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> With almost all traditional employment, people are paid for their time. Their output is more an expectation based on the time put in. Yes and no. It's true t

by lapcat 1y ago

> With almost all traditional employment, people are paid for their time. Their output is more an expectation based on the time put in. Yes and no. It's true that employees are rented for a limited amount of time rather than owned like tools. However, employees can earn vastly different sums of money for the same amount of time. Some make $7 per hour, while others (a privileged few) make $7000 per hour or more. > I would absolutely expect my employees (and vendors) to use these tools to go faster, just like laptops make them go faster than typewriters. It's not like it's causing the employee 4x more effort for that 4x output, is it? Ok, but are you going to let employees who use these "labor-saving" tools work 1/4 of the hours per week as before for the same compensation as before? I suspect not. > But as a business owner > But framing this as an "us vs. them" thing by comparing apples and oranges isn't going to get us anywhere. Of course that's what a business owner would tend to say. My point is that there's no inherent reason why the benefits of "increased productivity" would trickle down to employees. Individually, employees may look at A.I. and think it's great, but collectively, if all employees have access to the same tools, then employees don't benefit from A.I., because it doesn't fundamentally change their relationship with employers. Think about how students started using A.I. to cheat and get ahead. This turned out to be short-sighted, because everyone has the same access to ChatGPT, and thus A.I.-fueled cheating became ubiquitous in school, and the cheaters are back where they started, no longer ahead of their peers and no better off than before. Indeed, they may be worse off now, because potential employers have to expect that all college graduates are incompetent cheaters who didn't learn anything.

gruez 1y ago
In the end, it's all supply and demand. That's not to say it has no effect either. Increased productivity from AI can increase wages by raising the upper bound for salaries (companies won't pay an employee more than the value he can create), and creating competition between companies (if a single programmer can generate $500k worth of value, and their salaries are only $100k, then we'd expect other companies to spring up to arbitrage this difference).
- lapcat 1y ago
  > In the end, it's all supply and demand. That's true. > companies won't pay an employee more than the value he can create True, but the wealthy corporations aren't simply paying for "programmers". Cheap programming labor is available, especially in less wealthy countries, and corporations could avail themselves of that if they wanted (and they sometimes do). When some programmers make more than their peer average, it's because the employers consider those programmers to be "the best", the smartest, most skilled, hardest working, or whatever. In that regard, A.I. is largely irrelevant. The best programmers and the worst programmers can both use A.I., so it's not a distinguishing factor in the labor market. What matters the most is the supply of the type of programmers that companies are seeking. A.I. might (or might not) increase a company's revenue, but there's no reason the company can't just book that as profit. A.I. doesn't increase the demand for programmers; if anything, it might reduce the demand for programmers, if the programmers they've already hired become more productive. Adding more employees has diminishing returns, as we've seen with mass tech layoffs in recent years. Hiring is not an automatic productivity boost, if you're measuring productivity as an addition to revenue. At the end of the day, producing more stuff doesn't matter unless the company can sell that stuff. > if a single programmer can generate $500k worth of value How do you even determine the monetary value produced by a single programmer in a large team effort? (Ask yourself this: how much "value" is generated by human resources or administrative assistants or janitors? You might say $0, but nonetheless they get paid more than $0, because the work needs to be done. You can't a functional corporation without them. And their compensation is based on supply and demand, not on "value generated".) Let me put it this way: I used to work for a small company, and some of my coworkers also worked at a BigCo at some point, either before or after SmallCo. Their personal productivity didn't change much over time, from one employer to another, but their employer's revenue per employee changed dramatically from one employer to another. A tech company's revenue depends on many different factors, many of which have nothing to do with the employed programmers. Let me put it another way: the more that employers rely on publicly available automatated tools—for example, LLMs—rather than on the individual skills of employees to increase productivity, the more the employees themselves become interchangeable cogs in the machine, and thus by supply and demand, their compensation will not increase. Of course, if using LLMs were an elite skill that required inborn talent and/or years of specialized training, then you would expect LLMs to increase the compensation of those with that unique skill, but I've seen no evidence that this is the case.
atonse 1y ago
This is not true at least with the current crop of AI. I have seen 4-5 people use the tools (won’t say where and in what capacity, but only one of them was an employee of mine) and the results were wildly different. One person just copy pasted AI responses and added no value. But that meant they also copy pasted substandard responses and it actually reduced the quality of their work (in fact, their greatest asset was client management) Another one was a coder, and even though he was using windsurf every day, he was getting stuck on the most basic items. And having access to AI made no difference in his productivity because he doesn’t have the base knowledge and experience to be able to discern what is a quality suggestion and what isn’t. And he doesn’t know what questions to even ask the AI to help unblock him. I actually think these tools will WIDEN the gap between what a good engineer can do, and what a mediocre one can. And it will widen income gaps. I’m not going to say this is a good thing. I’m still a human being. But I’m just reporting what I’ve observed.
- lapcat 1y ago
  What you said didn't actually contradict me. For example, with regard to students, it was the mediocre, lazy students who started using ChatGPT to cheat. The good students didn't need it. And as I said, the cheaters are no better off than before. They mistakenly thought they had some completitive advantage, but the same tools were available to everyone. With regard to engineers, the issue isn't the difference between good engineeres and mediocre engineers. The issue is that all good engineers have access to the same AI. Thus, engineers who were equal to each other before AI are still equal to each other. It's not a competitive advantage over peers, and thus there's no incentive to pay them more. AI doesn't change the supply of good engineers, nor does it give individual good engineers a competitive advantage over other good engineers. Any additional productivity comes more or less for free, because it's due to factors external to the engineer rather than internal to the engineer.

by lapcat 1y ago

gruez 1y ago

In the end, it's all supply and demand. That's not to say it has no effect either. Increased productivity from AI can increase wages by raising the upper bound for salaries (companies won't pay an employee more than the value he can create), and creating competition between companies (if a single programmer can generate $500k worth of value, and their salaries are only $100k, then we'd expect other companies to spring up to arbitrage this difference).

lapcat 1y ago
> In the end, it's all supply and demand. That's true. > companies won't pay an employee more than the value he can create True, but the wealthy corporations aren't simply paying for "programmers". Cheap programming labor is available, especially in less wealthy countries, and corporations could avail themselves of that if they wanted (and they sometimes do). When some programmers make more than their peer average, it's because the employers consider those programmers to be "the best", the smartest, most skilled, hardest working, or whatever. In that regard, A.I. is largely irrelevant. The best programmers and the worst programmers can both use A.I., so it's not a distinguishing factor in the labor market. What matters the most is the supply of the type of programmers that companies are seeking. A.I. might (or might not) increase a company's revenue, but there's no reason the company can't just book that as profit. A.I. doesn't increase the demand for programmers; if anything, it might reduce the demand for programmers, if the programmers they've already hired become more productive. Adding more employees has diminishing returns, as we've seen with mass tech layoffs in recent years. Hiring is not an automatic productivity boost, if you're measuring productivity as an addition to revenue. At the end of the day, producing more stuff doesn't matter unless the company can sell that stuff. > if a single programmer can generate $500k worth of value How do you even determine the monetary value produced by a single programmer in a large team effort? (Ask yourself this: how much "value" is generated by human resources or administrative assistants or janitors? You might say $0, but nonetheless they get paid more than $0, because the work needs to be done. You can't a functional corporation without them. And their compensation is based on supply and demand, not on "value generated".) Let me put it this way: I used to work for a small company, and some of my coworkers also worked at a BigCo at some point, either before or after SmallCo. Their personal productivity didn't change much over time, from one employer to another, but their employer's revenue per employee changed dramatically from one employer to another. A tech company's revenue depends on many different factors, many of which have nothing to do with the employed programmers. Let me put it another way: the more that employers rely on publicly available automatated tools—for example, LLMs—rather than on the individual skills of employees to increase productivity, the more the employees themselves become interchangeable cogs in the machine, and thus by supply and demand, their compensation will not increase. Of course, if using LLMs were an elite skill that required inborn talent and/or years of specialized training, then you would expect LLMs to increase the compensation of those with that unique skill, but I've seen no evidence that this is the case.

atonse 1y ago

This is not true at least with the current crop of AI. I have seen 4-5 people use the tools (won’t say where and in what capacity, but only one of them was an employee of mine) and the results were wildly different. One person just copy pasted AI responses and added no value. But that meant they also copy pasted substandard responses and it actually reduced the quality of their work (in fact, their greatest asset was client management) Another one was a coder, and even though he was using windsurf every day, he was getting stuck on the most basic items. And having access to AI made no difference in his productivity because he doesn’t have the base knowledge and experience to be able to discern what is a quality suggestion and what isn’t. And he doesn’t know what questions to even ask the AI to help unblock him. I actually think these tools will WIDEN the gap between what a good engineer can do, and what a mediocre one can. And it will widen income gaps. I’m not going to say this is a good thing. I’m still a human being. But I’m just reporting what I’ve observed.

lapcat 1y ago
What you said didn't actually contradict me. For example, with regard to students, it was the mediocre, lazy students who started using ChatGPT to cheat. The good students didn't need it. And as I said, the cheaters are no better off than before. They mistakenly thought they had some completitive advantage, but the same tools were available to everyone. With regard to engineers, the issue isn't the difference between good engineeres and mediocre engineers. The issue is that all good engineers have access to the same AI. Thus, engineers who were equal to each other before AI are still equal to each other. It's not a competitive advantage over peers, and thus there's no incentive to pay them more. AI doesn't change the supply of good engineers, nor does it give individual good engineers a competitive advantage over other good engineers. Any additional productivity comes more or less for free, because it's due to factors external to the engineer rather than internal to the engineer.