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AI is making us work more

tawandamunongo.dev

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Re: AI is making us work more

#251

Post by pmg101 »

bcrosby95 wrote: post #155
everdrive wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course, but then why would I be excited about automation? I can imagine that the executives and shareholders could be excited for automation, but I'm not sure that it benefits me whatsoever.

The executives and shareholders will only be excited about the first order effects of widespread automation like this. They will be less excited about the second order - a steady loss of revenue as whole professions are automated and people can't find a well paying job. The third order will be even worse when no one has a job or money to buy anything. People always point to the industrial revolution. But that created…

I concur capitalism has it's problems but if this means we move back to feudalism I think we can safely say that will be worse.

Re: AI is making us work more

#252

Post by rightbyte »

abandonliberty wrote: post #239
jrowen wrote: post #203

This is due to the flawed cornerstone of our culture that a person's job is their worth and value and purpose in the world. This was necessary when the combined efforts of our labor were still not enough to provide basic needs for the people. The dream of automation was always to fix that. We did that, and more. We have long had the technology to provide for people. But we invent tons of meaningless unnecessary jobs…

>It's the same reason vacuum cleaners didn't reduce the amount of cleaning work to be done. It's true that some of the some of the capacity created by technology was consumed by increasing standards, the data do show a significant reduction in time spent on chores in spite of this. 1965-2011 hours spent on housework decreased 40%, while male housework doubled and female housework halved. The proportion of mothers wor…

> Technology dramatically improved the efficiency of household chores.

Since 1965? Except paying bills via the internet instead of in some bank office, what chore has become more efficient since 1965.

Regarding robot vacuum cleaners my take is that picking up stuff from the floor is what takes the most time anyway.

Re: AI is making us work more

#253

Post by byyoung3 »

baconbrand wrote: post #35
byyoung3 wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

until it works

yes… just one more data center… one more model… one million more gallons of water… it’s going to work any second now, I swear… we definitely can get human level output without human level intelligence… i promise…

im not a sam altman hypebeast. My point is we are so early. Nobody thought todays LLM's were possible 3 years ago.

Re: AI is making us work more

#254

Post by anarticle »

DrewADesign wrote: post #237
hirvi74 wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The ‘right’ way to do it is be able to deliver more than everyone else so you get a lot more work, undercut your competition, and take a bigger market share. You are absolutely correct from a business perspective. However, I just cannot shake the feeling that I am so 'over' this society that we have created. I'm near my breaking point, I swear. Each passing day, I just think living off the grid sounds better and be…

I work in manufacturing, having left software. You won’t find me extolling the virtues of tech freelancing. However, what I said would be even truer then than it is now. Our modern society lets people obfuscate things like saying you’re charging for time but retrospectively increasing the hourly rate like 20x because you felt like you had a really great 15 minutes. But if the guy selling you grain agreed to pay $10/d…

Software isn’t real, and your employer would sell you for meat if they could. It is only that your current value is worth more than your meat value.

The value of your product is much more scalable than a pile of horseshoes to your employer. It all depends on who is capturing that efficiency. How else do you end up with billionaire CEOs?

Do everything right in your career, get RIF’d, live through an era like 2008, and watch people who have zero qualifications get promoted over you and you’ll change your tune.

The world is not fair and I will no longer be on the losing end. It’s not nice but neither is my old CEO buying their second boat and bragging about doing yoga on it at Cannes while people are living in basement apartments in NYC during COVID. I think we’ve all seen enough.

See you on the battlefield.

Re: AI is making us work more

#255

Post by Aurornis »

BeetleB wrote: post #175
Aurornis wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I saw a very different perspective. Some of the people who got to WFH for the first time thought they were getting away with working less because they could bang out Slack replies on their phone when the notification bell came in, but it was really rather obvious that many weren’t working as much.

I’m still salty about it because the people who played this game poisoned the WFH situation for the rest of us who didn’t use COVID as an excuse to work less and try to pretend we were working more.

Re: AI is making us work more

#256

Post by te_chris »

consumer451 wrote: post #78

I know it's making me work more, and I am thrilled. I have not shipped production code for 20 years, and it was desktop back then. I am now able to single-handedly create webapp MVPs, one of which is getting traction. If anything actually takes-off, there will certainly be need for a real dev to take over. Also, my commits are not "vibe coded." I have read every single loc, and found so many issues that I am stunned…

Yes. What they've shown me is that I don't like code. Hate it, actually. But I like building things, and can still read and reason about problems and code. So I chose the best stack for what we're doing, but I don't get bogged down in arcania. It's great.

Re: AI is making us work more

#257

Post by xcf_seetan »

consumer451 wrote: post #78

I know it's making me work more, and I am thrilled. I have not shipped production code for 20 years, and it was desktop back then. I am now able to single-handedly create webapp MVPs, one of which is getting traction. If anything actually takes-off, there will certainly be need for a real dev to take over. Also, my commits are not "vibe coded." I have read every single loc, and found so many issues that I am stunned…

I am in the same boat. But i am getting overwhelm with the code quantity i have to review[0] before i update my code. I don’t let llm touch my code, i ask for code for this or that and then save the code for future review. But ideas flow in faster that i can review then.

[0] https://medium.com/@xcf.seetan/adventures-on-the-ai-coding-s...

Re: AI is making us work more

#258

Post by rhetocj23 »

byyoung3 wrote: post #253
baconbrand wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

yes… just one more data center… one more model… one million more gallons of water… it’s going to work any second now, I swear… we definitely can get human level output without human level intelligence… i promise…

im not a sam altman hypebeast. My point is we are so early. Nobody thought todays LLM's were possible 3 years ago.

My use of LLMs has declined not increased. Some of us are way ahead of the curve of understanding what these things can and cant do, and will not do due to fundamental issues the technology faces.

Re: AI is making us work more

#259

Post by jrowen »

abandonliberty wrote: post #239
jrowen wrote: post #203

This is due to the flawed cornerstone of our culture that a person's job is their worth and value and purpose in the world. This was necessary when the combined efforts of our labor were still not enough to provide basic needs for the people. The dream of automation was always to fix that. We did that, and more. We have long had the technology to provide for people. But we invent tons of meaningless unnecessary jobs…

>It's the same reason vacuum cleaners didn't reduce the amount of cleaning work to be done. It's true that some of the some of the capacity created by technology was consumed by increasing standards, the data do show a significant reduction in time spent on chores in spite of this. 1965-2011 hours spent on housework decreased 40%, while male housework doubled and female housework halved. The proportion of mothers wor…

Those statistics are extremely broad, hard to draw much inference from...do they account for the cleaning/maid industry? How has that changed over the same period? It could be possible that the general accumulation of wealth/tech allowed for more people to pay for someone to clean.

The dramatic improvements to quality of life brought by science and tech are undoubtable, it was not my intent to question that. More just that we as people have a hard time with the concept of a goal state. It is about balance. Let's keep creating new and great things to improve our lives, but let's also acknowledge the futility and desperation of an infinite treadmill.

Re: AI is making us work more

#260

Post by antonvs »

baconbrand wrote: post #35
byyoung3 wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

until it works

yes… just one more data center… one more model… one million more gallons of water… it’s going to work any second now, I swear… we definitely can get human level output without human level intelligence… i promise…

Model output is already superhuman in many significant respects, which raises the question: what are you talking about?
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