Your Prize for Saving Time at Work with AI: More Work(wsj.com)
wsj.com
Your Prize for Saving Time at Work with AI: More Work
https://www.wsj.com/lifestyle/careers/ai-work-free-time-51c8c92a
23 コメント
This has always been how it goes. The industry revolution. The digital revolution. They all increase output, but the hours of input largely stayed the same. I’m not sure why anyone expected any different.
That's true - except rather than just rolling over and accepting it, maybe the workforce as a whole should wise up so they dont get totally fleeced a third time?
Because capitalism/free market rewards companies that do this behaviour then a unified collective coordinated action among the workers will never happen, so the next best alternative we have is to discourage blind, jaded acceptance : and encourage the rebellious message that maybe, just maybe, SOME, nah, a decent chunk, of the rewards can go to the workforce itself.
Because capitalism/free market rewards companies that do this behaviour then a unified collective coordinated action among the workers will never happen, so the next best alternative we have is to discourage blind, jaded acceptance : and encourage the rebellious message that maybe, just maybe, SOME, nah, a decent chunk, of the rewards can go to the workforce itself.
This would be true, but we now have a globally market. So all it takes is one country to reject this and use AI, while putting in the same (or more) work, and they will win.
You can view this as a negative, but it’s also an argument against layoffs. If AI makes a person 20% more productive, laying off 20% of the workforce is short sighted. If everyone is increasing productivity by 20%, they will need their full workforce to do that. Laying off 20%, or cutting back 20% of the hours, will leave the company at their old output.
Of course, in reality the saving probably won’t be 20%, at least not in the short-term. We could also probably cut 20% of our work week and maintain similar productivity by simply avoiding interruptions, pointless meetings, and other such nonsense. But that’s a harder culture change than saying, “go use AI.”
You can view this as a negative, but it’s also an argument against layoffs. If AI makes a person 20% more productive, laying off 20% of the workforce is short sighted. If everyone is increasing productivity by 20%, they will need their full workforce to do that. Laying off 20%, or cutting back 20% of the hours, will leave the company at their old output.
Of course, in reality the saving probably won’t be 20%, at least not in the short-term. We could also probably cut 20% of our work week and maintain similar productivity by simply avoiding interruptions, pointless meetings, and other such nonsense. But that’s a harder culture change than saying, “go use AI.”
While it's true that we are competing in a global market, perhaps we shouldn't be racing to the bottom at the expense of our labor class.
I generally agree with this, but we’d need systems in place to incentivize companies to keep local workers and for customers to support local companies. There are a lot of politics at play.
Unless the country can be completely self-sufficient, even that is not enough. If a country decides to cut working hours and other's won't, it will eventually not be able to afford the resources it needs from other countries because the countries that squeeze their workers will have more money to pay for them. I believe these competition based systems will be our downfall. Nobody can do anything that doesn't improve their position compared to competing countries/companies/people, even if it would make things better overall. If you do, you lose and die out. We will use all our resources, kill each other, etc in pursuit of victory for as long as the systems of this planet can support it and then we die.
Those are called tariffs and other barriers, and in many sectors they work very well. I live in a country (South Korea) where such barriers have been enormously successful in keeping tech jobs and revenue inside the country. Literally everyone here has benefited from it, it's a huge win-win-win; consumers get human customer service, properly localized services and much less enshittification, politicians have a success to point at and get more tax revenue, the public gets jobs. Everyone gets sovereignty.
This also extends past tech. Forcing physical companies to set up a local subsidiary/do JVs has done the same. Examples abound, Starbucks being a big one. Forcing them to do a JV means a huge portion of the revenue of the biggest coffee chain in the country stays inside the country, as well as plenty of office jobs. Otherwise everything but the actual in-store jobs would have once again flowed to the US.
China of course has done the same, to similar success. Imagine if they hadn't, and just let e.g. Meta be their social media platform of choice, Google their search engine, Amazon their shopping platform. It'd be nothing but a massive net loss to everyone involved but those tech firms; including the Chinese public as the state would impose the exact same censorship and rules on those companies, as they currently do with the remaining ones.
That other countries haven't done so and just let SV walk over them in order to appease the US - who has now turned out not to be their friend after all, surprise surprise! - is very unfortunate.
This incredible imbalance is what has let the average HN FAANG employee make absolute bank at the cost of the rest of the world, so I'm not expecting this to be particularly popular here :)
This also extends past tech. Forcing physical companies to set up a local subsidiary/do JVs has done the same. Examples abound, Starbucks being a big one. Forcing them to do a JV means a huge portion of the revenue of the biggest coffee chain in the country stays inside the country, as well as plenty of office jobs. Otherwise everything but the actual in-store jobs would have once again flowed to the US.
China of course has done the same, to similar success. Imagine if they hadn't, and just let e.g. Meta be their social media platform of choice, Google their search engine, Amazon their shopping platform. It'd be nothing but a massive net loss to everyone involved but those tech firms; including the Chinese public as the state would impose the exact same censorship and rules on those companies, as they currently do with the remaining ones.
That other countries haven't done so and just let SV walk over them in order to appease the US - who has now turned out not to be their friend after all, surprise surprise! - is very unfortunate.
This incredible imbalance is what has let the average HN FAANG employee make absolute bank at the cost of the rest of the world, so I'm not expecting this to be particularly popular here :)
Yeah every time workers do this, the ruling class sends in the cops to beat everyone into submission, gives everyone some pittance (maybe we'll get paid sick days for hourly office workers this time!), and everyone shrugs and says "well it could be worse."
The luddites literally attempted this, btw, and now everyone mocks them for trying to slow the inevitable exploitation of labor by technology.
The luddites literally attempted this, btw, and now everyone mocks them for trying to slow the inevitable exploitation of labor by technology.
I've seen this sentiment come up multiple times, but it's theoretically impossible in current economic and political conditions.
A world-wide revolution may be the only way to change. Or wait for the inequality between nations to erase.
A world-wide revolution may be the only way to change. Or wait for the inequality between nations to erase.
And guess where the increased earnings from your increase in productivity goes.
The issue here, is that this removes a lot of tasks that allowed a person to relax a little mentally. So now we are working the same hours, but we need to be switched on for much longer during these hours. Could this result in more burnout and mental fatigue?
I think it does and this has been a pattern since the beginning of automation and maybe even technology in general. We look down on factory workers tightening the same screw a hundred times or dishwashers cleaning the same dishes every day as if it’s somehow wasteful to not run your mind 100% of the time but maybe we’ve got it all backwards.
This kind of specialization can be bad for factory workers as well. Doing the same motion over and over can lead to repetitive stress injury.
I think it's true for any worker that performing the same activity over and over can lead to issues that wouldn't occur if work was more varied. That isn't necessarily in a companies interest though since for them it's easier to train people on one task, and they're easier to measure or replace.
The predictable and measurable thing for developers is thinking and cranking out features.
I think it's true for any worker that performing the same activity over and over can lead to issues that wouldn't occur if work was more varied. That isn't necessarily in a companies interest though since for them it's easier to train people on one task, and they're easier to measure or replace.
The predictable and measurable thing for developers is thinking and cranking out features.
I mean the time allowance to complete each step in factory work is the maximum the human brain can process with the minimum of scrap. Sometime stages/operation might have a spaced out flow like driving but most can actually be really mentally taxing, just with zero fulfillment.
The root question is: what made productivity gains decouple from labor earnings?
https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/
https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/
The reason is tons of graphs, bunch of arrows, zero words ?
Altough I’m not an economist, it seems that the events shown in the graph coincide with the suspension of dollar - gold convertibility until then regulated by Bretton Woods monetary system
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bretton_Woods_system
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nixon_shock
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bretton_Woods_system
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nixon_shock
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LLM with agent wrappers, currently claude code, has really helped my bootstrapping efforts, but I don't have much incentive to use it at work. I'll just get more work done and get handed more work, without any kind of matching pay bump.
It’s weird all these office jobs are mostly unevenly distributed UBI with weird rules around it.
Sort of not much to say. This was an obvious issue right from the start.
30h week please
Welcome to capitalism, same as it's always been