews the per-hour calculation. Then as things settled down companies re-hired, and then over-hired.
\S
Now whether or not that would actually work given the reality of the AI output is a question, but that's the general premise.
Do the horses win in the market?
Imo the vast majority of companies would be better with a lot less engineers. For the simple fact that they are not setup for producing that much work.
They need time to discuss, decide what they even want to accomplish, just letting your POs throw more features at all your products on a whim is hugely detrimental.
It's very normal to think that the extra revenue growth you bring in should mean you have either 1) a larger share of the pie for every efficiency increase that grows revenue or 2) less expectation from you, as a worker, to labor as intensively since you are continue to bring in surplus value that is being actively skimmed from.
Most of the tech companies I have worked at are ridiculously easy and generous, I get to work with smart people, and the entire job can be done in a few hours per week. It's not like we're doing manual labor and digging ditches; half the people on this website are laptop-class workers who occasionally use the slightest bit of energy to write a few lines of code or participate in a meeting.
I show up to work and I often do extra because I like it.
The company isn't "extracting" anything from me except the extremely consentual labor I want to give back simply out of the love of the game. If you don't feel that way, the problem isn't the capitalist system it's probably your own life choices.
And you do it to provide the product/service, provide for your workers, etc
It's debatable whether he would even make as much as he gets paid currently, in that scenario.
According to AI boosters he should be able to make magnitude more now
Even if you don’t like the concept of co-ops it’s fairly easy to ask yourself if you would you be more or less motivated if you shared more in the success of a company rather than it being sucked up by shareholders?
Would love to see just one example of a billion+ valuation company with nothing but C-suite and that against the ratio of companies with 1000+ employees who are worth a billion+. The only two sub-dozen workers that come to mind for me are Theranos and Bernie Madoff and I'm not sure they are examples of success.
That’s why your happy experience is not inconsistent with this description.
Same idea with all these agents that are going to negotiate our insurance down, haggle with our cell phone providers, and find the best hotel deals.
Your counterparty will have its own agent, a larger budget for that agent, and a lot more skin in the game to ensure they retain their advantage (cell phone bills are 100% of the cell companies income but is only 0.5% of your spending). Good luck.
Reminds me of the old press pieces along "with the new machines, the workers won't have to do this tedious and dangerous work anymore and will have so much more free time!"
And free time they had...
Another way of looking at that is you could own a home and a modern car, and support your entire family and have the latest technology all on a single income.
TV wasn't worth having in 1950 for most people, if they even got reception at all, but by 1955 75% of homes had state of the art TVs. Phones improved over the decade as well, and pretty much everyone had at least one in their home (technically owned by AT&T). What people had seems primitive to us, but it was all new and constantly improving to the people at the time.
Today our experience causes us to expect that greed and enshittification will make everything both worse and more expensive, but back then people were excited about the future and about how technology would make their lives better while getting cheaper because that was their experience.
He produces much more shareholder value.
He works much more harder.
He is much more tired.
Exactly why does he think this is a good deal for him? Because he's VP of blah?
The whole AI-boosterism is from people convinced that if only they can maximise shareholder value, their lot in life would improve.
Massive productivity gains over the last few years and the rewards have all gone to shareholders, not working class people.
If they had, and workers rights, minimum wage etc had kept pace with the economy, we'd be on a 3 day week by now.
We do need to do something, and soon, but “tax those guys a lot and send the proceeds to government services or pittance checks” isn’t going to cut it.
If can be just factually and morally correct step of taxing given company for income from given country and thats almost it. Maybe close few biggest loopholes how to hide income while having massive revenues. None of the faangs operate like that, with such move their revenues and stock prices would fall down since part of valuation is based on continuing this tax scam/fraud.
This would spawn few hundred billions globally to start with. Of course tech bros et al would launch some massive PR counter-campaign also here, thats all fine and expected.
Will it solve everything? No but will set a better path for future while helping also right now massively. If you have kids and cared even a little what world they will inherit from us, this is how you build its foundations. Not hoarding money at all costs and fuck the rest since everybody relies on rest for existence and thriving.
Once you go from horse to tractor the fields increase but work hours doesn't decrease. And if you still use a horse, you are outperformed by the tractor guys who will sell stuff at less the price that you can sustain.
I am theoretically paid on deliverables, not hours.
And the reason is likely because AI automates the things that were time consuming but not 'hard'. So now we only have hard stuff left.
I'm quite amazed how many people actually think they can get away with working for few hours and think they are somehow entitled to it under 9-5 40hr workweek contract.
Shouldn’t they now pay more for more work?
> employed by a compassionate human
I would add that companies are incentivised to chase profits, and paying employees more is not aligned with that, sadly.
Unless you think you should pay more now for more content that can be delivered to you via AI generation?
What?! Good to know. When contractor comes to do the kitchen, I will make them do the garden and will reduce the money I’d pay them, because supply and demand!
> Unless you think you should pay more now for more content
We do already! You realize you’re paying by the token? More token -> bigger bill!
If things are to rebalance again and give some of the productivity gains back to the rest of us, we should be working far less and I hope it comes with less of a fight than it took for us to get 2 days a week off.
It's been over 100 years now.
You could argue that companies reap outsized benefits, and that the benefits are not shared fairly with workers.
When I get stronger the load gets heavier. When I run faster the road gets longer.
In terms of social effect, there's two axes that jump out at me for things that are _not_ value-neutral:
I think there's a decent argument to be made that the former category is mostly a subset of the latter anyway.In a _very_ hand-wavey, un-nuanced take, decentralized systems shift power and profit away from the establishment and are inconvenient to use, and centralized systems tend to be easier to use -- and they support and create establishments, and give them power and profit. Unsurprisingly, a fair number of establishments exist and grow precisely because they found a way to centralize a decentralized technology.
The choices that we make in our lived systems mean these axes are mere tendencies, not predictions. The "old" Internet was largely a decentralization technology. The shift towards platforms (Facebook, Xitter...) made many of the old-internet functionality easier to use by centralizing it. Blockchain is superficially and deliberately a decentralizing technology, but with the choices we've made, it's mostly empowered people positioned to centralize it (initially in the form of fiat currency exchange points).
LLM progress is currently in a centralizing phase, but overall its direction remains unclear; will open-weight models running on cheap commodity hardware (once OpenAI won't or can't clear the aisles of available VRAM) turn the tide, or will the frontier labs retain a permanent structural advantage -- and what market and regulatory choices will we make to nudge that direction?
There's the historical experience with early/mid 20th century unions, the establishment of the 8 hour workweek and worker rights, even Henry Ford's wage increases.
Not necessarily that they'd do it out of their own good heart, of course.
The value proposition is extremely simple:
1. Clankers do almost everything for us as ethical slaves
2. Everything costs next to nothing, from raw materials to finished products, and much of it can be done at home, sustainably and even better than we have it today
3. Society transitions towards utopia, basic needs met for all, away from hand-to-mouth, and we spend our time on friends, family, community and personal enrichment
The alternative is a dystopia beyond Orwellian.
People need to get this idea into their heads: our governments work for us and with almost infinite cheap robot labour and national resources the focus should be on society and not enriching some fucking crooks.
Its literally us or them, literally a fight for our lives
And this is where we go full speed, and if anybody voices concern there is 'think about children!' for 'em or just laugh them off as luddites. If you ever wanted to move social layers, yesterday was too late.
But imagine the control - how desperate folks will be for some pocket money if half of population is unemployable. So much control! So many cheap gardeners / sex slaves to choose from! You would have to work outside openai / anthropic to refuse that, for sure you will be one of few on top of the pile, not some trash within it right.
Time to rewatch V for Vendetta and Gattaca.
1. Where the market will pay for the privilege or 'quality' of a human (you pay more for a nurse, nanny, server etc., its a status symbol)
2. Where human accountability is required by law, even if that human is just following the recommendations of AI (C-suite, human-in-the-loop safety monitoring)
3. Where personal ownership exists, AI can only serve your small business it cannot own anything
But also, with almost infinite cheap robot labour (and army), our governments no longer need to work for us.
OF the people, BY the people, FOR the people, OR death to the tyrants.
We cannot afford to fuck around this time, this tech will enable a power dynamic beyond all previous estimation. Stalin, Hitler, the Stasi - their systems were as sophisticated as piece of chalk compared to this potential for universal cross-referenced real-time surveillance backed up by an army of super-soldiers that would murder their own children without hesitation if they had any.
May we take this as an opportunity to recognize what a bad deal we get from most employers and build better companies. It's never been more possible. UBI is unlikely to happen and uncertain it would even be beneficial. If AI can lead to a better world, this seems like the most promising path.
If you also want a bigger share of the pie you need to be one of the people driving its growth.
How much, presumably, depends on their bargaining power, such as unions or low unemployment.
The question is not so much how AI affects productivity, but how it affects the economic value of human labor.
The real question is: what's the rate of growth for capital returns vs labor returns? If capital returns are accelerating, over 50-100 years, yeah, we will still end up in techno feudalism.
But I took OP to just worry about absolute growth in real wages.
I always plan our capacity based on a % of bugs/support/upgrade vs. new feature development which is roughly at 50%.
AI will be able to reduce this while also increasing quality which will allow us build more features faster which is actually quite fun.
How it will impact budget etc. no clue yet, in best case though i can transfer my team into a new product while maintaining the old one with very little effort.
But there might never be a better time to change that now and start building and shipping your products with AI tools (as long as there is a leverage for technical people).
I am having a blast building and playing the game I always wanted and with AI I can do this on the side, while working part time a shit job. Whether it works out, we will see once I ship it.
But people are still willing to pay for good software.
(But there is a strong temptation to me, to make the game logic and physics server only, SaaS style, despite it working very nice locally, but right now it would be it too easy to just clone it otherwise)
Now with AI and the flood of CVEs, management anxiety makes discussions much harder. Throw in unrealistic expectations about productivity - derived from venture money fueled AI POCs in greenfield hotel california and stress goes up.
The CVE’s drive work, the introduction of AI drives work, the old ci/cd is creaking under the load and architecture really needs a rethink. Add to that the genius manager pronouncing that very soon nobody will be coding fueling the dissonance between what is needed from me today and where we are supposedly heading increasing motivation - not.
No wonder there's so much animosity towards AI -- it's not the tech itself, it's the fact that it makes the lives of a small minority better while making the lives of the vast majority worse.
It could be used to make most people's lives better, but it's not, and it won't be.
Because these tools are now available whoever that is up in the management chain (possibly someone that has no idea about code or technology) is now entitled to request the undeliverable in the same amount of time.
I believe a couple of scenarios might unfold in the near mid-term future:
* Programming becomes now a task that anyone can do (assuming models outpace even the highest standards when it comes to certain software qualities). Under this premise wages go to the floor, now even grandma can do it.
* Companies still demand competent people as models plateau and do not offer outstanding software qualities yet the output is good enough that programmers should be able to do way way more than before. The job should then be high-paid but turns out highly-stressful.
* For some years eveything goes "just fine" under the vibe code party until competent people at major companies realize that have disastrous products and basically unfixable. Models start to decay. Then old school competent developers become again highly required and only a minority of "skilled-previous-generation" programmers that decided to keep doing things the old way get desperately required.
Obviously no-one has the crystal ball and anything can happen...
There are nothing to be done wrt #1 nor #2
Why would models “start to decay”? I keep hearing people on here extolling that open weight models are now “good enough”. Where do they go in this future?
Then companies started testing it out, and have noticed that things like sick leaves plummeted, and that the employees produced the same amount, sometimes even more.
What you call an illusion is reality, and the notion that it's an illusion is absurd.
By not limiting WIP they are actually making their employees less efficient.
Because supposedly, the new tooling (in this case, AI) allows them to produce the same or greater output despite doing less work. Workers are under the perennial illusion that they'll ever benefit from productivity gains, but that hasn't been the case since the 1970s.
Agreed, except that workers have never benefited from productivity gains, those always accrue to the employer.
The wage growth before the 1970s was mostly from the postwar boom, before jobs started to be moved out of the country. After that there was downward pressure on wages.
People can argue that the workers benefit from buying cheaper stuff, but that's on the other side of the equation.
1. It took a very long time. Short term effects were that massive amount of rural populations had to move to the cities in search of work and lived in destitution.
2. Things didn’t improve until workers formed unions and forced the capital to part with its profits. We finally had a brief moment in history where increased productivity improved lives for workers but then the decline in union membership (around 1970s) started the reversal pretty quickly.
3. There is a hyper focus on the industrial nations but at global level, it desplaced workers in poor and imperial colonies, who quite literally never recovered.
Or you have a good union
Um… work is not important. Value is important. Your employer is employing you because they expect your value to be higher than your cost. Moreover, if you are busy, your marginal value is likely declining. You are not taking the time to think about things that will actually have high impact. This to me is the biggest problem I see with AI assisted work, it makes it very easy to feel productive, when in reality you only worked on the easy low value things.
What’s more, is I have a very distinct experience working on a team years ago that decided to do less work. The team actively started turning down tickets and commiting to fewer tasks each week. And the counter intuitive thing, was that not only did that force only the higher value tickets get closed, we actually ended up closing more tickets. Was really wild to watch and experience.
You do much less work than a farm labourer 200 years ago and get paid more.
In my opinion what people think is that they will be more productive for the same amount of work, not have more work than previously and still only be approximately at the same level of productivity.
What AI has done to many is create more busywork than it solves in many cases, rather than making me more efficient for the same amount of working hours.
It’s been deployed widely enough that it’s becoming apparent where its lines are from genuine tool that boosts productivity to bolted on and makes things the same or worse, the pipeline for the work simply looking different
The idea is that each individual employee does more with less and therefore the price of the end product comes down, raising the standard of living for everybody.
Once a total economic conversion happens, which might take a decade, individual employees can definitely upskill and jump revenue bands.
Electric utility workers get paid 10x more than the lamplighters of yore.
Workers need an answer to this problem and we shouldn't wait until all the deleterious effects stack up to make the demand.
A 32 hour work week would be a really good start.
that's just more work in a shorter amount of time for the same money.
One of my strangest memories was a junior hire who decided after a few months that they didn’t like the work they were hired to do (which was exactly the job description, no surprises).
They informed their boss that the job wasn’t working out for them so the company would have to find some different work for them to do. There were a lot of difficult conversations trying to explain that they were hired to do a specific job that was needed, not to become part of a family where everyone belongs no matter what. This was a small company that didn’t have other open roles and wouldn’t have the budget to backfill even if they could move the person.
Yet it didn’t register. The person viewed their job as a jobs program, where they were chosen to join the company like a family and then it was the company’s job to find enjoyable work for them to do. They saw the paycheck as owed for their presence, and work produced for the company to be a nice bonus when it worked out.
It was a difficult situation until the person was finally let go because they could not accept the idea that their job was to do work in exchange for pay, and that the company wasn’t going to pay them if their work was not producing the necessary.
That’s the most extreme example but I’ve run into this a lot more in recent years. It got really bad again for the cohort of graduates who entered the job market post-COVID and thought getting jobs was always going to be this easy. I’ve been helping with resume review on and off and it’s stunning to see so many people who worked for 2-3 years post-COVID and can’t really tell you what work they did, but are so angry and shocked that their employers let them go.
What do you think about someone who gets a job, doesn't like it, then expects the employer to give them a different one?
I think this isn't helped by the fact that HR in alot of companies in the past decade or so has been going with this narrative. We are all a family together in this, stay late when needed, work extra/after-hours, etc.. Lots of places even have the expectation in this regard.
Of course this all goes away instantly when you get cold-emailed a layoff for example. I think its a systemic problem that originated some decade ago in an attempt to exploit people's judgment by creating self-doubt (ie: work more/harder under the premise that if you dont you are letting your "family" down), got perpetuated around alot, all job postings are worded like that nowadays too ("join our family") and it gives the newcomers to the job market the wrong expectation.
The worst offenders are all under IT companies as far as I can see, but because it's been going for so long it wouldn't surprise me if this is industry wide at this point for non-manual-labor job offers.
Company "mission statements" and such are a similar tactic. Though I think it's a bit less cynical, because the company leadership sometimes (rarely IMO) believes in the mission to a minor degree.
On the other hand, it's not in anyone's interest to tell them the accurate version, right?
If the same kid instead spent their evenings working unpaid overtime for the company, because they would see it analogically to helping a family in need... the boss probably wouldn't tell them that they are making a mistake.
Heck, if someone just started telling those kids "the company owes you nothing, and you owe nothing to the company, the relationship is purely transactional, either side will be replaced when convenient", probably many people would object.
So yeah, the kids are sometimes confused by the confusing messages they get.
Even that is unlikely. If you are self-employed in any remotely competitive industry, everyone is continuing to work the same amount and AI is boosting their productivity. If you just start slacking off, your product will become inferior.
This then extends to the employment situation as well.
Only way you can get less work is if you (or your employer) are in a monopoly with a strong moat.
Work is about the work written down in your work contract. If you manage to fulfill your contract by doing less, you still worked according to your contract so you should be able to expect the same amount of pay.
One can pretend it is very very complicated and invent many excuses. One can pretend not to notice only the uniparty is promoted on the Tee Vee and in the old media. One can pretend it doesn't cost many millions to pull the wool over your eyes.
Surely if increasing the minimum wage was impossible they wouldn't need to do all that? They would keep the money in their pocket. Apparently those with absolute control over everything experience it quite differently? They seem to still believe you can change things.
I've never worked a job where 40hrs was even enough, so any efficiency is instantly absorbed. That is the work world as I see it.
However I've run into in people and online and in real life whom's entire work life seems to be on the opposite side. It seems to be a rather large swath of people as well. They have never worked anywhere where they even have 40hrs of work a week.
Even last year I ran into a guy who gets paid 140k to by his own admission, basically update a handful of websites a few times a week. Those jobs are not coming back and those that exist are rapidly drying up. Thats the disconnect.
Suppose someone (pre AI) wrote 100k lines in 50 hrs/week of bad code but someone else wrote 10k good lines working 40 hours. In theory the former person would not be the high performer.
I agree many places don’t work that way, but also many do - so it’s maybe a hard discussion to have broadly and not scoped to the individuals limited experience.
I did a deep dive with AI last night and asked it: if we extrapolate the level of industrialization vs the rate of job loss due to AI, what year does it become cheaper to live off-grid in an independent community?
The AI's answer? Between 2030 and 2035.
Meaning that money will soon require so much productivity to acquire, that it will eventually become easier to produce goods and services independently and provide for ourselves.
The main reason is that currently labor represents 60% of the workforce while owners represent 40%. That is flipping to 45/55, meaning that labor is on the verge of losing its majority stakeholder status and collective bargaining power.
When that happens, we'll only be left with market forces propping up wages. Meaning that AI automation will gradually undermine wages to the point of subsistence.
When that happens, the opportunity cost of exiting the traditional economy drops to 0. Why would anyone work at the behest of an owner when they could be an owner themselves for the same or lesser labor?
Now, we could reject that and pretend that supply and demand curves won't be undermined by a falling cost of production. We could do that, but I'll leave that as an exercise for the reader who won't hear a word I'm saying anyway.
If we stay rooted in history and extrapolate, we're left with at least these options:
a) Allow free market capitalism to regress into authoritarian neofeudalism and create conditions similar to those of the early 20th century when robber baron industrialization caused widespread wage stagnation, leading to revolution and the seising of industry by displaced workers (communism or more accurately state capitalism like Russia's Bolshevik Revolution in 1917).
b) Raise taxes on the wealthy/capitalists (the owners of the means of production) through increased regulation, and use the proceeds to buy back and nationalize those economic inputs to fund public services and UBI (socialism like China's Second Centenary Goal or 2049 Plan).
c) Embrace the rapidly falling cost of technology to get ahead of widespread unemployment and bring about something like solarpunk, where open source tech like AI and 3D printing allow society to reduce the cost of living to nearly 0, so that people have the leisure time to embrace art, culture and the humanities to finally achieve widespread self-actualization (post-scarcity economics a.k.a. Star Trek when it eradicated poverty, hunger and war around 2113, 50 years after Zefram Cochrane achieved warp drive in 2063 and the Vulcans made first contact, as the story goes).
I'm partial to one of these, and have been putting my efforts into a home economics that can provide for at least one other person so that it can go viral. If we dream big enough, we could finally have what the wealthy and powerful will never have: enough.
If the wealthy and powerful continue buying land at the rate they are, through private equity firms for example, then we could end up in the neofeudalist scenario where us peasants can't acquire the capital to buy the land back (like in England before the Black Death around 1350 broke the nobles who could no longer afford essential workers). Then the only options left to us are taxes/regulation or revolution. Since the capitalists would have captured government by that point, the only option left may be revolution.
I could also see scenarios where we go full vanlife, although more vagrancy laws are being passed, and flock cameras could be used to enforce high registration fees to the point where it's no cheaper to live in one's car than to rent.
Admittedly those scenarios are pretty out there. Probably what will happen is something outside of what we expect. For example, the "rabble" may end up being the blue collar workers that we used to think of as the conservatives. They don't take any crap, so would probably requisition land to feed their families and guard it with firearms. If the authorities tried to take it back, armed conflict could very quickly squander any remaining goodwill held towards the capitalists.
We could play all this out with game theory, but I suspect that most scenarios end in revolution. That's probably why billionaires don't talk about the bunkers they're building. If they truly don't see a way out of the end times, then I don't know why they persist in doing what they're doing. At some point it would simply be in their financial best interest to raise their own taxes, or face the wrath of the people they formerly employed.
Want to do less work? Join a union and campaign for a 4-day work week or something. If the productivity benefit from AI is real, there's no reason you shouldn't be paid the same for less time because your output is the same/better.
The reason is economic growth for the company / the country.
This in turn is a more subtle point than it seems at first glance. Not having economic growth isn't really a desirable option for a company, a country, or in (the long run) the people involved.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Compression
Outside of that small 20ish year window, workers have never benefitted from increased productivity compared to the capitalists that have stolen $50 trillion from the masses:
https://time.com/5888024/50-trillion-income-inequality-ameri...
That said, ppp adjusted median houshold income has grown fairly steadily even in the US, even with growing inequality... so workers too have benefitted, just not as much as they could of the gains had been spread more evenly
What it seems to miss is that we get to walk around while doing some work, not the other way around. The alternative would be being stuck at a desk or in a meeting room, not quietly enjoying nature on a day off.
> quietly enjoying nature on a day off
You seem to have your concepts mixed up!
I for one much prefer to do work at a desk instead of wandering around.
Put another way: if my twin and I are both working at competing firms doing the same job, but I do it via satellite phone while hiking the PCT and he does it from in front of a keyboard, there is no way he's not getting more done, even with AI. The bandwidth of voice/text to speech is a tiny fraction of visual.
OP: "I had an amazing time doing something. "
Commenters: "No you didn't."
Or you would be unemployed and nervous about how you were going to pay your bills, replaced by someone willing to do the same work for lower cost while chained to said desk.
Of someone’s carried my ass around all day I’d be a physically atrophied and mentally addled maniac, on obese to boot if I’m stuffing my face the whole ride
Part of the dilemma with modern culture is that most people seem to be striving for and hoping technology will provide pleasure funk laziness and glut. But these things in and of themselves produce bad outcomes. I get why people really stressed out might daydream about that, but this is probably more indicative of being overworked than of the virtues of laziness and glut
Shocks Opencomm 2 headset or my Sony xm6 earbuds connected to a custom Android app. Android local Supertonic model for text to voice, private whisper on the server for voice to text. Local Nvidia Glider LLM for PII filtering of CRM related data. The Android app controls codex app server instances (mostly working with latest GPT model on high), switches between projects and threads based on voice commands, a ton of little tweaks to optimize my workflow. Every service except the public facing website runs behind a Wireguard VPN.
Also, you are telling me that you can get only with voice interaction an AI to write well engineered and maintainable code, something I've yet to see an AI be able to do, to me the result that they tend is at best the same of a junior developer, except that the junior developer learns, the AI continues to make the same mistakes (because it's context is limited, when it's full it's full).
The choice is do you want to walk or sit behind a desk when doing a task that needs human attention. It doesn't have to replace a nice "offline" outdoor activity.
It reminds me of the 7-minute abs scene in Something About Mary.
No, the next step is the employer to ask "why are you walking on a beach when you could be working?" and won't accept the answer that they are just orchestrating agents.
The only part the employer will focus on is "walking on a beach" and think "I don't pay you to walk on a beach."
(Caveat: OP might be running their own business. That's different. Also makes me rethink my life choices a bit).
(1) More tech doesn't save time if it's developed in the direction/dimension of more information flow. Because it seems that the best environment for creativity is a somewhat restricted environment of information. And if one needs to engage with information to take advantage of this new tech, it actually impedes creativity.
(2) A lot of the grunt work that we seem to be automating also encourages creativity. From what I've observed from many artists and programmers (I hang out with both), it seems that creativity strikes best when it's not forced, and the "downtime" doing grunt work actually accelerates it.
So I think that AI breaks these two principles (minimal information and the removal of the crucial grunt work), and actually makes us work more for less.
The only gains seem to be those short-term kinds (a program can be made faster, rewards can be reaped by senior people who have thought about stuff for a while), rather than encouraging a healthy environment of creativity....
Every technology, even technologies that are, from the limited and naive perspective of the user, "free" (LLms can do what I used to do a lot faster than I can, and I don't need to maintain them right?) is not actually free. All technologies bring about their own demands and need for maintenance. Often they don't actually eliminate labor, they just shift it to new areas.
Consider LLMs. Even at the user level they have created their own information ecosystem and new grunt work and overhead. Now you have to prompt, you need to organize and manage context, skills, memory. You need to keep up with model releases. You need to be more vigilant reviewing things, the list goes on.
At a higher level they create even more toil, we need to maintain vast electrical supports and data infrastructure, data needs to be amassed continually for training, the information environment needs to be filtered and sorted more than ever as it gets flooded with slop.
This is the grand irony of technology. It's actually pretty rare for it to just be a total labor saving device. More often its real benefit is rearrangement of the world's structure and resources to move labor to more optimal places for certain needs (for example water supply systems).
This rearrangement also often rearranged financial resources and power. The big problem with LLMs today is that this aspect of the rearrangement is one of great concentration, and it's concerning (employers having a lot more power to extract labor from employees is one example)
So on average I would say I'm getting about as much work done now as before ai.
Until the agents decide to start messing with snapshots.
It can help if you can't remember where something is, but then you'll never learn so I try to action everything myself, but again agents like to just blab on constantly and overstep.
I found I was doing bulk changes etc with it, seemed helpful until I realised I could just use dsh as Ive done in the past and basically do the same thing with way less resources and more consistency.
It's a laugh for now, whilst its "free".
The way to better leverage this is to build your own company, I know this is not as simple as saying it but the gap is widening and it doesn't look good for employees.
"The pitch was that AI would give us our time back. Write less boilerplate, delegate the boring parts, go home earlier."
Who pitched this? Where was this argued?
And for what it's worth, our entire industry was pitched as a way for businesses to do more with less. Our raison d'être is that we would automate and enhance parts of business so you no longer need the rooms of analysts, the constant inventory manpower churn, rooms of typists, mailrooms, and on and on and on.
It's a bit rich for us to clutch pearls now. We exist as an industry to put other people out of work, and many of us have made a lot of money doing just that. There is zero surprise that businesses would like to put us out of work if they could.
And even among our industry, many of us spent much of our time trying to reduce the need for other programmers. Doesn't the website builder maker put web developers out of business? Framework vendors are replacing lots of internal code that could keep big teams employed for decades! Microsoft and other big firms are constantly trying to figure out what the many employers of software dev teams are doing...so they can replace them. I mean, we all do that, trying to automate and simplify the need for other teams to exist.
The "pitch" of AI is that it's a new tool that your competitors are going to be using, so you had better get onboard now too, in a classic adapt or die choice. And...this is largely true! You can't argue it away. You can mythologize a never existed history where software used to be perfect in the pre-AI era. You can't moralize about slop or pretend it's all a mirage. It's all just foolish rhetoric that groups all cluck and upvote to make each other feel good, while the rest of the world moves on.
So the result is noticeably worse, but you basically must do it, because the efficiency gains are inescapable. This makes the work seem even more pointless, adding to the feeling that you're working more and accomplishing less.
And hopefully it will to that to all labor, so we can finally crumple up the workers and throw them into the bin too!
14 years ago: "The Battle for Raw Materials - A Company on the Hunt for Aluminum" (DE)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rd1Fern6JQ8
few days ago: "Dispute Over Aluminum Scrap: European Industry Calls for Export Restrictions" (DE)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ucgyfee6eNk
AI gives me the ability to do that stuff faster so I can focus more on the 20% and the quality of what I'm doing, not the nuance of formatting a document.
Khm, ackshually... any documentation work is best not left to LLMs. They are excellent at generating many words with little value. Even sketching a doc and running through an LLM although a bit better than just a prompt "generate docs from this code" still suffers from similar problems. I prefer to write briefly, but doing it myself.
OTOH - formatting and other stuff not related to content, this is great to delegate, even though the results are often mediocre, but I really don't care about that at this point.
And a corollary being that without any time spent on the "mundane", almost every single aspect of the work becomes the genuinely consequential decision-making steps.
Which I find exhausting.
But what happens when the 20% quality margin that we lost aggregates over different layers of infrastructure and compounds into brokenness and chaos?
It’s not like companies never shipped broken shit before AI
During the day, I am using Opus 5.5 to develop solutions our team would never think was possible two years ago.
Ar night I am watching my 5yo learn how to read and do math. The sense of accomplishment he shows being able to add double digits is contagious.
Nothing is mundane. One man's basic work is another man's magic. When we have appreciation for each other, we advance more as a species.
I switched to a dumb flip phone as my primary device and now my work mostly only gets done on my computer during work hours. I obviously still have my iPhone and I sometimes take it on walks during the day if I want to have a productive walk, but it mostly stays plugged in in my drawer.
I always thought I wanted to be constantly connected to my dev environment and be able to work from anywhere, but it turns out that adds way too much noise to my life and is a net negative. I was constantly thinking about work and then able to act on those thoughts so the cycle just continued until I fell asleep.
You and I have different definitions of a productive walk. To me a walk is productive if I get my heart beating fast. Bonus points if I see an unusual bird or insect.
I know, this ship has long sailed, but I just can't get used and accept this kind of writing.
Meanwhile, I get to do more of what I enjoy. Of course, it's always tempting to let Codex work on the core product itself - but I resisted that urge so far as I feel a strong sense of ownership and craftsmanship - plus its the thing I actually like doing.
I ran a AI detector through your blog and most of it is written by AI.
> Should tech workers supercharged by AI be able to take more time off? Meta's chief technology officer, Andrew Bosworth, said he doesn't think so. [1]
> A Meta employee asked Bosworth if AI productivity gains could be channeled into more vacation time — specifically, the revival of "Meta Days," a since-canceled holiday program that allowed staff to take a few extra days off. [1]
> In response, Bosworth said that while working at Meta isn't easy, that time should be used to build more products for its users [1]
> "stop asking about Meta Days. It's very dumb." [1]
[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/meta-cto-andrew-bosworth-ai-...
'You should be able to work 7x as hard now'
Not sure where he got the multiplier, but I gently tried to educate him what AI actually does and does not do over time.
There’s a life hack for this and it’s called “being paid below market average and your employer having no better options.”
If this even needs to be said, OP’s experience as a Principal Engineer and VP of Technology is not a typical experience. I would expect a VP of Technology to be a very high-stress job.
But I would also expect a VP of Technology to stop doing technical work and start being a strategic leader. Another mistake on OP’s part. The worst leaders at my company are the ones who think they should still be submitting PRs.
Both of us feel the AI fatigue from time to time.
My personal analysis is that the speed went up, with this the bandwith of different topics. Other factors that weigh in are a not lowering learning curve inside the heavily iterating AI sector and the chattiness of the Agents. If not stopped they produce so much facts that it kills me. I started constantly working on this to stop the waterfall of facts and get ontop of it.
Still not succeeded :)
Even though everyone has the same tools and it can clearly be seen not everyone has the same output.