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AI is making us work more

tawandamunongo.dev

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Re: AI is making us work more

#61

Post by microtonal »

everdrive wrote: post #37

I 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…

I think it all hinges on recognizing what opportunities automation helps.

For instance, I had to rename a collection of files almost following a pattern. I know that there are apps that do this and normally I’d reach for the Perl-based rename script. But I do it so irregularly that I have to install it every time, figure out how I can do a dry run first, etc. Meanwhile, with the Raycast AI integration that also supports Finder, I did it in the 10-15 seconds that it took to type the prompt.

There are a lot of tasks that you do not do often enough to commit them fully to memory, but every time you do them it takes a lot of time. LLM-based automation really speeds up these tasks. Similar for refactors that an IDE or language server cannot do, some kinds of scripts etc.

On the other hand LLMs constantly mess up some algorithms and data structures, so I simply do not let LLMs touch certain code.

It’s all about getting a feeling for the right opportunities. As with any tool.

Re: AI is making us work more

#62

Post by Aurornis »

everdrive wrote: post #47
Aurornis wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 di…

> 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.

When you find an employer that is happy to pay people to not work, let me know because I also want to work there.

Re: AI is making us work more

#63

Post by benzible »

iamleppert wrote: post #17

The 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…

Agree for the most part but at the SaaS company I'm at, we've built a feature using LLMs to extract structured data from large unstructured documents. Not something that's been done well in this domain and this solution works better than any other we've tried.

We've kept the LLM constrained to just extracting values with context, and we show the values to end-users in a review UI that shows the source doc and allows them to navigate to exactly the place the doc where a given value was extracted. These are mostly numbers but occasionally the LLM needs to do a bit of reasoning to determine a value (e.g., is this X, Y or Z type of transaction where the exact words X, Y or X will not necessarily appear). Any calculations that can be performed deterministically are done in a later step using a very detailed, domain specific financial model.

This is not a chatbot or other crap shoehorned into the app. Users are very excited about this - it automates painful data entry and allows them to check the source - which they actually do, because they understand the cost of getting the numbers wrong.

Re: AI is making us work more

#64

Post by j45 »

everdrive wrote: post #37

I 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…

Premature automation is what causes problems.

Too many people are trying to jump to the end when they don't even have their day to day managed or efficient today can tend to carry forward efficiency in a number of business workflows.

Checking the LLM output is required when it's not consistent, in many cases maintaining the benefit requires the human to know more on the subject than the LLM.

Re: AI is making us work more

#65

Post by HWR_14 »

anarticle wrote: post #6

Yes, 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.

> Personally I bill the 3h.

So, fraud? If you put a fixed price based on 3 hours, that's of course fine. If you lie about how long work takes you, that's fraud.

Unless your bids are what you bill not what it takes, and you would bill the same 3 hours if it took you 4. In which case it's a fixed price under a different name.

Re: AI is making us work more

#67

Post by philipwhiuk »

jstummbillig wrote: post #58
everdrive wrote: post #37

I 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…

This is just empirically not true. Increase in productivity has lead to broad increase in prosperity (with one relatively recent but currently very important caveat, the housing market). Now, if what you actually want is to be relatively more prosperous and have more status that's a game you can keep playing forever. But you really don't have to, to simply be better off than all people in the past with far less work.

A bigger caveat is that measuring improvement by 'prosperity' is both vague (are you using GDP, GDP/capita or GDP/capita of the lowest 10%) and arbitrary (perhaps a better measure is the life expectancy of the poorest 10%).

Re: AI is making us work more

#70

Post by surajrmal »

everdrive wrote: post #37

I 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…

Do you like washing laundry at the river or carrying water from the well back to your house? You cannot talk in generalities about this topic as it is too broad.

There are definitely many things which when automated loses out on some edge cases. But most folks don't need artisanal soap.

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