I can't find the article anymore but I remember reading almost 10 years ago an article on the economist saying that the result of automation was not removal of jobs but more work + less junior employment positions.
The example they gave was search engine + digital documents removed the junior lawyer headcount by a lot. Prior to digital documents, a fairly common junior lawyer task was: "we have a upcoming court case. Go to the (physical) archive and find past cases relevant to current case. Here's things to check for:" and this task would be assigned to a team of junior (3-10 people). But now one junior with a laptop suffice. As a result the firm can also manage more cases.
Seems like a pretty general pattern.
Balgair · 11h ago
Dwarkesh had a good interview with Zuck the other week. And in it, Zuck had an interesting example (that I'm going to butcher):
FB has long wanted to have a call center for its ~3.5B users. But that call center would automatically be the largest in history and cost ~15B/yr to run. Something that is cost ineffective in the extreme. But, with FB's internal AIs, they're starting to think that a call center may be feasible. Most of the calls are going to be 'I forgot my password' and 'it's broken' anyways. So having a robot guide people along the FAQs in the 50+ languages is perfectly fine for ~90% (Zuck's number here) of the calls. Then, with the harder calls, you can actually route it to a human.
So, to me, this is a great example of how the interaction of new tech and labor is a fractal not a hierarchy. In that, with each new tech that your specific labor sector finds, you get this fractalization of the labor in the end. Zuck would have never thought of a call center, denying the labor of many people. But this new tech allows for a call center that looks a lot like the old one, just with only the hard problems. It's smaller, yes, but it looks the same and yet is slightly different (hence a fractal).
Look, I'm not going to argue that tech is disruptive. But what I am arguing is that tech makes new jobs (most of the time), it's just that these new jobs tend to be dealing with much harder problems. Like, we''re pushing the boundaries here, and that boundary gets more fractal-y, and it's a more niche and harder working environment for your brain. The issue, of course, is that, like a grad student, you have to trust in the person working at the boundary is actually doing work and not just blowing smoke. That issue, the one of trust, I think is the key issue to 'solve'. Cal Newport talks a lot about this now and how these knowledge worker tasks really don't do much for a long time, and then they have these spats of genius. It's a tough one, and not an intellectual enterprise, but an emotional one.
firefoxd · 10h ago
I worked in automated customer support, and I agree with you. By default, we automated 40% of all requests. It becomes harder after that, but not because the problems the next 40% face are any different, but because they are unnecessarily complex.
A customer who wants to track the status of their order will tell you a story about how their niece is visiting from Vermont and they wanted to surprise her for her 16th birthday. It's hard because her parents don't get along as they used to after the divorce, but they are hoping that this will at the very least put a smile on her face.
The AI will classify the message as order tracking correctly, and provide all the tracking info and timeline. But because of the quick response, the customer will write back to say they'd rather talk to a human and ask for a phone number they can call.
The remaining 20% can't be resolved by neither human nor robot.
dweinus · 9h ago
Between the lines, you highlight a tangental issue: execs like Zuckerberg think easy/automatable stuff is 90%. People with skin in the game know it is much less (40% per your estimate).This isn't unique to LLMs. Overestimating the benefit of automation is a time-honored pastime.
svelle · 5h ago
This reminds me how Klarna fired their a large part of their customer support department to replace it with ai, only to eventually realize they couldn't do the job primarily using ai and had to rehire a ton of people.
exe34 · 8h ago
> But because of the quick response, the customer will write back to say they'd rather talk to a human
Is this implying it's because they want to wag their chins?
My experience recently with moving house was that most services I had to call had some problem that the robots didn't address. Fibre was listed as available on the website but then it crashed when I tried "I'm moving home" - turns out it's available in the general area but not available for the specific row of houses (had to talk to a human to figure it out). Water company, I had an account at house N-2, but at N-1 it was included, so the system could not move me from my N-1 address (no water bills) to house N (water bill). Pretty sure there was something about power and council tax too. With the last one I just stopped bothering, figuring that it's the one thing that they would always find me when they're ready (they got in touch eventually).
palmotea · 9h ago
> Most of the calls are going to be 'I forgot my password' and 'it's broken' anyways. So having a robot guide people along the FAQs in the 50+ languages is perfectly fine for ~90% (Zuck's number here) of the calls.
No it isn't. Attempts to do this are why I mash 0 repeatedly and chant "talk to an agent" after being in a phone tree for longer than a minute.
Matthyze · 8h ago
And you don't think that this won't improve with better bots?
palmotea · 8h ago
> And you don't think that this won't improve with better bots?
Actually, now that I think about it, yeah.
The whole purpose of the bots is to deflect you from talking to a human. For instance: Amazon's chatbot. It's gotten "better": now when I need assistance, it tries three times to deflect me from a person after it's already agreed to connect me to one.
Anything they'll allow the bot to do can probably can be done better by a customer facing webpage.
spongebobstoes · 18m ago
Maybe for you, but not for most people. Most people have problems that are answered online, but knowledge sites are hard to navigate, and they can't solve their own problems.
A high quality bot to guide people through their poorly worded questions will be hugely helpful for a lot of people. AI is quickly getting to the point that a very high quality experience is possible.
The premise is also that the bots are what enable the people to exist. The status quo is no interactive customer service at all.
exe34 · 8h ago
I try to enunciate very clearly: "What would you like to do?" - "Speak to a fcuking human. Speak to a fcuking human. Speak to a fcuking human. Speak to a fcuking human."
theoreticalmal · 7h ago
Just say “fucking”
SoftTalker · 8h ago
Zuck is just bullshitting here, like most of what he says.
There is zero chance he wants to pay even a single person to sit and take calls from users.
He would eliminate every employee at Facebook it it were technically possible to automate what they do.
ivape · 32m ago
He can definitely fire most people at Facebook. He just doesn't because it would be like not providing a simple defense against a pawn move on a Chess board. No point in not matching the opposition's move if you can afford it. They hire, we hire, they fire, we fire.
wslh · 10h ago
Sorry for the acidity, just training my patience while waiting for the mythical FB/AI call center.
Maxion · 10h ago
As someone who has been involved with customer support (on the in-house tech side) the very vast majority of contacts to a CS team will be very inane or extremely inane. If you can automate away the lowest tier of support with LLMs you'll improve response times for not just the simple questions but also for the hard ones.
pclmulqdq · 9h ago
I have had the problem with customer support that about 90% of the calls/chats I have placed should have been automated (on their side), and the remaining 10% needed escalation beyond the "customer service" escalation ladder. In America, sadly, that means one of two things: (1) you call a friend who works there or (2) you have your lawyer send a demand letter requesting something rather inane.
wslh · 10h ago
I agree with that common pattern but even without [current] AI there were ways to automate/improve the lowest tier: very often I don't find my basic questions in the typical corporation's FAQ.
Balgair · 9h ago
Yeah, I was a little credulous about what Zuck said there too.
Like, if AI is so good, then it'll just eat away at those jobs and get asymptotically close to 100% of the calls. If it's not that good, then you've got to loop in the product people and figure out why everyone is having a hard time with whatever it is.
Generally, I'd say that calls are just another feedback channel for the product. One that FB has thus far been fine without consulting, so I can't imagine its contribution can be all that high. (Zuck also goes on to talk about the experiments they run on people with FB/Insta/WA, and woah, it is crazy unethical stuff he casually throws out there to Dwarkesh)
Still, to the point here: I'm still seeing Ai mostly as a tool/tech, not something that takes on an agency of it's own. We, the humans, are still the thing that says 'go/do/start', the prime movers (to borrow a long held and false bit of ancient physics). The AIs aren't initiating things, and it seems to a large extent, we're not going to want them to do so. Not out of a sense of doom or lack-of-greed, but simply as we're more interested in working at the edge of the fractal.
tom_m · 28m ago
Definitely. When computers came out, jobs increased. When the Internet became widely used, jobs increased. AI is simply another tool.
The sad part is, do you think we'll see this productivity gain as an opportunity to stop the culture of over working? I don't think so. I think people will expect more from others because of AI.
If AI makes employees twice as efficient, do you think companies will decrease working hours or cut their employment in half? I don't think so. It's human nature to want more. If 2 is good, 4 is surely better.
So instead of reducing employment, companies will keep the same number of employees because that's already factored into their budget. Now they get more output to better compete with their competitors. To reduce staff would be to be at a disadvantage.
So why do we hear stories about people being let go? AI is currently a scapegoat for companies that were operating inefficiently and over-hired. It was already going to happen. AI just gave some of these larger tech companies a really good excuse. They weren't exactly going to admit their make a mistake and over-hired, now were they? Nope. AI was the perfect excuse.
As all things, it's cyclical. Hiring will go up again. AI boom will bust. On to the next thing. One thing is for certain though, we all now have a fancy new calculator.
toxik · 12h ago
I don't know about lawyering, but with engineering research, I can now ask ChatGPT's Deep Research to do a literature review on any topic. This used to take time and effort.
jvanderbot · 9h ago
You either believe that companies are trying to grow as much as possible within their current budget, or not.
Automation is one way to do that.
f_allwein · 8h ago
The Productivity Paradox is officially a thing. Maybe that’s what you’re thinking of?
Read the article. The book is just a long boring elongation without new content.
breppp · 9h ago
I do not agree, I think the book is much more interesting than the article. For example the type of jobs such as Box Tickers and Flunkies, as well some really interesting anecdotes
yieldcrv · 11h ago
15 years ago I created my own LLC, work experience from some contracts, and had a friend answer the reference checks
I skipped over junior positions for the most part
I don’t see that not working now
JCM9 · 12h ago
Modern AI tools are amazing, but they’re amazing like spell check was amazing when it came out. Does it help with menial tasks? Yes, but it creates a new baseline that everyone has and just moves the bar. Theres scant evidence that we’re all going to just sit on a beach while AI runs your company anytime soon.
There’s little sign of any AI company managing to build something that doesn’t just turn into a new baseline commodity. Most of these AI products are also horribly unprofitable, which is another reality that will need to be faced sooner rather than later.
amarant · 12h ago
It's got me wondering: do any of my hard work actually matter? Or is it all just pointless busy-work invented since the industrial revolution to create jobs for everyone, when in reality we would be fine if like 5% of society worked while the rest slacked off? Don't think we'd have as many videogames, but then again, we would have time to play, which I would argue is more valuable than games.
To paraphrase Lee Iacocca:
We must stop and ask ourselves, how much videogames do we really need?
hliyan · 21m ago
I've been thinking similarly. Bertrand Russell once said: "there are two types of work. One, moving objects on or close to the surface of the Earth. Two, telling other people to do so". Most of us work in buildings that don't actually manufacture, process or anything. Instead, we process information that describes manufacturing and transport. Or we create information for people to consume when they are not working (entertainment). Only a small faction of human beings are actually producing things that are necessary for physiological survival. Rest of us are at best, helping them optimize that process, or at worst, leeching off of them in the name of "management" of their work.
randcraw · 11h ago
> It's got me wondering: do any of my hard work actually matter?
I recently retired from 40 years in software-based R&D and have been wondering the same thing. Wasn't it true that 95% of my life's work was thrown away after a single demo or a disappointingly short period of use?
And I think the answer is yes, but this is just the cost of working in an information economy. Ideas are explored and adopted only until the next idea replaces it or the surrounding business landscape shifts yet again. Unless your job is in building products like houses or hammers (which evolve very slowly or are too expensive to replace), the cost of doing of business today is a short lifetime for any product; they're replaced in increasingly fast cycles, useful only until they're no longer competitive. And this evanescent lifetime is especially the case for virtual products like software.
The essence of software is to prototype an idea for info processing that has utility only until the needs of business change. Prototypes famously don't last, and increasingly today, they no longer live long enough even to work out the bugs before they're replaced with yet another idea and its prototype that serves a new or evolved mission.
Will AI help with this? Only if it speeds up the cycle time or reduces development cost, and both of those have a theoretical minimum, given the time needed to design and review any software product has an irreducible minimum cost. If a human must use the software to implement a business idea then humans must be used to validate the app's utility, and that takes time that can't be diminished beyond some point (just as there's an inescapable need to test new drugs on animals since biology is a black box too complex to be simulated even by AI). Until AI can simulate the user, feedback from the user of new/revised software will remain the choke point on the rate at which new business ideas can be prototyped by software.
zeroonetwothree · 34m ago
I still have code running in production I wrote 20 years ago. Sure, it’s a small fraction, but arguably that’s the whole point.
dehrmann · 8h ago
So... to what extent is software a durable good?
staunton · 7h ago
Who said it's durable?
dehrmann · 6h ago
This is what makes software interesting. It theoretically works forever and has zero marginal production cost, but it's durability is driven by business requirements and hardware and OS changes. Some software might have a 20 year life. Some might only be 6 months.
npteljes · 12h ago
>do any of my hard work actually matter?
Yes... basically in life, you have to find the definition of "to matter" that you can strongly believe in. Otherwise everything feels aimless, the very life itself.
The rest of what you ponder in your comment is the same. And I'd like to add that baselines shifted a lot over the years of civilization. I like to think about one specific example: painkillers. Painkillers were not used during medical procedures in a widespread manner until some 150 years ago, maybe even later. Now, it's much less horrible to participate in those procedures, for everyone involved really, and also the outcomes are better just for this factor - because the patients moves around less while anesthetized.
But even this is up for debate. All in all, it really boils down to what the individual feels like it's a worthy life. Philosophy is not done yet.
amarant · 11h ago
Well, from a societal point of view, meaningful work would be work that is necessary to either maintain or push that baseline.
Perhaps my initial estimate of 5% of the workforce was a bit optimistic, say 20% of current workforce necessary to have food, healthcare, and maybe a few research facilities focused on improving all of the above?
npteljes · 11h ago
I'm sure we could organize it if that would be the goal.
amarant · 11h ago
Right? So what's the current goal, and why is it better than this one?
npteljes · 5h ago
Power itself seems to be the goal, and the reasons for it is human DNA I think. I have doubts that we can build anything different than this (on a sufficiently long run).
amarant · 1h ago
Power might be a goal for individuals, but surely it's not the goal for society as a whole?
Does society as a whole even have a goal currently? I don't really think it does. Like do ideologists even exist today?
I wish society was working towards some kind of idea of utopia, but I'm not convinced we're even trying for that. Are we?
cortesoft · 7h ago
> Don't think we'd have as many videogames, but then again, we would have time to play, which I would argue is more valuable than games.
Would we have fewer video games? If all our basic needs were met and we had a lot of free time, more people might come together to create games together for free.
I mean, look at how much free content (games, stories, videos, etc) is created now, when people have to spend more than half their waking hours working for a living. If people had more free time, some of them would want to make video games, and if they weren’t constrained by having to make money, they would be open source, which would make it even easier for someone else to make their own game based on the work.
jajko · 11h ago
Mine doesn't, and I am fine with that, never needed such validation. I derive fulfillment from my personal life and achievements and passions there, more than enough. With that optics, office politics and promotion rat race and what people do in them just makes me smile. Seeing how otherwise smart folks ruin (or miss out) their actual lives and families in pursuit of excellence in a very narrow direction, often hard underappreciated by employers and not rewarded adequately. I mean, at certain point you either grok the game and optimize, or you don't.
The work brings over time modest wealth, allows me and my family to live in long term safe place (Switzerland) and builds a small reserve for bad times (or inheritance, early retirement etc. this is Europe, no need to save up for kids education or potentially massive healthcare bills). Don't need more from life.
qwerpy · 11h ago
Agree. Now I watch the rat racers with bemusement while I put in just enough to get a paycheck. I have enough time and energy to participate deeply in my children’s upbringing.
I’m in America so the paychecks are very large, which helps with private school, nanny, stay at home wife, and the larger net worth needed (health care, layoff risk, house in a nicer neighborhood). I’ve been fortunate, so early retirement is possible now in my early 40s. It really helps with being able to detach from work, when I don’t even care if I lose my job. I worry for my kids though. It won’t be as easy for them. AI and relentless human resources optimization will make tech a harder place to thrive.
Clubber · 9h ago
>It's got me wondering: do any of my hard work actually matter?
It mattered enough for someone to pay you money to do it, and that money put food on the table and clothes on your body and a roof over your head and allowed you to contribute to larger society through paying taxes.
Is it the same as discovering that E = MC2 or Jonas Salk's contributions? No, but it's not nothing either.
Phanteaume · 11h ago
You're on the right path, don't fall back into the global gaslight.
Go deeper.
Most work is redundant and unnecessary. Take for example the classic gas station on every corner situation that often emerges. This turf war between gas providers (or their franchisees by proxy they granted a license to this location for) is not because three or four gas stations are operating at maximum capacity. No, this is 3 or 4 fisherman with a line in the river, made possible solely because inputs (real estate, gas, labor, merchandise) are cheap enough where the gas station need not ever run even close to capacity and still return a profit for the fisherman.
Who benefits from the situation? You or I who don’t have to make a u turn to get gas at this intersection, perhaps, but that is not much benefit in comparison for the opportunity cost of not having 3 prime corner lots squandered on the same single use. The clerk at the gas station for having a job available? Perhaps although maybe their labor in aggregate would have been employed in other less redundant uses that could benefit out society otherwise than selling smokes and putting $20 on 4 at 3am. The real beneficiary of this entire arrangement is the fisherman, the owner or shareholder who ultimately skims from all the pots thanks to having what is effectively a modern version of a plantation sharecropper, spending all their money in the company store and on company housing with a fig leaf of being able to choose from any number of minimum wage jobs, spend their wages in any number of national chain stores, and rent any number of increasingly investor owned property. Quite literally all owned by the same shareholders when you consider how people diversify their investments into these multiple sectors.
senordevnyc · 9h ago
We benefit because when there’s only one gas station, they can charge more than if there are four.
overfeed · 3h ago
It's weird to read the same HN crowd that decries monopolies and extols the virtues of competition turn around and complain about job duplication and "bullshit jobs" like marketing and advertising that arise from competition.
arealaccount · 12h ago
Its why executive types are all hyped about AI. Being able to code 2x more will mean they get 2x more things (roughly speaking), but the workers aren’t going to get 2x the compensation.
npteljes · 12h ago
Indeed. And AI does its work without those productivity-hindering things like need for recreation and sleep, ethical treatment, and a myriad of others. It's a new resource to exploit, and that makes everyone excited who is building on some resource.
pythonguython · 11h ago
AI can’t do our jobs today, but we’re only 2.5 years from the release of chatGPT. The performance of these models might plateau today, but we simply don’t know. If they continue to improve at the current rate for 3-5 more years, it’s hard for me to see how human input would be useful at all in engineering.
codr7 · 9h ago
They will never be creative, and creativity is a pretty big deal.
pythonguython · 8h ago
To the extent it’s measurable, LLMs are becoming more creative as the models improve. I think it’s a bold statement to say they’ll NEVER be creative. Once again, we’ll have to see. Creativity very well could be emergent from training on large datasets. But also it might not be. I recommend not speaking in such absolutes about a technology that is improving every day.
codr7 · 3h ago
Difficult to measure, but trivial to define.
Creativity means play, as in not following rules, adding something of yourself.
Something a computer just can't do.
pclmulqdq · 7h ago
"To the extent it's measurable" is very load-bearing in the semantics here. A lot of "creativity" is very hard to measure.
pythonguython · 6h ago
I agree, and I think most people would say the current models would rank low on creativity metrics however we define them. But to the main point, I don’t see how the quality we call creativity is unique to biological computing machines vs electronic computing machines. Maybe one day we’ll conclusively declare creativity to be a human trait only, but in 2025 that is not a closed question - however it is measured.
Jensson · 4h ago
We were talking about LLM here, not computing machines in general. LLM are trained to mimic not to produce novel things, so a person can easily think LLM wont get creative even though some computer program in the future could.
lsy · 10h ago
I feel like people in the comments are misunderstanding the findings in the article. It’s not that people save time with AI and then turn that time to novel tasks; it’s that perceived savings from using AI are nullified by new work which is created by the usage of AI: verification of outputs, prompt crafting, cheat detection, debugging, whatever.
This seems observationally true in the tech industry, where the world’s best programmers and technologists are tied up fiddling with transformers and datasets and evals so that the world’s worst programmers can slap together temperature converters and insecure twitter clones, and meanwhile the quality of the consumer software that people actually use is in a nosedive.
ausbah · 1h ago
the state of consumer software is already so bad & LLMs are trained on a good chunk of that so their output can possible produce worse software right? /s
_heimdall · 11h ago
This is effectively Jevans paradox[1] in action.
The cost, in money or time, for getting certain types of work done decreases. People ramp up demand to fill the gap, "full utilization" of the workers.
Its a very old claim that the next technology will lead to a utopia where we don't have to work, or we work drastically less often. Time and again we prove that we don't actually want that.
My hypothesis (I'm sure its not novel or unique) is that very few people know what to do with idle hands. We tend to keep stress levels high as a distraction, and tend to freak out in various ways if we find ourselves with low stress and nothing that "needs" to be done.
I think a lot of people would be fine being idle if they had a guaranteed standard of living. When I was unemployed for a while, I was pretty happy in general but stressed about money running out. Without the money issue the last thing I would want to do is to sell my time to a soulless corporation. I have enough interests to keep me busy. Work just sucks up time I would love to spend on better things.
_heimdall · 11h ago
Oh for sure, I should have included that. I was thinking of people being idle by choice rather than circumstance.
n_ary · 7h ago
> Its a very old claim that the next technology will lead to a utopia where we don't have to work, or we work drastically less often. Time and again we prove that we don't actually want that.
It actually does but due to wrong distribution of reward gained from that tech(automation) it does not work for the common folks.
Lets take a simple example, you, me and 8 other HN users work in Bezos’ warehouse. We each work 8h/day. Suddenly a new tech comes in which can now do the same task we do and each unit of that machine can do 2-4 of our work alone. If Bezos buys 4 of the units and setting each unit to work at x2 capacity, then 8 of us now have 8h/day x 5 days x 4 weeks = 160h leisure.
Problem is, now 8 of us still need money to survive(food, rent, utilities, healthcare etc). So, according to tech utopians, 8 of us now can use 160h of free time to focus on more important and rewarding works.(See in context of all the AI peddlers, how using AI will free us to do more important and rewarding works!). But to survive my rewarding work is to do gig work or something of same effort or more hours.
So in theory, the owner controlling the automation gets more free time to attend interviews and political/social events. The people getting automated away fall downward and has to work harder to maintain their survivality. Of course, I hope our over enthusiastic brethren who are paying LLM provider for the priviledge of training their own replacements figure the equation soon and don’t get sold by the “free time to do more meaningful work” same way the Bezos warehouse gave some of us some leisure while the automation were coming online and needed some failsafe for a while. :)
BriggyDwiggs42 · 11h ago
I don’t think it’s the consequence of most individuals’ preferences. I think it’s just the result of disproportionate political influence held by the wealthy, who are heavily incentivized to maximize working hours. Since employers mostly have that incentive, and since the political system doesn’t explicitly forbid it, there aren’t a ton of good options for workers seeking shorter hours.
hatefulmoron · 10h ago
> there aren’t a ton of good options for workers seeking shorter hours.
But you do have that option, right? Work 20 hours a week instead of 40. You just aren't paid for the hours that you don't work. In a world where workers are exchanging their labor for wages, that's how it's supposed to work.
For there to be a "better option" (as in, you're paid money for not working more hours) what are you actually being paid to do?
For all the thoughts that come to mind when I say "work 20 hours a week instead of 40" -- that's where the individual's preference comes in. I work more hours because I want the money. Nobody pays me to not work.
BriggyDwiggs42 · 9h ago
>nobody pays me not to work.
If you’re in the US, then in theory you’re getting overtime for going over 40hrs a week. That’s time and a half for doing nothing, correct? I’d expect your principles put you firmly against overtime pay.
>But you do have that option, right? Work 20 hours a week instead of 40. You just aren't paid for the hours that you don't work. In a world where workers are exchanging their labor for wages, that's how it's supposed to work.
Look the core of your opinion is the belief that market dynamics naturally lead to desirable outcomes always. I simply don’t believe that, and I think interference to push for desirable outcomes which violate principles of a free market is often good. We probably won’t be able to agree on this.
hatefulmoron · 9m ago
> I’d expect your principles put you firmly against overtime pay.
No.. if society wants to disincentive over working by introducing overtime, that's fine by me. I'm not making any moral judgement. You just seem to live in a fantasy world where people aren't exchanging their labor for money.
> Look the core of your opinion is the belief that market dynamics naturally lead to desirable outcomes always.
I didn't say that, and I don't believe that. If you're just going to hallucinate what I think, what's the point in replying?
vjvjvjvjghv · 2h ago
At least in the US part time work often not really a thing. A while ago I talked to HR about reducing to 32 hours and they didn't seem to get the idea at all. It's either all in or nothing. In the US there is also the health insurance question.
For my relatives in Germany going part time seems easier and more accepted by companies.
dragonwriter · 10h ago
> But you do have that option, right?
Not really. Lots of kinds of work don’t hire part timers in any volume period. There are very limited jobs where the only tradeoff if you want to work fewer hours is a reduction in compensation proportional to the reduction in hours worked, or even just a reduction in compensation even if disproportionate to the reduction in hours worked.
linsomniac · 11h ago
>technology will lead to a utopia where we don't have to work
I'm kind of ok with doing more work in the same time, though if I'm becoming way more effective I'll probably start pushing harder on my existing discussions with management about 4 day work weeks (I'm looking to do 4x10s, but I might start looking to negotiate it to "instead of a pay increase, let's keep it the same but a 4x8 week").
If AI lets me get more done in the same time, I'm ok with that. Though, on the other hand, my work is budgeting $30/mo for the AI tools, so I'm kind of figuring that any time that personally-purchased AI tools are saving me, I deduct from my work week. ;-)
>very few people know what to do with idle hands
"Millions long for immortality that don't know what to do with themselves on a rainy Sunday afternoon." -- Susan Ertz
nathan_douglas · 11h ago
Thank you! I didn't know this had a name. I remember thinking something along these lines in seventh grade social studies when we learned that Eli Whitney's cotton gin didn't actually end up improving conditions for enslaved people.
I suspected this would be the case with AI too. A lot of people said things like "there won't be enough work anymore" and I thought, "are you kidding? Do you use the same software I use? Do you play the same games I've played? There's never enough time to add all of the features and all of the richness and complexity and all of the unit tests and all of the documentation that we want to add! Most of us are happy if we can ship a half-baked anything!"
The only real question I had was whether the tech sector would go through a prolonged, destructive famine before realizing that.
Retric · 11h ago
Food production is a class case where once productivity is high enough you simply get fewer farmers.
We are currently a long way from that kind of change as current AI tools suck by comparison to literally 1,000x increases in productivity. So, in well under 100 years programming could become extremely niche.
_heimdall · 11h ago
We are seeing an interesting limit in the food case though.
We increased production and needed fewer farmers, but we now have so few farmers that most people have very little idea of what food really is, where it comes from, or what it takes to run our food system.
Higher productivity is good to a point, but eventually it risks becoming too fragile.
master_crab · 10h ago
100%. In fact, this exact scenario is playing out in the cattle industry.
Screwworm, a parasite that kills cattle in days is making a comeback. And we are less prepared for it this time because previously (the 1950s-1970s) we had a lot more labor in the industry to manually check each head of cattle. Bloomberg even called it out specifically.
Ranchers also said the screwworm would be much deadlier if it were to return, because of a lack of labor. “We can’t fight it like we did in the ’60s, we can’t go out and rope every head of cattle and put a smear on every open wound,” Schumann said.
This sounds like the kind of labor problem that could quickly be solved by hiring more people. So really the worst case here is that beef will cost a little more for a little while. Hardly an existential threat.
_heimdall · 6h ago
Who will they hire though? Cattle operations are often in very rural areas, and we are putting up huge blockers for immigrants and migrant workers.
quantumHazer · 11h ago
> Food production is a class case where once productivity is high enough you simply get fewer farmers.
Yes, but.
There are more jobs in other fields that are adjacent to food production, particularly in distribution. Middle class does not existed and retail workers are now a large percentage of workers in most parts of the world.
Retric · 9h ago
Sure, but when farmers where 90% of the labor force many of the remaining 10% also related to food distribution and production, a village blacksmith was mostly in support of farming, salt production/transport for food storage, etc.
Food is just a smaller percentage of the economy overall.
_heimdall · 9h ago
Was there ever a time when 90% of labor was in farming and we had anything resembling an economy?
I would have assumed that if 90% of people are farming its largely subsistence and any trade or happened on a much more local scale, potentially without any proper currency involved.
Retric · 9h ago
Globally perhaps not as fishing and hunting have been major food sources in antiquity especially when you include North America etc. Similarly slavery meant a significant portion of the population was in effect outside the economy.
That said, there’s been areas where 90% of the working population was at minimum helping with the harvest up until the Middle Ages.
anticensor · 7h ago
Did you type in an additional zero there?
Retric · 7h ago
Nope, where a family might struggle to efficiently manage 50 acres under continuous cultivation even just a few hundred years ago, now it’s not uncommon to see single family farms with 20,000 acres each of which is several times more productive.
It’s somewhat arbitrary where you draw the line historically but it’s not just maximum productivity worth remembering crops used to fail from drought etc far more frequently.
Small hobby farms are also a thing these days, but that’s a separate issue.
_heimdall · 6h ago
For those 20,000 acre farms, by what measure are they more productive?
In my experience they're very productive by poundage yield, but horribly unproductive when it comes to inputs required, chemicals used, biodiversity, soil health, etc.
Retric · 4h ago
We’re looking at hours of labor per lb of food.
The difference is so extreme vs historic methods you can skip pesticides, avoid harming soil health or biodiversity vs traditional methods etc without any issues here and still be talking 1,000x.
Though really growing crops for human consumption is something of a rounding error here. It’s livestock, biofuels, cotton, organic plastics, wood, flowers, etc that’s consuming the vast majority of output from farms.
_heimdall · 1h ago
If that's the metric, sure we have gotten very good at producing more pounds of food per human hour of labor.
Two things worth noting though, pounds of food say little about the nutritional value to consumers. I don't have hood links handy so I won't make any specific claims, just worth considering if weight is the right metric.
As far as human labor hours goes, we've gotten very good at outsourcing those costs. Farm labor hours ignores all the hours put in to their off-farm inputs (machinery, pesticides and fertilizers, seed production, etc). We also leverage an astronomical amount of (mostly) diesel fuel to power all of it. The human labor hours are small, but I've seen estimates of a single barrel of oil being comparable to 25,000 hours of human labor or 12.5 years of full employment. I'd be interested to do the math now, but I expect we have seen a fraction of that 25,000x multiplier materialize in the reduction of farm hours worked over the last century (or back to the industrial revolution).
Dylan16807 · 24m ago
> pounds of food say little about the nutritional value to consumers
Nah, it's not 100% but it says a lot about the nutritional value.
> inputs
You can approximate those with price. A barrel of oil might be a couple hours.
Retric · 1h ago
> The human labor hours are small, but I've seen estimates of a single barrel of oil being comparable to 25,000 hours of human labor
That’s just wildly wrong by several orders of magnitude, to the point I question your judgment to even consider it a valid possibility.
Not only would the price be inherently much higher but if everyone including infants working 50 hours per week we’d still would produce less than 1/30th the current world’s output of oil and going back we’ve been extracting oil at industrial scale for over 100 years.
To get even close to those numbers you’d need to assume 100% of human labor going back into prehistory was devoted purely to oil extraction.
_heimdall · 38m ago
What are you claiming is widely wrong exactly? The estimate of comparison between the amount of energy in a barrel of oil and the average amount of energy a human can produce in an hour?
Dylan16807 · 21m ago
You were comparing amount of energy between human labor and a barrel of oil? That's such a baffling metric that neither they nor I realized that's what you meant. It's not like you can replace a human with a solar panel, but if you could that would be astoundingly impressive and not diminished toward "horribly unproductive" by the fact that the solar panel is delivering more watts to do the same thing.
zdragnar · 11h ago
Econ 101: supply is finite, demand infinite. Increased efficiency of production means that demand will meet the new price point, not that demand will cease to exist.
There are probably plenty of goods that are counter examples, but time utilization isn't one of them, I don't think.
tehjoker · 10h ago
> Time and again we prove that we don't actually want that.
That's the capitalist system. Unions successfully fought to decrease the working day to 8 hrs.
_heimdall · 10h ago
I don't think we can so easily pin it on capitalism. Capitalism brings incentives that drive work hours and expectations up for sure, but that's not the only thing in play.
Workers are often looking to make more money, take more responsibility, or build some kind of name or reputation for themselves. There's absolutely nothing wrong with that, but that goal also incentivizes to work harder and longer.
There's no one size fits all description for workers, everyone's different. The same is true for the whole system though, it doesn't roll up to any one cause.
tehjoker · 9h ago
What you say is true, but the dominant effect in the system driving it towards more exertion than anyone would find desirable is the profit incentive of owners to drive their workers harder.
_heimdall · 9h ago
How do you narrow it down to capitalism as the root cause though? It seems like a reasonable guess, but our entire system is capitalist - we have no way to isolate or compare against to see how a roughly similar system would play out without capitalism.
atonse · 11h ago
Yes in fact, to me it’s not a utopia that everyone’s going to paint landscapes, write poetry, or play musical instruments all day.
I worry more that an idle humanity will cause a lot more conflict. “An idle mind’s the devil’s playground” and all.
_heimdall · 11h ago
I wish people could handle an idle mind, I expect we'd all be better off. But yeah, realistically most people when idle would do a lot of damage.
Its always possible that risk would be transitional. Anyone alive today, at least in western style societies, likely doesn't know a life without high levels of stress and distraction. It makes sense that change would cause people to lash out, maybe people growing up in that new system would handle it better (if they had the chance).
jasonjmcghee · 11h ago
I think distraction is doing a lot of work here. Many people could play video games 24/7 with no issues. The urge to be productive and/or make personal progress is something a lot of people feel, (which is fantastic), but video games do a really good job of replacing those feelings along with other emotional experiences.
Many shows and movies can play a similar role.
I think we would/will see a lot more of that. Even in transitional periods where people can multitask more now as ai starts taking over moment to moment thinking.
BriggyDwiggs42 · 11h ago
I don’t think people would be idle. They’d just be concerned with different things, like social dynamics, games/competition/sports, raising family etc.
_heimdall · 10h ago
Oh sure, I didn't actually mean to describe it being idle as in sitting and literally doing nothing. I more meant idle in comparison to how much people work today and how much they think about or stress over work.
Take 7 hours out if the day because an LLM makes you that much more productive and I expect people wouldn't know what to do with themselves. That could be wrong, but I'd expect a lot more societal problems than we already have today if a year from now a large number of people only worked 4 or 5 hours a week.
That's not even getting to the Shopify CEOs ridiculous claim that employees will get 100x more work done [1].
What an absurd straw man. Moving the needle away from “large portions of the population are a few paychecks away from being homeless” does not constitute “the devil’s playground”.
Where’s all of the articles that HN loves about kids these days not being bored anymore? What about google’s famous 20% time?
Idle time isn’t just important, it’s the point.
CaptainFever · 1h ago
This is what the "AI will be a normal technology" camp is telling the "AI is going to put us all out of work!" camp all along. It's always been like this.
alexpotato · 9h ago
My dad has a great quote on computers and automation:
"In the 1970s when office computers started to come out we were told:
'Computers will save you SO much effort you won't know what to do with all of your free time'.
We just ended up doing more things per day thanks to computers."
TekMol · 13h ago
When it comes to programming, I would say AI has about doubled my productivity so far.
Yes, I spend time on writing prompts. Like "Never do this. Never do that. Always do this. Make sure to check that.". To tell the AI my coding preferences. Bot those prompts are forever. And I have written most of them months ago, so that now I just capitalize on them.
rcruzeiro · 13h ago
Would you be comfortable sharing a bit about the kind of work you do? I’m asking because I mostly write iOS code in Swift, and I feel like AI hasn’t been all that helpful in that area. It tends to confidently spit out incorrect code that, even when it compiles, usually produces bad results and doesn’t really solve the problem I’m trying to fix.
That said, when I had to write a Terraform project for a backend earlier this year, that’s when generative AI really shined for me.
rdn · 12h ago
For ios/swift the results reflect the quality of the information available to the LLM.
There is a lack of training data; Apple docs arent great or really thorough, much documentation is buried in WWDC videos and requires an understanding of how the APIs evolved over time to avoid confusion when following stackoverflow posts, which confused newcomers as well as code generators. Stackoverflow is also littered with incorrect or outdated solutions to iOS/Swift coding questions.
anshumankmr · 13h ago
Cannot comment on swift but I presume training data for it might be less avaialble online. Whereas Python, what I use and in my anecdotal experience, it can produce quite decent code, and some sparks of brilliance here and there. But I use it for boilerplate code I find boring, not the core stuff. I would say as time progresses and these models get more data it may help with Swift too (though this issue may take a while cause I remember a convo with another person online who said the swift code GPT3.5 produced was bad, referencing libraries that did not exist.)
TekMol · 13h ago
Which LLMs have you used? Everything from o3-mini has been very useful to me. Currently I use o3 and gemini-2.5 pro.
I do full stack projects, mostly Python, HTML, CSS, Javascript.
I have two decades of experience. Not just my work time during these two decades but also much of my free time. As coding is not just my work but also my passion.
So seeing my productivity double over the course of a few months is quite something.
My feeling is that it will continue to double every few months from now on. In a few years we can probably tell the AI to code full projects from scratch, no matter how complex they are.
roywiggins · 13h ago
I think LLMs are just better at Python and JS than other languages, probably because that's what they're more extensively trained on.
dingnuts · 12h ago
LLMs are better at languages that are forgiving, like those two, because if something is not exactly right the interpreter will often be able to just continue on
codr7 · 9h ago
As long as you're just rebuilding what already exists, yes.
genghisjahn · 12h ago
I’ve found it to be really helpful with golang.
With swift it was somewhat helpful but not nearly as much. Eventually stopped using it for swift.
natch · 12h ago
Sometimes it’s PEBCAK. You have to push back on bad code and it will do better. Also not specifying the model used
is a red flag.
nico · 13h ago
> When it comes to programming, I would say AI has about doubled my productivity so far
For me it’s been up to 10-100x for some things, especially starting from scratch
Just yesterday, I did a big overhaul of some scrapers, that would have taken me at least a week to get done manually (maybe doing 2-4 hrs/day for 5 days ~ 15hrs). With the help of ChatGPT, I was done in less than 2 hours
So not only it was less work, it was a way shorter delivery time
And a lot less stress
mountainriver · 12h ago
Agree! I love this aspect, coding feels so smooth and fun now
nico · 12h ago
Yes! It has definitely brought back a lot of joy in coding for me
croes · 12h ago
Is the code audit included in that 2 hours?
nico · 12h ago
This didn’t require PRs
But, it did require passing tests
Most of the changes in the end were relatively straightforward, but I hadn’t read the code in over a year.
The code also implemented some features I don’t use super regularly, so it would’ve taken me a long time to load everything up in my head, to fully understand it enough, to confidently make the necessary changes
Without ai, it would have also required a lot of google searches finding documentation and instructions for setting up some related services that needed to be configured
And, it would have also taken a lot more communication with the people depending on these changes + having someone doing the work manually while the scrapers were down
So even though it might have been a reduction of 15hrs down to 1.5hrs for me, it saved many people a lot of time and stress
giantg2 · 12h ago
Who created those tests?
nico · 12h ago
I did, years ago, before AI coding was a thing
But, from my experience now, I’d happily use AI to build the tests
At the end of the day: 1) a human is the ultimate evaluator of the code results anyway, 2) the thing either works or it doesn’t
humanrebar · 12h ago
Excellent question. Maybe people will use this newfound productivity to actually review, test, and document code. Maybe.
nico · 12h ago
Not so sure given how fast ai can understand the code already written
Personally, I do try to keep a comment at the top of every major file, with a comment with bullets points, explaining the main functionality implemented and the why
That way, when I pass the code to a model, it can better “understand” what the code is meant to do and can provide better answers
(A lot of times, when a chat session gets too long and seems like the model is getting stuck without good solutions, I ask it to create the comment, and then I start a new chat, passing the code that includes the comment, so it has better initial context for the task)
croes · 8h ago
AI doesn’t understand that’s the problem.
If the training data contains some mistakes often it will reproduce them more likely.
Unless there are preprogrammed rules to prevent them.
nico · 6h ago
I’ve had really good results, but of course ymmv
As a side note, most good coding models now are also reasoning models, and spend a few seconds “thinking” before giving a reply
That’s by no means infalible, but they’ve come a long way even just in the last 12 months
taylorius · 12h ago
Lol.
Bjorkbat · 9h ago
I'm always a little bit skeptical whenever people say that AI has resulted in anything more than a personal 50% increase in productivity.
Like, just stop and think about it for a second. You're saying that AI has doubled your productivity. So, you're actually getting twice as much done as you were before? Can you back this up with metrics?
I can believe AI can make you waaaaaaay more productive in selective tasks, like writing test conditions, making quick disposable prototypes, etc, but as a whole saying you get twice as much done as you did before is a huge claim.
It seems more likely that people feel more productive than they did before, which is why you have this discrepancy between people saying they're 2x-10x more productive vs workplace studies where the productivity gain is around 25% on the high end.
TekMol · 8h ago
I'm surprised there are developers who seem to not get twice as much done with AI than they did without.
I see it happening right in front of my eyes. I tell the AI to implement a feature that would take me an hour or more to implement and after one or two tries with different prompts, I get a solution that is almost perfect. All I need to do is fine-tune some lines to my liking, as I am very picky when it comes to code. So the implementation time goes down from an hour to 10 minutes. That is something I see happening on a daily basis.
Have you actually tried? Spend some time to write good prompts, use state of the art models (o3 or gemini-2.5 pro) and let AI implement features for you?
zeroonetwothree · 27m ago
There are specific subsets of work at which it can sometimes be a huge boost. That’s a far cry from making me 2x more productive at my job overall.
shafyy · 7h ago
Even if what you are saying is true, a significant part of a developer's time is not writing code, but doing other things like thinking about how to best solve a problem, thinking about the architecture, communicating with coworkers, and so on.
So, even if AI helps you write code twice as fast, it does not mean that it makes you twice as productive in your job.
Then again, maybe you really have a shitty job at a ticket factory where you just write boilerplate code all day. In which case, I'm sorry!
ptx · 11h ago
> those prompts are forever
Have you tested them across different models? It seems to me that even if you manage to cajole one particular model into behaving a particular way, a different model would end up in a different state with the same input, so it might need a completely different prompt. So all the prompts would become useless whenever the vendor updates the model.
yubblegum · 13h ago
What is it like to maintain the code? How long have they been in production? How many iterations (enhancements, refactoring, ...) cycles have you seen with this type of code?
TekMol · 13h ago
It's not different from code I write myself.
I read each line of the commit diff and change it, if it is not how I would have done it myself.
risyachka · 12h ago
GG, you do twice the work, twice the mental strain for same wage. And you spend time on writing prompts instead of mastering your skills, thus becoming less competitive as a professional (as anyone can use ai, thats a given level now)
Sounds like a total win.
gabrieledarrigo · 12h ago
And...?
Does it result in a double salary, perhaps?
IshKebab · 12h ago
Obviously not because AI is available to everyone and salary isn't only a function of work completed.
gabrieledarrigo · 7h ago
Exactly that!
iammrpayments · 13h ago
Do you use vscode?
TekMol · 13h ago
No, why?
iammrpayments · 13h ago
Trying to figure out how can you double productivity, I try to use AI with neovim and can’t get more than 5% boost from it
jncfhnb · 13h ago
The trick is to have a terrible baseline
TekMol · 13h ago
I use normal VIM.
I let the AI implement features on its own, then look at the commit diffs and then use VIM to finetune them.
I wrote my own tool for it. But I guess it is similar to cursor, aider and many other tools that do this. Also what Microsoft offers via the AI "edit" tool I have seen in GitHub codespaces. Maybe that is part of VScode?
sodapopcan · 12h ago
Hello fellow normal Vim user! Is your tool to open source?
TekMol · 12h ago
No. Aren't there enough "Hey AI here is a codebase, please implement the following feature" tools out there yet?
I have not tried them, but I guess aider, cursor and others offer this? One I tried is copilot in "edit" mode on github codespaces. And it seems similar.
sodapopcan · 12h ago
I thought you were talking about a Vim plugin. Sorry for taking an interest.
linsomniac · 12h ago
The past month or so I've been largely using Claude Code (similar to aider, which I haven't used in 6+ months, and OpenAI Codex I gather), from the CLI, for the "vibe coding" portion, and then hop into vim for regular coding when I need to "take the stick". I don't have any AI tools integrated into vim (though I do have LSP, etc). This method has been pretty effective, though I would like to have some AI built into the editor as well, my experiences with Cursor and Zed haven't been as rewarding as I'd like so I've iterated towards my current Claude Code. My first serious project, a fastapi-based replacement for an ancient Ruby on Rails project is just in "dev test" mode and going out to production probably in 2.5 weeks.
selfhoster · 13h ago
No, I don't believe you. AI isn't deterministic. It isn't a tool. What you're describing doesn't sound credible to me.
No comments yet
giantg2 · 12h ago
The real problem is with lower skilled positions. Either people in easier roles or more junior people. We will end up with a significant percent of the population who are unemployable because we lack positions commensurate with their skills.
hwillis · 29m ago
Lower skilled than office clerks and customer service representatives? Because they were in the study.
qoez · 13h ago
That's the story of all technology and the argument AI won't take jobs pmarca etc has been predicting for a while now. Our focus will be able to shift into ever narrower areas. Cinema was barely a thing 100 years ago. A hundred years from now we'll get some totally new industry thanks to freeing up labor.
Mbwagava · 12h ago
Cinema created jobs though, it didn't reduce them. Furthermore the value of film is obvious. You need to extremely hedge an LLM to pitch it to anyone.
pimlottc · 12h ago
> Cinema created jobs though, it didn't reduce them.
Is it that straightforward? What about theater jobs? Vaudeville?
atonse · 11h ago
Tough to say how it maps but with cinema, you have so many different skill sets needed for every single film. Costumes, builders for sets, audio engineers, the crews, the caterers, location scouts, composers, etc.
In live theater it would be mostly actors, some one time set and costume work, and some recurring support staff.
But then again, there are probably more theaters and theater production by volume.
Mbwagava · 11h ago
Fair point, but that's hardly applicable to the llm metaphor. If you're ok with shit work you can just run a program.
api · 12h ago
Also the nature of software is that the more software is written the more software needs to be written to manage, integrate, and make use of all the software that has been written.
AI automating software production could hugely increase demand for software.
The same thing happened as higher level languages replaced manual coding in assembly. It allowed vastly more software and more complex and interesting software to be built, which enlarged the industry.
bluefirebrand · 11h ago
> AI automating software production could hugely increase demand for software
Let's think this through
1: AI automates software production
2: Demand for software goes through the roof
3: AI has lowered the skill ceiling required to make software, so many more can do it with a 'good-enough' degree of success
4: People are making software for cheap because the supply of 'good enough' AI prompters still dwarfs the rising demand for software
5: The value of being a skilled software engineer plummets
6: The rich get richer, the middle class shrinks even further, and the poor continue to get poorer
This isn't just some kind of wild speculation. Look at any industry over the history of mankind. Look at Textiles
People used to make a good living crafting clothing, because it was a skill that took time to learn and master. Automation makes it so anyone can do it. Nowadays, automation has made it so people who make clothes are really just operating machines. Throughout my life, clothes have always been made by the cheapest overseas labour that capital could find. Sometimes it has even turned out that companies were using literal slaves or child labour.
Meanwhile the rich who own the factories have gotten insanely wealthy, the middle class has shrunk substantially, and the poor have gotten poorer
Do people really not see that this will probably be the outcome of "AI automates literally everything"?
Yes, there will be "more work" for people. Yes, overall society will produce more software than ever
McDonalds also produces more hamburgers than ever. The company makes tons of money from that. The people making the burgers usually earn the least they can legally be paid
ImHereToVote · 12h ago
This assumes we won't achieve AGI. If we do, all bets are off. Perhaps neuromorphic hardware will get is there.
sph · 12h ago
Let's achieve AGI first before making predictions.
dsign · 12h ago
When AGI is achieved, it will be able to make the predictions. And everything else. And off we the humans go to the reserve.
littlestymaar · 12h ago
Only if it can do it in an affordable fashion.
If you need a supercomputer to run your AGI then it's probably not worth it for any task that a human can do, because humans happen to be much cheaper than supercomputers.
Also, it's not clear if AGI doesn't mean it's necessarily better than existing AIs: a 3 years old child has general intelligence indeed, but it's far less helpful than even a sub-billion parameters LLM for any task.
codr7 · 9h ago
A child learns from experience, something still missing in LLMs.
littlestymaar · 9h ago
Yep, but it won't deserve to be called AGI before it can learn too.
Mbwagava · 12h ago
Is there any evidence that AGI is a meaningful concept? I don't want to call it "obviously" a fantasy, but it's difficult to paint the path towards AGI without also employing "fantasize".
ceejayoz · 12h ago
I mean, humans exist. We know a blob of fat is capable of thought.
layer8 · 7h ago
The question is whether AGI makes sense as a concept without a moving, living, feeling body.
Mbwagava · 12h ago
Sure, but what does that have to do with AGI? I don't think anyone is proposing simulating an entire brain (yet, anyway).
Like you could have "AGI" if you simply virtualized the universe. I don't think we're any closer to that than we are to AGI; hell, something that looks like a human mouth output is a lot easier and cheaper to model than virtualize.
ceejayoz · 11h ago
Unless you believe humans have something mystical like a soul, our brains are evidence that “general intelligence” is achievable in a relatively small, energy efficient form.
Mbwagava · 11h ago
Ok, but very few people contest that consciousness is computable. It's basically just Penrose (and other folks without the domain knowledge to engage). This doesn't imply that at any point during all human existence will computing consciousness be economically feasible or worthwhile.
Actual AGI presumably implies a not-brain involved.
And this isn't even broaching the subject of "superintelligence", which I would describe as "superunbelievable".
Eisenstein · 9h ago
Until you can create a definition of consciousness which can be tested externally from the tested object, then the whole subject is moot.
Mbwagava · 9h ago
It obviously isn't if people are casually bringing up AGI like it's feasible.
Jensson · 6h ago
AGI has nothing to do with consciousness, AGI is just about intelligence. There is no C for "Consciousness" in the acronym.
bwfan123 · 12h ago
There is no point in these ill-formed hypothetical untestable assumptions.
- Assuming god comes to earth tomorrow, earth will be heaven
- Assuming an asteroid strikes earth in the future we need settlements on mars
etc, pointless discussion, gossip, and bs required for human bonding like on this forum or in a bierhauz
risyachka · 12h ago
Id we do it will be able to grow food, build houses etc using humanoids or other robots.
We won’t need jobs so we would be just fine.
layer8 · 7h ago
How would you pay for those robots without a job? Or do you think whoever makes them will give them to you for free? Maybe the AI overlord will, but I doubt it.
littlestymaar · 12h ago
The agricultural revolution did in fact reduce the amount of work in society by a lot though. That's why we can have week-ends, vacation, retirement and study instead of working from non stop 12yo to death like we did 150 years earlier.
Reducing the amount of work done by humans is a good thing actually, though the institutional structures must change to help spread this reduction to society as a whole instead of having mass unemployment + no retirement before 70 and 50 hours work week for those who work.
AI isn't a problem, unchecked capitalism can be one.
vunderba · 12h ago
That's not really why (at least in the U.S.) - it was due to strong labor laws otherwise post industrial revolution you'd still have people working 12 hours a day 7 days a week - though with minimum wage stagnation one could argue that many people have to do this anyway just to make ends meet.
That's exactly what I'm saying! You need labor laws so that you can lower the amount of work across the board and not just in average.
But you can't have labor laws that cut the amount worked by half if you have no way to increase productivity.
UncleOxidant · 12h ago
The agricultural revolution has been very beneficial for feeding more people with less labor inputs, but I'm kind of skeptical of the claim that it led to weekends (and the 40hr workweek). Those seem to have come from the efforts of the labor movement on the manufacturing side of things (late 19th, early 20th century). Business interests would have continued to work people 12hrs a day 7 days a week (plus child labor) to maximize profits regardless of increasing agricultural efficiency.
littlestymaar · 10h ago
Please re-read my comment, it says exactly the same thing as you are.
bilsbie · 12h ago
Medical is our fastest growing employer and you could make the case that modern agriculture produced most of that demand:
Obesity, mineral depletion, pesticides, etc.
So in a way automation did make more work.
cadamsdotcom · 4h ago
2023-24 models couldn’t be relied on at smaller levels thanks to hallucinations and poor instruction following; newer models are much better and that trend will keep going. That low level reliability allows models to be a building block for bigger systems. Check out this personal assistant done by Nate Herk, a youtuber who builds automations with n8n:
It’s early. There are new skills everyone is just getting the hang of. If the evolution of AI was mapped to the evolution of computing we would be in the era of “check out this room-sized bunch of vacuum tubes that can do one long division at a time”.
But it’s already exciting, so just imagine how good things will get with better models and everyone skilled in the art of work automation!
nialv7 · 12h ago
Work will expand to fill the time available.
(I know this is not the commonly accepted meaning of Parkinson's law.)
analog31 · 10h ago
This reminds me of a thought I had about driver-less trucks. The truck drivers who get laid off will be re-employed as security guards to protect the automated trucks from getting robbed.
crazygringo · 10h ago
That's an amusing idea, but won't happen. Trucks will just be made more secure, that much harder to open, if theft starts to increase.
layer8 · 7h ago
Only if that’s cheaper than security guards. “Just” hiring security guards may be more cost-effective than “just” making trucks more robbery-resistant.
crazygringo · 5h ago
Of course it's going to be cheaper.
If a truck has a lifetime of 20 years, that's 20 years' worth of paying a security guard for it.
You really think it could take 20 years' worth of human effort in labor and materials to make a truck more secure? The price of the truck itself in the first place doesn't even come close to that.
zubiaur · 12h ago
Thats called a productivity increase. Finally. We were due for one.
hwillis · 38m ago
> Indeed, the reported productivity benefits were modest in the study. Users reported average time savings of just 2.8 percent of work hours (about an hour per week).
linkjuice4all · 11h ago
It’s somewhat exciting to see the commodification of AI models and hardware. At first I was concerned that the hyperscalers would just own the whole thing as a service that keeps squeezing you.
But if model development and self hosting become financially feasible for the majority of organizations then this might really be a “democratized” productivity boost.
throwaway98465 · 9h ago
The hyperscalers will always own the best models, and even if you're willing to excuse that, requiring organization-levels of funding to run a decent model locally hardly makes the tech "democratized". Sure, you'll always be able to run ${LOCAL_MODEL} on your personal hardware, but that might be akin to programming using Notepad if the gap with the best models in the market is wide enough.
kotaKat · 11h ago
All of our communications at my organization that have clearly been run through Copilot (as we seem to keep championing in some kind of bizarre wankfest) lead me to have to waste a significant sum of time to read and decipher the slop.
What could have been a single paragraph turns into five separate bulleted lists and explanations and fluff.
iknowSFR · 9h ago
Is the communication for you or for other AI tools? Meaning is your eventual role just making sure it’s within reason and keeping the AI to AI ecosystem functioning properly? If the output is missing something or misrepresenting something, you update.
Your responsibility is now as an AI response mechanic. And someone else that’s ingesting your AI’s output is making sure their AI’s output on your output is reasonable.
This obviously doesn’t scale well but does move the “doing” out of human hands, replacing that time with a guardrail responsibility.
bilsbie · 12h ago
Seems obvious: If AI lets you produce more of your product then there would be more work added as well. Sales, maintenance, etc.
hwillis · 28m ago
> Indeed, the reported productivity benefits were modest in the study. Users reported average time savings of just 2.8 percent of work hours (about an hour per week).
> Our main finding is that AI chatbots have had minimal impact on adopters’ economic outcomes. Difference-in-differences estimates for earnings, hours, and wages are all precisely estimated zeros, with confidence intervals ruling out average effects larger than 1%. At the occupation level, estimates are similarly close to zero, generally excluding changes greater than 6%.
tennisflyi · 7h ago
Yes. Companies aren’t going to allow you to relax with said new time
esafak · 11h ago
As long as they can capture some of the productivity gains, this is good news for workers.
hwillis · 27m ago
> Indeed, the reported productivity benefits were modest in the study. Users reported average time savings of just 2.8 percent of work hours (about an hour per week).
> Our main finding is that AI chatbots have had minimal impact on adopters’ economic outcomes. Difference-in-differences estimates for earnings, hours, and wages are all precisely estimated zeros, with confidence intervals ruling out average effects larger than 1%. At the occupation level, estimates are similarly close to zero, generally excluding changes greater than 6%.
jmclnx · 13h ago
No surprise here, same can be true of IT. I remember a time before PCs and most work was done on Mainframes and paper w/file cabinets.
Compared to now, the amount of work is about the same, or maybe a bit more than back then. But the big difference is the amount of data being processed and kept, that increased exponentially since then and is still increasing.
So I expect the same with AI, maybe the work is a bit different, but work will be the same or more as data increases.
selfhoster · 13h ago
> No surprise here, same can be true of IT. I remember a time before PCs and most work was done on Mainframes and paper w/file cabinets.
I understand your point but it lacks accuracy in that mainframes, paper and filing cabinets are deterministic tools. AI is neither deterministic nor a tool.
signatoremo · 11h ago
> AI is neither deterministic nor a tool
You keep repeating this in this thread, but as has been refuted elsewhere, this doesn't mean AI is not productive. A tool it definitely can be. Your handwriting is non deterministic, yet you could write reports with it.
codr7 · 9h ago
Yes, but the one thing computers had going for them over humans was determinism, and we just threw that out the window.
thowawatp302 · 11h ago
If AI isn’t either of those things, then what is it?
xigency · 8h ago
Unironically it's a form of occult divination.
I know it sounds crazy but it really is the synthesis of humans' collective works combined with some dice rolls.
I'm quite honestly surprised someone more superstitious than I am hasn't raised this point yet (that I've seen).
ModernMech · 8h ago
It's like when they widen a highway yet the traffic jam persists.
andrethegiant · 11h ago
Always has been
m3kw9 · 8h ago
It’s just math, we tend to like to add and add, more and more. To think AI will take out all work for humans is likely false. Humans always find a problem. You solved your money problem? You are gonna have another problem like and existential crisis problem and that creates more stuff. Just an extreme example
cess11 · 9h ago
So this study says people are producing more profit. The important question is whether they get it or someone else does.
hwillis · 27m ago
It does not.
> Indeed, the reported productivity benefits were modest in the study. Users reported average time savings of just 2.8 percent of work hours (about an hour per week).
> Our main finding is that AI chatbots have had minimal impact on adopters’ economic outcomes. Difference-in-differences estimates for earnings, hours, and wages are all precisely estimated zeros, with confidence intervals ruling out average effects larger than 1%. At the occupation level, estimates are similarly close to zero, generally excluding changes greater than 6%.
fortyseven · 11h ago
That's why they say never give 110 percent, because they'll come to expect that all the time. Workload abhors a vacuum.
throw0101b · 13h ago
This has probably been true of all invention / automation: when we went from handwashing to using washing machines, did we start doing more leisurely things for the hours that were saved by that 'labour saving' device?
> Now it is true that the needs of human beings may seem to be insatiable. But they fall into two classes --those needs which are absolute in the sense that we feel them whatever the situation of our fellow human beings may be, and those which are relative in the sense that we feel them only if their satisfaction lifts us above, makes us feel superior to, our fellows. Needs of the second class, those which satisfy the desire for superiority, may indeed be insatiable; for the higher the general level, the higher still are they. But this is not so true of the absolute needs-a point may soon be reached, much sooner perhaps than we are all of us aware of, when these needs are satisfied in the sense that we prefer to devote our further energies to non-economic purposes.
[…]
> For many ages to come the old Adam will be so strong in us that everybody will need to do some work if he is to be contented. We shall do more things for ourselves than is usual with the rich to-day, only too glad to have small duties and tasks and routines. But beyond this, we shall endeavour to spread the bread thin on the butter-to make what work there is still to be done to be as widely shared as possible. Three-hour shifts or a fifteen-hour week may put off the problem for a great while. For three hours a day is quite enough to satisfy the old Adam in most of us!
* John Maynard Keynes, "Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren" (1930)
An essay putting forward / hypothesizing four reasons on why the above did not happen (We haven't spread the wealth around enough; People actually love working; There's no limit to human desires; Leisure is expensive):
We probably have more leisure time (and fewer hours worked: five versus six days) in general, but it's still being filled (probably especially in the US where being "productive" is an unofficial religion).
rainsford · 11h ago
One additional factor to consider is that in most cases those setting the leisure hours (i.e. employers) are not the same ones enjoying the leisure (i.e. employees). While the leisure/productivity tradeoff applies to an individual, an economically rational employer only really values productivity and will only offer as much leisure time as necessary to attract and retain employees. So while social forces do generally push for additional leisure over time, such as shorter work weeks, it's often challenging for people to find the type of employment situation where they have significant flexibility in trading off income for leisure time.
As an example, I have a pretty good paying, full-time white collar job. It would be much more challenging if not impossible to find an equivalent job making half as much working 20 hours a week. Of course I could probably find some way to apply the same skills half-time as a consultant or whatever, but that comes with a lot of tradeoffs besides income reduction and is less readily available to a lot of people.
Maybe the real exception here is at the top of the economic ladder, although at that point the mechanism is slightly different. Billionaires have pretty infinite flexibility on leisure time because their income is almost entirely disconnected from the amount of "labor" they put in.
skywhopper · 13h ago
What?? What do you think we’re doing instead of handwashing clothes exactly?
Swizec · 12h ago
> What?? What do you think we’re doing instead of handwashing clothes exactly?
The average American spends almost 3 hours per day on social media. [1]
The average American spends 1.5 hours per day watching streaming media. [2]
Washing machines are deterministic. Automation is deterministic. AI is not deterministic. AI is not a tool. AI is destined to be what it is now, a parlor trick designed to passify and amuse.
ta988 · 12h ago
You will have to explain your logic to go from determinism to usefulness. Are you dismissing people's experiences because they don't fit in your analysis frame so they HAVE to be misled because your analysis HAS to be right?
mystraline · 11h ago
Depends.
If you run your own LLM, and you don't update the training data, that IS deterministic.
And, it is a powerful tool.
warkdarrior · 12h ago
Driving is not deterministic, yet commercial trucking is a core part of the US economy and definitely a productivity boost over trains, mules, and whatever else was before.
iLoveOncall · 8h ago
This is an insane clickbait, and none of the comments seem to have read further than the title.
There are two metrics in the study:
> AI chatbots save time across all exposed occupations (for 64%–90% of users)
and
> AI chatbots have created new job tasks for 8.4% of workers
There's absolutely no indication anywhere in the study that the time saved is offset by the new work created. The percentages for the two metrics are so vastly different that it's fairly safe to assume it's not the case.
hwillis · 33m ago
> Indeed, the reported productivity benefits were modest in the study. Users reported average time savings of just 2.8 percent of work hours (about an hour per week).
> Our main finding is that AI chatbots have had minimal impact on adopters’ economic outcomes. Difference-in-differences estimates for earnings, hours, and wages are all precisely estimated zeros, with confidence intervals ruling out average effects larger than 1%. At the occupation level, estimates are similarly close to zero, generally excluding changes greater than 6%.
yawboakye · 13h ago
there's always more work to do. the workforce is always tied up in a few areas of work. once they're freed, they're able to work in new areas. the unemployment due to technological development isn't due to a reduction in work (as in quantity of work available and/or necessary). the more efficient we become, the more work areas we open up.
hwillis · 26m ago
> Indeed, the reported productivity benefits were modest in the study. Users reported average time savings of just 2.8 percent of work hours (about an hour per week).
> Our main finding is that AI chatbots have had minimal impact on adopters’ economic outcomes. Difference-in-differences estimates for earnings, hours, and wages are all precisely estimated zeros, with confidence intervals ruling out average effects larger than 1%. At the occupation level, estimates are similarly close to zero, generally excluding changes greater than 6%.
nico · 13h ago
> there's always more work to do
Right on point
As shown by never-shrinking backlogs
Todo lists always grow
The crucial task ends up being prioritizing, ie. figuring out what to put in priority at the current moment
vjvjvjvjghv · 11h ago
I think we may be reaching a point where tech is better at almost everything. When I look at my workplace , there are only a few people who do stuff that’s truly creative. Everybody else does work that’s maybe difficult but fundamentally still very mechanical and in principle automatable.
Add to that progress in robotics and we may reach a point where humans are not needed anymore for most tasks. Then the capitalists will have fully automated factories but nobody who can buy their products.
Maybe capitalism had a good run for the last 200 years and a new economic system needs to arise. Whatever that will be.
mrandish · 6h ago
Based on the history of technology, this is overwhelmingly the expected result of technology-enabled automation - despite every time pundits claiming "but this time it'll be different."
The example they gave was search engine + digital documents removed the junior lawyer headcount by a lot. Prior to digital documents, a fairly common junior lawyer task was: "we have a upcoming court case. Go to the (physical) archive and find past cases relevant to current case. Here's things to check for:" and this task would be assigned to a team of junior (3-10 people). But now one junior with a laptop suffice. As a result the firm can also manage more cases.
Seems like a pretty general pattern.
FB has long wanted to have a call center for its ~3.5B users. But that call center would automatically be the largest in history and cost ~15B/yr to run. Something that is cost ineffective in the extreme. But, with FB's internal AIs, they're starting to think that a call center may be feasible. Most of the calls are going to be 'I forgot my password' and 'it's broken' anyways. So having a robot guide people along the FAQs in the 50+ languages is perfectly fine for ~90% (Zuck's number here) of the calls. Then, with the harder calls, you can actually route it to a human.
So, to me, this is a great example of how the interaction of new tech and labor is a fractal not a hierarchy. In that, with each new tech that your specific labor sector finds, you get this fractalization of the labor in the end. Zuck would have never thought of a call center, denying the labor of many people. But this new tech allows for a call center that looks a lot like the old one, just with only the hard problems. It's smaller, yes, but it looks the same and yet is slightly different (hence a fractal).
Look, I'm not going to argue that tech is disruptive. But what I am arguing is that tech makes new jobs (most of the time), it's just that these new jobs tend to be dealing with much harder problems. Like, we''re pushing the boundaries here, and that boundary gets more fractal-y, and it's a more niche and harder working environment for your brain. The issue, of course, is that, like a grad student, you have to trust in the person working at the boundary is actually doing work and not just blowing smoke. That issue, the one of trust, I think is the key issue to 'solve'. Cal Newport talks a lot about this now and how these knowledge worker tasks really don't do much for a long time, and then they have these spats of genius. It's a tough one, and not an intellectual enterprise, but an emotional one.
A customer who wants to track the status of their order will tell you a story about how their niece is visiting from Vermont and they wanted to surprise her for her 16th birthday. It's hard because her parents don't get along as they used to after the divorce, but they are hoping that this will at the very least put a smile on her face.
The AI will classify the message as order tracking correctly, and provide all the tracking info and timeline. But because of the quick response, the customer will write back to say they'd rather talk to a human and ask for a phone number they can call.
The remaining 20% can't be resolved by neither human nor robot.
Is this implying it's because they want to wag their chins?
My experience recently with moving house was that most services I had to call had some problem that the robots didn't address. Fibre was listed as available on the website but then it crashed when I tried "I'm moving home" - turns out it's available in the general area but not available for the specific row of houses (had to talk to a human to figure it out). Water company, I had an account at house N-2, but at N-1 it was included, so the system could not move me from my N-1 address (no water bills) to house N (water bill). Pretty sure there was something about power and council tax too. With the last one I just stopped bothering, figuring that it's the one thing that they would always find me when they're ready (they got in touch eventually).
No it isn't. Attempts to do this are why I mash 0 repeatedly and chant "talk to an agent" after being in a phone tree for longer than a minute.
Actually, now that I think about it, yeah.
The whole purpose of the bots is to deflect you from talking to a human. For instance: Amazon's chatbot. It's gotten "better": now when I need assistance, it tries three times to deflect me from a person after it's already agreed to connect me to one.
Anything they'll allow the bot to do can probably can be done better by a customer facing webpage.
A high quality bot to guide people through their poorly worded questions will be hugely helpful for a lot of people. AI is quickly getting to the point that a very high quality experience is possible.
The premise is also that the bots are what enable the people to exist. The status quo is no interactive customer service at all.
There is zero chance he wants to pay even a single person to sit and take calls from users.
He would eliminate every employee at Facebook it it were technically possible to automate what they do.
Like, if AI is so good, then it'll just eat away at those jobs and get asymptotically close to 100% of the calls. If it's not that good, then you've got to loop in the product people and figure out why everyone is having a hard time with whatever it is.
Generally, I'd say that calls are just another feedback channel for the product. One that FB has thus far been fine without consulting, so I can't imagine its contribution can be all that high. (Zuck also goes on to talk about the experiments they run on people with FB/Insta/WA, and woah, it is crazy unethical stuff he casually throws out there to Dwarkesh)
Still, to the point here: I'm still seeing Ai mostly as a tool/tech, not something that takes on an agency of it's own. We, the humans, are still the thing that says 'go/do/start', the prime movers (to borrow a long held and false bit of ancient physics). The AIs aren't initiating things, and it seems to a large extent, we're not going to want them to do so. Not out of a sense of doom or lack-of-greed, but simply as we're more interested in working at the edge of the fractal.
The sad part is, do you think we'll see this productivity gain as an opportunity to stop the culture of over working? I don't think so. I think people will expect more from others because of AI.
If AI makes employees twice as efficient, do you think companies will decrease working hours or cut their employment in half? I don't think so. It's human nature to want more. If 2 is good, 4 is surely better.
So instead of reducing employment, companies will keep the same number of employees because that's already factored into their budget. Now they get more output to better compete with their competitors. To reduce staff would be to be at a disadvantage.
So why do we hear stories about people being let go? AI is currently a scapegoat for companies that were operating inefficiently and over-hired. It was already going to happen. AI just gave some of these larger tech companies a really good excuse. They weren't exactly going to admit their make a mistake and over-hired, now were they? Nope. AI was the perfect excuse.
As all things, it's cyclical. Hiring will go up again. AI boom will bust. On to the next thing. One thing is for certain though, we all now have a fancy new calculator.
Automation is one way to do that.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Productivity_paradox
https://libcom.org/article/phenomenon-bullshit-jobs-david-gr...
I skipped over junior positions for the most part
I don’t see that not working now
There’s little sign of any AI company managing to build something that doesn’t just turn into a new baseline commodity. Most of these AI products are also horribly unprofitable, which is another reality that will need to be faced sooner rather than later.
To paraphrase Lee Iacocca: We must stop and ask ourselves, how much videogames do we really need?
I recently retired from 40 years in software-based R&D and have been wondering the same thing. Wasn't it true that 95% of my life's work was thrown away after a single demo or a disappointingly short period of use?
And I think the answer is yes, but this is just the cost of working in an information economy. Ideas are explored and adopted only until the next idea replaces it or the surrounding business landscape shifts yet again. Unless your job is in building products like houses or hammers (which evolve very slowly or are too expensive to replace), the cost of doing of business today is a short lifetime for any product; they're replaced in increasingly fast cycles, useful only until they're no longer competitive. And this evanescent lifetime is especially the case for virtual products like software.
The essence of software is to prototype an idea for info processing that has utility only until the needs of business change. Prototypes famously don't last, and increasingly today, they no longer live long enough even to work out the bugs before they're replaced with yet another idea and its prototype that serves a new or evolved mission.
Will AI help with this? Only if it speeds up the cycle time or reduces development cost, and both of those have a theoretical minimum, given the time needed to design and review any software product has an irreducible minimum cost. If a human must use the software to implement a business idea then humans must be used to validate the app's utility, and that takes time that can't be diminished beyond some point (just as there's an inescapable need to test new drugs on animals since biology is a black box too complex to be simulated even by AI). Until AI can simulate the user, feedback from the user of new/revised software will remain the choke point on the rate at which new business ideas can be prototyped by software.
Yes... basically in life, you have to find the definition of "to matter" that you can strongly believe in. Otherwise everything feels aimless, the very life itself.
The rest of what you ponder in your comment is the same. And I'd like to add that baselines shifted a lot over the years of civilization. I like to think about one specific example: painkillers. Painkillers were not used during medical procedures in a widespread manner until some 150 years ago, maybe even later. Now, it's much less horrible to participate in those procedures, for everyone involved really, and also the outcomes are better just for this factor - because the patients moves around less while anesthetized.
But even this is up for debate. All in all, it really boils down to what the individual feels like it's a worthy life. Philosophy is not done yet.
Perhaps my initial estimate of 5% of the workforce was a bit optimistic, say 20% of current workforce necessary to have food, healthcare, and maybe a few research facilities focused on improving all of the above?
Does society as a whole even have a goal currently? I don't really think it does. Like do ideologists even exist today?
I wish society was working towards some kind of idea of utopia, but I'm not convinced we're even trying for that. Are we?
Would we have fewer video games? If all our basic needs were met and we had a lot of free time, more people might come together to create games together for free.
I mean, look at how much free content (games, stories, videos, etc) is created now, when people have to spend more than half their waking hours working for a living. If people had more free time, some of them would want to make video games, and if they weren’t constrained by having to make money, they would be open source, which would make it even easier for someone else to make their own game based on the work.
The work brings over time modest wealth, allows me and my family to live in long term safe place (Switzerland) and builds a small reserve for bad times (or inheritance, early retirement etc. this is Europe, no need to save up for kids education or potentially massive healthcare bills). Don't need more from life.
I’m in America so the paychecks are very large, which helps with private school, nanny, stay at home wife, and the larger net worth needed (health care, layoff risk, house in a nicer neighborhood). I’ve been fortunate, so early retirement is possible now in my early 40s. It really helps with being able to detach from work, when I don’t even care if I lose my job. I worry for my kids though. It won’t be as easy for them. AI and relentless human resources optimization will make tech a harder place to thrive.
It mattered enough for someone to pay you money to do it, and that money put food on the table and clothes on your body and a roof over your head and allowed you to contribute to larger society through paying taxes.
Is it the same as discovering that E = MC2 or Jonas Salk's contributions? No, but it's not nothing either.
http://youtube.com/watch?v=9lDTdLQnSQo
Who benefits from the situation? You or I who don’t have to make a u turn to get gas at this intersection, perhaps, but that is not much benefit in comparison for the opportunity cost of not having 3 prime corner lots squandered on the same single use. The clerk at the gas station for having a job available? Perhaps although maybe their labor in aggregate would have been employed in other less redundant uses that could benefit out society otherwise than selling smokes and putting $20 on 4 at 3am. The real beneficiary of this entire arrangement is the fisherman, the owner or shareholder who ultimately skims from all the pots thanks to having what is effectively a modern version of a plantation sharecropper, spending all their money in the company store and on company housing with a fig leaf of being able to choose from any number of minimum wage jobs, spend their wages in any number of national chain stores, and rent any number of increasingly investor owned property. Quite literally all owned by the same shareholders when you consider how people diversify their investments into these multiple sectors.
Creativity means play, as in not following rules, adding something of yourself.
Something a computer just can't do.
This seems observationally true in the tech industry, where the world’s best programmers and technologists are tied up fiddling with transformers and datasets and evals so that the world’s worst programmers can slap together temperature converters and insecure twitter clones, and meanwhile the quality of the consumer software that people actually use is in a nosedive.
The cost, in money or time, for getting certain types of work done decreases. People ramp up demand to fill the gap, "full utilization" of the workers.
Its a very old claim that the next technology will lead to a utopia where we don't have to work, or we work drastically less often. Time and again we prove that we don't actually want that.
My hypothesis (I'm sure its not novel or unique) is that very few people know what to do with idle hands. We tend to keep stress levels high as a distraction, and tend to freak out in various ways if we find ourselves with low stress and nothing that "needs" to be done.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox
It actually does but due to wrong distribution of reward gained from that tech(automation) it does not work for the common folks.
Lets take a simple example, you, me and 8 other HN users work in Bezos’ warehouse. We each work 8h/day. Suddenly a new tech comes in which can now do the same task we do and each unit of that machine can do 2-4 of our work alone. If Bezos buys 4 of the units and setting each unit to work at x2 capacity, then 8 of us now have 8h/day x 5 days x 4 weeks = 160h leisure.
Problem is, now 8 of us still need money to survive(food, rent, utilities, healthcare etc). So, according to tech utopians, 8 of us now can use 160h of free time to focus on more important and rewarding works.(See in context of all the AI peddlers, how using AI will free us to do more important and rewarding works!). But to survive my rewarding work is to do gig work or something of same effort or more hours.
So in theory, the owner controlling the automation gets more free time to attend interviews and political/social events. The people getting automated away fall downward and has to work harder to maintain their survivality. Of course, I hope our over enthusiastic brethren who are paying LLM provider for the priviledge of training their own replacements figure the equation soon and don’t get sold by the “free time to do more meaningful work” same way the Bezos warehouse gave some of us some leisure while the automation were coming online and needed some failsafe for a while. :)
But you do have that option, right? Work 20 hours a week instead of 40. You just aren't paid for the hours that you don't work. In a world where workers are exchanging their labor for wages, that's how it's supposed to work.
For there to be a "better option" (as in, you're paid money for not working more hours) what are you actually being paid to do?
For all the thoughts that come to mind when I say "work 20 hours a week instead of 40" -- that's where the individual's preference comes in. I work more hours because I want the money. Nobody pays me to not work.
>But you do have that option, right? Work 20 hours a week instead of 40. You just aren't paid for the hours that you don't work. In a world where workers are exchanging their labor for wages, that's how it's supposed to work.
Look the core of your opinion is the belief that market dynamics naturally lead to desirable outcomes always. I simply don’t believe that, and I think interference to push for desirable outcomes which violate principles of a free market is often good. We probably won’t be able to agree on this.
No.. if society wants to disincentive over working by introducing overtime, that's fine by me. I'm not making any moral judgement. You just seem to live in a fantasy world where people aren't exchanging their labor for money.
> Look the core of your opinion is the belief that market dynamics naturally lead to desirable outcomes always.
I didn't say that, and I don't believe that. If you're just going to hallucinate what I think, what's the point in replying?
For my relatives in Germany going part time seems easier and more accepted by companies.
Not really. Lots of kinds of work don’t hire part timers in any volume period. There are very limited jobs where the only tradeoff if you want to work fewer hours is a reduction in compensation proportional to the reduction in hours worked, or even just a reduction in compensation even if disproportionate to the reduction in hours worked.
I'm kind of ok with doing more work in the same time, though if I'm becoming way more effective I'll probably start pushing harder on my existing discussions with management about 4 day work weeks (I'm looking to do 4x10s, but I might start looking to negotiate it to "instead of a pay increase, let's keep it the same but a 4x8 week").
If AI lets me get more done in the same time, I'm ok with that. Though, on the other hand, my work is budgeting $30/mo for the AI tools, so I'm kind of figuring that any time that personally-purchased AI tools are saving me, I deduct from my work week. ;-)
>very few people know what to do with idle hands
"Millions long for immortality that don't know what to do with themselves on a rainy Sunday afternoon." -- Susan Ertz
I suspected this would be the case with AI too. A lot of people said things like "there won't be enough work anymore" and I thought, "are you kidding? Do you use the same software I use? Do you play the same games I've played? There's never enough time to add all of the features and all of the richness and complexity and all of the unit tests and all of the documentation that we want to add! Most of us are happy if we can ship a half-baked anything!"
The only real question I had was whether the tech sector would go through a prolonged, destructive famine before realizing that.
We are currently a long way from that kind of change as current AI tools suck by comparison to literally 1,000x increases in productivity. So, in well under 100 years programming could become extremely niche.
We increased production and needed fewer farmers, but we now have so few farmers that most people have very little idea of what food really is, where it comes from, or what it takes to run our food system.
Higher productivity is good to a point, but eventually it risks becoming too fragile.
Screwworm, a parasite that kills cattle in days is making a comeback. And we are less prepared for it this time because previously (the 1950s-1970s) we had a lot more labor in the industry to manually check each head of cattle. Bloomberg even called it out specifically.
Ranchers also said the screwworm would be much deadlier if it were to return, because of a lack of labor. “We can’t fight it like we did in the ’60s, we can’t go out and rope every head of cattle and put a smear on every open wound,” Schumann said.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2025-05-02/deadly-sc...
Yes, but.
There are more jobs in other fields that are adjacent to food production, particularly in distribution. Middle class does not existed and retail workers are now a large percentage of workers in most parts of the world.
Food is just a smaller percentage of the economy overall.
I would have assumed that if 90% of people are farming its largely subsistence and any trade or happened on a much more local scale, potentially without any proper currency involved.
That said, there’s been areas where 90% of the working population was at minimum helping with the harvest up until the Middle Ages.
It’s somewhat arbitrary where you draw the line historically but it’s not just maximum productivity worth remembering crops used to fail from drought etc far more frequently.
Small hobby farms are also a thing these days, but that’s a separate issue.
In my experience they're very productive by poundage yield, but horribly unproductive when it comes to inputs required, chemicals used, biodiversity, soil health, etc.
The difference is so extreme vs historic methods you can skip pesticides, avoid harming soil health or biodiversity vs traditional methods etc without any issues here and still be talking 1,000x.
Though really growing crops for human consumption is something of a rounding error here. It’s livestock, biofuels, cotton, organic plastics, wood, flowers, etc that’s consuming the vast majority of output from farms.
Two things worth noting though, pounds of food say little about the nutritional value to consumers. I don't have hood links handy so I won't make any specific claims, just worth considering if weight is the right metric.
As far as human labor hours goes, we've gotten very good at outsourcing those costs. Farm labor hours ignores all the hours put in to their off-farm inputs (machinery, pesticides and fertilizers, seed production, etc). We also leverage an astronomical amount of (mostly) diesel fuel to power all of it. The human labor hours are small, but I've seen estimates of a single barrel of oil being comparable to 25,000 hours of human labor or 12.5 years of full employment. I'd be interested to do the math now, but I expect we have seen a fraction of that 25,000x multiplier materialize in the reduction of farm hours worked over the last century (or back to the industrial revolution).
Nah, it's not 100% but it says a lot about the nutritional value.
> inputs
You can approximate those with price. A barrel of oil might be a couple hours.
That’s just wildly wrong by several orders of magnitude, to the point I question your judgment to even consider it a valid possibility.
Not only would the price be inherently much higher but if everyone including infants working 50 hours per week we’d still would produce less than 1/30th the current world’s output of oil and going back we’ve been extracting oil at industrial scale for over 100 years.
To get even close to those numbers you’d need to assume 100% of human labor going back into prehistory was devoted purely to oil extraction.
There are probably plenty of goods that are counter examples, but time utilization isn't one of them, I don't think.
That's the capitalist system. Unions successfully fought to decrease the working day to 8 hrs.
Workers are often looking to make more money, take more responsibility, or build some kind of name or reputation for themselves. There's absolutely nothing wrong with that, but that goal also incentivizes to work harder and longer.
There's no one size fits all description for workers, everyone's different. The same is true for the whole system though, it doesn't roll up to any one cause.
I worry more that an idle humanity will cause a lot more conflict. “An idle mind’s the devil’s playground” and all.
Its always possible that risk would be transitional. Anyone alive today, at least in western style societies, likely doesn't know a life without high levels of stress and distraction. It makes sense that change would cause people to lash out, maybe people growing up in that new system would handle it better (if they had the chance).
Many shows and movies can play a similar role.
I think we would/will see a lot more of that. Even in transitional periods where people can multitask more now as ai starts taking over moment to moment thinking.
Take 7 hours out if the day because an LLM makes you that much more productive and I expect people wouldn't know what to do with themselves. That could be wrong, but I'd expect a lot more societal problems than we already have today if a year from now a large number of people only worked 4 or 5 hours a week.
That's not even getting to the Shopify CEOs ridiculous claim that employees will get 100x more work done [1].
[1] https://x.com/tobi/status/1909251946235437514
Where’s all of the articles that HN loves about kids these days not being bored anymore? What about google’s famous 20% time?
Idle time isn’t just important, it’s the point.
"In the 1970s when office computers started to come out we were told:
'Computers will save you SO much effort you won't know what to do with all of your free time'.
We just ended up doing more things per day thanks to computers."
Yes, I spend time on writing prompts. Like "Never do this. Never do that. Always do this. Make sure to check that.". To tell the AI my coding preferences. Bot those prompts are forever. And I have written most of them months ago, so that now I just capitalize on them.
That said, when I had to write a Terraform project for a backend earlier this year, that’s when generative AI really shined for me.
There is a lack of training data; Apple docs arent great or really thorough, much documentation is buried in WWDC videos and requires an understanding of how the APIs evolved over time to avoid confusion when following stackoverflow posts, which confused newcomers as well as code generators. Stackoverflow is also littered with incorrect or outdated solutions to iOS/Swift coding questions.
I do full stack projects, mostly Python, HTML, CSS, Javascript.
I have two decades of experience. Not just my work time during these two decades but also much of my free time. As coding is not just my work but also my passion.
So seeing my productivity double over the course of a few months is quite something.
My feeling is that it will continue to double every few months from now on. In a few years we can probably tell the AI to code full projects from scratch, no matter how complex they are.
With swift it was somewhat helpful but not nearly as much. Eventually stopped using it for swift.
For me it’s been up to 10-100x for some things, especially starting from scratch
Just yesterday, I did a big overhaul of some scrapers, that would have taken me at least a week to get done manually (maybe doing 2-4 hrs/day for 5 days ~ 15hrs). With the help of ChatGPT, I was done in less than 2 hours
So not only it was less work, it was a way shorter delivery time
And a lot less stress
But, it did require passing tests
Most of the changes in the end were relatively straightforward, but I hadn’t read the code in over a year.
The code also implemented some features I don’t use super regularly, so it would’ve taken me a long time to load everything up in my head, to fully understand it enough, to confidently make the necessary changes
Without ai, it would have also required a lot of google searches finding documentation and instructions for setting up some related services that needed to be configured
And, it would have also taken a lot more communication with the people depending on these changes + having someone doing the work manually while the scrapers were down
So even though it might have been a reduction of 15hrs down to 1.5hrs for me, it saved many people a lot of time and stress
But, from my experience now, I’d happily use AI to build the tests
At the end of the day: 1) a human is the ultimate evaluator of the code results anyway, 2) the thing either works or it doesn’t
Personally, I do try to keep a comment at the top of every major file, with a comment with bullets points, explaining the main functionality implemented and the why
That way, when I pass the code to a model, it can better “understand” what the code is meant to do and can provide better answers
(A lot of times, when a chat session gets too long and seems like the model is getting stuck without good solutions, I ask it to create the comment, and then I start a new chat, passing the code that includes the comment, so it has better initial context for the task)
If the training data contains some mistakes often it will reproduce them more likely.
Unless there are preprogrammed rules to prevent them.
As a side note, most good coding models now are also reasoning models, and spend a few seconds “thinking” before giving a reply
That’s by no means infalible, but they’ve come a long way even just in the last 12 months
Like, just stop and think about it for a second. You're saying that AI has doubled your productivity. So, you're actually getting twice as much done as you were before? Can you back this up with metrics?
I can believe AI can make you waaaaaaay more productive in selective tasks, like writing test conditions, making quick disposable prototypes, etc, but as a whole saying you get twice as much done as you did before is a huge claim.
It seems more likely that people feel more productive than they did before, which is why you have this discrepancy between people saying they're 2x-10x more productive vs workplace studies where the productivity gain is around 25% on the high end.
I see it happening right in front of my eyes. I tell the AI to implement a feature that would take me an hour or more to implement and after one or two tries with different prompts, I get a solution that is almost perfect. All I need to do is fine-tune some lines to my liking, as I am very picky when it comes to code. So the implementation time goes down from an hour to 10 minutes. That is something I see happening on a daily basis.
Have you actually tried? Spend some time to write good prompts, use state of the art models (o3 or gemini-2.5 pro) and let AI implement features for you?
So, even if AI helps you write code twice as fast, it does not mean that it makes you twice as productive in your job.
Then again, maybe you really have a shitty job at a ticket factory where you just write boilerplate code all day. In which case, I'm sorry!
Have you tested them across different models? It seems to me that even if you manage to cajole one particular model into behaving a particular way, a different model would end up in a different state with the same input, so it might need a completely different prompt. So all the prompts would become useless whenever the vendor updates the model.
I read each line of the commit diff and change it, if it is not how I would have done it myself.
I let the AI implement features on its own, then look at the commit diffs and then use VIM to finetune them.
I wrote my own tool for it. But I guess it is similar to cursor, aider and many other tools that do this. Also what Microsoft offers via the AI "edit" tool I have seen in GitHub codespaces. Maybe that is part of VScode?
I have not tried them, but I guess aider, cursor and others offer this? One I tried is copilot in "edit" mode on github codespaces. And it seems similar.
No comments yet
Is it that straightforward? What about theater jobs? Vaudeville?
In live theater it would be mostly actors, some one time set and costume work, and some recurring support staff.
But then again, there are probably more theaters and theater production by volume.
AI automating software production could hugely increase demand for software.
The same thing happened as higher level languages replaced manual coding in assembly. It allowed vastly more software and more complex and interesting software to be built, which enlarged the industry.
Let's think this through
1: AI automates software production
2: Demand for software goes through the roof
3: AI has lowered the skill ceiling required to make software, so many more can do it with a 'good-enough' degree of success
4: People are making software for cheap because the supply of 'good enough' AI prompters still dwarfs the rising demand for software
5: The value of being a skilled software engineer plummets
6: The rich get richer, the middle class shrinks even further, and the poor continue to get poorer
This isn't just some kind of wild speculation. Look at any industry over the history of mankind. Look at Textiles
People used to make a good living crafting clothing, because it was a skill that took time to learn and master. Automation makes it so anyone can do it. Nowadays, automation has made it so people who make clothes are really just operating machines. Throughout my life, clothes have always been made by the cheapest overseas labour that capital could find. Sometimes it has even turned out that companies were using literal slaves or child labour.
Meanwhile the rich who own the factories have gotten insanely wealthy, the middle class has shrunk substantially, and the poor have gotten poorer
Do people really not see that this will probably be the outcome of "AI automates literally everything"?
Yes, there will be "more work" for people. Yes, overall society will produce more software than ever
McDonalds also produces more hamburgers than ever. The company makes tons of money from that. The people making the burgers usually earn the least they can legally be paid
If you need a supercomputer to run your AGI then it's probably not worth it for any task that a human can do, because humans happen to be much cheaper than supercomputers.
Also, it's not clear if AGI doesn't mean it's necessarily better than existing AIs: a 3 years old child has general intelligence indeed, but it's far less helpful than even a sub-billion parameters LLM for any task.
Like you could have "AGI" if you simply virtualized the universe. I don't think we're any closer to that than we are to AGI; hell, something that looks like a human mouth output is a lot easier and cheaper to model than virtualize.
Actual AGI presumably implies a not-brain involved.
And this isn't even broaching the subject of "superintelligence", which I would describe as "superunbelievable".
- Assuming god comes to earth tomorrow, earth will be heaven
- Assuming an asteroid strikes earth in the future we need settlements on mars
etc, pointless discussion, gossip, and bs required for human bonding like on this forum or in a bierhauz
We won’t need jobs so we would be just fine.
Reducing the amount of work done by humans is a good thing actually, though the institutional structures must change to help spread this reduction to society as a whole instead of having mass unemployment + no retirement before 70 and 50 hours work week for those who work.
AI isn't a problem, unchecked capitalism can be one.
https://firmspace.com/theproworker/from-strikes-to-labor-law...
But you can't have labor laws that cut the amount worked by half if you have no way to increase productivity.
Obesity, mineral depletion, pesticides, etc.
So in a way automation did make more work.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=ZP4fjVWKt2w
It’s early. There are new skills everyone is just getting the hang of. If the evolution of AI was mapped to the evolution of computing we would be in the era of “check out this room-sized bunch of vacuum tubes that can do one long division at a time”.
But it’s already exciting, so just imagine how good things will get with better models and everyone skilled in the art of work automation!
(I know this is not the commonly accepted meaning of Parkinson's law.)
If a truck has a lifetime of 20 years, that's 20 years' worth of paying a security guard for it.
You really think it could take 20 years' worth of human effort in labor and materials to make a truck more secure? The price of the truck itself in the first place doesn't even come close to that.
But if model development and self hosting become financially feasible for the majority of organizations then this might really be a “democratized” productivity boost.
What could have been a single paragraph turns into five separate bulleted lists and explanations and fluff.
Your responsibility is now as an AI response mechanic. And someone else that’s ingesting your AI’s output is making sure their AI’s output on your output is reasonable.
This obviously doesn’t scale well but does move the “doing” out of human hands, replacing that time with a guardrail responsibility.
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=5219933
> Our main finding is that AI chatbots have had minimal impact on adopters’ economic outcomes. Difference-in-differences estimates for earnings, hours, and wages are all precisely estimated zeros, with confidence intervals ruling out average effects larger than 1%. At the occupation level, estimates are similarly close to zero, generally excluding changes greater than 6%.
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=5219933
> Our main finding is that AI chatbots have had minimal impact on adopters’ economic outcomes. Difference-in-differences estimates for earnings, hours, and wages are all precisely estimated zeros, with confidence intervals ruling out average effects larger than 1%. At the occupation level, estimates are similarly close to zero, generally excluding changes greater than 6%.
Compared to now, the amount of work is about the same, or maybe a bit more than back then. But the big difference is the amount of data being processed and kept, that increased exponentially since then and is still increasing.
So I expect the same with AI, maybe the work is a bit different, but work will be the same or more as data increases.
I understand your point but it lacks accuracy in that mainframes, paper and filing cabinets are deterministic tools. AI is neither deterministic nor a tool.
You keep repeating this in this thread, but as has been refuted elsewhere, this doesn't mean AI is not productive. A tool it definitely can be. Your handwriting is non deterministic, yet you could write reports with it.
> Indeed, the reported productivity benefits were modest in the study. Users reported average time savings of just 2.8 percent of work hours (about an hour per week).
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=5219933
> Our main finding is that AI chatbots have had minimal impact on adopters’ economic outcomes. Difference-in-differences estimates for earnings, hours, and wages are all precisely estimated zeros, with confidence intervals ruling out average effects larger than 1%. At the occupation level, estimates are similarly close to zero, generally excluding changes greater than 6%.
> Now it is true that the needs of human beings may seem to be insatiable. But they fall into two classes --those needs which are absolute in the sense that we feel them whatever the situation of our fellow human beings may be, and those which are relative in the sense that we feel them only if their satisfaction lifts us above, makes us feel superior to, our fellows. Needs of the second class, those which satisfy the desire for superiority, may indeed be insatiable; for the higher the general level, the higher still are they. But this is not so true of the absolute needs-a point may soon be reached, much sooner perhaps than we are all of us aware of, when these needs are satisfied in the sense that we prefer to devote our further energies to non-economic purposes.
[…]
> For many ages to come the old Adam will be so strong in us that everybody will need to do some work if he is to be contented. We shall do more things for ourselves than is usual with the rich to-day, only too glad to have small duties and tasks and routines. But beyond this, we shall endeavour to spread the bread thin on the butter-to make what work there is still to be done to be as widely shared as possible. Three-hour shifts or a fifteen-hour week may put off the problem for a great while. For three hours a day is quite enough to satisfy the old Adam in most of us!
* John Maynard Keynes, "Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren" (1930)
* http://www.econ.yale.edu/smith/econ116a/keynes1.pdf
An essay putting forward / hypothesizing four reasons on why the above did not happen (We haven't spread the wealth around enough; People actually love working; There's no limit to human desires; Leisure is expensive):
* https://www.vox.com/2014/11/20/7254877/keynes-work-leisure
We probably have more leisure time (and fewer hours worked: five versus six days) in general, but it's still being filled (probably especially in the US where being "productive" is an unofficial religion).
As an example, I have a pretty good paying, full-time white collar job. It would be much more challenging if not impossible to find an equivalent job making half as much working 20 hours a week. Of course I could probably find some way to apply the same skills half-time as a consultant or whatever, but that comes with a lot of tradeoffs besides income reduction and is less readily available to a lot of people.
Maybe the real exception here is at the top of the economic ladder, although at that point the mechanism is slightly different. Billionaires have pretty infinite flexibility on leisure time because their income is almost entirely disconnected from the amount of "labor" they put in.
The average American spends almost 3 hours per day on social media. [1]
The average American spends 1.5 hours per day watching streaming media. [2]
That’s a lot washed clothes right there.
[1] https://soax.com/research/time-spent-on-social-media
[2] https://www.nielsen.com/news-center/2024/time-spent-streamin...
If you run your own LLM, and you don't update the training data, that IS deterministic.
And, it is a powerful tool.
There are two metrics in the study:
> AI chatbots save time across all exposed occupations (for 64%–90% of users)
and
> AI chatbots have created new job tasks for 8.4% of workers
There's absolutely no indication anywhere in the study that the time saved is offset by the new work created. The percentages for the two metrics are so vastly different that it's fairly safe to assume it's not the case.
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=5219933
> Our main finding is that AI chatbots have had minimal impact on adopters’ economic outcomes. Difference-in-differences estimates for earnings, hours, and wages are all precisely estimated zeros, with confidence intervals ruling out average effects larger than 1%. At the occupation level, estimates are similarly close to zero, generally excluding changes greater than 6%.
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=5219933
> Our main finding is that AI chatbots have had minimal impact on adopters’ economic outcomes. Difference-in-differences estimates for earnings, hours, and wages are all precisely estimated zeros, with confidence intervals ruling out average effects larger than 1%. At the occupation level, estimates are similarly close to zero, generally excluding changes greater than 6%.
Right on point
As shown by never-shrinking backlogs
Todo lists always grow
The crucial task ends up being prioritizing, ie. figuring out what to put in priority at the current moment
Add to that progress in robotics and we may reach a point where humans are not needed anymore for most tasks. Then the capitalists will have fully automated factories but nobody who can buy their products.
Maybe capitalism had a good run for the last 200 years and a new economic system needs to arise. Whatever that will be.