just a repeat of the old fallacy that quantity beats quality; get everyone to put in 80 zombie-hours/wk and you’re not gonna get beat by a 90 hr/wk team, you’re gonna get beat by a 30 hr/wk crew that worked smarter part-time.
AI is making us work more
211–220 of 270 posts
Re: AI is making us work more
#212Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.…
Haha I mean if you’re asking for doomerism, I’ve got that too! Once robots can do it all, why keep any of the poors alive? Implement human breeding programs based on attractiveness and intelligence, and cull the rest. You know who don't riot? The dead. Once there's robot soldiers and baristas, everyone who's not super intelligent (but none of that autism) tall white and blonde, with blue eyes, is of no use to the overlords in this dystopian scenario, and is just a waste of resources. Better, then, to make it quick and painless for all of them. So they'll select "the good ones" among the poor to escape away on nuclear submarines, nuke the planet, get the rest of humanity to die off, then resurface once it's safe and repopulate the Earth in their own image. We're firmly in to writing science fiction now though, so we might as well add in a time machine and a cure for aging and bioengineering so I can have extra arms and also gills for breathing underwater.
If you want to go to conspiracies theory land, the world is already controlled by 100 families, or corporations, or the Jews or the lizard people. We’re all just toys for them to play with.
At the end of the day, you have three options and a choice to make: corporations, government, or billionaires. Which one are you going to throw your lot in with to survive the upcoming upheaval?
Re: AI is making us work more
#213Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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 on…
FWIW I don't think there's anything factually wrong with what you said, but I think misses the parent's point. They would be incredibly naïve to say that hardware is easy. But I think they were using "easy" as a relative word, not absolute. As is natural in these conversations, but also easily leads to misunderstanding.
> I do think one primary difference between physical objects and software is we bother to have precise specifications that one can validate against
This isn't to say that's the case everywhere, but it is frequent enough. There's plenty of bad physical engineering teams and plenty of great software teams. But there's definitely differences in approaches and importantly differences in thresholds. The culture too. I've never had a physical engineer ask me "what's the value?", clarifying that they mean monetary value. I've had managers do that, but not fellow engineers. The divide between the engineering teams and business teams was clearer. Which I think is a good thing. Engineers sacrifice profit for product. Business sacrifices product for profit. The adversarial nature keeps balance
Re: AI is making us work more
#214Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
There are a few managers who think the same way, but not that many.
Re: AI is making us work more
#215Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's an interesting analogy. But one difference between dishwashers and LLMs is that you don't need to check the dishes afterward (if you maintain and use it properly).
Yeah but to continue the analogy, the washer was JUST invented and your clothes will come out ruined for a while.
Why are you putting your clothes in the dishwasher
Re: AI is making us work more
#216I'd like to know, from people who really believe that we just need to invent the right technology , then we could all do 20 hour weeks and spend the rest of the time in leisure, what keeps them from doing that right now, and what exactly they believe that miracle tech would change. It seems relatively obvious to me that if a society has work as its cultural core then no amount of productivity increase will get rid of…
Some people seem to be under the impression that they (the employees) and their employers are a team, working towards the same goal (a better life with more spare time for everyone). I just wrote this comment in another thread, but it fits here too: The development, production and use of machines to replace labour is driven by employers to produce more efficiently, to gain an edge and make more money. You, as an empl…
Yep. But new technologies like this are often flanked by press coverage that frames them as beneficial for employees because then they'd have to work less... I'm not sure if those articles are genuinely naive or simply propaganda.
Re: AI is making us work more
#217Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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 promp…
> See, these two things seem at odds to me. I suppose it is, to a degree, knowledge that you can learn over time: that an LLM is suitable for renaming files but not for certain other tasks. But for me, I'd be really cautious about letting an AI rename a collection of files, to the point that the same restrictions apply as would apply to a script: I'd need to create the prompt, verify the output via a dry run or test…
As another commenter suggested, this only works for some workflows. I'd also argue it kind of undermines the idea that an LLM can do this work better than a script.
Re: AI is making us work more
#218To be honest the self confidence of ai is rubbing off on the species in a good way. As in suddenly there is somebody there who beliefs in you, unlike that family that constantly sabotage you, the partner that tries to keep your ego in a "handleable due to absence of success" shape. And all those ideologies that want to cripple any one standing out, they can take a hike. So what if its confidently wrong, at least it b…
What...
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Re: AI is making us work more
#219Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
I fail to see the problem! "Time to lean, time to clean" is fine for someone billing/paid by the hour. As someone on a salary, when the work is finished... I am too. What's overtime? I believe some paperwork had the word 'exempt' on it. My unvested shares are an incentive to save the place from immolation over the next N years. Where's this 'must be at work doing something else' in the contract, again? "Where's the l…
The problem is as soon as everyone returned to office they did care. Even while remote many employers acted like they were being cheated because employees would work less or distribute their work throughout the day.
We have a tendency to scream crisis while stock prices and market caps rapidly rise. Every little downturn is evidence for the cry, but that doesn't change the trend. They keep saying that the share holders are the real customers and they seem to be doing perfectly fine regardless of if it's a hiring spree or firing. Regardless of if it's even a global pandemic.
There's 4 companies worth more than $3T, one more than $4T. 11 are worth more than $1T. It's only been 7 years since we broke that $1T barrier. Most of the growth has happened recently too. Even Apple has had bigger swings since the pandemic.
Idk, I don't think these companies are in trouble anywhere near what they claim. More concerning is this rapid growth in value without corresponding game changing products. Sure, we got AI but it hasn't changed the game like the iPhone did. I'd give up AI a lot sooner than I'd give up my smartphone, even if all it did was make calls, play music, and have a web browser. A pocket computer is very handy
Re: AI is making us work more
#220Not only do you need to explain the problem in order to 'prompt' it successfully, you then have to audit the result. So you're really doing double work; both manager and IC.