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AI is making us work more

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Re: AI is making us work more

#181

Post by throwaway31131 »

everforward wrote: post #99
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…

> Your laptop is unquestionably better because it was constructed with the help of automated CNC machines and PCB assembly as opposed to workers manually populating PCBs. This is a fundamentally flawed analogy, because the problems are inverted. CNC and automated PCB assembly work well because creating a process to accurately create the items is hard, but validation that the work is correct is easy. Due to the mechan…

Validation that a PCB was manufactured correctly is... easy. Disagree, but how about VLSI. It's hugely automated. Moore's Law is exponential but team sizes aren't. That productivity gap is made up for with huge amounts of automation. And nothing is easy about manufacturing validation of an ASIC.

I do think one primary difference between physical objects and software is we bother to have precise specifications that one can validate against, and I think that's what you're trying to get at. If all software had that then software could have an "easy" validation story too, I suppose.

I have mixed feelings about precise specifications in software. On the one hand the hardware engineer in me thinks everything should have an exact specification. On the other hand, that's throws away the "soft" advantage which is important for some types of software. So there is a spectrum.

Re: AI is making us work more

#182

Post by throwaway0123_5 »

sothatsit wrote: post #164
cool_man_bob wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t give a fuck how cheap you make bread and circuses. The only goods and services I give a fuck about anymore are the ones that won’t be made cheaper with automation.

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…

Making all of those things cheaper is great, as long the automation isn't also making everyone poorer at an equal or faster rate. It doesn't really help if house prices and food prices are cut in half if most people lose their employment because of automation.

I think the concern is that true human+ AGI and advanced robotics would obsolete so many roles that it doesn't matter if things can be made more efficiently, because nobody will have any money at all. If/when AI can do my job better than me, it isn't giving me leverage, it is removing all leverage I have as someone who puts food on the table through labor.

In the interim period before that happens then sure, the automation is great for some people who can best leverage it.

Re: AI is making us work more

#183

Post by EGreg »

As a result, a new psychological loop forms:

Every moment I don't spend prompting, I'm falling behind.

The system insidiously guilts you for not leveraging it constantly. Allowing AI to sit there, just waiting, feels like a waste. It's subtle, but corrosive. Any downtime becomes a missed opportunity, and rest turns into inefficiency. Within this framework, leisure becomes a moral failure.

I don't feel that way.

What I feel is that in 2025 we're still the bottleneck because we make decisions. In 2026 we'll automate the QA part, and then we'll be able to fan out and fan in a lot of solutions at scale. Those who remove the bottlenecks in business beat everyone else. Is is why FAMGA and tech companies are the top of wall street. Biggest bang for the buck.

Re: AI is making us work more

#184

Post by lotsofpulp »

bcrosby95 wrote: post #167
lotsofpulp wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When a buyer shops at a lower priced store, they are also eliminating a cost. No one seems to bemoan that, but for some reason a buyer of labor qualified as “employee” eliminating costs is different than a buyer of say, a new roof shopping around or going to Costco to spend less than the full service grocery business.

I get that they're connected, but it isn't hard to see why people bemoan classifying humans as a cost and eliminating their ability to receive food and shelter.

The person shopping at Costco or choosing a cheaper roof installer who can work more efficiently with fewer humans is doing the same thing - “classifying humans as a cost”.

Choosing to clean your own house instead of hiring a house cleaner, cooking your own food, doing your own landscaping, driving your own car, all of these are “classifying humans as a cost”.

I probably could afford a maid and landscaper, but I don’t because I would rather keep the money. When an employer does that, it is somehow different.

Re: AI is making us work more

#185

Post by EGreg »

beachy wrote: post #142
BeetleB wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My first engineering job was non-SW, and had a lot of manual work. I automated a lot of it. Yes, it led to more work. What would take half a day could now be done in an hour. So we now had to produce 4x more. I spent 4 years there automating left and right. Everyone silently hated me. One of the problems with my automation was that it allowed for more and more Q/A. And the more you check for quality issues, the more…

I read a great article a while ago (can't remember where) when they tasked some embedded guys with building a somewhat complex front end app. When it was done, there were no bugs. Not a single issue. They asked the embedded guys how they had accomplished it. They said "we didn't know bugs were allowed". Many people have never authored or even been involved with a high quality piece of software, so they just don't kno…

One would think that machines and automation would be the perfect thing to catch bugs.

We already do that on many levels -- compilers, linters, pre-commit hooks etc. Well, AI can just red-team and create new tests. The great thing about red-teaming vs blue teaming is that false positive and hallucinations don't hurt the final product. So you can let it go wild.

Re: AI is making us work more

#186

Post by unloader6118 »

beachy wrote: post #142
BeetleB wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My first engineering job was non-SW, and had a lot of manual work. I automated a lot of it. Yes, it led to more work. What would take half a day could now be done in an hour. So we now had to produce 4x more. I spent 4 years there automating left and right. Everyone silently hated me. One of the problems with my automation was that it allowed for more and more Q/A. And the more you check for quality issues, the more…

I read a great article a while ago (can't remember where) when they tasked some embedded guys with building a somewhat complex front end app. When it was done, there were no bugs. Not a single issue. They asked the embedded guys how they had accomplished it. They said "we didn't know bugs were allowed". Many people have never authored or even been involved with a high quality piece of software, so they just don't kno…

Honestly, firmware is usually where we find the worse kind of bugs.

Re: AI is making us work more

#187

Post by onlyrealcuzzo »

BirAdam wrote: post #146

If the history of the world since the Industrial Revolution can teach anything, it is that while the machines took much of the work, they did not shorten the workday. Instead, we all just work more. Since the Information Revolution, some people get off work, go home, and continue to work. It never stops. The companies of the world will never tolerate giving people more time off. Why do that when people could just get…

> If the history of the world since the Industrial Revolution can teach anything, it is that while the machines took much of the work, they did not shorten the workday

I guess you missed the part where people worked 7 days a week and 10 hours per day, and we didn't have ~20% of the population retired.

Unless we break social contracts, in 30 years ~40% of the population will be retired in large parts of The West and China.

If you're still working 40 hours a week, doing basically nothing but posting on HN, going to the gym, having lunch for hour+ breaks, for most of the work day - you might think nothing has changed.

But for 10-20% more of the population to not be working, there's a huge number of hours that aren't being worked.

It's just that most of the gains are going to one group of people.

Most of us will be in that group by that time...

Re: AI is making us work more

#188

Post by lovich »

Aurornis wrote: post #40
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…

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…

> 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 they were feeling comfortable and stable. Being adaptable now is more important than ever.

Look at all the other threads with people’s experiences. They aren’t unhappy with automation because they were comfortable. They are unhappy with automation because the reward for being more productive is higher expectations and no compensation.

People think the Luddite movement was smashing looms because they inherently hated technology. They smashed the looms because the factories were producing more and the result of that productivity was the workers becoming destitute.

If the machines and progress only bring about a worse life for individuals, those individuals are going to be against the machines

Re: AI is making us work more

#189

Post by JohnMakin »

I've had jobs with 70-80 hour weeks I genuinely loved, and jobs that required maybe 4-8 hours a week of actual time devoted to it that burnt me out. Burnout is a lot more complicated than the sheer number of hours worked - if you are deriving meaningful value from such a schedule, and feel what you are doing is worthwhile, and you feel valued and compensated accordingly - you're not likely to mind that much. The issue of course is that this is rarely the case, and plenty of studies have shown there are severe diminishing returns to working past 50 hours in a week in knowledge work that I doubt AI is going to really help with that much.

Re: AI is making us work more

#190

Post by dancerofaran »

Does anyone actually look at evidence anymore or do they just look at the twitter ramblings of YC founders thinking this models reality?

Founders have been doing stupid signalling for ages to seem like they are more worthy of VC funding. A single anecdote in a podcast about a badly written Wired article based on a few anecdotes from hustle culture founders does not make something true.

Working 80 hour weeks for low pay and high expected upside has ALWAYS been SV software culture.

The individual leverage of an experienced software developer has never been higher.

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