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Can we have the day off?

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Re: Can we have the day off?

#501

Post by jessetemp »

throw262672 wrote: post #490
cattown wrote: post #33

This article is kind of playful, but I think there’s a serious point here that’s not discussed enough. We’re being asked to usher in huge productivity gains by introducing AI to our workflows, but we’re not asking how does it help us? Not a lot of us stand to directly gain from our employers becoming more productive. I know everybody is afraid of getting fired and replaced with AI or whatever right now. But we should…

You got into a contract. This contract specified what you will do and usually for how long. Unless this contract specified you need to get X done, I don’t see any way you can argue for this in any way that makes sense. _Nothing_ I do that benefits my employer directly benefits me. AI or not. That was the whole idea of the relationship: I show up, perform some type of labor and am shielded from the bullshit of doing b…

Creating a throwaway for this comment is telling

Re: Can we have the day off?

#503

Post by dmje »

What strikes me a significant percentage of the time I see posts like this and the responses to it is how shit other people’s jobs seem and how unfair their employers appear to be. I don’t know if this is because it’s US centric or tech centric or just full of people under a particular HN-like duress. But, man, it sounds crappy out there. Is there anyone here who actually likes what they do, has a decent employer, has a nice life…?

Re: Can we have the day off?

#504

Post by blackjack_ »

jlebar wrote: post #411
komali2 wrote: post #342

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The economic surplus from that increase in productivity accrued to everyone in society, not just the wealthy. Sure, a poor man with two dollars is richer than a poor man with one dollar. And yet the man handing out the dollars had 100$ in surplus when he was handing out 1s and now that he's handing out 2's he's got 1,000,000,000. Look at the wealth disparity. Even if quality of life has increased, it's not wrong fo…

> Look at the wealth disparity. Even if quality of life has increased, it's not wrong for the people delivering that increased quality of life (workers) to also demand a requisite slice of the pie. Sure, but the argument being made is that "productivity gains accrue to the benefit of solely those at the top of an enormous pile of wealth." That is simply not true. Across the entire world, from rich countries to poor c…

Both can be true. Standards can both have improved since the 1920s and income inequality can be equivalent or worse than the gilded age. This would be coherent with improvements mostly being funneled to the top, while some benefits accrue throughout the economy.

However the story is much more dynamic and interesting than that, with income inequality shrinking until the late 70s and early 80s, then expanding drastically until now, half a century later. That period of lower income inequality is mostly why things got better for the working class (but science and technology have marched on regardless).

Re: Can we have the day off?

#505

Post by sharpshadow »

alexpotato wrote: post #43

My dad was a stock broker in the late 1970s and remembers when most of trading was 100% manual and firms actually had "runners" who would take stock certificates back and forth between trading firms. He has this great quote about when computers came out: "We were told 'computers will save you so much time on work tasks that you won't even know what to do with your free time'. I spent the next 30 years working the sam…

It is the fundamental requirement of capitalism to convert every increase in productivity into profit rather than into time.

In a communist society where the people own the means of production collectively the measure of wealth would not be money but disposable free time.

Re: Can we have the day off?

#506

Post by glitchc »

moduspol wrote: post #199
cattown wrote: post #33

This article is kind of playful, but I think there’s a serious point here that’s not discussed enough. We’re being asked to usher in huge productivity gains by introducing AI to our workflows, but we’re not asking how does it help us? Not a lot of us stand to directly gain from our employers becoming more productive. I know everybody is afraid of getting fired and replaced with AI or whatever right now. But we should…

Computers and the Internet ushered in huge productivity gains. Despite many people losing their jobs as a result, it's tough to argue society isn't better off. I think that's the key difference with AI, though. It's not like I'm losing my job, but at least I have a robot at home that cleans the house and does my laundry. People are having their livelihoods threatened while their utility bills go up because of datacen…

> I think that's the key difference with AI, though. It's not like I'm losing my job, but at least I have a robot at home that cleans the house and does my laundry.

Do you though? You might be hallucinating those robots. And no, a Roomba doesn't mop the floor, wipe the countertops or clean the toilets.

> I'm OK with accepting a job that pays 10x less if the efficiencies from AI mean we're all living in abundance and life is >10x cheaper. But it's unclear if/when we'll move beyond marginal business impact, aside from in software development, I suppose.

Will it though? Your biggest cost is lodging, either rent or own, and both have consistently increased over the past millenia.

Re: Can we have the day off?

#508

Post by Maxatar »

gravypod wrote: post #340
mastazi wrote: post #294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you give some examples of jobs that are usually done by salaried employees and are paid by output? All the examples I can think of, are usually done by independent contractors.

Anything commissions based might fit the bill?

Commission is not salary.

Re: Can we have the day off?

#509

Post by NothingAboutAny »

madrox wrote: post #65

The four day work week is a prisoner's dilemma. If everyone did it, then we'd all get a payoff, but if someone defects to a longer work week they tend to get ahead at work. Thus we all do it and thus we all lose. It's funny how underappreciated it is how the five day work week is powered by norms...at least in the US. People assume there are laws about it. The only laws dictate compensation past certain thresholds, a…

I went through a big back and forth with a small startup where I initially negotiated in at 3 days a week. Eventually they said "we really need you the full 5 days" and I explained that I'm gonna do the same amount of work regardless and they could pay me 40% less by agreeing to 3 days. they still wanted me 5 days, so I took the job and just coasted those 2 days from home, they were still very happy with my performance, I ended up quitting in 6 months because I wanted my hours in the day back.

I really think management still doesn't get it.

Re: Can we have the day off?

#510

Post by JuniperMesos »

jlebar wrote: post #327
ncallaway wrote: post #304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right, but a day off would reduce supply. And 2 days off was not a system dictated by God, which we are obligated to keep in perpetuity (in fact, most religions dictate 1 day off, not 2). So, we could, as a society, just choose to make a 32 hour workweek “full time”, and mandate overtime pay after that. There’s no reason, even under capitalism that we must allow all of the productivity gains to accrue to the benefit…

> There’s no reason, even under capitalism that we must allow all of the productivity gains to accrue to the benefit of solely those at the top of an enormous pile of wealth. I would question the premise that all or even most of the productivity gains of any past technological improvement have accrued to the benefit of solely those at the top of an enormous pile of wealth. 200 years ago 90% of Americans lived on farm…

> But certainly the positive supply shock was not great news for farmers, many of whom lost their jobs. In the case of AI, I'm asking us -- programmers -- not to make the mistake of saying "this is not a benefit for me, therefore it's not a benefit for society".

I'm not sure about that - farming kind of sucks. I think what the transition away from farming generally looked like was people who had some kind of small family farm, where multiple generations had worked hard all their lives to make a living growing crops, having kids who left the farm to work in some other industry, and making more money that way and having better working conditions (at the price of living a more urban lifestyle foreign to their family back on the farm). When their parents' generation got old and was ready to pass the family farm along, the urban worker generation decided they'd rather not quit their jobs and go back to the family farm; so (perhaps with some feeling of guilt), they sold the land to a large farming conglomerate; and then the next generations who grew up in an urban area doing white-collar jobs simply forgot that their ancestors had ever been farmers.

Something like this happened in my own family - about one hundred years ago, my great-grandfather owned a farm on what was then the outskirts of the bay area. He sold the land when he retired, no one else in my family ever did agricultural work, I only know the story, and the land that farm was once on is now incredibly valuable bay area real estate that is not being used for any agricultural purpose. I have no desire to work in agriculture.

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