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I am arguing, and I thought this was obvious but I guess not, that that scope of work in general increases. My personal projects don’t get paid, no, they’re ju

by tombert 5mo ago

I am arguing, and I thought this was obvious but I guess not, that that scope of work in general increases. My personal projects don’t get paid, no, they’re just for fun, but I feel like my point was missed: instead of “having less to do”, I broadened the scope. I feel like people are making an incorrect assumption that “labor”, even white collar labor, is a fixed-size problem. I don’t agree with that: there’s never going to be a point where we say “shit, there is literally nothing left to do”.

luke5441 5mo ago
Is the scope is actually increasing, that would be the question. Are we re-allocating the labor from the work that got easier (let's assume SaaS) and reallocating it to something that needs doing, e.g. cancer research. To me looks like we aren't and your personal projects don't support the opposite.
- krupan 5mo ago
  Right and that's something I probably shouldn't have left unsaid. Yes, AI can do these relatively simple tasks like porting from one language to another, but you can't prompt it to cure cancer in one window and prompt it to solve climate change in another and watch it go
- tombert 5mo ago
  I wasn’t going to be curing cancer regardless so I am not sure I fully understand your point. Like most people reading this forum I am a relatively normal person who has a comfortable life but will be doomed to obscurity with no notable achievements when I die. I use Codex for work, and I feel like I accomplish more with it than I would have without it. I juggle a lot more projects concurrently and can broaden the scope of what I am doing. Now we can argue what I do is “easy”, and you’re probably not wrong, but most white collar work is pretty easy and being able to accomplish more easy tasks is still potential productivity. For that matter, if I am not distracted with the trivial tasks I can dedicate more of my time working on hard problems, maybe even ones we would call “important”.

by tombert 5mo ago

luke5441 5mo ago

Is the scope is actually increasing, that would be the question. Are we re-allocating the labor from the work that got easier (let's assume SaaS) and reallocating it to something that needs doing, e.g. cancer research. To me looks like we aren't and your personal projects don't support the opposite.

krupan 5mo ago
Right and that's something I probably shouldn't have left unsaid. Yes, AI can do these relatively simple tasks like porting from one language to another, but you can't prompt it to cure cancer in one window and prompt it to solve climate change in another and watch it go
tombert 5mo ago
I wasn’t going to be curing cancer regardless so I am not sure I fully understand your point. Like most people reading this forum I am a relatively normal person who has a comfortable life but will be doomed to obscurity with no notable achievements when I die. I use Codex for work, and I feel like I accomplish more with it than I would have without it. I juggle a lot more projects concurrently and can broaden the scope of what I am doing. Now we can argue what I do is “easy”, and you’re probably not wrong, but most white collar work is pretty easy and being able to accomplish more easy tasks is still potential productivity. For that matter, if I am not distracted with the trivial tasks I can dedicate more of my time working on hard problems, maybe even ones we would call “important”.