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Automation is a broad topic. At home I save time because my dishwasher automates washing my dishes. The clothes washer and dryer are a lot easier than doing it

Automation is a broad topic. At home I save time because my dishwasher automates washing my dishes. The clothes washer and dryer are a lot easier than doing it by hand. The fruit and vegetable at the grocery store are a lot cheaper than they would be without automation. I think individuals who get comfortable in their jobs don’t like automation arriving at their station because it upends the order of things just as they were feeling comfortable and stable. Being adaptable now is more important than ever. > Products don't get better either, but that's more of a "shareholder value" problem than it is a specific technology problem. This is broadly false. Your laptop is unquestionably better because it was constructed with the help of automated CNC machines and PCB assembly as opposed to workers manually populating PCBs. Some companies can try to use automation to stay in place with lower headcount, but they’ll be left behind by competition that uses automation to move forward. Once that leap happens it becomes accepted as the new normal, so it never feels like automation is making changes.

everdrive 1y ago
>Being adaptable now is more important than ever. I do actually plan on getting old, and as much as I would love to retire before I'm no longer adaptable, I'm not so sure my finances or my brain will comply. >At home I save time because my dishwasher automates washing my dishes. I don't think this fits my analogy, because you personally can go watch TV or read a book or exercise given the time that is saved by the dishwasher. At work, you must be at work doing something else, and the "something else" is seldom a real improvement. If I could automate my job and then go on a hike I'd be a lot more excited about it.
- Aurornis 1y ago
  > At work, you must be at work doing something else, and the "something else" is seldom a real improvement. If I could automate my job and then go on a hike I'd be a lot more excited about it. When you find an employer that is happy to pay people to not work, let me know because I also want to work there.
  - dingnuts 1y ago
    it's called being the employer. if you own the capital and you automate the labor then it's your call what to do with the extra time
  - BeetleB 1y ago
    > When you find an employer that is happy to pay people to not work, let me know because I also want to work there. This was most employers during COVID :-) I worked fewer hours, and still got more done than most of my team. Since I didn't come to office, no one knew. As long as I responded to emails/messages in a timely fashion, no one cared.
    - bravetraveler 1y ago
      I fail to see the problem! "Time to lean, time to clean" is fine for someone billing/paid by the hour. As someone on a salary, when the work is finished... I am too. What's overtime? I believe some paperwork had the word 'exempt' on it. My unvested shares are an incentive to save the place from immolation over the next N years. Where's this 'must be at work doing something else' in the contract, again? "Where's the loyalty?" I hear someone ask. It passed with a family member and employers that had no compassion. All this to say, I fully support your testing of the water. It's a strategy I've picked up/adapted, too. The poster above should enjoy the time saved by automation/hike. I shitpost.
      - godelski 1y ago
        The problem is as soon as everyone returned to office they did care. Even while remote many employers acted like they were being cheated because employees would work less or distribute their work throughout the day. We have a tendency to scream crisis while stock prices and market caps rapidly rise. Every little downturn is evidence for the cry, but that doesn't change the trend. They keep saying that the share holders are the real customers and they seem to be doing perfectly fine regardless of if it's a hiring spree or firing. Regardless of if it's even a global pandemic. There's 4 companies worth more than $3T, one more than $4T. 11 are worth more than $1T. It's only been 7 years since we broke that $1T barrier. Most of the growth has happened recently too. Even Apple has had bigger swings since the pandemic. Idk, I don't think these companies are in trouble anywhere near what they claim. More concerning is this rapid growth in value without corresponding game changing products. Sure, we got AI but it hasn't changed the game like the iPhone did. I'd give up AI a lot sooner than I'd give up my smartphone, even if all it did was make calls, play music, and have a web browser. A pocket computer is very handy
- pmg101 1y ago
  Let's say you could automate your job and go on a hike. Great! You can have a fun hike. But you wouldn't get paid for that. I think it's broadly reasonable that you would only be paid for doing something someone else needs doing.
  - everdrive 1y ago
    Of course, but then why would I be excited about automation? I can imagine that the executives and shareholders could be excited for automation, but I'm not sure that it benefits me whatsoever.
    - lotsofpulp 1y ago
      Automation reduces cost of goods sold, so in a market with multiple sellers, it leads to lower prices. Also, almost everyone is a shareholder, directly or indirectly by being a taxpayer and shouldering the cost of pensions, which are invested in businesses.
    - Coffeewine 1y ago
      The only advantage is that if the company is more efficient they'll be less likely to fire you because the business is failing. They'll just be firing you to eliminate a cost.
      - lotsofpulp 1y ago
        When a buyer shops at a lower priced store, they are also eliminating a cost. No one seems to bemoan that, but for some reason a buyer of labor qualified as “employee” eliminating costs is different than a buyer of say, a new roof shopping around or going to Costco to spend less than the full service grocery business.
        nemomarx 1y ago
        people complain all the time that Walmart and dollar tree drive local groceries out of business though
- bravetraveler 1y ago
  > At work, you must be at work doing something else Speak for yourself, salary means I'm done when the work is. I encourage you to enjoy the hike, book, whatever. That said, I truly hate the induced demand LLMs offer.
  - sojournerc 1y ago
    That works short-term. Long-term, expectations of productivity catch up, and you either deliver more or get laid off. It's a treadmill not a mountain.
    - bravetraveler 1y ago
      Eh, it's worked well for a couple decades. Pointed effort beats toil, every time. Layoffs are like the tide, do you like the beach?
      - sojournerc 1y ago
        I thought the same... Then I got laid off. It can happen, not certain it will happen to you, and delivering quality certainly matters more than loc or stupid metrics. Glad you're in a good situation
        bravetraveler 1y ago
        You say this as if I've never been laid off before. I have, because of acquisitions and even poor performance after the loss of a family member. My point is this: it's going to happen anyway. I refuse to over-extend [any more] to stave the inevitable. I'm in a good spot because I have a solid network (contacts/skills) and reasonable savings. I'm sure the employer would be mad to know I'm posting right now, I don't care. Their fault for allowing me to automate!
        sojournerc 1y ago
        Ok, we're 100% aligning. I was taking care of myself, because I was on the way to bad burnout, and wasn't delivering what I had during the "honeymoon" with that company. Despite feeling like a lynchpin in the organization, I was blindsided by a layoff. Now I'm a professional woodworker and don't give a shit about any of that anymore. Cheers!
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
candiddevmike 1y ago
I think "bottom up" or worker led automation works far, far better than top down. Leadership always comes up with "efficiency" ideas for automation without ever spending a day in the life of the people who will use the automation. And they almost always fail to realize any gains but disrupt everyone's workflow.
jadelcastillo 1y ago
It's an interesting analogy. But one difference between dishwashers and LLMs is that you don't need to check the dishes afterward (if you maintain and use it properly).
- almosthere 1y ago
  Yeah but to continue the analogy, the washer was JUST invented and your clothes will come out ruined for a while.
  - fragmede 1y ago
    Oh man, remember how much bigger a deal it was that you had to separate your clothes into the exact right categories and run the machine with different kinds of loads? Modern detergent, it's basically all machine wash cold, with far fewer exceptions compared to 30 years ago.
    - AlexandrB 1y ago
      I don't think it's just the detergent. Modern clothes are made of shitty, synthetic fabrics. This is also why most people don't have to iron anything anymore. The tradeoff is microplastics[1], comfort/breathability, and durability. Classic example is jeans. Modern jeans are ridiculously stretchy compared to "real" cotton denim because they contain tons synthetic fibers. However I run through jeans at an alarming pace - even compared to when I was a kid. They wear quickly, tear easily, and generally don't last. [1] https://www.pbs.org/newshour/science/laundry-is-a-top-source-of-microplastic-pollution-heres-how-to-clean-your-clothes-more-sustainably https://www.pbs.org/newshour/science/laundry-is-a-top-source...
    - denimnerd42 1y ago
      im not sure how youre getting around the physics of white lint on dark clothing. and i separate plastic clothing from cotton or wool clothing because cotton usually just gets machine dried but i dont want to put my wool or plastic clothing through that process because its not necessary.
  - 1y ago
fragmede 1y ago
The two other things that come immediately to mind are clothes; if a shirt cost $4,000 per, our closets would look way different, and cars. No matter your personal opinion on cars vs public transportation, if even if the cheapest vehicle cost $500,000, society would look way different. The real thing it exposes though, is which side of the capital vs labor you work on. If the widget factory suddenly is able to make 10x the widgets in the same amount of time thanks to a new automated widget machine, if you're capital, you now have 10x the widgets to sell. Awesome! However, if you're labor, you still have a 40/hr a week job, regardless of how many widgets you make in a week. And the boss is counting how many widgets you make on the new machine they bought. At the edges of this in the tech industry we have website building. The market haven't yet totally adjusted to the lower costs of labor. What used to take 10 hours to build and you'd charge a client $3,000 for, now takes 2 hours but since the client was previously paying $3,000 for that service, you're not going to charge them less, you're going to take on additional clients. Or spend more time at the beach. In this scenario, the programmer is capital, not labor, and gets to reap the rewards of automation. Until the market catches up, anyway. Given that the industrial machine in the website builder's factory is a laptop and a cloud hosting bill, it's unclear if the Marxist division between capital and labor, burgousie and proletariat is still the right place to draw the lines, but the trade off is still there. If you're selling your time in exchange for money, automation means a faster conveyor belt that you need to adapt to, but you're still working 40/h a week. If you're selling widgets, automation means more widgets to sell.
- rightbyte 1y ago
  Petite bourgeoisie maybe?
- harvey9 1y ago
  The customer who was paying 3000 for a website may now be going to somewhere like Wix.
  - fragmede 1y ago
    That client was going to use Wix before AI. B2B sales is a whole thing, and businesses pay to have a human to talk to, not a website.
everforward 1y ago
> Your laptop is unquestionably better because it was constructed with the help of automated CNC machines and PCB assembly as opposed to workers manually populating PCBs. This is a fundamentally flawed analogy, because the problems are inverted. CNC and automated PCB assembly work well because creating a process to accurately create the items is hard, but validation that the work is correct is easy. Due to the mechanics of CNC, we can't manufacture something more precise than we can measure. LLMs are inverted; it's incredibly easy to get them to output something, and hard to validate that the output is correct. The analogy falls apart if you apply that same constraint to CNC and PCB machines. If they each had a 10% chance of creating a faulty product in a way that can only be detected by the purchaser of the final product, we would probably go back to hand-assembling them. > Some companies can try to use automation to stay in place with lower headcount, but they’ll be left behind by competition that uses automation to move forward. I suspect there will be a spectrum, as there historically has been. Some companies will use AI heavily and get crazy velocity, but have poor stability as usage uncovers bugs in a poorly understood codebase because AI wrote most of it. Others will use AI less heavily and ship fewer features, but have fewer severe bugs and be more able to fix them because of deep familiarity with the codebase. I suspect stability wins for many use cases, but there are definitely spaces where being down for a full day every month isn't the end of the world.
- throwaway31131 1y ago
  Validation that a PCB was manufactured correctly is... easy. Disagree, but how about VLSI. It's hugely automated. Moore's Law is exponential but team sizes aren't. That productivity gap is made up for with huge amounts of automation. And nothing is easy about manufacturing validation of an ASIC. I do think one primary difference between physical objects and software is we bother to have precise specifications that one can validate against, and I think that's what you're trying to get at. If all software had that then software could have an "easy" validation story too, I suppose. I have mixed feelings about precise specifications in software. On the one hand the hardware engineer in me thinks everything should have an exact specification. On the other hand, that's throws away the "soft" advantage which is important for some types of software. So there is a spectrum.
edflsafoiewq 1y ago
You recoup the saving of home automation immediately as additional leisure time. But for most people, work automation neither reduces your working time nor increases your wage.
lovich 1y ago
> I think individuals who get comfortable in their jobs don’t like automation arriving at their station because it upends the order of things just as they were feeling comfortable and stable. Being adaptable now is more important than ever. Look at all the other threads with people’s experiences. They aren’t unhappy with automation because they were comfortable. They are unhappy with automation because the reward for being more productive is higher expectations and no compensation. People think the Luddite movement was smashing looms because they inherently hated technology. They smashed the looms because the factories were producing more and the result of that productivity was the workers becoming destitute. If the machines and progress only bring about a worse life for individuals, those individuals are going to be against the machines
jononor 1y ago
Are you sure you spend less time per week on clothes washing than people did before the clothes washer? I suspect that before, people would wash their clothes considerably more seldom - which might even out the efficiency gains of the machine.

everdrive 1y ago

>Being adaptable now is more important than ever. I do actually plan on getting old, and as much as I would love to retire before I'm no longer adaptable, I'm not so sure my finances or my brain will comply. >At home I save time because my dishwasher automates washing my dishes. I don't think this fits my analogy, because you personally can go watch TV or read a book or exercise given the time that is saved by the dishwasher. At work, you must be at work doing something else, and the "something else" is seldom a real improvement. If I could automate my job and then go on a hike I'd be a lot more excited about it.

Aurornis 1y ago
> At work, you must be at work doing something else, and the "something else" is seldom a real improvement. If I could automate my job and then go on a hike I'd be a lot more excited about it. When you find an employer that is happy to pay people to not work, let me know because I also want to work there.
- dingnuts 1y ago
  it's called being the employer. if you own the capital and you automate the labor then it's your call what to do with the extra time
- BeetleB 1y ago
  > When you find an employer that is happy to pay people to not work, let me know because I also want to work there. This was most employers during COVID :-) I worked fewer hours, and still got more done than most of my team. Since I didn't come to office, no one knew. As long as I responded to emails/messages in a timely fashion, no one cared.
  - bravetraveler 1y ago
    I fail to see the problem! "Time to lean, time to clean" is fine for someone billing/paid by the hour. As someone on a salary, when the work is finished... I am too. What's overtime? I believe some paperwork had the word 'exempt' on it. My unvested shares are an incentive to save the place from immolation over the next N years. Where's this 'must be at work doing something else' in the contract, again? "Where's the loyalty?" I hear someone ask. It passed with a family member and employers that had no compassion. All this to say, I fully support your testing of the water. It's a strategy I've picked up/adapted, too. The poster above should enjoy the time saved by automation/hike. I shitpost.
    - godelski 1y ago
      The problem is as soon as everyone returned to office they did care. Even while remote many employers acted like they were being cheated because employees would work less or distribute their work throughout the day. We have a tendency to scream crisis while stock prices and market caps rapidly rise. Every little downturn is evidence for the cry, but that doesn't change the trend. They keep saying that the share holders are the real customers and they seem to be doing perfectly fine regardless of if it's a hiring spree or firing. Regardless of if it's even a global pandemic. There's 4 companies worth more than $3T, one more than $4T. 11 are worth more than $1T. It's only been 7 years since we broke that $1T barrier. Most of the growth has happened recently too. Even Apple has had bigger swings since the pandemic. Idk, I don't think these companies are in trouble anywhere near what they claim. More concerning is this rapid growth in value without corresponding game changing products. Sure, we got AI but it hasn't changed the game like the iPhone did. I'd give up AI a lot sooner than I'd give up my smartphone, even if all it did was make calls, play music, and have a web browser. A pocket computer is very handy
pmg101 1y ago
Let's say you could automate your job and go on a hike. Great! You can have a fun hike. But you wouldn't get paid for that. I think it's broadly reasonable that you would only be paid for doing something someone else needs doing.
- everdrive 1y ago
  Of course, but then why would I be excited about automation? I can imagine that the executives and shareholders could be excited for automation, but I'm not sure that it benefits me whatsoever.
  - lotsofpulp 1y ago
    Automation reduces cost of goods sold, so in a market with multiple sellers, it leads to lower prices. Also, almost everyone is a shareholder, directly or indirectly by being a taxpayer and shouldering the cost of pensions, which are invested in businesses.
  - Coffeewine 1y ago
    The only advantage is that if the company is more efficient they'll be less likely to fire you because the business is failing. They'll just be firing you to eliminate a cost.
    - lotsofpulp 1y ago
      When a buyer shops at a lower priced store, they are also eliminating a cost. No one seems to bemoan that, but for some reason a buyer of labor qualified as “employee” eliminating costs is different than a buyer of say, a new roof shopping around or going to Costco to spend less than the full service grocery business.
      - nemomarx 1y ago
        people complain all the time that Walmart and dollar tree drive local groceries out of business though
bravetraveler 1y ago
> At work, you must be at work doing something else Speak for yourself, salary means I'm done when the work is. I encourage you to enjoy the hike, book, whatever. That said, I truly hate the induced demand LLMs offer.
- sojournerc 1y ago
  That works short-term. Long-term, expectations of productivity catch up, and you either deliver more or get laid off. It's a treadmill not a mountain.
  - bravetraveler 1y ago
    Eh, it's worked well for a couple decades. Pointed effort beats toil, every time. Layoffs are like the tide, do you like the beach?
    - sojournerc 1y ago
      I thought the same... Then I got laid off. It can happen, not certain it will happen to you, and delivering quality certainly matters more than loc or stupid metrics. Glad you're in a good situation
      - bravetraveler 1y ago
        You say this as if I've never been laid off before. I have, because of acquisitions and even poor performance after the loss of a family member. My point is this: it's going to happen anyway. I refuse to over-extend [any more] to stave the inevitable. I'm in a good spot because I have a solid network (contacts/skills) and reasonable savings. I'm sure the employer would be mad to know I'm posting right now, I don't care. Their fault for allowing me to automate!
        sojournerc 1y ago
        Ok, we're 100% aligning. I was taking care of myself, because I was on the way to bad burnout, and wasn't delivering what I had during the "honeymoon" with that company. Despite feeling like a lynchpin in the organization, I was blindsided by a layoff. Now I'm a professional woodworker and don't give a shit about any of that anymore. Cheers!

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

candiddevmike 1y ago

I think "bottom up" or worker led automation works far, far better than top down. Leadership always comes up with "efficiency" ideas for automation without ever spending a day in the life of the people who will use the automation. And they almost always fail to realize any gains but disrupt everyone's workflow.

jadelcastillo 1y ago

It's an interesting analogy. But one difference between dishwashers and LLMs is that you don't need to check the dishes afterward (if you maintain and use it properly).

almosthere 1y ago
Yeah but to continue the analogy, the washer was JUST invented and your clothes will come out ruined for a while.
- fragmede 1y ago
  Oh man, remember how much bigger a deal it was that you had to separate your clothes into the exact right categories and run the machine with different kinds of loads? Modern detergent, it's basically all machine wash cold, with far fewer exceptions compared to 30 years ago.
  - AlexandrB 1y ago
    I don't think it's just the detergent. Modern clothes are made of shitty, synthetic fabrics. This is also why most people don't have to iron anything anymore. The tradeoff is microplastics[1], comfort/breathability, and durability. Classic example is jeans. Modern jeans are ridiculously stretchy compared to "real" cotton denim because they contain tons synthetic fibers. However I run through jeans at an alarming pace - even compared to when I was a kid. They wear quickly, tear easily, and generally don't last. [1] https://www.pbs.org/newshour/science/laundry-is-a-top-source-of-microplastic-pollution-heres-how-to-clean-your-clothes-more-sustainably https://www.pbs.org/newshour/science/laundry-is-a-top-source...
  - denimnerd42 1y ago
    im not sure how youre getting around the physics of white lint on dark clothing. and i separate plastic clothing from cotton or wool clothing because cotton usually just gets machine dried but i dont want to put my wool or plastic clothing through that process because its not necessary.
- 1y ago

fragmede 1y ago

The two other things that come immediately to mind are clothes; if a shirt cost $4,000 per, our closets would look way different, and cars. No matter your personal opinion on cars vs public transportation, if even if the cheapest vehicle cost $500,000, society would look way different. The real thing it exposes though, is which side of the capital vs labor you work on. If the widget factory suddenly is able to make 10x the widgets in the same amount of time thanks to a new automated widget machine, if you're capital, you now have 10x the widgets to sell. Awesome! However, if you're labor, you still have a 40/hr a week job, regardless of how many widgets you make in a week. And the boss is counting how many widgets you make on the new machine they bought. At the edges of this in the tech industry we have website building. The market haven't yet totally adjusted to the lower costs of labor. What used to take 10 hours to build and you'd charge a client $3,000 for, now takes 2 hours but since the client was previously paying $3,000 for that service, you're not going to charge them less, you're going to take on additional clients. Or spend more time at the beach. In this scenario, the programmer is capital, not labor, and gets to reap the rewards of automation. Until the market catches up, anyway. Given that the industrial machine in the website builder's factory is a laptop and a cloud hosting bill, it's unclear if the Marxist division between capital and labor, burgousie and proletariat is still the right place to draw the lines, but the trade off is still there. If you're selling your time in exchange for money, automation means a faster conveyor belt that you need to adapt to, but you're still working 40/h a week. If you're selling widgets, automation means more widgets to sell.

rightbyte 1y ago
Petite bourgeoisie maybe?
harvey9 1y ago
The customer who was paying 3000 for a website may now be going to somewhere like Wix.
- fragmede 1y ago
  That client was going to use Wix before AI. B2B sales is a whole thing, and businesses pay to have a human to talk to, not a website.

everforward 1y ago

> Your laptop is unquestionably better because it was constructed with the help of automated CNC machines and PCB assembly as opposed to workers manually populating PCBs. This is a fundamentally flawed analogy, because the problems are inverted. CNC and automated PCB assembly work well because creating a process to accurately create the items is hard, but validation that the work is correct is easy. Due to the mechanics of CNC, we can't manufacture something more precise than we can measure. LLMs are inverted; it's incredibly easy to get them to output something, and hard to validate that the output is correct. The analogy falls apart if you apply that same constraint to CNC and PCB machines. If they each had a 10% chance of creating a faulty product in a way that can only be detected by the purchaser of the final product, we would probably go back to hand-assembling them. > Some companies can try to use automation to stay in place with lower headcount, but they’ll be left behind by competition that uses automation to move forward. I suspect there will be a spectrum, as there historically has been. Some companies will use AI heavily and get crazy velocity, but have poor stability as usage uncovers bugs in a poorly understood codebase because AI wrote most of it. Others will use AI less heavily and ship fewer features, but have fewer severe bugs and be more able to fix them because of deep familiarity with the codebase. I suspect stability wins for many use cases, but there are definitely spaces where being down for a full day every month isn't the end of the world.

throwaway31131 1y ago
Validation that a PCB was manufactured correctly is... easy. Disagree, but how about VLSI. It's hugely automated. Moore's Law is exponential but team sizes aren't. That productivity gap is made up for with huge amounts of automation. And nothing is easy about manufacturing validation of an ASIC. I do think one primary difference between physical objects and software is we bother to have precise specifications that one can validate against, and I think that's what you're trying to get at. If all software had that then software could have an "easy" validation story too, I suppose. I have mixed feelings about precise specifications in software. On the one hand the hardware engineer in me thinks everything should have an exact specification. On the other hand, that's throws away the "soft" advantage which is important for some types of software. So there is a spectrum.

edflsafoiewq 1y ago

You recoup the saving of home automation immediately as additional leisure time. But for most people, work automation neither reduces your working time nor increases your wage.

lovich 1y ago

> I think individuals who get comfortable in their jobs don’t like automation arriving at their station because it upends the order of things just as they were feeling comfortable and stable. Being adaptable now is more important than ever. Look at all the other threads with people’s experiences. They aren’t unhappy with automation because they were comfortable. They are unhappy with automation because the reward for being more productive is higher expectations and no compensation. People think the Luddite movement was smashing looms because they inherently hated technology. They smashed the looms because the factories were producing more and the result of that productivity was the workers becoming destitute. If the machines and progress only bring about a worse life for individuals, those individuals are going to be against the machines

jononor 1y ago

Are you sure you spend less time per week on clothes washing than people did before the clothes washer? I suspect that before, people would wash their clothes considerably more seldom - which might even out the efficiency gains of the machine.