Your Prize for Saving Time at Work with AI: More Work

https://www.wsj.com/lifestyle/careers/ai-work-free-time-51c8c92a

by petethomas • 1 year ago

44 22 1 year ago

evolve2k• 1 year ago

Sort of not much to say. This was an obvious issue right from the start.

al_borland3• 1 year ago

This has always been how it goes. The industry revolution. The digital revolution. They all increase output, but the hours of input largely stayed the same. I’m not sure why anyone expected any different.

malux85• 1 year ago

That's true - except rather than just rolling over and accepting it, maybe the workforce as a whole should wise up so they dont get totally fleeced a third time?

Because capitalism/free market rewards companies that do this behaviour then a unified collective coordinated action among the workers will never happen, so the next best alternative we have is to discourage blind, jaded acceptance : and encourage the rebellious message that maybe, just maybe, SOME, nah, a decent chunk, of the rewards can go to the workforce itself.

al_borland3• 1 year ago

This would be true, but we now have a globally market. So all it takes is one country to reject this and use AI, while putting in the same (or more) work, and they will win.

You can view this as a negative, but it’s also an argument against layoffs. If AI makes a person 20% more productive, laying off 20% of the workforce is short sighted. If everyone is increasing productivity by 20%, they will need their full workforce to do that. Laying off 20%, or cutting back 20% of the hours, will leave the company at their old output.

Of course, in reality the saving probably won’t be 20%, at least not in the short-term. We could also probably cut 20% of our work week and maintain similar productivity by simply avoiding interruptions, pointless meetings, and other such nonsense. But that’s a harder culture change than saying, “go use AI.”

queenkjuul2• 1 year ago

Yeah every time workers do this, the ruling class sends in the cops to beat everyone into submission, gives everyone some pittance (maybe we'll get paid sick days for hourly office workers this time!), and everyone shrugs and says "well it could be worse."

The luddites literally attempted this, btw, and now everyone mocks them for trying to slow the inevitable exploitation of labor by technology.

thedevilslawyer• 1 year ago

I've seen this sentiment come up multiple times, but it's theoretically impossible in current economic and political conditions.

A world-wide revolution may be the only way to change. Or wait for the inequality between nations to erase.

trollbridge• 1 year ago

And guess where the increased earnings from your increase in productivity goes.

hexasquid• 1 year ago

30h week please

Max_aaa• 1 year ago

The issue here, is that this removes a lot of tasks that allowed a person to relax a little mentally. So now we are working the same hours, but we need to be switched on for much longer during these hours. Could this result in more burnout and mental fatigue?

an0malous2• 1 year ago

I think it does and this has been a pattern since the beginning of automation and maybe even technology in general. We look down on factory workers tightening the same screw a hundred times or dishwashers cleaning the same dishes every day as if it’s somehow wasteful to not run your mind 100% of the time but maybe we’ve got it all backwards.

_DeadFred_• 1 year ago

I mean the time allowance to complete each step in factory work is the maximum the human brain can process with the minimum of scrap. Sometime stages/operation might have a spaced out flow like driving but most can actually be really mentally taxing, just with zero fulfillment.

atom_arranger• 1 year ago

This kind of specialization can be bad for factory workers as well. Doing the same motion over and over can lead to repetitive stress injury.

I think it's true for any worker that performing the same activity over and over can lead to issues that wouldn't occur if work was more varied. That isn't necessarily in a companies interest though since for them it's easier to train people on one task, and they're easier to measure or replace.

The predictable and measurable thing for developers is thinking and cranking out features.

an0malous2• 1 year ago

The root question is: what made productivity gains decouple from labor earnings?

https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/

anon122233• 1 year ago

The reason is tons of graphs, bunch of arrows, zero words ?

sirpilade• 1 year ago

Altough I’m not an economist, it seems that the events shown in the graph coincide with the suspension of dollar - gold convertibility until then regulated by Bretton Woods monetary system

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bretton_Woods_system

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nixon_shock

queenkjuul2• 1 year ago

Welcome to capitalism, same as it's always been

duttish• 1 year ago

LLM with agent wrappers, currently claude code, has really helped my bootstrapping efforts, but I don't have much incentive to use it at work. I'll just get more work done and get handed more work, without any kind of matching pay bump.

bilsbie• 1 year ago

It’s weird all these office jobs are mostly unevenly distributed UBI with weird rules around it.

Your Prize for Saving Time at Work with AI: More Work

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