14 ms·

Time saved by AI offset by new work created, study suggests

448 points by amichail 1y ago

yawboakye 1y ago
there's always more work to do. the workforce is always tied up in a few areas of work. once they're freed, they're able to work in new areas. the unemployment due to technological development isn't due to a reduction in work (as in quantity of work available and/or necessary). the more efficient we become, the more work areas we open up.
- nico 1y ago
  > there's always more work to do Right on point As shown by never-shrinking backlogs Todo lists always grow The crucial task ends up being prioritizing, ie. figuring out what to put in priority at the current moment
- hwillis 1y ago
  > Indeed, the reported productivity benefits were modest in the study. Users reported average time savings of just 2.8 percent of work hours (about an hour per week). https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=5219933 https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=5219933 > Our main finding is that AI chatbots have had minimal impact on adopters’ economic outcomes. Difference-in-differences estimates for earnings, hours, and wages are all precisely estimated zeros, with confidence intervals ruling out average effects larger than 1%. At the occupation level, estimates are similarly close to zero, generally excluding changes greater than 6%.
TekMol 1y ago
When it comes to programming, I would say AI has about doubled my productivity so far. Yes, I spend time on writing prompts. Like "Never do this. Never do that. Always do this. Make sure to check that.". To tell the AI my coding preferences. Bot those prompts are forever. And I have written most of them months ago, so that now I just capitalize on them.
- iammrpayments 1y ago
  Do you use vscode?
  - TekMol 1y ago
    No, why?
    - iammrpayments 1y ago
      Trying to figure out how can you double productivity, I try to use AI with neovim and can’t get more than 5% boost from it
      - TekMol 1y ago
        I use normal VIM. I let the AI implement features on its own, then look at the commit diffs and then use VIM to finetune them. I wrote my own tool for it. But I guess it is similar to cursor, aider and many other tools that do this. Also what Microsoft offers via the AI "edit" tool I have seen in GitHub codespaces. Maybe that is part of VScode?
        sodapopcan 1y ago
        Hello fellow normal Vim user! Is your tool to open source?
        TekMol 1y ago
        No. Aren't there enough "Hey AI here is a codebase, please implement the following feature" tools out there yet? I have not tried them, but I guess aider, cursor and others offer this? One I tried is copilot in "edit" mode on github codespaces. And it seems similar.
        sodapopcan 1y ago
        I thought you were talking about a Vim plugin. Sorry for taking an interest.
jmclnx 1y ago
No surprise here, same can be true of IT. I remember a time before PCs and most work was done on Mainframes and paper w/file cabinets. Compared to now, the amount of work is about the same, or maybe a bit more than back then. But the big difference is the amount of data being processed and kept, that increased exponentially since then and is still increasing. So I expect the same with AI, maybe the work is a bit different, but work will be the same or more as data increases.
- selfhoster 1y ago
  > No surprise here, same can be true of IT. I remember a time before PCs and most work was done on Mainframes and paper w/file cabinets. I understand your point but it lacks accuracy in that mainframes, paper and filing cabinets are deterministic tools. AI is neither deterministic nor a tool.
  - signatoremo 1y ago
    > AI is neither deterministic nor a tool You keep repeating this in this thread, but as has been refuted elsewhere, this doesn't mean AI is not productive. A tool it definitely can be. Your handwriting is non deterministic, yet you could write reports with it.
    - codr7 1y ago
      Yes, but the one thing computers had going for them over humans was determinism, and we just threw that out the window.
      - signatoremo 1y ago
        We did not throw that out the window. AI is new capability on top of what the computer is already capable of
        codr7 1y ago
        No, AI is a computer pretending (badly) to be human.
throw0101b 1y ago
This has probably been true of all invention / automation: when we went from handwashing to using washing machines, did we start doing more leisurely things for the hours that were saved by that 'labour saving' device? > Now it is true that the needs of human beings may seem to be insatiable. But they fall into two classes --those needs which are absolute in the sense that we feel them whatever the situation of our fellow human beings may be, and those which are relative in the sense that we feel them only if their satisfaction lifts us above, makes us feel superior to, our fellows. Needs of the second class, those which satisfy the desire for superiority, may indeed be insatiable; for the higher the general level, the higher still are they. But this is not so true of the absolute needs-a point may soon be reached, much sooner perhaps than we are all of us aware of, when these needs are satisfied in the sense that we prefer to devote our further energies to non-economic purposes. […] > For many ages to come the old Adam will be so strong in us that everybody will need to do some work if he is to be contented. We shall do more things for ourselves than is usual with the rich to-day, only too glad to have small duties and tasks and routines. But beyond this, we shall endeavour to spread the bread thin on the butter-to make what work there is still to be done to be as widely shared as possible. Three-hour shifts or a fifteen-hour week may put off the problem for a great while. For three hours a day is quite enough to satisfy the old Adam in most of us! * John Maynard Keynes, "Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren" (1930) * http://www.econ.yale.edu/smith/econ116a/keynes1.pdf http://www.econ.yale.edu/smith/econ116a/keynes1.pdf An essay putting forward / hypothesizing four reasons on why the above did not happen (We haven't spread the wealth around enough; People actually love working; There's no limit to human desires; Leisure is expensive): * https://www.vox.com/2014/11/20/7254877/keynes-work-leisure https://www.vox.com/2014/11/20/7254877/keynes-work-leisure We probably have more leisure time (and fewer hours worked: five versus six days) in general, but it's still being filled (probably especially in the US where being "productive" is an unofficial religion).
- selfhoster 1y ago
  Washing machines are deterministic. Automation is deterministic. AI is not deterministic. AI is not a tool. AI is destined to be what it is now, a parlor trick designed to passify and amuse.
qoez 1y ago
That's the story of all technology and the argument AI won't take jobs pmarca etc has been predicting for a while now. Our focus will be able to shift into ever narrower areas. Cinema was barely a thing 100 years ago. A hundred years from now we'll get some totally new industry thanks to freeing up labor.
- ImHereToVote 1y ago
  This assumes we won't achieve AGI. If we do, all bets are off. Perhaps neuromorphic hardware will get is there.
  - sph 1y ago
    Let's achieve AGI first before making predictions.
    - dsign 1y ago
      When AGI is achieved, it will be able to make the predictions. And everything else. And off we the humans go to the reserve.
      - littlestymaar 1y ago
        Only if it can do it in an affordable fashion. If you need a supercomputer to run your AGI then it's probably not worth it for any task that a human can do, because humans happen to be much cheaper than supercomputers. Also, it's not clear if AGI doesn't mean it's necessarily better than existing AIs: a 3 years old child has general intelligence indeed, but it's far less helpful than even a sub-billion parameters LLM for any task.
        codr7 1y ago
        A child learns from experience, something still missing in LLMs.
        1y ago
NalNezumi 1y ago
I can't find the article anymore but I remember reading almost 10 years ago an article on the economist saying that the result of automation was not removal of jobs but more work + less junior employment positions. The example they gave was search engine + digital documents removed the junior lawyer headcount by a lot. Prior to digital documents, a fairly common junior lawyer task was: "we have a upcoming court case. Go to the (physical) archive and find past cases relevant to current case. Here's things to check for:" and this task would be assigned to a team of junior (3-10 people). But now one junior with a laptop suffice. As a result the firm can also manage more cases. Seems like a pretty general pattern.
- PeterStuer 1y ago
  We have an infinite capacity in 'making' work. It just shifts from real productivity to make-work overhead. Pfiefdoms and empires will be maintained.
- toxik 1y ago
  I don't know about lawyering, but with engineering research, I can now ask ChatGPT's Deep Research to do a literature review on any topic. This used to take time and effort.
  - camdenreslink 1y ago
    If you don't know about lawyering, then how do you know if the literature review is any good? It's the same thing as a non-programmer asking an LLM to vibe code an application. They have no idea about the quality.
    - rainonmoon 1y ago
      I think the point with most applications of LLMs is that the users don’t care if it’s good, only if it’s good enough. How much despair this induces is down to your bias for whatever subject is being reduced.
- yieldcrv 1y ago
nialv7 1y ago
Work will expand to fill the time available. (I know this is not the commonly accepted meaning of Parkinson's law.)
zubiaur 1y ago
Thats called a productivity increase. Finally. We were due for one.
- linkjuice4all 1y ago
  It’s somewhat exciting to see the commodification of AI models and hardware. At first I was concerned that the hyperscalers would just own the whole thing as a service that keeps squeezing you. But if model development and self hosting become financially feasible for the majority of organizations then this might really be a “democratized” productivity boost.
  - throwaway98465 1y ago
    The hyperscalers will always own the best models, and even if you're willing to excuse that, requiring organization-levels of funding to run a decent model locally hardly makes the tech "democratized". Sure, you'll always be able to run ${LOCAL_MODEL} on your personal hardware, but that might be akin to programming using Notepad if the gap with the best models in the market is wide enough.
- hwillis 1y ago
  > Indeed, the reported productivity benefits were modest in the study. Users reported average time savings of just 2.8 percent of work hours (about an hour per week).
JCM9 1y ago
Modern AI tools are amazing, but they’re amazing like spell check was amazing when it came out. Does it help with menial tasks? Yes, but it creates a new baseline that everyone has and just moves the bar. Theres scant evidence that we’re all going to just sit on a beach while AI runs your company anytime soon. There’s little sign of any AI company managing to build something that doesn’t just turn into a new baseline commodity. Most of these AI products are also horribly unprofitable, which is another reality that will need to be faced sooner rather than later.
- amarant 1y ago
  It's got me wondering: do any of my hard work actually matter? Or is it all just pointless busy-work invented since the industrial revolution to create jobs for everyone, when in reality we would be fine if like 5% of society worked while the rest slacked off? Don't think we'd have as many videogames, but then again, we would have time to play, which I would argue is more valuable than games. To paraphrase Lee Iacocca: We must stop and ask ourselves, how much videogames do we really need?
  - npteljes 1y ago
    >do any of my hard work actually matter? Yes... basically in life, you have to find the definition of "to matter" that you can strongly believe in. Otherwise everything feels aimless, the very life itself. The rest of what you ponder in your comment is the same. And I'd like to add that baselines shifted a lot over the years of civilization. I like to think about one specific example: painkillers. Painkillers were not used during medical procedures in a widespread manner until some 150 years ago, maybe even later. Now, it's much less horrible to participate in those procedures, for everyone involved really, and also the outcomes are better just for this factor - because the patients moves around less while anesthetized. But even this is up for debate. All in all, it really boils down to what the individual feels like it's a worthy life. Philosophy is not done yet.
    - amarant 1y ago
      Well, from a societal point of view, meaningful work would be work that is necessary to either maintain or push that baseline. Perhaps my initial estimate of 5% of the workforce was a bit optimistic, say 20% of current workforce necessary to have food, healthcare, and maybe a few research facilities focused on improving all of the above?
giantg2 1y ago
The real problem is with lower skilled positions. Either people in easier roles or more junior people. We will end up with a significant percent of the population who are unemployable because we lack positions commensurate with their skills.
- hwillis 1y ago
  Lower skilled than office clerks and customer service representatives? Because they were in the study.
  - giantg2 1y ago
    Yep, I'm talking about non-office jobs, such as in warehouses and retail. Why do you need sales associates when you can just ask an AI associate that knows everything. But, the study is also about LLMs currently impacting wages and hours. We're still in the process of creating targeted models for many domains. It's entirely possible the customer representatives and clerks will start to be replaced in part by AI tools. It also seems that the current increase in work could mean that headcount is kept flat, which is great for a business, but bad for employment.
- chii 1y ago
  and we used to have people who were illiterate and yet, today we have almost everybody literate. I think skills in using ai to augment work will become just a new form of literacy.
  - giantg2 1y ago
    Approximately 1 in 5 adults in the US are illiterate currently. I wouldn't call that "almost everybody".
- ausbah 1y ago
  there’s was some podcast ezra klein had a couple months ago, but a point his guest made about education that sticks with me is the next generation of students that will be successful are the ones that can use AI as a tool not as a dependency - outcomes which may largely depend on how the education system changes with the times. i wonder there very well
bilsbie 1y ago
Seems obvious: If AI lets you produce more of your product then there would be more work added as well. Sales, maintenance, etc.
- hwillis 1y ago
  > Indeed, the reported productivity benefits were modest in the study. Users reported average time savings of just 2.8 percent of work hours (about an hour per week). https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=5219933 https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=5219933 > Our main finding is that AI chatbots have had minimal impact on adopters’ economic outcomes. Difference-in-differences estimates for earnings, hours, and wages are all precisely estimated zeros, with confidence intervals ruling out average effects larger than 1%. At the occupation level, estimates are similarly close to zero, generally excluding changes greater than 6%.
catlover76 1y ago
[dead]
fortyseven 1y ago
That's why they say never give 110 percent, because they'll come to expect that all the time. Workload abhors a vacuum.
_heimdall 1y ago
This is effectively Jevans paradox[1] in action. The cost, in money or time, for getting certain types of work done decreases. People ramp up demand to fill the gap, "full utilization" of the workers. Its a very old claim that the next technology will lead to a utopia where we don't have to work, or we work drastically less often. Time and again we prove that we don't actually want that. My hypothesis (I'm sure its not novel or unique) is that very few people know what to do with idle hands. We tend to keep stress levels high as a distraction, and tend to freak out in various ways if we find ourselves with low stress and nothing that "needs" to be done. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox
- atonse 1y ago
  Yes in fact, to me it’s not a utopia that everyone’s going to paint landscapes, write poetry, or play musical instruments all day. I worry more that an idle humanity will cause a lot more conflict. “An idle mind’s the devil’s playground” and all.
  - _heimdall 1y ago
    I wish people could handle an idle mind, I expect we'd all be better off. But yeah, realistically most people when idle would do a lot of damage. Its always possible that risk would be transitional. Anyone alive today, at least in western style societies, likely doesn't know a life without high levels of stress and distraction. It makes sense that change would cause people to lash out, maybe people growing up in that new system would handle it better (if they had the chance).
    - jasonjmcghee 1y ago
      I think distraction is doing a lot of work here. Many people could play video games 24/7 with no issues. The urge to be productive and/or make personal progress is something a lot of people feel, (which is fantastic), but video games do a really good job of replacing those feelings along with other emotional experiences. Many shows and movies can play a similar role. I think we would/will see a lot more of that. Even in transitional periods where people can multitask more now as ai starts taking over moment to moment thinking.
vjvjvjvjghv 1y ago
I think we may be reaching a point where tech is better at almost everything. When I look at my workplace , there are only a few people who do stuff that’s truly creative. Everybody else does work that’s maybe difficult but fundamentally still very mechanical and in principle automatable. Add to that progress in robotics and we may reach a point where humans are not needed anymore for most tasks. Then the capitalists will have fully automated factories but nobody who can buy their products. Maybe capitalism had a good run for the last 200 years and a new economic system needs to arise. Whatever that will be.
kotaKat 1y ago
All of our communications at my organization that have clearly been run through Copilot (as we seem to keep championing in some kind of bizarre wankfest) lead me to have to waste a significant sum of time to read and decipher the slop. What could have been a single paragraph turns into five separate bulleted lists and explanations and fluff.
- iknowSFR 1y ago
  Is the communication for you or for other AI tools? Meaning is your eventual role just making sure it’s within reason and keeping the AI to AI ecosystem functioning properly? If the output is missing something or misrepresenting something, you update. Your responsibility is now as an AI response mechanic. And someone else that’s ingesting your AI’s output is making sure their AI’s output on your output is reasonable. This obviously doesn’t scale well but does move the “doing” out of human hands, replacing that time with a guardrail responsibility.
esafak 1y ago
As long as they can capture some of the productivity gains, this is good news for workers.
- hwillis 1y ago
  > Indeed, the reported productivity benefits were modest in the study. Users reported average time savings of just 2.8 percent of work hours (about an hour per week). https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=5219933 https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=5219933 > Our main finding is that AI chatbots have had minimal impact on adopters’ economic outcomes. Difference-in-differences estimates for earnings, hours, and wages are all precisely estimated zeros, with confidence intervals ruling out average effects larger than 1%. At the occupation level, estimates are similarly close to zero, generally excluding changes greater than 6%.
andrethegiant 1y ago
Always has been
analog31 1y ago
This reminds me of a thought I had about driver-less trucks. The truck drivers who get laid off will be re-employed as security guards to protect the automated trucks from getting robbed.
- crazygringo 1y ago
  That's an amusing idea, but won't happen. Trucks will just be made more secure, that much harder to open, if theft starts to increase.
  - layer8 1y ago
    Only if that’s cheaper than security guards. “Just” hiring security guards may be more cost-effective than “just” making trucks more robbery-resistant.
    - crazygringo 1y ago
      Of course it's going to be cheaper. If a truck has a lifetime of 20 years, that's 20 years' worth of paying a security guard for it. You really think it could take 20 years' worth of human effort in labor and materials to make a truck more secure? The price of the truck itself in the first place doesn't even come close to that.
lsy 1y ago
I feel like people in the comments are misunderstanding the findings in the article. It’s not that people save time with AI and then turn that time to novel tasks; it’s that perceived savings from using AI are nullified by new work which is created by the usage of AI: verification of outputs, prompt crafting, cheat detection, debugging, whatever. This seems observationally true in the tech industry, where the world’s best programmers and technologists are tied up fiddling with transformers and datasets and evals so that the world’s worst programmers can slap together temperature converters and insecure twitter clones, and meanwhile the quality of the consumer software that people actually use is in a nosedive.
- ausbah 1y ago
  the state of consumer software is already so bad & LLMs are trained on a good chunk of that so their output can possible produce worse software right? /s
- acedTrex 1y ago
  > where the world’s best programmers and technologists are tied up fiddling with transformers and datasets and evals so that the world’s worst programmers can slap together temperature converters and insecure twitter clones This statement is incredibly accurate
  - chii 1y ago
    > slap together temperature converters and insecure twitter clones because those "best programmers" don't want to be making temperature converters nor twitter clones (unless they're paid mega bucks). This enables the low paid "worst" programmers to do those jobs for peanuts. It's an acceptable outcome imho.
    - delusional 1y ago
      But do we actually need more temperature converters? Maybe it would be better if they were hard to make such that people didn't waste their time, and the bad programmers went out and did some yard work.
nvk255 1y ago
Yeah, that finding about verification tasks eating the time savings makes total sense. Since AI output is probabilstic, you always need a independent human check, right ? .. that also feels like a shifting bottleneck.. maybe you speed up the coding part but then get bogged down in testing or integration, or the scope just expands to fill the saved time. Plus, how much AI actually helps seems super task dependent, and can vary quite a bit depending on what you are doing
cess11 1y ago
So this study says people are producing more profit. The important question is whether they get it or someone else does.
- hwillis 1y ago
  It does not. > Indeed, the reported productivity benefits were modest in the study. Users reported average time savings of just 2.8 percent of work hours (about an hour per week). https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=5219933 https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=5219933 > Our main finding is that AI chatbots have had minimal impact on adopters’ economic outcomes. Difference-in-differences estimates for earnings, hours, and wages are all precisely estimated zeros, with confidence intervals ruling out average effects larger than 1%. At the occupation level, estimates are similarly close to zero, generally excluding changes greater than 6%.
  - cess11 1y ago
    To me it looks like your conclusion does not follow from those quotes. Four hours per month ought to sum up to an extra week of vacation per year, even if the labour buyer takes some of it.
alexpotato 1y ago
My dad has a great quote on computers and automation: "In the 1970s when office computers started to come out we were told: 'Computers will save you SO much effort you won't know what to do with all of your free time'. We just ended up doing more things per day thanks to computers."
- joshdavham 1y ago
  Your dad sounds like a wise man!
- perilunar 1y ago
  It’s Solow’s paradox: “You can see the computer age everywhere, except in productivity statistics.” — Nobel Prize-winning American economist Robert Solow, in 1987
  - alexpotato 1y ago
    I forget where I heard this but there was an interesting quote: "In the early 1900s, 25% of the US population worked in agriculture. Today it's 2%. I would imagine that economists back then would be astounded by that change. I should point out: there were also no pediatric oncologists back then."
m3kw9 1y ago
It’s just math, we tend to like to add and add, more and more. To think AI will take out all work for humans is likely false. Humans always find a problem. You solved your money problem? You are gonna have another problem like and existential crisis problem and that creates more stuff. Just an extreme example
iLoveOncall 1y ago
This is an insane clickbait, and none of the comments seem to have read further than the title. There are two metrics in the study: > AI chatbots save time across all exposed occupations (for 64%–90% of users) and > AI chatbots have created new job tasks for 8.4% of workers There's absolutely no indication anywhere in the study that the time saved is offset by the new work created. The percentages for the two metrics are so vastly different that it's fairly safe to assume it's not the case.
- hwillis 1y ago
  > Indeed, the reported productivity benefits were modest in the study. Users reported average time savings of just 2.8 percent of work hours (about an hour per week). https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=5219933 https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=5219933 > Our main finding is that AI chatbots have had minimal impact on adopters’ economic outcomes. Difference-in-differences estimates for earnings, hours, and wages are all precisely estimated zeros, with confidence intervals ruling out average effects larger than 1%. At the occupation level, estimates are similarly close to zero, generally excluding changes greater than 6%.
  - iLoveOncall 1y ago
    Again, none of this, especially the calculation about economic output, indicates that the new work it generated led offset the time it saved. If people save an hour a week and use that to browse HackerNews, they've saved time but haven't produced any economic value, but it doesn't mean they didn't save time.
ModernMech 1y ago
It's like when they widen a highway yet the traffic jam persists.
tennisflyi 1y ago
Yes. Companies aren’t going to allow you to relax with said new time
mrandish 1y ago
Based on the history of technology, this is overwhelmingly the expected result of technology-enabled automation - despite every time pundits claiming "but this time it'll be different."
cadamsdotcom 1y ago
2023-24 models couldn’t be relied on at smaller levels thanks to hallucinations and poor instruction following; newer models are much better and that trend will keep going. That low level reliability allows models to be a building block for bigger systems. Check out this personal assistant done by Nate Herk, a youtuber who builds automations with n8n: https://youtube.com/watch?v=ZP4fjVWKt2w https://youtube.com/watch?v=ZP4fjVWKt2w It’s early. There are new skills everyone is just getting the hang of. If the evolution of AI was mapped to the evolution of computing we would be in the era of “check out this room-sized bunch of vacuum tubes that can do one long division at a time”. But it’s already exciting, so just imagine how good things will get with better models and everyone skilled in the art of work automation!
CaptainFever 1y ago
This is what the "AI will be a normal technology" camp is telling the "AI is going to put us all out of work!" camp all along. It's always been like this.
Animats 1y ago
Wasn't this covered a few days ago? One point here is that the data is from late 2023, before LLMs were any good. Another point is that the data was collected from remaining workers after any layoffs.
cmsefton 1y ago
Previous discussion https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43830613 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43830613
matt3210 1y ago
I feel that I spend a lot more time Looking out for hidden Easter eggs in code reviews. Easter eggs being small errors that look right but hard to catch, but obvious to the one who wrote it. The problem is that the LLM wrote it so we have no benefit of the code author during review or testing.
bgwalter 1y ago
""The adoption of these chatbots has been remarkably fast," Humlum told The Register about the study. "Most workers in the exposed occupations have now adopted these chatbots... But then when we look at the economic outcomes, it really has not moved the needle." How does that comply with the GDPR? OpenAI now has all sensitive data? The article markets the study as Danish. However, the working paper is from the Becker Friedman Institute of the University of Chicago: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=5219933 https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=5219933 It is no wonder that the Chicago School of Economics will not find any impact of AI on employment. Calling it Danish to imply some European "socialist" values is deceptive.
bgwalter 1y ago
AI has certainly created new work for the GCC project. They had to implement a scraper protection from the bots run by corporations who benefit for free from GCC but want to milk it even further: https://gcc.gnu.org/pipermail/gcc/2025-April/245954.html https://gcc.gnu.org/pipermail/gcc/2025-April/245954.html
everdrive 1y ago
Others have already said so, but the same is true for automation and anything else. We've had the technology to do less work for a long time, but it doesn't seem to be in our psychology. Not necessarily that we're intentionally choosing to work 40 hours for no reason. But, it feels like we're a bit stuck, and individuals who would try to work less just set themselves back compared to others, and so no one can move.
- intalentive 1y ago
  With sufficient political will it is possible to change things. The Covid lockdowns proved that most work in today’s economy is “non-essential”.
kranke155 1y ago
It’s the same since industrialisation, it’s not that we have less work, we have less of some type of work. The issue is that after automation the “old” jobs often don’t pay well, and the new jobs that do are (by virtue of the multiplier of technology) actually scarcer than the ones it replaced. While in a craftsmanship society you had people painting plates for the well to do, factories started mass painting plates for everyone to own. Now this solved the problem of scarcity, which is great. But it created a new problem which is all those craftsmen are now factory workers whose output is more replaceable. If you’re more replaceable your wages are lower due to increased competition. Now for some things this is great, but Marx’s logic was that if technology kept making Capital able to use less and less Labour (increasing profits) then eventually a fairly small number of people would own almost everything. Like most visionaries he was incredibly off on his timeline, and he didn’t predict a service economy after we had overabundance of goods. So yet again Marx’s logic will be put to the test and yet again we will see the results. I still find that his logic seems fairy solid, although like many others I don’t agree with the solutions. I wonder how well the this will hold up against AI.
xyst 1y ago
AI craze has been such an awful joke. We are burning Earth’s resources at an alarming rate for minimal gains at best.

448 points by amichail 1y ago

there's always more work to do. the workforce is always tied up in a few areas of work. once they're freed, they're able to work in new areas. the unemployment due to technological development isn't due to a reduction in work (as in quantity of work available and/or necessary). the more efficient we become, the more work areas we open up.

nico 1y ago
> there's always more work to do Right on point As shown by never-shrinking backlogs Todo lists always grow The crucial task ends up being prioritizing, ie. figuring out what to put in priority at the current moment
hwillis 1y ago
> Indeed, the reported productivity benefits were modest in the study. Users reported average time savings of just 2.8 percent of work hours (about an hour per week). https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=5219933 https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=5219933 > Our main finding is that AI chatbots have had minimal impact on adopters’ economic outcomes. Difference-in-differences estimates for earnings, hours, and wages are all precisely estimated zeros, with confidence intervals ruling out average effects larger than 1%. At the occupation level, estimates are similarly close to zero, generally excluding changes greater than 6%.

TekMol 1y ago

When it comes to programming, I would say AI has about doubled my productivity so far. Yes, I spend time on writing prompts. Like "Never do this. Never do that. Always do this. Make sure to check that.". To tell the AI my coding preferences. Bot those prompts are forever. And I have written most of them months ago, so that now I just capitalize on them.

iammrpayments 1y ago
Do you use vscode?
- TekMol 1y ago
  No, why?
  - iammrpayments 1y ago
    Trying to figure out how can you double productivity, I try to use AI with neovim and can’t get more than 5% boost from it
    - TekMol 1y ago
      I use normal VIM. I let the AI implement features on its own, then look at the commit diffs and then use VIM to finetune them. I wrote my own tool for it. But I guess it is similar to cursor, aider and many other tools that do this. Also what Microsoft offers via the AI "edit" tool I have seen in GitHub codespaces. Maybe that is part of VScode?
      - sodapopcan 1y ago
        Hello fellow normal Vim user! Is your tool to open source?
        TekMol 1y ago
        No. Aren't there enough "Hey AI here is a codebase, please implement the following feature" tools out there yet? I have not tried them, but I guess aider, cursor and others offer this? One I tried is copilot in "edit" mode on github codespaces. And it seems similar.
        sodapopcan 1y ago
        I thought you were talking about a Vim plugin. Sorry for taking an interest.

jmclnx 1y ago

No surprise here, same can be true of IT. I remember a time before PCs and most work was done on Mainframes and paper w/file cabinets. Compared to now, the amount of work is about the same, or maybe a bit more than back then. But the big difference is the amount of data being processed and kept, that increased exponentially since then and is still increasing. So I expect the same with AI, maybe the work is a bit different, but work will be the same or more as data increases.

selfhoster 1y ago
> No surprise here, same can be true of IT. I remember a time before PCs and most work was done on Mainframes and paper w/file cabinets. I understand your point but it lacks accuracy in that mainframes, paper and filing cabinets are deterministic tools. AI is neither deterministic nor a tool.
- signatoremo 1y ago
  > AI is neither deterministic nor a tool You keep repeating this in this thread, but as has been refuted elsewhere, this doesn't mean AI is not productive. A tool it definitely can be. Your handwriting is non deterministic, yet you could write reports with it.
  - codr7 1y ago
    Yes, but the one thing computers had going for them over humans was determinism, and we just threw that out the window.
    - signatoremo 1y ago
      We did not throw that out the window. AI is new capability on top of what the computer is already capable of
      - codr7 1y ago
        No, AI is a computer pretending (badly) to be human.

throw0101b 1y ago

This has probably been true of all invention / automation: when we went from handwashing to using washing machines, did we start doing more leisurely things for the hours that were saved by that 'labour saving' device? > Now it is true that the needs of human beings may seem to be insatiable. But they fall into two classes --those needs which are absolute in the sense that we feel them whatever the situation of our fellow human beings may be, and those which are relative in the sense that we feel them only if their satisfaction lifts us above, makes us feel superior to, our fellows. Needs of the second class, those which satisfy the desire for superiority, may indeed be insatiable; for the higher the general level, the higher still are they. But this is not so true of the absolute needs-a point may soon be reached, much sooner perhaps than we are all of us aware of, when these needs are satisfied in the sense that we prefer to devote our further energies to non-economic purposes. […] > For many ages to come the old Adam will be so strong in us that everybody will need to do some work if he is to be contented. We shall do more things for ourselves than is usual with the rich to-day, only too glad to have small duties and tasks and routines. But beyond this, we shall endeavour to spread the bread thin on the butter-to make what work there is still to be done to be as widely shared as possible. Three-hour shifts or a fifteen-hour week may put off the problem for a great while. For three hours a day is quite enough to satisfy the old Adam in most of us! * John Maynard Keynes, "Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren" (1930) * http://www.econ.yale.edu/smith/econ116a/keynes1.pdf http://www.econ.yale.edu/smith/econ116a/keynes1.pdf An essay putting forward / hypothesizing four reasons on why the above did not happen (We haven't spread the wealth around enough; People actually love working; There's no limit to human desires; Leisure is expensive): * https://www.vox.com/2014/11/20/7254877/keynes-work-leisure https://www.vox.com/2014/11/20/7254877/keynes-work-leisure We probably have more leisure time (and fewer hours worked: five versus six days) in general, but it's still being filled (probably especially in the US where being "productive" is an unofficial religion).

selfhoster 1y ago
Washing machines are deterministic. Automation is deterministic. AI is not deterministic. AI is not a tool. AI is destined to be what it is now, a parlor trick designed to passify and amuse.

qoez 1y ago

That's the story of all technology and the argument AI won't take jobs pmarca etc has been predicting for a while now. Our focus will be able to shift into ever narrower areas. Cinema was barely a thing 100 years ago. A hundred years from now we'll get some totally new industry thanks to freeing up labor.

ImHereToVote 1y ago
This assumes we won't achieve AGI. If we do, all bets are off. Perhaps neuromorphic hardware will get is there.
- sph 1y ago
  Let's achieve AGI first before making predictions.
  - dsign 1y ago
    When AGI is achieved, it will be able to make the predictions. And everything else. And off we the humans go to the reserve.
    - littlestymaar 1y ago
      Only if it can do it in an affordable fashion. If you need a supercomputer to run your AGI then it's probably not worth it for any task that a human can do, because humans happen to be much cheaper than supercomputers. Also, it's not clear if AGI doesn't mean it's necessarily better than existing AIs: a 3 years old child has general intelligence indeed, but it's far less helpful than even a sub-billion parameters LLM for any task.
      - codr7 1y ago
        A child learns from experience, something still missing in LLMs.
        1y ago

NalNezumi 1y ago

I can't find the article anymore but I remember reading almost 10 years ago an article on the economist saying that the result of automation was not removal of jobs but more work + less junior employment positions. The example they gave was search engine + digital documents removed the junior lawyer headcount by a lot. Prior to digital documents, a fairly common junior lawyer task was: "we have a upcoming court case. Go to the (physical) archive and find past cases relevant to current case. Here's things to check for:" and this task would be assigned to a team of junior (3-10 people). But now one junior with a laptop suffice. As a result the firm can also manage more cases. Seems like a pretty general pattern.

PeterStuer 1y ago
We have an infinite capacity in 'making' work. It just shifts from real productivity to make-work overhead. Pfiefdoms and empires will be maintained.
toxik 1y ago
I don't know about lawyering, but with engineering research, I can now ask ChatGPT's Deep Research to do a literature review on any topic. This used to take time and effort.
- camdenreslink 1y ago
  If you don't know about lawyering, then how do you know if the literature review is any good? It's the same thing as a non-programmer asking an LLM to vibe code an application. They have no idea about the quality.
  - rainonmoon 1y ago
    I think the point with most applications of LLMs is that the users don’t care if it’s good, only if it’s good enough. How much despair this induces is down to your bias for whatever subject is being reduced.
yieldcrv 1y ago

nialv7 1y ago

Work will expand to fill the time available. (I know this is not the commonly accepted meaning of Parkinson's law.)

zubiaur 1y ago

Thats called a productivity increase. Finally. We were due for one.

linkjuice4all 1y ago
It’s somewhat exciting to see the commodification of AI models and hardware. At first I was concerned that the hyperscalers would just own the whole thing as a service that keeps squeezing you. But if model development and self hosting become financially feasible for the majority of organizations then this might really be a “democratized” productivity boost.
- throwaway98465 1y ago
  The hyperscalers will always own the best models, and even if you're willing to excuse that, requiring organization-levels of funding to run a decent model locally hardly makes the tech "democratized". Sure, you'll always be able to run ${LOCAL_MODEL} on your personal hardware, but that might be akin to programming using Notepad if the gap with the best models in the market is wide enough.
hwillis 1y ago
> Indeed, the reported productivity benefits were modest in the study. Users reported average time savings of just 2.8 percent of work hours (about an hour per week).

JCM9 1y ago

Modern AI tools are amazing, but they’re amazing like spell check was amazing when it came out. Does it help with menial tasks? Yes, but it creates a new baseline that everyone has and just moves the bar. Theres scant evidence that we’re all going to just sit on a beach while AI runs your company anytime soon. There’s little sign of any AI company managing to build something that doesn’t just turn into a new baseline commodity. Most of these AI products are also horribly unprofitable, which is another reality that will need to be faced sooner rather than later.

amarant 1y ago
It's got me wondering: do any of my hard work actually matter? Or is it all just pointless busy-work invented since the industrial revolution to create jobs for everyone, when in reality we would be fine if like 5% of society worked while the rest slacked off? Don't think we'd have as many videogames, but then again, we would have time to play, which I would argue is more valuable than games. To paraphrase Lee Iacocca: We must stop and ask ourselves, how much videogames do we really need?
- npteljes 1y ago
  >do any of my hard work actually matter? Yes... basically in life, you have to find the definition of "to matter" that you can strongly believe in. Otherwise everything feels aimless, the very life itself. The rest of what you ponder in your comment is the same. And I'd like to add that baselines shifted a lot over the years of civilization. I like to think about one specific example: painkillers. Painkillers were not used during medical procedures in a widespread manner until some 150 years ago, maybe even later. Now, it's much less horrible to participate in those procedures, for everyone involved really, and also the outcomes are better just for this factor - because the patients moves around less while anesthetized. But even this is up for debate. All in all, it really boils down to what the individual feels like it's a worthy life. Philosophy is not done yet.
  - amarant 1y ago
    Well, from a societal point of view, meaningful work would be work that is necessary to either maintain or push that baseline. Perhaps my initial estimate of 5% of the workforce was a bit optimistic, say 20% of current workforce necessary to have food, healthcare, and maybe a few research facilities focused on improving all of the above?

giantg2 1y ago

The real problem is with lower skilled positions. Either people in easier roles or more junior people. We will end up with a significant percent of the population who are unemployable because we lack positions commensurate with their skills.

hwillis 1y ago
Lower skilled than office clerks and customer service representatives? Because they were in the study.
- giantg2 1y ago
  Yep, I'm talking about non-office jobs, such as in warehouses and retail. Why do you need sales associates when you can just ask an AI associate that knows everything. But, the study is also about LLMs currently impacting wages and hours. We're still in the process of creating targeted models for many domains. It's entirely possible the customer representatives and clerks will start to be replaced in part by AI tools. It also seems that the current increase in work could mean that headcount is kept flat, which is great for a business, but bad for employment.
chii 1y ago
and we used to have people who were illiterate and yet, today we have almost everybody literate. I think skills in using ai to augment work will become just a new form of literacy.
- giantg2 1y ago
  Approximately 1 in 5 adults in the US are illiterate currently. I wouldn't call that "almost everybody".
ausbah 1y ago
there’s was some podcast ezra klein had a couple months ago, but a point his guest made about education that sticks with me is the next generation of students that will be successful are the ones that can use AI as a tool not as a dependency - outcomes which may largely depend on how the education system changes with the times. i wonder there very well

bilsbie 1y ago

Seems obvious: If AI lets you produce more of your product then there would be more work added as well. Sales, maintenance, etc.

hwillis 1y ago
> Indeed, the reported productivity benefits were modest in the study. Users reported average time savings of just 2.8 percent of work hours (about an hour per week). https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=5219933 https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=5219933 > Our main finding is that AI chatbots have had minimal impact on adopters’ economic outcomes. Difference-in-differences estimates for earnings, hours, and wages are all precisely estimated zeros, with confidence intervals ruling out average effects larger than 1%. At the occupation level, estimates are similarly close to zero, generally excluding changes greater than 6%.

catlover76 1y ago

[dead]

fortyseven 1y ago

That's why they say never give 110 percent, because they'll come to expect that all the time. Workload abhors a vacuum.

_heimdall 1y ago

This is effectively Jevans paradox[1] in action. The cost, in money or time, for getting certain types of work done decreases. People ramp up demand to fill the gap, "full utilization" of the workers. Its a very old claim that the next technology will lead to a utopia where we don't have to work, or we work drastically less often. Time and again we prove that we don't actually want that. My hypothesis (I'm sure its not novel or unique) is that very few people know what to do with idle hands. We tend to keep stress levels high as a distraction, and tend to freak out in various ways if we find ourselves with low stress and nothing that "needs" to be done. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox

atonse 1y ago
Yes in fact, to me it’s not a utopia that everyone’s going to paint landscapes, write poetry, or play musical instruments all day. I worry more that an idle humanity will cause a lot more conflict. “An idle mind’s the devil’s playground” and all.
- _heimdall 1y ago
  I wish people could handle an idle mind, I expect we'd all be better off. But yeah, realistically most people when idle would do a lot of damage. Its always possible that risk would be transitional. Anyone alive today, at least in western style societies, likely doesn't know a life without high levels of stress and distraction. It makes sense that change would cause people to lash out, maybe people growing up in that new system would handle it better (if they had the chance).
  - jasonjmcghee 1y ago
    I think distraction is doing a lot of work here. Many people could play video games 24/7 with no issues. The urge to be productive and/or make personal progress is something a lot of people feel, (which is fantastic), but video games do a really good job of replacing those feelings along with other emotional experiences. Many shows and movies can play a similar role. I think we would/will see a lot more of that. Even in transitional periods where people can multitask more now as ai starts taking over moment to moment thinking.

vjvjvjvjghv 1y ago

I think we may be reaching a point where tech is better at almost everything. When I look at my workplace , there are only a few people who do stuff that’s truly creative. Everybody else does work that’s maybe difficult but fundamentally still very mechanical and in principle automatable. Add to that progress in robotics and we may reach a point where humans are not needed anymore for most tasks. Then the capitalists will have fully automated factories but nobody who can buy their products. Maybe capitalism had a good run for the last 200 years and a new economic system needs to arise. Whatever that will be.

kotaKat 1y ago

All of our communications at my organization that have clearly been run through Copilot (as we seem to keep championing in some kind of bizarre wankfest) lead me to have to waste a significant sum of time to read and decipher the slop. What could have been a single paragraph turns into five separate bulleted lists and explanations and fluff.

iknowSFR 1y ago
Is the communication for you or for other AI tools? Meaning is your eventual role just making sure it’s within reason and keeping the AI to AI ecosystem functioning properly? If the output is missing something or misrepresenting something, you update. Your responsibility is now as an AI response mechanic. And someone else that’s ingesting your AI’s output is making sure their AI’s output on your output is reasonable. This obviously doesn’t scale well but does move the “doing” out of human hands, replacing that time with a guardrail responsibility.

esafak 1y ago

As long as they can capture some of the productivity gains, this is good news for workers.

hwillis 1y ago
> Indeed, the reported productivity benefits were modest in the study. Users reported average time savings of just 2.8 percent of work hours (about an hour per week). https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=5219933 https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=5219933 > Our main finding is that AI chatbots have had minimal impact on adopters’ economic outcomes. Difference-in-differences estimates for earnings, hours, and wages are all precisely estimated zeros, with confidence intervals ruling out average effects larger than 1%. At the occupation level, estimates are similarly close to zero, generally excluding changes greater than 6%.

andrethegiant 1y ago

Always has been

analog31 1y ago

This reminds me of a thought I had about driver-less trucks. The truck drivers who get laid off will be re-employed as security guards to protect the automated trucks from getting robbed.

crazygringo 1y ago
That's an amusing idea, but won't happen. Trucks will just be made more secure, that much harder to open, if theft starts to increase.
- layer8 1y ago
  Only if that’s cheaper than security guards. “Just” hiring security guards may be more cost-effective than “just” making trucks more robbery-resistant.
  - crazygringo 1y ago
    Of course it's going to be cheaper. If a truck has a lifetime of 20 years, that's 20 years' worth of paying a security guard for it. You really think it could take 20 years' worth of human effort in labor and materials to make a truck more secure? The price of the truck itself in the first place doesn't even come close to that.

lsy 1y ago

I feel like people in the comments are misunderstanding the findings in the article. It’s not that people save time with AI and then turn that time to novel tasks; it’s that perceived savings from using AI are nullified by new work which is created by the usage of AI: verification of outputs, prompt crafting, cheat detection, debugging, whatever. This seems observationally true in the tech industry, where the world’s best programmers and technologists are tied up fiddling with transformers and datasets and evals so that the world’s worst programmers can slap together temperature converters and insecure twitter clones, and meanwhile the quality of the consumer software that people actually use is in a nosedive.

ausbah 1y ago
the state of consumer software is already so bad & LLMs are trained on a good chunk of that so their output can possible produce worse software right? /s
acedTrex 1y ago
> where the world’s best programmers and technologists are tied up fiddling with transformers and datasets and evals so that the world’s worst programmers can slap together temperature converters and insecure twitter clones This statement is incredibly accurate
- chii 1y ago
  > slap together temperature converters and insecure twitter clones because those "best programmers" don't want to be making temperature converters nor twitter clones (unless they're paid mega bucks). This enables the low paid "worst" programmers to do those jobs for peanuts. It's an acceptable outcome imho.
  - delusional 1y ago
    But do we actually need more temperature converters? Maybe it would be better if they were hard to make such that people didn't waste their time, and the bad programmers went out and did some yard work.

nvk255 1y ago

Yeah, that finding about verification tasks eating the time savings makes total sense. Since AI output is probabilstic, you always need a independent human check, right ? .. that also feels like a shifting bottleneck.. maybe you speed up the coding part but then get bogged down in testing or integration, or the scope just expands to fill the saved time. Plus, how much AI actually helps seems super task dependent, and can vary quite a bit depending on what you are doing

cess11 1y ago

So this study says people are producing more profit. The important question is whether they get it or someone else does.

hwillis 1y ago
It does not. > Indeed, the reported productivity benefits were modest in the study. Users reported average time savings of just 2.8 percent of work hours (about an hour per week). https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=5219933 https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=5219933 > Our main finding is that AI chatbots have had minimal impact on adopters’ economic outcomes. Difference-in-differences estimates for earnings, hours, and wages are all precisely estimated zeros, with confidence intervals ruling out average effects larger than 1%. At the occupation level, estimates are similarly close to zero, generally excluding changes greater than 6%.
- cess11 1y ago
  To me it looks like your conclusion does not follow from those quotes. Four hours per month ought to sum up to an extra week of vacation per year, even if the labour buyer takes some of it.

alexpotato 1y ago

My dad has a great quote on computers and automation: "In the 1970s when office computers started to come out we were told: 'Computers will save you SO much effort you won't know what to do with all of your free time'. We just ended up doing more things per day thanks to computers."

joshdavham 1y ago
Your dad sounds like a wise man!
perilunar 1y ago
It’s Solow’s paradox: “You can see the computer age everywhere, except in productivity statistics.” — Nobel Prize-winning American economist Robert Solow, in 1987
- alexpotato 1y ago
  I forget where I heard this but there was an interesting quote: "In the early 1900s, 25% of the US population worked in agriculture. Today it's 2%. I would imagine that economists back then would be astounded by that change. I should point out: there were also no pediatric oncologists back then."

m3kw9 1y ago

It’s just math, we tend to like to add and add, more and more. To think AI will take out all work for humans is likely false. Humans always find a problem. You solved your money problem? You are gonna have another problem like and existential crisis problem and that creates more stuff. Just an extreme example

iLoveOncall 1y ago

This is an insane clickbait, and none of the comments seem to have read further than the title. There are two metrics in the study: > AI chatbots save time across all exposed occupations (for 64%–90% of users) and > AI chatbots have created new job tasks for 8.4% of workers There's absolutely no indication anywhere in the study that the time saved is offset by the new work created. The percentages for the two metrics are so vastly different that it's fairly safe to assume it's not the case.

hwillis 1y ago
> Indeed, the reported productivity benefits were modest in the study. Users reported average time savings of just 2.8 percent of work hours (about an hour per week). https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=5219933 https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=5219933 > Our main finding is that AI chatbots have had minimal impact on adopters’ economic outcomes. Difference-in-differences estimates for earnings, hours, and wages are all precisely estimated zeros, with confidence intervals ruling out average effects larger than 1%. At the occupation level, estimates are similarly close to zero, generally excluding changes greater than 6%.
- iLoveOncall 1y ago
  Again, none of this, especially the calculation about economic output, indicates that the new work it generated led offset the time it saved. If people save an hour a week and use that to browse HackerNews, they've saved time but haven't produced any economic value, but it doesn't mean they didn't save time.

ModernMech 1y ago

It's like when they widen a highway yet the traffic jam persists.

tennisflyi 1y ago

Yes. Companies aren’t going to allow you to relax with said new time

mrandish 1y ago

Based on the history of technology, this is overwhelmingly the expected result of technology-enabled automation - despite every time pundits claiming "but this time it'll be different."

cadamsdotcom 1y ago

2023-24 models couldn’t be relied on at smaller levels thanks to hallucinations and poor instruction following; newer models are much better and that trend will keep going. That low level reliability allows models to be a building block for bigger systems. Check out this personal assistant done by Nate Herk, a youtuber who builds automations with n8n: https://youtube.com/watch?v=ZP4fjVWKt2w https://youtube.com/watch?v=ZP4fjVWKt2w It’s early. There are new skills everyone is just getting the hang of. If the evolution of AI was mapped to the evolution of computing we would be in the era of “check out this room-sized bunch of vacuum tubes that can do one long division at a time”. But it’s already exciting, so just imagine how good things will get with better models and everyone skilled in the art of work automation!

CaptainFever 1y ago

This is what the "AI will be a normal technology" camp is telling the "AI is going to put us all out of work!" camp all along. It's always been like this.

Animats 1y ago

Wasn't this covered a few days ago? One point here is that the data is from late 2023, before LLMs were any good. Another point is that the data was collected from remaining workers after any layoffs.

cmsefton 1y ago

Previous discussion https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43830613 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43830613

matt3210 1y ago

I feel that I spend a lot more time Looking out for hidden Easter eggs in code reviews. Easter eggs being small errors that look right but hard to catch, but obvious to the one who wrote it. The problem is that the LLM wrote it so we have no benefit of the code author during review or testing.

bgwalter 1y ago

""The adoption of these chatbots has been remarkably fast," Humlum told The Register about the study. "Most workers in the exposed occupations have now adopted these chatbots... But then when we look at the economic outcomes, it really has not moved the needle." How does that comply with the GDPR? OpenAI now has all sensitive data? The article markets the study as Danish. However, the working paper is from the Becker Friedman Institute of the University of Chicago: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=5219933 https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=5219933 It is no wonder that the Chicago School of Economics will not find any impact of AI on employment. Calling it Danish to imply some European "socialist" values is deceptive.

bgwalter 1y ago

AI has certainly created new work for the GCC project. They had to implement a scraper protection from the bots run by corporations who benefit for free from GCC but want to milk it even further: https://gcc.gnu.org/pipermail/gcc/2025-April/245954.html https://gcc.gnu.org/pipermail/gcc/2025-April/245954.html

everdrive 1y ago

Others have already said so, but the same is true for automation and anything else. We've had the technology to do less work for a long time, but it doesn't seem to be in our psychology. Not necessarily that we're intentionally choosing to work 40 hours for no reason. But, it feels like we're a bit stuck, and individuals who would try to work less just set themselves back compared to others, and so no one can move.

intalentive 1y ago
With sufficient political will it is possible to change things. The Covid lockdowns proved that most work in today’s economy is “non-essential”.

kranke155 1y ago

It’s the same since industrialisation, it’s not that we have less work, we have less of some type of work. The issue is that after automation the “old” jobs often don’t pay well, and the new jobs that do are (by virtue of the multiplier of technology) actually scarcer than the ones it replaced. While in a craftsmanship society you had people painting plates for the well to do, factories started mass painting plates for everyone to own. Now this solved the problem of scarcity, which is great. But it created a new problem which is all those craftsmen are now factory workers whose output is more replaceable. If you’re more replaceable your wages are lower due to increased competition. Now for some things this is great, but Marx’s logic was that if technology kept making Capital able to use less and less Labour (increasing profits) then eventually a fairly small number of people would own almost everything. Like most visionaries he was incredibly off on his timeline, and he didn’t predict a service economy after we had overabundance of goods. So yet again Marx’s logic will be put to the test and yet again we will see the results. I still find that his logic seems fairy solid, although like many others I don’t agree with the solutions. I wonder how well the this will hold up against AI.

xyst 1y ago

AI craze has been such an awful joke. We are burning Earth’s resources at an alarming rate for minimal gains at best.