Site is down to me, but I agree with the argument. I speak for myself: I think AI has removed a lot of small barriers that would naturally slow my work down, increasing dissatisfaction and stress with it. Without barriers, productivity increases and with it, work satisfaction. It's just nice to get things done(tm) faster and at a lower effort due to the quality of the virtual assistant.
AI is making us work more
41–50 of 270 posts
Re: AI is making us work more
#42Earlier quoted context omitted.
Could you explain how AI is going to make energy, water, food, and shelter cheaper ?
My follow up would be, "if AI is doing so many 'menial' jobs, even if AI makes everything cheap, how will unemployed people afford anything?"
It's not a coincidence the people loudest in pushing AI are the same people who build high walls around their San Francisco homes. They plan to do the same thing around larger chunks of society. There is no plan for people who are unemployed and unable to afford anything. The expectation is the walls will be built high enough that their suffering can be hidden.
Someone recently said there will be "sustainable abundance" but this is magical thinking. There will be abundance for people in one class and death and poverty for people in the other class. But the abundance will not be "sustained" -- it will be fueled by the suffering of the under class.
Re: AI is making us work more
#43The absolute worst place to be right now is in a B tech startup. Not only do you need to build some kind of app or product, you also need to build some kind of AI feature into the product. The users don't want it and never asked for it. It sucks all the resources out of your actual product that you should be focusing on, doesn't actually work or works non deterministically, but you are held to the same standards if i…
> And the only lever you have to pull is a lengthy model re-training or fine tuning/development cycle. Is this really how professionals work on such a problem today? The times I'd had a tune the responses, we'd gather bad/good examples, chuck it into a .csv/directory, then create an automated pipeline to give us a percentage of success rate for what we expect, then start tuning the prompt, parameters for inference an…
Got it, professionals don't fine tune their models and you can do everything via prompt engineering and some script called optimze.py that fiddles with API parameters for your call to OpenAI. So simple!
Re: AI is making us work more
#44Yes, this is why it's better to be a contractor/individual right now. You need to capture this efficiency yourself. You have access to the same tools faster than BigCos, so go hard in the paint. If you estimate 3h, and it takes 15m it's up to you how to reconcile this. Personally I bill the 3h.
That's only going to be possible for a short time, as your competitors will bill 15 minutes and you'll have to explain why you need 3h.
Blue oceans not red will prevent this.
Re: AI is making us work more
#45Site is down to me, but I agree with the argument. I speak for myself: I think AI has removed a lot of small barriers that would naturally slow my work down, increasing dissatisfaction and stress with it. Without barriers, productivity increases and with it, work satisfaction. It's just nice to get things done(tm) faster and at a lower effort due to the quality of the virtual assistant.
Hopefully they get AI to fix it
Re: AI is making us work more
#46Site is down to me, but I agree with the argument. I speak for myself: I think AI has removed a lot of small barriers that would naturally slow my work down, increasing dissatisfaction and stress with it. Without barriers, productivity increases and with it, work satisfaction. It's just nice to get things done(tm) faster and at a lower effort due to the quality of the virtual assistant.
Same experience here. spend more hours babysitting AI but able to do 3x the work while i wait. and willing to start new challenges that take a lot of effort without the new tools.
Re: AI is making us work more
#47I was never excited for automation. Automation doesn't mean we do less. It means that we do as much work, and now also the work has a higher complexity ceiling; you need to understand the systems that are being automated, and need to maintain the automation. More things are possible, but everything is more complex, and of course, you still need to work 40 hours a week. Products don't get better either, but that's mor…
Automation is a broad topic. At home I save time because my dishwasher automates washing my dishes. The clothes washer and dryer are a lot easier than doing it by hand. The fruit and vegetable at the grocery store are a lot cheaper than they would be without automation. I think individuals who get comfortable in their jobs don’t like automation arriving at their station because it upends the order of things just as t…
>Being adaptable now is more important than ever.
I do actually plan on getting old, and as much as I would love to retire before I'm no longer adaptable, I'm not so sure my finances or my brain will comply.
>At home I save time because my dishwasher automates washing my dishes.
I don't think this fits my analogy, because you personally can go watch TV or read a book or exercise given the time that is saved by the dishwasher. At work, you must be at work doing something else, and the "something else" is seldom a real improvement. If I could automate my job and then go on a hike I'd be a lot more excited about it.
Re: AI is making us work more
#48I did not anticipate this much traffic, working on restoring it right now
I’ve heard that GPT 5 Pro is great at fixing bugs.
Re: AI is making us work more
#49Page doesn't load for me. I'm in the UK, not sure if geoblocked. But a response to the title: "_buzzword tech_ is making us work more" - it's rarely the tech making us work more, it's normally the behaviour and attitude of businesses trying to profit from the tech that makes life hard for everyone.
Catalysts and causes might be entirely unrelated in a vacuum, but in context, they’re inextricably linked. In the real world, if the effects weren’t genuinely unforeseeable, manufacturers can’t absolve themselves that easily.
Re: AI is making us work more
#50AI is making us work harder, not smarter? I think it's both actually, I'm working harder and smarter with AI. SMH.