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AI is making us work more

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Re: AI is making us work more

#171

Post by hn_acc1 »

fragmede wrote: post #118
daymanstep wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could you explain how AI is going to make energy, water, food, and shelter cheaper ?

If you're asking for AI hype, promises that haven't come to pass and may not ever, but proponents want you to believe (I mean, I want to believe, the question is if it's a rational belief or not), I can give you some. AI could lead to scientific advancements and make fusion reactors on Earth feasible. (We have one in the sky already, it's just 1 AU away.) With AI enabling fusion, (because controlling the magnetic fie…

So let's say everything is cheap - will that lower housing prices? Grocery prices? Energy prices?

Or will the cheapest provider gobble everyone else up and then raise prices to maximize marginal revenue / whatever everyone can bear? For example, imagine if Oracle (or whoever you want) somehow wins the AI price wars and completely owns every energy company, every housing company, every farm on earth, every bank, etc. You think they'll LOWER prices to make life easy for everyone? When they'll know exactly just how much you can pay each month to still survive and not riot?

Re: AI is making us work more

#172

Post by HWR_14 »

anarticle wrote: post #130
HWR_14 wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Keep working at FANG. I will not undercut myself to large organizations where I am a rounding error to their budget. Simply not doing it. https://www.kalzumeus.com/2006/08/14/you-can-probably-stand-...

I'm in no way suggesting you should bill less. I'm suggesting you bill for work product and not time.

I'm also stating if you choose to bill by the hour, not by the work product, you are legally and ethically required to bill by the actual time it takes.

Re: AI is making us work more

#173

Post by sothatsit »

pdntspa wrote: post #169
sothatsit wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Speak for yourself. I want cheaper building costs so we can build more housing, cheaper and safer vehicles, higher quality food so we can all be healthier, better medical technology and medicines so we can solve more diseases, and new washing-machine-like technologies so I can spend more time with friends/family. That’s not to mention that greater leverage on my labour would give me even more flexibility to choose th…

It's never going to go down like that as long as companies are required to serve shareholder interests above customers' or employees'. Instead all these automation tools are and will be used to cut corners and optimize on cost. Quality, peace-of-mind, and increased free time will be the sales pitch used to placate us plebes. But we all know what the executive dipshits will really care about.

Most people here could choose to work less than full-time hours if they wanted to. I already do (although I do it so I can work more on my own projects, to be fair).

Although, maybe going against the hedonic treadmill is against our nature. There’s always a nicer house in a better neighbourhood to work for. But I at least want more people to have the choice to work fewer hours through higher wages. That might not come for free with economic growth, but it certainly won’t come without it.

Re: AI is making us work more

#174

Post by throwaway0123_5 »

nahuel0x wrote: post #113
throwaway0123_5 wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the problem is if/when AGI enables "someone else" to not need human employees for ~anything. The people that own physical capital (land, farms, mines, etc.) would have robots and GPT-N to extract value from it. The people who survive based on their labor are SOL. I think it is reasonable that many people won't be excited about that kind of automation.

The problem is capitalism, not automation.

I don't disagree.

Social/economic stratification (to a certain degree) makes sense as long as there is a reasonable amount of social mobility. AGI paired with advanced robotics seems as though it would all but eliminate social mobility. What would your options be? Politics, celebrity, or a small number of jobs where the human element is essential? I think the economic system needs to dramatically change if/when we reach that point (and ideally before, so people don't suffer in the transition).

Re: AI is making us work more

#175

Post by BeetleB »

Aurornis wrote: post #62
everdrive wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

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

This was most employers during COVID :-)

I worked fewer hours, and still got more done than most of my team. Since I didn't come to office, no one knew. As long as I responded to emails/messages in a timely fashion, no one cared.

Re: AI is making us work more

#176

Post by throwaway314155 »

> According to a recent Wired investigation, AI start-ups in Silicon Valley have begun to adopt 996-style work schedules.

The Wired article seems to be mostly focused on situations where employees are compensated for working this lifestyle. Aside from that - they discuss how AI _founders_ are doing this to keep up with things. The former surprises me (a little - it wouldn't surprise me to see companies doing this _somewhere_ in the US pre-ChatGPT). The latter doesn't really surprise me at all. Typical founder hustle culture.

A better title would be AI is making startup founders hustle harder [and they are trying to normalize this workload across their (small but growing) companies). NOT "AI Is Making [All Of] Us Work More".

Re: AI is making us work more

#177

Post by thewebguyd »

pmg101 wrote: post #71
everdrive wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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…

Let's say you could automate your job and go on a hike. Great! You can have a fun hike. But you wouldn't get paid for that. I think it's broadly reasonable that you would only be paid for doing something someone else needs doing.

> But you wouldn't get paid for that.f

Maybe you wouldn't, but you definitely should. Knowledge workers aren't paid for their labor (in the form of me trading my time and effort for wages), knowledge workers are paid for impact. I'm trading my ability to reason, decide, and create value for the company.

I'm valuable not because I sit at a desk and type for 8 hours. I'm valuable because the outputs of my thinking help move the company forward. My employer isn't buying 8 hours of my time , they're buying the outputs that come from expertise and judgement.

So if I automate something, the company still receives the same value the pay me for whether I perform the task manually or build something that automates it. I work in ops, so if I use ansible and a script to automate patching 100 servers instead of doing it by hand, my employers gets the same result: patched systems. The automation didn't diminish my contribution, it proved it. I get paid the same either way.

In essence, my salary is a retainer. It's payment to keep my expertise availalbe, and working for my employers instead of someone else. It's not payment for activity or time.

Re: AI is making us work more

#178

Post by risyachka »

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…

Its like a factory.

First things were made by hand, slowly - they were expensive and you could make a living making things.

Now those things are made in factories.

And they are 99% automated - like where software is going.

And whats left is to be a mindless factory worker doing repetitive things all day for a living wage.

But hey, you are so productive - now you make 100k items in a day. Must feel nice.

Re: AI is making us work more

#179

Post by lezojeda »

OptionOfT wrote: post #114

For me, it is making my work miserable. I'm seeing amount of changes needed to produce new features when coding with these AI tools constantly increasing, due to the absence of a proper foundation, and due to the willingness of people to accept it, with the idea that 'we can change it quickly'. It has become acceptable to push those changes in a PR and present them as your own, filled with filler comments that are in…

[dead]

Re: AI is making us work more

#180

Post by photochemsyn »

Solution: run open source LLMs on local hardware where inference takes a while but you're not leaking your sacred proprietary code to some backdoored cloud cluster. Then downtime arises naturally, see the relevant xkcd on compiling:

https://3d.xkcd.com/303/

Note also, compilers automated the process of machine instruction generation - quite a bit more reproducibly than 'prompt engineers' are able to control the output of their LLMs. If you really want the LLMs to generate high-quality programming code to feed to the compiler, the overnight build might have to come back.

Also, in many fields the processes can't be shut down just because the human needs to sleep, so you become a process caretaker, living your life around the process - generally this involves coordinating with other human beings, but nobody likes the night shift, and automating that makes a lot of sense. Eg, a rare earth refinery needs to run 24/7, etc.

Finally, I've known many grad students who excelled at gaming the 996 schedule - hour long breaks for lunch, extended afternoon discussions, tracking the boss's schedule so when they show up, everyone looks busy. It's a learned skill, even if overall this is kind of a ridiculous thing to do.

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