You must be new here. No, that's not how this work. If you are able to produce the same amount of work by midday Monday we expect you to increase the amount of output in the current system by 14 x. And the owners pocket the financial gain from this productivity delta and you should be happy you even have a job.
This is why it’s prudent for more of us to figure out a way to be our own owners.
"Most of the things that we worry about under the mode of capitalism that the U.S practices, that is going to put people out of work, that is going to make people’s lives harder, because corporations will see it as a way to increase their profits and reduce their costs."
The problem is, it has always been that way - and not just in the US. The introduction of any kind of new technology or other way of disproportionately improving corporate bottom lines has always led to job losses, the key thing is what governments do in response to it.
The Industrial Revolution for example led to widespread devastation, the shift from agriculture being the dominant employer to industry and service sectors did not (as the ag workers were absorbed by the rapidly growing other sectors), the globalization / offshoring wave of neoliberalism once again led to widespread devastation, and AI will probably again lead to devastation.
And if Sam Altman isn't arrested for his blatant RAM market manipulation... I'm pretty sure there will be either people with pitchforks at the end or he will have ushered in, in retrospective, a new era of "stuff that uber rich people can get away with".
Yes, everyone has a modern smartphone now. Cool, thanks. But last time I checked, can't pay my rent with a smartphone when I'm out of a job.
> Nobody will suggest we ban cars and go back to horse and buggies so cowboys can have jobs.
Maybe not that, but have you looked at sustainable farming movements? In farming, there is a growing movement believing that the way we do farming - basically, ever larger and larger central operations running farms with tens if not hundreds of thousands of animals or acres upon acres of monoculture crops - is no longer sustainable, as the externalities get too serious to be able to ignore:
Biodiversity loss, land erosion (when everything is just the same crop from horizon to horizon and no bushes, wind and rain has an easy time carrying away soil after harvest), an increasing vulnerability to all kinds of pests...
But in order to get smaller, you need people again, because a tractor costing half a million dollars won't ever make the money back on a small farm.
Are you willing to part with your smartphone and computer? I would bet not.
I fear being targeted by an AI drone and mass surveillance. Neither of which are driven by capitalism (although being targeted by either of those by some billionaire because I refuse to RTO is related).
U.S. becomes more authoritarian -> you are more afraid of being targeted by an AI drone and mass surveillance -> companies that make those weapons of war for the government (prime contractors) make billions -> they use their money to influence politics and public opinion -> U.S. becomes more authoritarian -> etc.
https://rickwebb.medium.com/the-economics-of-star-trek-29bab...
There are people out there who would rather other people starve than they have one iota less prestige, power, influence or luxury. And, unfortunately, they are the people who wield most of the power in our society.
We have to solve that before we can solve the economics, which is the easy part.
I argue - there's nothing we can do to stop it; humanity, I mean. We will either achieve Star Trek or get wiped out as a species.
As a Kardashev Type 3, we will have achieved full automation. I'll leave the door open for Elysium problems, but hopefully Mr. Damon will save us then too.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Past_Tense_(Star_Trek:_Deep_Sp...
A couple of years ago, in fact. We're running late.
WWIII lasted 25 years and it took another 100 years to rebuild after that. WWIII in universe is also scheduled for 2026 I believe.
we definitely choose consumption over free time for the most part.
people generally choose nicer home, starbucks, vacay, neflix over work hours or retirement.
so this is a cultural issue
Post-scarcity is no longer technological problem, it's a political one. But it's still very much a problem, so no, we are not anywhere near post-scarcity.
I also don't understand the point you're making about people wanting to spend $15 on netflix or $12 on a coffee. Would everybody cutting netflix and lattes allow us to live in that utopia more quickly?
It's far more a cultural problem than political.
We starting hitting post-scarcity at the start of the 19th century, towards the end of the industrial revolution [1]
We were growing enough food, housing is actually not that expensive, we were 'starting to not need that much more'.
This is when we started marketing consumption to the population - it was the only way to grow the economy.
We have far, far more than we need for basic satiety.
It's not quite so simple though - many innovations that we 'truly want', like medicines and health tech - come out of the economy as a whole and would not be possible were that the only hugely important sector.
We work 5 days on 2 days off because that's the very strongly entrenched social contract, it's the 'labour equilibrium'.
No amount of tech or AI will change that - unless we collectively agree to change the rules.
The social contract is slightly different in different countries, and nobody seems to have figured out how to work on 2-3 days, I believe that we mostly prefer the way it is. Maybe 4 day weeks would be more amenable.
But the marginal income from the 4th day ... I think people would prefer to work it rather than not.
[1] https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/a-brief-history-of-consum...
My girlfriend had a similar schedule when she worked at a hospital.
Good shoes like Brooks or Hoka and a good sleep schedule and it's doable. I only work 15 or 16 days a month. I work every other weekend, but the weekends I have off are 3 days.
Employers have two modes, waste peoples time, or sack them
That would be true if you and only you are 10x more productive than anyone else. Since everyone is now 10x more productive it just means you have to work just as much as before since you're competition can outwork you. I don't get why people don't understand this.
Why? I don't need 10x more stuff. I'd far rather spend 10x less time working. If we're talking about an actual productivity increase, let's just produce the same amount of stuff in 10x less time.
And let's say that work is correlated with quality. Company A wants to spend 10x less time working, while Company B works 10x more. Company B therefore has a better product than Company A, so eventually Company A goes away. The consumer still consumed the same amount, but they switched to the better product.
Either the product was 10x better, which I don't think I need, or it wasn't really a 10x increase in productivity.
In the world where someone can take your cake by working 25% more hours, it's always going to happen.
Almost this entire thread is people discussing a labour issue with no reference to the fundamental antagonism between labour and capital.
Appetite grows with eating.
It does when you own the tech. If you give the tech away then the people who you gave it to will continue to expect more of the same, naturally.
You wrote a lot of words, but none of them describe a slippery slope, or explain how a supposed 10x increase in productivity precludes a 20% reduction in hours worked.
Then, let's do a 3 day work week and multiply it by 0.6.
Pretty simple math
If it's just time, then why are we doing so much overtime?
>> If AI is going to 10x our productivity across the board, that means that I should be able to produce the same amount of output by midday on Monday that, in the before times, would have taken all week.
You are thinking of productivity as "code written". And certainly that part of your job will get more productive.
But that is just something you do when you're not in meetings. (or when you're in a meeting, but the camera is off, and you're not really listening). Your real job is to attend meetings. And unfortunately AI can't help with that (yet).
(I'm not even being sarcastic. Most programmers don't realize that they have been hired to have meetings.)
What it can do is free you up from the pesky code-writing part of your job, freeing you up to attend even more meetings. And this does indeed make management happy because (seriously now) their job is having meetings, and you being "unavailable" (because you know, you want to program) was hindering them in the first place.
So no, you can't have Friday off, but now that you mention it, let's set aside that time for "team building" exercises...
Many meetings have 0% content "that applies to you". But that doesn't stop you being "added to meetings".
I know everybody is afraid of getting fired and replaced with AI or whatever right now. But we should be seriously asking in our next all hands meetings if 10x’ing our productivity can get us some days off. Or when our paycheck is going to be multiplied accordingly.
So far we’re all kind of being chumps about this, bragging on Linkedin about all of our new found AI productivity while accepting less job security and no increase in comp.
From the data I’ve seen the bottom decile Americans consume significantly more per capita compared to even 2006.
e.g. plane travel was completely absent amongst the bottom decile in 2006, like so close to zero mileage per capita per annum it was a rounding error.
Home ownership, high-quality food, working hours etc. seem far more relevant.
People will, intentionally, work longer hours to afford more frequent plane travel. And to upgrade classes, perks, lounge access, etc…
I’m pretty sure there are literally millions of people like that.
To your example it seems worth noting that the quality of the air travel experience appears to decline over time as well.
Real physical consumption is by far the hardest metric to game or play tricks with.
Yes technically, some probably are trading a bit of their future prospects for a nicer flight schedule, less red-eyes, etc… But I don’t see how that is relevant at all?
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2018/08/07/for-most-...
I hate to imagine what this graph looks like today, given the massive amount of inflation that's happened in the last 6 years.
Yes, lower classes have access to many more conveniences then they might have had in earlier decades, but they are working far more hours, and their expected lifespan has started decreasing.
Just because things may have been worse for specific individuals does *not* mean that current problems shouldn't be addressed.
In relative terms, they seem much worse, Americans standing isn’t what it was. In absolute terms, I don’t know. What’s the measure?
It's the highest, at the moment, that it's been since the 1800s. The nadir for the US was in the late 40s early 50s when we had a 92% top marginal tax rate and extremely high social cohesion despite massive WW2 debts. Needless to say the late 40s and early 50s was not exactly utopia, but substantially more stable.
Then why have we not all been fired already? Sounds like an instant win.
Of course, until just recently, Big Tech workers were so proud to be on top of the world that they didn't think unions made sense for them.
Were you among them? Has that changed?
More flour more water. More water more flour.
Either way it doesn't change that being paid for your output is the realm of entrepreneurship and submitting bids for project work.
"Salaried" vs hourly is increasingly a scam anyway, but all that benefits stuff is something that would have to evolve. And it could, if people find the political will.
As such, you are still expected to work a minimum amount of time. That's what you're signing up for. Fixed deliverable contracts- completing certain objectives- tend to either specify those things as minimum performance expectations, or are for contractors rather than employees.
That doesn't increase shareholder value, so it would be a violation of the c-suite's fiduciary responsibility. Sorry, the extra capital will instead be used on stock buybacks.
1. Reduce working hours 2. Grow the economy
Guess which option was last picked in 1868 and never again despite massive gains in productivity?
What it's telling you is that a company would rather have 4 people working 5 days a week than 5 people working 4 days a week. The reason for that is, productivity drops a lot when it's spread out over multiple people. The reason behind that is communication overhead - the more context an individual carries in their heads, the less likely their role will exist on an hourly basis in the industry.
So, if anyone wants AI to give us another day off, we need to think about how it can reduce the cost of "context switching" a whole person on and off a task, without simultaneously formalizing our roles so much that it gives us all five. ;-)
This ignores a lot of historical fighting (sometimes literally!) to get it down to 5 in the first place.
If everyone sufficiently "flips out" about it being 5 then the problem of "reduce the context switching problem" is something the owner can try to figure out.
Cause otherwise, you could find a perfect solution to that problem, and still not have leverage to make ownership actually change anything vs just raise expectations that much higher.
(Meanwhile, some companies are trying to import 996 and push it past 5 for white-collar work anyway, so any sort of non-political, non-disruptive action seems doomed to fail since the status quo is moving the wrong direction.)
How so? Without technology we wouldn't have a "work week" in the first place and work would be much more directly tied to survival of the community and generally less negotiable in the first place. The "flipping out" came about precisely because technology changed what work was and what the conditions around it were while people noticed that those new expectations and conditions didn't actually seem necessary for their survival (or even much to their personal direct benefit vs the benefit of business owners).
Any technology that lets more be done with less time is an opportunity for a population to make an attempt to claim some of those gains for themselves.
Are you saying you can't think of examples from the past of the introduction of technology changing labor dynamics or organization? Say, mechanical agriculture?
The changes are hardly going to always be good - there's no determinism of "new technology means society will get 'better'". But they've often been periods of change, and such periods are when it's easier to influence the direction if you happen to care about the direction of the change.
We think of productivity as linear to the number of employees, but it’s more of Log(N) for knowledge work because of the communication overhead. If your AI spend and employee productivity improvement ends up being proportional to headcount thats a linear gain that used to be Log(N).
Remember to thank your unions for the weekend.
The other thing is that if leadership is better—they have stronger vision and coordinate the silos (of people or teams) themselves—the communication overhead is less. As you move down the hierarchy, the more each level needs to communicate, sync, and align with each other, the more it reflects the top not doing it. This is so thoroughly normalized today that it's hard to see otherwise. This is what middle managers (and product managers) are supposed to be for—coordinating and communicating to take that off the plate of their subordinates. The lack of leadership above is why the managers below get hired. Those managers then do the same and thus ICs need to coordinate amongst themselves.
You get to keep your job. You agreed to accept X pay for 40 hours, do it or we'll find someone else who will.
We're really failing to meet the moment before us by merely repeating the propaganda of elders glazing over on live TV trying to act authoritative and useful to humanity.
Exploitation of youth is no less ageist than telling gramps look in the mirror.
I do agree though, give me AI tooling, and I will build you cities, but pay me to match it.
the concern would be that this new ability will actually increase competition and give us less than we had before
this is not something that can just be blamed on the "CEOs/execs/shareholders" of the world. it is evolutionary competition - unless we can ALL join forces to draw the line somewhere, someone will choose to defect from the agreement to "just work less", because doing so will make them succeed at the expense of others. even if everyone from one country agrees, the other competing country that defects and works 996 with agents will "win" and conquer the lazy country.
I wish I knew what to do to fix it, doesn't seem sustainable but I don't know how to make all of humanity cooperate without doing something even worse
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 same number of hours. "
I fixed it for you.
If I was smarter I’d have 200k in my 401k now. Assuming I live cheap in Vietnam and a good yield I’d just live off 10k usd per year
This reminds me of the Luddite movement in England. Industrial machines were disrupting the textile industry. The Luddites were not anti technology they were against technology allowing employers to suppress wages and working conditions and for increasing the quality of life and more humane working conditions for the extra productivity.
As we know their movement was not successful giving rise to the bleak images of industrial factory life in England. I think all that will happen is workers will expect to be more productive than before but their skills will be less compensated because “the machine” did most of the work.
https://theconversation.com/im-a-luddite-you-should-be-one-t...
I’m seeing this talking point circulated a lot recently but it’s not really the whole story. Luddites weren’t on a selfless crusade to steal from the rich and give to the poor. They wanted to fight off competition for their specific jobs. They didn’t want anyone having access to cheaper fabrics and clothes and other things because that was their golden goose. They wanted to be in control and force you to go through the inefficient methods to get those things because it benefited themselves.
A closer modern day analog would be something like the dock workers striking to keep automation out of ports. They have a sweet gig and they don’t want machines doing anything to jeopardize their stranglehold on ports, even if it would benefit literally everyone else in the entire country if we could modernize our ports like the rest of the world.
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, and in the case of well paid knowledge workers those don't even tend to apply. If you ever read HR material referring to your role as "exempt" now you know what you're exempt from.
And what's more, software engineers are exempt from these rules because of their pay grades. If you're a SWE making a salary the odds are your employer could require you work on Saturdays without running afowl of labor laws.
This is all powered by norms.
Unless you're imagining congress do something. I want to shoot fireballs from my fingers, but unfortunately we don't live in a world of magic.
Instead of asking for the day off, some startups should just implement the practice and popularize it
The joke, of course, being that every increase in productivity has ALWAYS gone straight to ownership.
Economists have been predicting a boom in human leisure time since the dawn of economics. It has NEVER happened...
Which of course means that if you want to capture that upside for yourself, you need to be an owner.
The real problem with AI is that it breaks that for programmers. Before AI, you actually could be an owner. Of course big tech companies tried to get you to centralize, to depend on their tools, but you didn't have to. You could always run your own open source tooling on your own hardware, and freelance if you absolutely couldn't accept the loss of upside in being an employee.
But now AI has centralized a key tool, and that changes the game, at least if you think the game requires you to use AI to stay competitive.
* - not while any of us reading this are under 65.
3 And they said: 'The God of the Hebrews hath met with us. Let us go, we pray thee, three days' journey into the wilderness, and sacrifice unto the LORD our God; lest He fall upon us with pestilence, or with the sword.'4 And the king of Egypt said unto them: 'Wherefore do ye, Moses and Aaron, cause the people to break loose from their work? get you unto your burdens.'5 And Pharaoh said: 'Behold, the people of the land are now many, and will ye make them rest from their burdens?'6 And the same day Pharaoh commanded the taskmasters of the people, and their officers, saying:7 'Ye shall no more give the people straw to make brick, as heretofore. Let them go and gather straw for themselves.8 And the tale of the bricks, which they did make heretofore, ye shall lay upon them; ye shall not diminish aught thereof; for they are idle; therefore they cry, saying: Let us go and sacrifice to our God.9 Let heavier work be laid upon the men, that they may labour therein; and let them not regard lying words.'
10 And the taskmasters of the people went out, and their officers, and they spoke to the people, saying: 'Thus saith Pharaoh: I will not give you straw.11 Go yourselves, get you straw where ye can find it; for nought of your work shall be diminished.'12 So the people were scattered abroad throughout all the land of Egypt to gather stubble for straw.13 And the taskmasters were urgent, saying: 'Fulfil your work, your daily task, as when there was straw.'14 And the officers of the children of Israel, whom Pharaoh's taskmasters had set over them, were beaten, saying: 'Wherefore have ye not fulfilled your appointed task in making brick both yesterday and today as heretofore?'
It used to be that 80+% of the population worked in agriculture. In developed countries that number is now around 1-2%. Some of the freed labour was funneled into improving living standards, some of it was funneled into new jobs created by the increasingly complex society (the "intermediate economy").
With AI, the same is true: labour is freed by the productivity gains (which I doubt are 10x sustainably but whatever), more labour is needed for power generation, mineral extraction, maintaining this new extra layer of complexity in the intermediate economy, etc. In the end we might see, say, a net 3% increase in global productivity per year over the next 10 years, which will be funneled into increasing living standards and increasing economic inequalities, but not in reducing working hours.
If you accept living below average standards, you could easily work a single day of the week for the rest of your life. But why would an employer hire 5 people working one day a week, instead of one working 5 days a week? They won't, hence we don't see a reduction in working hours.
The alternative is to work full time but retire earlier, much earlier, than you would otherwise, which in the end is the equivalent of having worked one day a week for your whole life.
I highly recommend reading Lean Logic by David Fleming, it explores several of these concepts in a very interesting way.
Though this was a 100-year prediction so we still got three and half to go!
What inspires me to work harder is getting to work on things that I enjoy.
I've been trying to figure out how to bring the idea up to my boss of going back to it... at least the 4x10.
So yes, take the day off but the models still need you to steer them when you’re back
nemomarx•1h ago
Ancalagon•1h ago
jayknight•55m ago
_carbyau_•1h ago
Time not spent working could be time working on spending.
euroderf•40m ago
darth_avocado•57m ago
k12sosse•11m ago