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AI is making us work more
- cranberryturkey 11mo agoit really is and its costing me about $100/day too
- coreyp_1 11mo agoHow? (Genuine question... I only pay for a handful of AI services, which is <$2/day.) I'm not doubting you, btw... I've seen others here on HN also saying that they burn through money with AI, I guess I'm just missing something. In fact, the geek in me absolutely wants to know what's going on, because you have probably found something that I would love to know about! :)
- cranberryturkey 11mo agoi use claude
- dustingetz 11mo agowhen the bottleneck is communication (coordination costs scale polynomial with number of nodes in the graph), the optimal strategy is to have fewer nodes working harder. If AI makes individual nodes more effective, then in terms of people we’re going to eliminate jobs and concentrate effort. The mean job effort (including the unemployed) may be halftime while the median is 996 and the mode is 0. Whether it works is more of a question of policy and how deflationary the technology is - if energy, water, food, shelter becomes too cheap to meter due to rapid technology advances, then i guess maybe that is how governments stave off revolution and survive? Otherwise - civil unrest, etc
- daymanstep 11mo agoCould you explain how AI is going to make energy, water, food, and shelter cheaper ?
- swsieber 11mo agoI didn't read that as AI making energy, water, food and shelter cheaper. I read it as "technology (generally) making energy, water, food and shelter will determine how the AI driven job changes are received"
- deleted 11mo ago[deleted]
- burnte 11mo agoMy follow up would be, "if AI is doing so many 'menial' jobs, even if AI makes everything cheap, how will unemployed people afford anything?"
- deleted 11mo ago[deleted]
- ModernMech 11mo agoIt's not a coincidence the people loudest in pushing AI are the same people who build high walls around their San Francisco homes. They plan to do the same thing around larger chunks of society. There is no plan for people who are unemployed and unable to afford anything. The expectation is the walls will be built high enough that their suffering can be hidden. Someone recently said there will be "sustainable abundance" but this is magical thinking. There will be abundance for people in one class and death and poverty for people in the other class. But the abundance will not be "sustained" -- it will be fueled by the suffering of the under class.
- Legend2440 11mo agoWe've done this before, and it turned out great. In the industrial revolution, tractors and machine looms and steam engines did all the old 'menial' jobs. We just invented new jobs that pay better with all the extra wealth created by automation. The middle class grew and quality of life skyrocketed. It was arguably the best thing to ever happen to the world.
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- PKop 11mo ago> energy, water, food, shelter becomes too cheap AI is currently making energy more expensive. Shelter and these other commodities aren't made cheaper if population expands along with any capacity increases (like lanes on a highway). Lots of "ifs" in this statement that don't seem to match with observation of reality. The point of the discussion here is that AI in many ways is making workers less efficient.
- palata 11mo ago> if energy, water, food, shelter becomes too cheap to meter due to rapid technology advances "If", of course, but it's all but certain. The energy situation, today, is that we as a species depend on fossil fuels, and they are depleting. And we don't have a solution to replace them (renewables are not remotely replacing oil today, those who believe it say something like "we've done 1% of the job, it proves that we will reach 100%!"). AI is making us use more energy, and our use of energy is what is killing the world. Again, the consequences of abundant energy are global warming, mass extinction and political instability as the fossil fuels get less and less available.
- zb3 11mo agoThe page doesn't load, so I'll just add that we need AI that can clean up after AI.. but this might be difficult, because AI accepting AI output as input seems to be more likely to get "infected" and return the same AI crap.
- someothherguyy 11mo agohttps://archive.ph/qb2h8 https://archive.ph/qb2h8
- rhetocj23 11mo agoThe recursive self improving AI is the pipe dream.
- byyoung3 11mo agountil it works
- baconbrand 11mo agoyes… just one more data center… one more model… one million more gallons of water… it’s going to work any second now, I swear… we definitely can get human level output without human level intelligence… i promise…
- byyoung3 11mo agoim not a sam altman hypebeast. My point is we are so early. Nobody thought todays LLM's were possible 3 years ago.
- rhetocj23 11mo agoMy use of LLMs has declined not increased. Some of us are way ahead of the curve of understanding what these things can and cant do, and will not do due to fundamental issues the technology faces.
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- anarticle 11mo agoYes, this is why it's better to be a contractor/individual right now. You need to capture this efficiency yourself. You have access to the same tools faster than BigCos, so go hard in the paint. If you estimate 3h, and it takes 15m it's up to you how to reconcile this. Personally I bill the 3h.
- SoftTalker 11mo agoThat's only going to be possible for a short time, as your competitors will bill 15 minutes and you'll have to explain why you need 3h.
- mettamage 11mo ago> You need to capture this efficiency yourself. One could simply work less. Even if you're full in the office, you can just use that extra time to learn something new.
- 1dom 11mo agoPage doesn't load for me. I'm in the UK, not sure if geoblocked. But a response to the title: "_buzzword tech_ is making us work more" - it's rarely the tech making us work more, it's normally the behaviour and attitude of businesses trying to profit from the tech that makes life hard for everyone.
- palata 11mo agoAdding a data point: it's not loading in the US either.
- sfitz 11mo agoprobably hugged to death
- RemiGaudin 11mo agoNot loading from France too.
- deleted 11mo ago[deleted]
- gdulli 11mo ago"Making" can mean different things. Yes, the new technology directly increases work by introducing new categories of tasks and a new learning treadmill to consume the time savings. Yes, the new technology does indirectly make us work harder by raising the expectations from management of how much we can get done in the same amount of time.
- DrewADesign 11mo agoCatalysts and causes might be entirely unrelated in a vacuum, but in context, they’re inextricably linked. In the real world, if the effects weren’t genuinely unforeseeable, manufacturers can’t absolve themselves that easily.
- greener_grass 11mo agoIt does just seem to be "down". But such is that state of the UK that I had simply assumed the government had censored it. Remarkable how quickly expectations have shifted.
- iamleppert 11mo agoThe absolute worst place to be right now is in a B tech startup. Not only do you need to build some kind of app or product, you also need to build some kind of AI feature into the product. The users don't want it and never asked for it. It sucks all the resources out of your actual product that you should be focusing on, doesn't actually work or works non deterministically, but you are held to the same standards if it was another kind of software. And the only lever you have to pull is a lengthy model re-training or fine tuning/development cycle. The suits don't understand AI or what it takes to make it successful. They were sold on the hype that AI is going to save money, and forgot to budget for the team of AI engineers you'll need, infrastructure for training, extensive data annotations and reams of data that most startups don't have. Tell me again how this isn't pure hell and the cuck chair?
- CaptainOfCoit 11mo ago> And the only lever you have to pull is a lengthy model re-training or fine tuning/development cycle. Is this really how professionals work on such a problem today? The times I'd had a tune the responses, we'd gather bad/good examples, chuck it into a .csv/directory, then create an automated pipeline to give us a percentage of success rate for what we expect, then start tuning the prompt, parameters for inference and other things in an automated manner. As we discover more bad cases, add them to the testing pipeline. Only if it was something that was very wrong would you reach for model re-training or fine-tuning, or when you know up front the model wouldn't be up for the exact task you have in mind.
- iamleppert 11mo agoGot it, professionals don't fine tune their models and you can do everything via prompt engineering and some script called optimze.py that fiddles with API parameters for your call to OpenAI. So simple!
- singron 11mo agoIt depends. Fine-tuning is a significant productivity drag over in-context learning, so you shouldn't attempt it lightly. If you are working on low-latency tasks or need lower marginal costs, then fine-tuning a small model might be the only way to achieve your goals.
- tokyolights2 11mo agoSounds similar to [Jevon's Paradox](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox), although here the resource is developer time.
- elcapithanos 11mo agoI did not anticipate this much traffic, working on restoring it right now
- Narciss 11mo agoI’ve heard that GPT 5 Pro is great at fixing bugs.
- gossipaddress 11mo ago[dead]
- sh3rl0ck 11mo agoAh yes, the good ol' HN hug o' death.
- SomaticPirate 11mo agoCurious about your hosting stack? I'm always curious if a jam stack site can handle these big surges better. Or is this just a single VPS?
- WorldPeas 11mo agoMaybe it's hosted on a disposable vape
- lolive 11mo agoMore AI = more efficiency = more time saved = more meetings = less efficiency. #andRepeat
- Kudos 11mo agoYou're confusing system efficiency and individual efficiency.
- moneywoes 11mo agosite is down
- everdrive 11mo agoI was never excited for automation. Automation doesn't mean we do less. It means that we do as much work, and now also the work has a higher complexity ceiling; you need to understand the systems that are being automated, and need to maintain the automation. More things are possible, but everything is more complex, and of course, you still need to work 40 hours a week. Products don't get better either, but that's more of a "shareholder value" problem than it is a specific technology problem. And yes, I only talked about automation, but the same high-level issues apply to LLMs, but with different downsides: you need to check the LLM output which becomes a bigger topic, and then potentially your own skills stagnate as you rely on LLMs more and more.
- deleted 11mo ago[deleted]
- Aurornis 11mo agoAutomation is a broad topic. At home I save time because my dishwasher automates washing my dishes. The clothes washer and dryer are a lot easier than doing it by hand. The fruit and vegetable at the grocery store are a lot cheaper than they would be without automation. I think individuals who get comfortable in their jobs don’t like automation arriving at their station because it upends the order of things just as they were feeling comfortable and stable. Being adaptable now is more important than ever. > Products don't get better either, but that's more of a "shareholder value" problem than it is a specific technology problem. This is broadly false. Your laptop is unquestionably better because it was constructed with the help of automated CNC machines and PCB assembly as opposed to workers manually populating PCBs. Some companies can try to use automation to stay in place with lower headcount, but they’ll be left behind by competition that uses automation to move forward. Once that leap happens it becomes accepted as the new normal, so it never feels like automation is making changes.
- everdrive 11mo ago>Being adaptable now is more important than ever. I do actually plan on getting old, and as much as I would love to retire before I'm no longer adaptable, I'm not so sure my finances or my brain will comply. >At home I save time because my dishwasher automates washing my dishes. I don't think this fits my analogy, because you personally can go watch TV or read a book or exercise given the time that is saved by the dishwasher. At work, you must be at work doing something else, and the "something else" is seldom a real improvement. If I could automate my job and then go on a hike I'd be a lot more excited about it.
- rodolphoarruda 11mo agoSite is down to me, but I agree with the argument. I speak for myself: I think AI has removed a lot of small barriers that would naturally slow my work down, increasing dissatisfaction and stress with it. Without barriers, productivity increases and with it, work satisfaction. It's just nice to get things done(tm) faster and at a lower effort due to the quality of the virtual assistant.
- Narciss 11mo agoHopefully they get AI to fix it
- dionian 11mo agoSame experience here. spend more hours babysitting AI but able to do 3x the work while i wait. and willing to start new challenges that take a lot of effort without the new tools.
- deleted 11mo ago[deleted]
- themanmaran 11mo agoThis is certainly something I have felt. The idea of spending a day or two debugging a small problem, coming up with the right regex, or setting up boilerplate is all gone. Now it's 30 seconds, and you're right back to the high level "what do I build next" thinking. Which is great, and has unblocked so much productivity, but I do miss some of the grunt work. I feel like it helped spawn new ideas and gave you some time to think through implementation.
- candiddevmike 11mo agoYou don't have the epiphany that you're going down a dead end road anymore ("there has to be a better way"). Now codebases will be littered with dead end roads.
- rodolphoarruda 11mo ago> coming up with the right regex Yes, and this a meme I have in my mind of LLM engineers talking to each other and a balloon: "If we could just get the right regex done in a few seconds we'd win the entire global programming community."
- nakamoto_damacy 11mo agoAI is making us work harder, not smarter? I think it's both actually, I'm working harder and smarter with AI. SMH.
- gdulli 11mo agoYou're living the dream, bro.
- nakamoto_damacy 11mo agoLOL. Someone got the joke. After getting downvoted by those who did not. SMH.
- gdulli 11mo agoFor what it's worth I responded sarcastically thinking you were being serious, because... gestures vaguely around
- nakamoto_damacy 11mo agoThe SMH did not give it way? On the SMH as a semiotic, funny how IMHO evolved into IMO and SMDH evolved into SMH. Some of us refuse to be humble or self deprecating.
- rightbyte 11mo agoI though SMH meant 'somehow' until looking it up now.
- josefritzishere 11mo agoCan't get to the site. Hug of death?
- yawz 11mo agoCurrently giving 504 Gateway Timeout.
- hirvi74 11mo agoWhen I was younger, I was given a warning about the world of work. I was told, "The reward for digging the biggest hole is a bigger shovel." As jaded as that may be, I believe LLMs for many will become our bigger shovels.
- consumer451 11mo agoI know it's making me work more, and I am thrilled. I have not shipped production code for 20 years, and it was desktop back then. I am now able to single-handedly create webapp MVPs, one of which is getting traction. If anything actually takes-off, there will certainly be need for a real dev to take over. Also, my commits are not "vibe coded." I have read every single loc, and found so many issues that I am stunned that "vibe coding" is actually a thing. I do let the models run wild on prototypes though. I think that I happen to be in some magical sweet spot as a person who knows the words, kept up with tech, but not the syntax of framework xyz. I thought this sweet spot was very transient, and I am very happy that the tools appear to be reaching a plateau for now, so I still have at least another year of being useful. Since agentic dev tools arrived, I am having the time of my life while gladly working 60hrs per week. I realize that I am an outlier, but is anyone else in this same boat? If you have product ideas, is this not the best time ever to build? All of our ideas are being indirectly subsidized by billions of VC & FAANG dollars. That is pretty freaking cool.
- CharlesW 11mo ago> I realize that I am an outlier, but is anyone else in this same boat? Yep. I have a computer science background but have always been "the most technical product management/marketing guy in the room". Now I'm having lots of fun building a SaaS and a mobile app to my standards, plus turning out micro-projects like pwascore.com in a day or two. It turns out that I love designing/architecting products, just not the grind-y coding bits. Because I create lots of tests, use code analysis tools, etc., I'm confident that I'm creating higher quality code than (for example) what most outsourced coders are creating without LLMs.
- insane_dreamer 11mo agoSounds like these are hobby projects that you're doing on your own. The point of AI making us work more is referring to people at companies, not for themselves. Employers are capturing the productivity benefits (if they exist), not employees.
- consumer451 11mo ago
- featherless 11mo agoAI is an amphetamine.
- OptionOfT 11mo agoFor me, it is making my work miserable. I'm seeing amount of changes needed to produce new features when coding with these AI tools constantly increasing, due to the absence of a proper foundation, and due to the willingness of people to accept it, with the idea that 'we can change it quickly'. It has become acceptable to push those changes in a PR and present them as your own, filled with filler comments that are instant tech debt, because they just repeat the code. And while I actually don't care who writes the code, I do expect the PR author to properly understand the code and most importantly, the impact on the codebase. In my role as a mentor I now spend a lot of time looking at things written and wonder: Did the author write this, or did they AI? Because if the code is wrong, this question changes how the conversation goes. It also impacts the kind of energy I'm willing to put in into educating the other person as to how things can be improved.
- jonator 11mo agoThe issue you described is an issue with AI?
- lezojeda 11mo ago[dead]
- figers 11mo agoI reject commits like this, make them re-write it and explain why such and such coding will never be allowed in our code base. Forces the change in coding practice.
- bakugo 11mo ago> I reject commits like this Which is a great idea until your superior asks why you're holding back the vibe coders and crippling their 100x productivity by rejecting their PRs instead of just going with the flow.
- butlike 11mo agoWhich is the hill you get paid to die on as a manager. Die on the hill and ask for your severance package.
- _pdp_ 11mo agoI had to post this because it’s a related to OP’s post https://chatbotkit.com/reflections/why-ai-coding-agents-create-more-work-not-less https://chatbotkit.com/reflections/why-ai-coding-agents-crea... The tldr is that AI works like multiplier on both sides of the equation. Not only we will work more but we will get even more stressed because things will be moving at increasing speed - perpetually - until we hit some limit of course .
- daxfohl 11mo agoJust wait till AI starts taking managerial roles. Instead of annual reviews it'll be hourly reviews. "You only have five background AI coding sessions in progress right now. PIP!"
- rightbyte 11mo agoMS' Recall is probably some build up for automatic performance reviews.
- jihadjihad 11mo agoFascinating to see this much attention toward a post nobody can seem to access.
- julianlam 11mo agoSometimes all you need is a headline
- cbhl 11mo agohttps://archive.is/qb2h8 https://archive.is/qb2h8
- xg15 11mo agoI'd like to know, from people who really believe that we just need to invent the right technology, then we could all do 20 hour weeks and spend the rest of the time in leisure, what keeps them from doing that right now, and what exactly they believe that miracle tech would change. It seems relatively obvious to me that if a society has work as its cultural core then no amount of productivity increase will get rid of work - it would destabilize the entire society before it could do so.
- fainpul 11mo agoSome people seem to be under the impression that they (the employees) and their employers are a team, working towards the same goal (a better life with more spare time for everyone). I just wrote this comment in another thread, but it fits here too: The development, production and use of machines to replace labour is driven by employers to produce more efficiently, to gain an edge and make more money. You, as an employee, are just means to an end. "The company" doesn't care about you and you will not reap the benefits of whatever efficiency improvements the future brings.
- xg15 11mo agoYep. But new technologies like this are often flanked by press coverage that frames them as beneficial for employees because then they'd have to work less... I'm not sure if those articles are genuinely naive or simply propaganda.
- ashanoko 11mo agoTo be honest the self confidence of ai is rubbing off on the species in a good way. As in suddenly there is somebody there who beliefs in you, unlike that family that constantly sabotage you, the partner that tries to keep your ego in a "handleable due to absence of success" shape. And all those ideologies that want to cripple any one standing out, they can take a hike. So what if its confidently wrong, at least it beliefs more in you then the rest of the species.
- scuff3d 11mo agoWhat...
- cindyllm 11mo ago[dead]
- inetknght 11mo agoYou're absolutely right! [0] [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44885398 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44885398
- lovich 11mo agoBuddy, be careful of going down the ai psychosis path. No one is 100% correct all the time. Leaning on an AI model because it glazes you 24/7 and does tell you that you are correct 100% of the time doesn’t mean it right about you, its just a seductive trap to fall into and the models are very good at telling you the next thing you want to hear
- mousefriend 11mo ago> So what if its confidently wrong, at least it beliefs more in you then the rest of the species. I have to believe this is satire.
- BirAdam 11mo agoIf the history of the world since the Industrial Revolution can teach anything, it is that while the machines took much of the work, they did not shorten the workday. Instead, we all just work more. Since the Information Revolution, some people get off work, go home, and continue to work. It never stops. The companies of the world will never tolerate giving people more time off. Why do that when people could just get more done in fewer total days? Personally, in the times I've had the most time off, I find that I am more productive, but that doesn't matter to any employer.
- onlyrealcuzzo 11mo ago> If the history of the world since the Industrial Revolution can teach anything, it is that while the machines took much of the work, they did not shorten the workday I guess you missed the part where people worked 7 days a week and 10 hours per day, and we didn't have ~20% of the population retired. Unless we break social contracts, in 30 years ~40% of the population will be retired in large parts of The West and China. If you're still working 40 hours a week, doing basically nothing but posting on HN, going to the gym, having lunch for hour+ breaks, for most of the work day - you might think nothing has changed. But for 10-20% more of the population to not be working, there's a huge number of hours that aren't being worked. It's just that most of the gains are going to one group of people. Most of us will be in that group by that time...
- chrisulloa 11mo agoA lot of people work hours like that in China and in America like 996 workers or service workers. You’ll find that as the middle class is wiped out more folks will retire later or not at all.
- pk455 11mo agoPast HN discussions of the Ironies of Automation (Bainbridge): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41800036 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41800036
- someothherguyy 11mo agoI think a lot of people always worked this way. On the other hand, LLMs in hands of a misinformed team member who doesn't actually give any fucks whatsoever, is like a time bomb waiting to torpedo a project.
- fogzen 11mo ago> What keeps us awake are the stories we tell ourselves about what it means to be "productive". I thought it was threat of being fired and left without means to pay for rent and food? The ruling class will work you as much as possible – to the point of death – unless stopped via labor co-ordination, mass strikes, and force. The 40-hour week w/ fair overtime, fair breaks, etc. could be enforced and expanded to include software engineering.
- dougdonohoe 11mo agoI worked in the Bay Area during the dot-com boom and large swathes of time were effectively 996. I was generally irritable, gained a bunch of weight (up to 220; am now 170), and eventually burned out. What was old is now new. Perhaps AI encourages 996'ing, but people will still burn out just the same.
- throwaway314155 11mo ago> According to a recent Wired investigation, AI start-ups in Silicon Valley have begun to adopt 996-style work schedules. The Wired article seems to be mostly focused on situations where employees are compensated for working this lifestyle. Aside from that - they discuss how AI _founders_ are doing this to keep up with things. The former surprises me (a little - it wouldn't surprise me to see companies doing this _somewhere_ in the US pre-ChatGPT). The latter doesn't really surprise me at all. Typical founder hustle culture. A better title would be AI is making startup founders hustle harder [and they are trying to normalize this workload across their (small but growing) companies). NOT "AI Is Making [All Of] Us Work More".
- photochemsyn 11mo agoSolution: run open source LLMs on local hardware where inference takes a while but you're not leaking your sacred proprietary code to some backdoored cloud cluster. Then downtime arises naturally, see the relevant xkcd on compiling: https://3d.xkcd.com/303/ https://3d.xkcd.com/303/ Note also, compilers automated the process of machine instruction generation - quite a bit more reproducibly than 'prompt engineers' are able to control the output of their LLMs. If you really want the LLMs to generate high-quality programming code to feed to the compiler, the overnight build might have to come back. Also, in many fields the processes can't be shut down just because the human needs to sleep, so you become a process caretaker, living your life around the process - generally this involves coordinating with other human beings, but nobody likes the night shift, and automating that makes a lot of sense. Eg, a rare earth refinery needs to run 24/7, etc. Finally, I've known many grad students who excelled at gaming the 996 schedule - hour long breaks for lunch, extended afternoon discussions, tracking the boss's schedule so when they show up, everyone looks busy. It's a learned skill, even if overall this is kind of a ridiculous thing to do.
- EGreg 11mo agoAs a result, a new psychological loop forms: Every moment I don't spend prompting, I'm falling behind. The system insidiously guilts you for not leveraging it constantly. Allowing AI to sit there, just waiting, feels like a waste. It's subtle, but corrosive. Any downtime becomes a missed opportunity, and rest turns into inefficiency. Within this framework, leisure becomes a moral failure. I don't feel that way. What I feel is that in 2025 we're still the bottleneck because we make decisions. In 2026 we'll automate the QA part, and then we'll be able to fan out and fan in a lot of solutions at scale. Those who remove the bottlenecks in business beat everyone else. Is is why FAMGA and tech companies are the top of wall street. Biggest bang for the buck.
- JohnMakin 11mo agoI've had jobs with 70-80 hour weeks I genuinely loved, and jobs that required maybe 4-8 hours a week of actual time devoted to it that burnt me out. Burnout is a lot more complicated than the sheer number of hours worked - if you are deriving meaningful value from such a schedule, and feel what you are doing is worthwhile, and you feel valued and compensated accordingly - you're not likely to mind that much. The issue of course is that this is rarely the case, and plenty of studies have shown there are severe diminishing returns to working past 50 hours in a week in knowledge work that I doubt AI is going to really help with that much.
- dancerofaran 11mo agoDoes anyone actually look at evidence anymore or do they just look at the twitter ramblings of YC founders thinking this models reality? Founders have been doing stupid signalling for ages to seem like they are more worthy of VC funding. A single anecdote in a podcast about a badly written Wired article based on a few anecdotes from hustle culture founders does not make something true. Working 80 hour weeks for low pay and high expected upside has ALWAYS been SV software culture. The individual leverage of an experienced software developer has never been higher.
- jrowen 11mo agoThis is due to the flawed cornerstone of our culture that a person's job is their worth and value and purpose in the world. This was necessary when the combined efforts of our labor were still not enough to provide basic needs for the people. The dream of automation was always to fix that. We did that, and more. We have long had the technology to provide for people. But we invent tons of meaningless unnecessary jobs and still cling to the "jobs" model because that's all we know. It's the same reason vaccuum cleaners didn't reduce the amount of cleaning work to be done. We never say "great, I can do less now because I have a thing to do it for me." That thing just enables me to fixate on the next thing "to be done." The next dollar to be gained. A McDonalds robot should free the people of doing that kind of work. But instead those people become "unemployed" and one individual gets another yacht and creates a couple "marketing" jobs that don't actually provide any value in a holistic humanitarian sense.
- xg15 11mo agoThat's part of it, but I think not the whole picture. Many jobs do have some genuine benefits they give the employee (in addition to salary) : practical experience and skill training, but most importantly a certain degree of influence and power: You can't go on strike if you don't have a job. Those are cold comfort if compensation isn't enough or the job ruins your health or drives you into burnout, but I think their absence becomes important if you talk about popular UBI or "end of work" scenarios. That's why I think even if we had some friendly tech company that did All The Jobs for free using automation and allowed everyone to live a comfortable life without even the need for an income, and even if we changed the culture such that this was totally fine, it would still be a dystopia, or at least risk very quickly drifting into one: Because while everyone could live a happy, fully consumption-oriented life, they'd have zero influence how to live that life: If the company does everything for you that is to be done, it also has all the knowledge and power to set the rules.
- jrowen 11mo agopractical experience and skill training, but most importantly a certain degree of influence and power: You can't go on strike if you don't have a job. People don't have to need these things though. For a lot of people it's all just the means to the end of being able to live comfortably. Because while everyone could live a happy, fully consumption-oriented life, they'd have zero influence how to live that life: I don't think most people care much about that. But either way, they have the option to. I don't think humanity will slip into a vegetative dystopia because the default spirit of life is grow, expand, go, go, go, don't stop to think about the bigger picture. There is always curiosity and ambition in the gene pool. But society is jammed up with this model that is low-efficiency for everyone except the people that are financially in a position where they don't have to care (and I include myself at the lower end of that tier).
- nacozarina 11mo agojust a repeat of the old fallacy that quantity beats quality; get everyone to put in 80 zombie-hours/wk and you’re not gonna get beat by a 90 hr/wk team, you’re gonna get beat by a 30 hr/wk crew that worked smarter part-time.
- butlike 11mo agoNot only do you need to explain the problem in order to 'prompt' it successfully, you then have to audit the result. So you're really doing double work; both manager and IC.
- stefap2 11mo agoWhen developers are allowed to use AI tools, they take 19% longer to complete issues—a significant slowdown that goes against developer beliefs and expert forecasts. This gap between perception and reality is striking: developers expected AI to speed them up by 24%, and even after experiencing the slowdown, they still believed AI had sped them up by 20%. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45661775 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45661775
- kylehotchkiss 11mo agoWhere are all the shiny new native Mac apps following Apple UI guidelines then? Where’s the wave of new open source frameworks and libraries?
- insane_dreamer 11mo agoAI "will do the heavy lifting so you have more time for the creative work you enjoy, or free to enjoy things outside work", was always a lie. Americans are much more "productive" than we were 50 years ago but we're working as many hours or more. So obviously we're not the ones capturing the benefits from that added productivity.