6 ms·

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 th

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 2y 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 2y 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 2y 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.
    - bluefirebrand 2y ago
      > Many people could play video games 24/7 with no issues I disagree pretty strongly here. I've known a few people who lived this sort of gamer rotting lifestyle and they were miserable. Many people like this wind up suicidal, or are prime candidates to shoot up a school. Videogames, movies, shows, whatever, they do not replace the need for meaningful interaction with the real world.
- llbeansandrice 2y ago
  What an absurd straw man. Moving the needle away from “large portions of the population are a few paychecks away from being homeless” does not constitute “the devil’s playground”. Where’s all of the articles that HN loves about kids these days not being bored anymore? What about google’s famous 20% time? Idle time isn’t just important, it’s the point.
  - atonse 2y ago
    To be clear I’m not saying we shouldn’t have this because people would lash out. I’m saying I’m worried that it would be more likely that people would lash out, than everyone just passively sitting around. But to respond to your google analogy, 20% time is complemented by 80% being busy. This scenario would be 100% time. It would be better to look at a population that doesn’t have to work, like retirees. And see what the various issues they face. But also correct for age and biology of course. Or look at populations of places like Qatar where most of the native population don’t have to work much due to oil/gas revenues.
- BriggyDwiggs42 2y ago
  I don’t think people would be idle. They’d just be concerned with different things, like social dynamics, games/competition/sports, raising family etc.
  - _heimdall 2y ago
    Oh sure, I didn't actually mean to describe it being idle as in sitting and literally doing nothing. I more meant idle in comparison to how much people work today and how much they think about or stress over work. Take 7 hours out if the day because an LLM makes you that much more productive and I expect people wouldn't know what to do with themselves. That could be wrong, but I'd expect a lot more societal problems than we already have today if a year from now a large number of people only worked 4 or 5 hours a week. That's not even getting to the Shopify CEOs ridiculous claim that employees will get 100x more work done [1]. [1] https://x.com/tobi/status/1909251946235437514 https://x.com/tobi/status/1909251946235437514
- 52-6F-62 2y ago
  Tell that to any monk…
zdragnar 2y ago
Econ 101: supply is finite, demand infinite. Increased efficiency of production means that demand will meet the new price point, not that demand will cease to exist. There are probably plenty of goods that are counter examples, but time utilization isn't one of them, I don't think.
nathan_douglas 2y ago
Thank you! I didn't know this had a name. I remember thinking something along these lines in seventh grade social studies when we learned that Eli Whitney's cotton gin didn't actually end up improving conditions for enslaved people. I suspected this would be the case with AI too. A lot of people said things like "there won't be enough work anymore" and I thought, "are you kidding? Do you use the same software I use? Do you play the same games I've played? There's never enough time to add all of the features and all of the richness and complexity and all of the unit tests and all of the documentation that we want to add! Most of us are happy if we can ship a half-baked anything!" The only real question I had was whether the tech sector would go through a prolonged, destructive famine before realizing that.
vjvjvjvjghv 2y ago
I think a lot of people would be fine being idle if they had a guaranteed standard of living. When I was unemployed for a while, I was pretty happy in general but stressed about money running out. Without the money issue the last thing I would want to do is to sell my time to a soulless corporation. I have enough interests to keep me busy. Work just sucks up time I would love to spend on better things.
- _heimdall 2y ago
  Oh for sure, I should have included that. I was thinking of people being idle by choice rather than circumstance.
- chii 2y ago
  > a lot of people would be fine being idle if they had a guaranteed standard of living just a lot of words for "lazy" - it's built in to living organisms. The whole economic system today is constructed to ensure that one would suffer from being "lazy". And this would be the case until post-scarcity.
  - kubb 2y ago
    Lazy is a pejorative term used to chastise people in a culture that promotes activity even if it’s pointless.
  - _heimdall 2y ago
    I would have said lazy rather than idle if that what I meant. For most people lazy implies that there are things you things you really ought to get done but you're choosing to avoid doing it to the point where its a problem that whatever the thing is still isn't taken care of. Idle just means you don't feel like you have anything that needs to be done, you aren't avoiding things to the point that it causes a problem. Of course our economic system prefers people to be "fully utilized" rather than idle, but who cares? I don't owe an economic system anything, we could change the system whenever we want, and ultimately an economy is only useful to analyze the comparative output that already happened - it has nothing to do with the present or future.
- deleted 2y ago
linsomniac 2y ago
>technology will lead to a utopia where we don't have to work I'm kind of ok with doing more work in the same time, though if I'm becoming way more effective I'll probably start pushing harder on my existing discussions with management about 4 day work weeks (I'm looking to do 4x10s, but I might start looking to negotiate it to "instead of a pay increase, let's keep it the same but a 4x8 week"). If AI lets me get more done in the same time, I'm ok with that. Though, on the other hand, my work is budgeting $30/mo for the AI tools, so I'm kind of figuring that any time that personally-purchased AI tools are saving me, I deduct from my work week. ;-) >very few people know what to do with idle hands "Millions long for immortality that don't know what to do with themselves on a rainy Sunday afternoon." -- Susan Ertz
Retric 2y ago
Food production is a class case where once productivity is high enough you simply get fewer farmers. We are currently a long way from that kind of change as current AI tools suck by comparison to literally 1,000x increases in productivity. So, in well under 100 years programming could become extremely niche.
- quantumHazer 2y ago
  > Food production is a class case where once productivity is high enough you simply get fewer farmers. Yes, but. There are more jobs in other fields that are adjacent to food production, particularly in distribution. Middle class does not existed and retail workers are now a large percentage of workers in most parts of the world.
  - Retric 2y ago
    Sure, but when farmers where 90% of the labor force many of the remaining 10% also related to food distribution and production, a village blacksmith was mostly in support of farming, salt production/transport for food storage, etc. Food is just a smaller percentage of the economy overall.
    - _heimdall 2y ago
      Was there ever a time when 90% of labor was in farming and we had anything resembling an economy? I would have assumed that if 90% of people are farming its largely subsistence and any trade or happened on a much more local scale, potentially without any proper currency involved.
      - Retric 2y ago
        Globally perhaps not as fishing and hunting have been major food sources in antiquity especially when you include North America etc. Similarly slavery meant a significant portion of the population was in effect outside the economy. That said, there’s been areas where 90% of the working population was at minimum helping with the harvest up until the Middle Ages.
BriggyDwiggs42 2y ago
I don’t think it’s the consequence of most individuals’ preferences. I think it’s just the result of disproportionate political influence held by the wealthy, who are heavily incentivized to maximize working hours. Since employers mostly have that incentive, and since the political system doesn’t explicitly forbid it, there aren’t a ton of good options for workers seeking shorter hours.
- hatefulmoron 2y ago
  > there aren’t a ton of good options for workers seeking shorter hours. But you do have that option, right? Work 20 hours a week instead of 40. You just aren't paid for the hours that you don't work. In a world where workers are exchanging their labor for wages, that's how it's supposed to work. For there to be a "better option" (as in, you're paid money for not working more hours) what are you actually being paid to do? For all the thoughts that come to mind when I say "work 20 hours a week instead of 40" -- that's where the individual's preference comes in. I work more hours because I want the money. Nobody pays me to not work.
  - dragonwriter 2y ago
    > But you do have that option, right? Not really. Lots of kinds of work don’t hire part timers in any volume period. There are very limited jobs where the only tradeoff if you want to work fewer hours is a reduction in compensation proportional to the reduction in hours worked, or even just a reduction in compensation even if disproportionate to the reduction in hours worked.
  - BriggyDwiggs42 2y ago
    >nobody pays me not to work. If you’re in the US, then in theory you’re getting overtime for going over 40hrs a week. That’s time and a half for doing nothing, correct? I’d expect your principles put you firmly against overtime pay. >But you do have that option, right? Work 20 hours a week instead of 40. You just aren't paid for the hours that you don't work. In a world where workers are exchanging their labor for wages, that's how it's supposed to work. Look the core of your opinion is the belief that market dynamics naturally lead to desirable outcomes always. I simply don’t believe that, and I think interference to push for desirable outcomes which violate principles of a free market is often good. We probably won’t be able to agree on this.
tehjoker 2y ago
> Time and again we prove that we don't actually want that. That's the capitalist system. Unions successfully fought to decrease the working day to 8 hrs.
- _heimdall 2y ago
  I don't think we can so easily pin it on capitalism. Capitalism brings incentives that drive work hours and expectations up for sure, but that's not the only thing in play. Workers are often looking to make more money, take more responsibility, or build some kind of name or reputation for themselves. There's absolutely nothing wrong with that, but that goal also incentivizes to work harder and longer. There's no one size fits all description for workers, everyone's different. The same is true for the whole system though, it doesn't roll up to any one cause.
  - tehjoker 2y ago
    What you say is true, but the dominant effect in the system driving it towards more exertion than anyone would find desirable is the profit incentive of owners to drive their workers harder.
    - _heimdall 2y ago
      How do you narrow it down to capitalism as the root cause though? It seems like a reasonable guess, but our entire system is capitalist - we have no way to isolate or compare against to see how a roughly similar system would play out without capitalism.
      - tehjoker 2y ago
        We have seen other systems, socialist systems, that are much kinder to workers and give them more security and free time. The capitalists managed to destroy most competing examples and forced the remaining ones to somewhat liberalize via the IMF and other trade regimes, to make it appear as if there is only one choice. Not so!
- 2y ago
n_ary 2y ago
> 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. It actually does but due to wrong distribution of reward gained from that tech(automation) it does not work for the common folks. Lets take a simple example, you, me and 8 other HN users work in Bezos’ warehouse. We each work 8h/day. Suddenly a new tech comes in which can now do the same task we do and each unit of that machine can do 2-4 of our work alone. If Bezos buys 4 of the units and setting each unit to work at x2 capacity, then 8 of us now have 8h/day x 5 days x 4 weeks = 160h leisure. Problem is, now 8 of us still need money to survive(food, rent, utilities, healthcare etc). So, according to tech utopians, 8 of us now can use 160h of free time to focus on more important and rewarding works.(See in context of all the AI peddlers, how using AI will free us to do more important and rewarding works!). But to survive my rewarding work is to do gig work or something of same effort or more hours. So in theory, the owner controlling the automation gets more free time to attend interviews and political/social events. The people getting automated away fall downward and has to work harder to maintain their survivality. Of course, I hope our over enthusiastic brethren who are paying LLM provider for the priviledge of training their own replacements figure the equation soon and don’t get sold by the “free time to do more meaningful work” same way the Bezos warehouse gave some of us some leisure while the automation were coming online and needed some failsafe for a while. :)
- _qswe 1y ago
  In summary, the Luddites had a point. It doesn't mean they were ultimately correct, just that their concerns were valid. Regardless of anyone's thoughts on genAI in particular, it's important for us as a society to consider what our economic model looks like in a future where technology breaks the assumption of near-universal employment. Maybe that's UBI. Maybe it's a system of universally accessible educational stipends and pumping public funds into venture capital. Maybe it's something else entirely.

atonse 2y 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 2y 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 2y 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.
  - bluefirebrand 2y ago
    > Many people could play video games 24/7 with no issues I disagree pretty strongly here. I've known a few people who lived this sort of gamer rotting lifestyle and they were miserable. Many people like this wind up suicidal, or are prime candidates to shoot up a school. Videogames, movies, shows, whatever, they do not replace the need for meaningful interaction with the real world.
llbeansandrice 2y ago
What an absurd straw man. Moving the needle away from “large portions of the population are a few paychecks away from being homeless” does not constitute “the devil’s playground”. Where’s all of the articles that HN loves about kids these days not being bored anymore? What about google’s famous 20% time? Idle time isn’t just important, it’s the point.
- atonse 2y ago
  To be clear I’m not saying we shouldn’t have this because people would lash out. I’m saying I’m worried that it would be more likely that people would lash out, than everyone just passively sitting around. But to respond to your google analogy, 20% time is complemented by 80% being busy. This scenario would be 100% time. It would be better to look at a population that doesn’t have to work, like retirees. And see what the various issues they face. But also correct for age and biology of course. Or look at populations of places like Qatar where most of the native population don’t have to work much due to oil/gas revenues.
BriggyDwiggs42 2y ago
I don’t think people would be idle. They’d just be concerned with different things, like social dynamics, games/competition/sports, raising family etc.
- _heimdall 2y ago
  Oh sure, I didn't actually mean to describe it being idle as in sitting and literally doing nothing. I more meant idle in comparison to how much people work today and how much they think about or stress over work. Take 7 hours out if the day because an LLM makes you that much more productive and I expect people wouldn't know what to do with themselves. That could be wrong, but I'd expect a lot more societal problems than we already have today if a year from now a large number of people only worked 4 or 5 hours a week. That's not even getting to the Shopify CEOs ridiculous claim that employees will get 100x more work done [1]. [1] https://x.com/tobi/status/1909251946235437514 https://x.com/tobi/status/1909251946235437514
52-6F-62 2y ago
Tell that to any monk…

zdragnar 2y ago

Econ 101: supply is finite, demand infinite. Increased efficiency of production means that demand will meet the new price point, not that demand will cease to exist. There are probably plenty of goods that are counter examples, but time utilization isn't one of them, I don't think.

nathan_douglas 2y ago

Thank you! I didn't know this had a name. I remember thinking something along these lines in seventh grade social studies when we learned that Eli Whitney's cotton gin didn't actually end up improving conditions for enslaved people. I suspected this would be the case with AI too. A lot of people said things like "there won't be enough work anymore" and I thought, "are you kidding? Do you use the same software I use? Do you play the same games I've played? There's never enough time to add all of the features and all of the richness and complexity and all of the unit tests and all of the documentation that we want to add! Most of us are happy if we can ship a half-baked anything!" The only real question I had was whether the tech sector would go through a prolonged, destructive famine before realizing that.

vjvjvjvjghv 2y ago

I think a lot of people would be fine being idle if they had a guaranteed standard of living. When I was unemployed for a while, I was pretty happy in general but stressed about money running out. Without the money issue the last thing I would want to do is to sell my time to a soulless corporation. I have enough interests to keep me busy. Work just sucks up time I would love to spend on better things.

_heimdall 2y ago
Oh for sure, I should have included that. I was thinking of people being idle by choice rather than circumstance.
chii 2y ago
> a lot of people would be fine being idle if they had a guaranteed standard of living just a lot of words for "lazy" - it's built in to living organisms. The whole economic system today is constructed to ensure that one would suffer from being "lazy". And this would be the case until post-scarcity.
- kubb 2y ago
  Lazy is a pejorative term used to chastise people in a culture that promotes activity even if it’s pointless.
- _heimdall 2y ago
  I would have said lazy rather than idle if that what I meant. For most people lazy implies that there are things you things you really ought to get done but you're choosing to avoid doing it to the point where its a problem that whatever the thing is still isn't taken care of. Idle just means you don't feel like you have anything that needs to be done, you aren't avoiding things to the point that it causes a problem. Of course our economic system prefers people to be "fully utilized" rather than idle, but who cares? I don't owe an economic system anything, we could change the system whenever we want, and ultimately an economy is only useful to analyze the comparative output that already happened - it has nothing to do with the present or future.
deleted 2y ago

linsomniac 2y ago

>technology will lead to a utopia where we don't have to work I'm kind of ok with doing more work in the same time, though if I'm becoming way more effective I'll probably start pushing harder on my existing discussions with management about 4 day work weeks (I'm looking to do 4x10s, but I might start looking to negotiate it to "instead of a pay increase, let's keep it the same but a 4x8 week"). If AI lets me get more done in the same time, I'm ok with that. Though, on the other hand, my work is budgeting $30/mo for the AI tools, so I'm kind of figuring that any time that personally-purchased AI tools are saving me, I deduct from my work week. ;-) >very few people know what to do with idle hands "Millions long for immortality that don't know what to do with themselves on a rainy Sunday afternoon." -- Susan Ertz

Retric 2y ago

Food production is a class case where once productivity is high enough you simply get fewer farmers. We are currently a long way from that kind of change as current AI tools suck by comparison to literally 1,000x increases in productivity. So, in well under 100 years programming could become extremely niche.

quantumHazer 2y ago
> Food production is a class case where once productivity is high enough you simply get fewer farmers. Yes, but. There are more jobs in other fields that are adjacent to food production, particularly in distribution. Middle class does not existed and retail workers are now a large percentage of workers in most parts of the world.
- Retric 2y ago
  Sure, but when farmers where 90% of the labor force many of the remaining 10% also related to food distribution and production, a village blacksmith was mostly in support of farming, salt production/transport for food storage, etc. Food is just a smaller percentage of the economy overall.
  - _heimdall 2y ago
    Was there ever a time when 90% of labor was in farming and we had anything resembling an economy? I would have assumed that if 90% of people are farming its largely subsistence and any trade or happened on a much more local scale, potentially without any proper currency involved.
    - Retric 2y ago
      Globally perhaps not as fishing and hunting have been major food sources in antiquity especially when you include North America etc. Similarly slavery meant a significant portion of the population was in effect outside the economy. That said, there’s been areas where 90% of the working population was at minimum helping with the harvest up until the Middle Ages.

BriggyDwiggs42 2y ago

I don’t think it’s the consequence of most individuals’ preferences. I think it’s just the result of disproportionate political influence held by the wealthy, who are heavily incentivized to maximize working hours. Since employers mostly have that incentive, and since the political system doesn’t explicitly forbid it, there aren’t a ton of good options for workers seeking shorter hours.

hatefulmoron 2y ago
> there aren’t a ton of good options for workers seeking shorter hours. But you do have that option, right? Work 20 hours a week instead of 40. You just aren't paid for the hours that you don't work. In a world where workers are exchanging their labor for wages, that's how it's supposed to work. For there to be a "better option" (as in, you're paid money for not working more hours) what are you actually being paid to do? For all the thoughts that come to mind when I say "work 20 hours a week instead of 40" -- that's where the individual's preference comes in. I work more hours because I want the money. Nobody pays me to not work.
- dragonwriter 2y ago
  > But you do have that option, right? Not really. Lots of kinds of work don’t hire part timers in any volume period. There are very limited jobs where the only tradeoff if you want to work fewer hours is a reduction in compensation proportional to the reduction in hours worked, or even just a reduction in compensation even if disproportionate to the reduction in hours worked.
- BriggyDwiggs42 2y ago
  >nobody pays me not to work. If you’re in the US, then in theory you’re getting overtime for going over 40hrs a week. That’s time and a half for doing nothing, correct? I’d expect your principles put you firmly against overtime pay. >But you do have that option, right? Work 20 hours a week instead of 40. You just aren't paid for the hours that you don't work. In a world where workers are exchanging their labor for wages, that's how it's supposed to work. Look the core of your opinion is the belief that market dynamics naturally lead to desirable outcomes always. I simply don’t believe that, and I think interference to push for desirable outcomes which violate principles of a free market is often good. We probably won’t be able to agree on this.

tehjoker 2y ago

> Time and again we prove that we don't actually want that. That's the capitalist system. Unions successfully fought to decrease the working day to 8 hrs.

_heimdall 2y ago
I don't think we can so easily pin it on capitalism. Capitalism brings incentives that drive work hours and expectations up for sure, but that's not the only thing in play. Workers are often looking to make more money, take more responsibility, or build some kind of name or reputation for themselves. There's absolutely nothing wrong with that, but that goal also incentivizes to work harder and longer. There's no one size fits all description for workers, everyone's different. The same is true for the whole system though, it doesn't roll up to any one cause.
- tehjoker 2y ago
  What you say is true, but the dominant effect in the system driving it towards more exertion than anyone would find desirable is the profit incentive of owners to drive their workers harder.
  - _heimdall 2y ago
    How do you narrow it down to capitalism as the root cause though? It seems like a reasonable guess, but our entire system is capitalist - we have no way to isolate or compare against to see how a roughly similar system would play out without capitalism.
    - tehjoker 2y ago
      We have seen other systems, socialist systems, that are much kinder to workers and give them more security and free time. The capitalists managed to destroy most competing examples and forced the remaining ones to somewhat liberalize via the IMF and other trade regimes, to make it appear as if there is only one choice. Not so!
2y ago

n_ary 2y ago

> 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. It actually does but due to wrong distribution of reward gained from that tech(automation) it does not work for the common folks. Lets take a simple example, you, me and 8 other HN users work in Bezos’ warehouse. We each work 8h/day. Suddenly a new tech comes in which can now do the same task we do and each unit of that machine can do 2-4 of our work alone. If Bezos buys 4 of the units and setting each unit to work at x2 capacity, then 8 of us now have 8h/day x 5 days x 4 weeks = 160h leisure. Problem is, now 8 of us still need money to survive(food, rent, utilities, healthcare etc). So, according to tech utopians, 8 of us now can use 160h of free time to focus on more important and rewarding works.(See in context of all the AI peddlers, how using AI will free us to do more important and rewarding works!). But to survive my rewarding work is to do gig work or something of same effort or more hours. So in theory, the owner controlling the automation gets more free time to attend interviews and political/social events. The people getting automated away fall downward and has to work harder to maintain their survivality. Of course, I hope our over enthusiastic brethren who are paying LLM provider for the priviledge of training their own replacements figure the equation soon and don’t get sold by the “free time to do more meaningful work” same way the Bezos warehouse gave some of us some leisure while the automation were coming online and needed some failsafe for a while. :)

_qswe 1y ago
In summary, the Luddites had a point. It doesn't mean they were ultimately correct, just that their concerns were valid. Regardless of anyone's thoughts on genAI in particular, it's important for us as a society to consider what our economic model looks like in a future where technology breaks the assumption of near-universal employment. Maybe that's UBI. Maybe it's a system of universally accessible educational stipends and pumping public funds into venture capital. Maybe it's something else entirely.