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MIT says AI isn't replacing you it's just wasting your boss's money

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Re: MIT says AI isn't replacing you it's just wasting your boss's money

#21
post #8

Another blog post about the study that found 90% of employees were using AI regularly in their work....that totally omits the part about 90% of employees using AI regularly. The study found that company implementations were failing while people heavily used their own choice LLMs.

I agree. The original report is vague about that as well: > Over 80 percent of organizations have explored or piloted them, and nearly 40 percent report deployment. But these tools primarily enhance individual productivity, not P&L performance. How on earth does "enhancing individual productivity" not improve P&L performance?

How is this 'enhancing individual productivity' being measured? If by self-reporting, it's worthless.

Here's a recent experiment: https://www.theregister.com/2025/09/04/m365_copilot_uk_gover...

A fairly common pattern seems to be emerging; users _believe_ that it makes them more productive, but attempts to actually measure this don't show that.

Re: MIT says AI isn't replacing you it's just wasting your boss's money

#22

[dupe] Another day, another substa... Lots of discussion just a few weeks ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44941118 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44974104 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44940944

Thanks! Big discussions too.

95% of Companies See 'Zero Return' on $30B Generative AI Spend - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44974104 - Aug 2025 (415 comments)

95% of generative AI pilots at companies are failing – MIT report - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44941118 - Aug 2025 (167 comments)

AI is predominantly replacing outsourced, offshore workers - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44940944 - Aug 2025 (235 comments)

Re: MIT says AI isn't replacing you it's just wasting your boss's money

#23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>If the individual is more productive, they can work fewer hours. I have never seen people working fewer hours due to technological improvement, productivity just goes up from them working more efficiently for 8 hours.

Have you met many humans? ;) A very large proportion of the people I've worked with over my career would absolutely work less hard if they could get away with it.

Ah for sure, that's not what I meant. I was talking about the fact that sooner or later people running the business figure out they can increase the workload if employees have too much spare time. Else we'd be at pre-computers productivity levels.

Re: MIT says AI isn't replacing you it's just wasting your boss's money

#24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you met many humans? ;) A very large proportion of the people I've worked with over my career would absolutely work less hard if they could get away with it.

Ah for sure, that's not what I meant. I was talking about the fact that sooner or later people running the business figure out they can increase the workload if employees have too much spare time. Else we'd be at pre-computers productivity levels.

Fair point!

Re: MIT says AI isn't replacing you it's just wasting your boss's money

#25
post #9

That was a random show thought I had a couple days ago: > We’ve managed to convince the biggest tech companies to invest trillions into tech that doesn’t replace SWEs, rather, a new dev tool at our disposal to make some aspects of our job easier: search and tedious coding tasks, saving us time. https://fosstodon.org/@erock/115112206590198248

> saving us time

citation needed

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