5 ms·

This really hit home for me: In some cases, workers are also being asked to automate the parts of their jobs they enjoy most, Hinds said on the podcast, pointi

This really hit home for me: In some cases, workers are also being asked to automate the parts of their jobs they enjoy most, Hinds said on the podcast, pointing to customer-service employees who enjoy building relationships but are increasingly expected to supervise AI agents instead. "That's what gives you joy and meaning at work," she said. "That is very dangerous." What's a 20% productivity gain if I constantly feel deflated by work that used to energize me? That's going to give back the productivity gain and more, while also decreasing my quality of life.

add-sub-mul-div 4mo ago
It's like if your career switched from solving puzzles to filling out TPS reports.
- strken 4mo ago
  For me it feels less like filling out reports, and more like mentoring an intern who can search for stuff really quickly but forgets everything at the end of the day due to anterograde amnesia. Except the intern is trapped inside an iron lung and must communicate entirely by text. And also has zero real creativity or self-motivation.
jader201 4mo ago
> What's a 20% productivity gain Where did the 20% number come from? I’d argue it’s way more than that (or variable, i.e. dependent on who’s using it/how it’s being used/what it’s being used on). Having said that, the number, to me, doesn’t even matter. You could replace that with 200%, and it’d be just as true.
data-ottawa 4mo ago
The cynic in me has learned one is measurable and can go on a slide deck, the other is vague and hard to measure.
ge96 4mo ago
When I was given a semi-ultimatum "use AI or get fired" kind of thing for writing code I had a brief bout of depression/sadness. Whereas my friend doesn't care/says "I get paid to not work". I have gotten past it, now I'm just like, I'll do what I need to do to get paid since unfortunately I'm in a lot of debt so I need this job. I learned to code in 2013 so I like typing the code myself but now it seems like a waste of time. I still write my own code for myself/hardware hobby.
- halfmatthalfcat 4mo ago
  FWIW, I was just like you but then completely gave in and found enjoyment in the act of simply ideating and shipping. The gap now between idea and implementation is so small. At first I was depressed but now I'm in the acceptance phase of grief. We aren't going back, for better or for worse.
  - falcor84 4mo ago
    What we're seeing now reminds me of that pub dialogue about running in Back to the Future 3, paraphrased: > Jeb: "If everybody's got one of these auto-whatsits, does anybody code anymore?" > Doc Brown: "Of course we code. But for recreation. For fun." > Jeb: "Code for fun? What the hell kind of fun is that?"
- ffsm8 4mo ago
  Heh, my employer kept pushing us to use Copilot. And over the last months the cli has actually gotten halfway decent... So I did start using it. Albeit sparingly because the token allotment was always pretty low. Then they announced that they removed the limit/making further request just cost extra for them. That's when I started using it as I did for my personal projects I pay subscriptions for... Then Copilot increased their pricing. Announced in April I think? But took effect this month. This Monday they announced that the limits are back in effect. So I guess I'll be going back to hand coding next week, as my tokens are about to run out ಥ ‿ ಥ Corporate is always so silly. I mean I know how it happens: everyone just wants to get their bonus, so different management roles try to coerce the employees to do whatever best serves their bottomline - rarely related to whatever is good for the corporation... But it's always silly to live through it.
mullingitover 4mo ago
> customer-service employees who enjoy building relationships but are increasingly expected to supervise AI agents instead. It sucks for the employees, otoh it might be the only way we're going to beat Baumol's Cost Disease. In the past few decades productivity has exploded, but service employees have largely failed to increase productivity in any way because it's harder to automate these tasks. It's the reason the costs of things like education and healthcare are downright extortionate, the reason you're paying back your college well into your fifties, the reason you don't call an ambulance for someone in the US because you don't want to ruin their life financially. We may have to trade the personal fulfillment in these jobs for the broader affordable access to these services.
- haritha-j 4mo ago
  Education and healthcare are both ridiculously overpriced in the US for reasons that have little to do with service costs. Questionable financial systems behind these services are much more to blame.
  - curuinor 3mo ago
    finance is a service.
- hoppyhoppy2 4mo ago
  As a former first responder, I'm interested in hearing more about how AI-powered ambulance services would work. (related question: will the 911 dispatchers be AI?)
  - wang_li 4mo ago
    As a person who drives on a daily basis, I want to know why we don't have AI controlled stop lights and overall traffic control.
  - mullingitover 4mo ago
    I don't think first responders are ever going to be at risk. Administrators, on the other hand, are a massive part of the costs in the health sector (IIRC the Obama administration chickened out on truly reforming healthcare exactly because the number of administrators that would be made redundant would tank the economy). A significant amount of administrative work can be automated.
krapp 4mo ago
Most people don't have the luxury of finding joy and meaning in their work. You aren't hired to have fun, you're hired to create value and wealth for your employer. Just do what literally everyone else does and grind through it until you get a pension and hope it's enough to let you die with a bit of dignity.
- erikerikson 4mo ago
  Here in stupid town we stab ourselves with knives. It hurts and we get infections but everybody does it. We don't even remember why we do it any more but we do so you have to as well. The real problem is the amount of value that gets left on the table. Also, mental health is just as much a part of health and well-being as the physical.
  - krapp 4mo ago
    We know why we do it. We do it because we live under a system that requires most of us to bleed for our supper. And now tech is being normalized to work like every other job, and techies get to feel the knife. A lot of people are going to be shocked to realize what their actual relationship to capital has always been.
    - erikerikson 4mo ago
      If we know, why would a lot of us be shocked? Seems contradictory. That's probably too much a troll so while I get that you are grinding your anti-capitalism axe, you're also seeding hopelessness and trapped falsely fatalistic thinking. It has gone this way but it doesn't have to and the whole arrangement is a local optimum with much higher global optima available. In fact there are many of us who have created a parallel life and extend ladders all the time (within our capacity) for others to join us.
- arcatech 4mo ago
  That is definitely not what everybody else does. Some people try harder to find the things that they enjoy doing that provide value to others.
2OEH8eoCRo0 4mo ago
Don't worry. They'll find some freak that actually enjoys it and is even willing to be paid less!
dist-epoch 4mo ago
The vast majority of jobs are not full-filling or enjoyable. Because there were way more job seekers than jobs. Programming was one of the ones which was, because there were fewer programmers than openings. Now that's flipping, thus naturally, the enjoyment is going to be sucked out of it.
graphime 4mo ago
[flagged]
- matkoniecz 4mo ago
  People are definitely entitled to complaining about decreasing quality of life and not liking causes of such changes.
- n4r9 4mo ago
  One imagines that quality of life ought to increase as technology evolves and the economy grows.
  - YorgishBorg 4mo ago
    [dead]
- _verandaguy 4mo ago
  Driving everyone's QoL to be as bad as possible will lead to increasing enshittiffication in the entire market. Consumers will be spoiled for choice between deeply mediocre options. Besides, what's the point of adopting new technologies if it's not to increase the quality of life? If everyone just exists in service of the product development lifecycle, who and what are the products actually for?
  - rob74 4mo ago
    In my experience, for every customer support agent that really wants to help people and cares about their problems, there are at least ten who don't even read what you wrote and answer with prefabricated blocks of text that have little to do with what you asked. If AI customer support actually tries to understand what I ask of it and help me, and there are still (motivated) humans available for the more tricky cases that AI can't handle, that might be a win...
  - graphime 4mo ago
    > If everyone just exists in service of the product development lifecycle, who and what are the products actually for? Anyone holding passive index ETFs in their brokerage / 401k / pension accounts.
kqr 4mo ago
This is an important point. My light-bulb moment was when I talked to a product owner in a previous job, and I expressed surprise around an expensive planned change, because it didn't seem that valuable to our customers. He said, "Almost half of what we do is not that valuable to our customers, but it's valuable to him, and her, and him", pointing through the conference-room window at my fellow programmers, "and that's why we do it. If we only did things that were very valuable to our customers, we wouldn't have nearly as many good engineers on the team as we do."
- threetonesun 4mo ago
  Do the engineers not derive enjoyment in their jobs from making the customer experience better? This does track with what I've experience in my career, where we've gone from everything being to better the user experience to tech companies sort of trying to out-do each other in their technical solutions while the software continuously gets worse and more antagonistic.
  - lubujackson 4mo ago
    This is the danger of isolating engineering from customers, or even internal customer-interfacing employees. If all they see is code, they will get satisfaction from tidy code, not user happiness. One good thing about AI is it elevates product engineers because they more directly bridge the customer-product-code divide.
    - busterarm 4mo ago
      Not just isolating them from customers but also from engineering-adjacent work that isn't code. I've been at a place that is basically microservices slop (several dozen services per engineer). They're all poorly maintained and at least a solid 40% of all this code that they've written could have been just a traefik or nginx configuration/container. When you have a lot of inexperienced (relative to industry) and overworked software engineers, the solution to every problem becomes to write code and writing new code should be a last resort. Worse still, there's just a poor general understanding of the internet protocols they're working with and of how to do distributed systems right. Unfortunately with LLMs I've been seeing this get worse, not better. They use the LLMs for code generation but not architecture review. Bad ideas are getting fully-baked quickly before anyone with good sense can intervene.
StefanBatory 4mo ago
> That's going to give back the productivity gain and more, while also decreasing my quality of life. Unfortunately though, what does that matter? Your employer does not care how do you feel. You are paid to bring them benefits, they aren't running a charity. If you do feel down, that is your issue and you shouldn't let that influence how you work. Just to be clear, I don't like that either. But it is what it is.
- banannaise 4mo ago
  Mental health is health. Negative mental health impacts are particularly significant when your job is to perform mental labor. It's not defiance, it's reality: if you drag down my motivation, that's going to drag down my productivity. I don't really have much active control over that.
  - StefanBatory 4mo ago
    But that's the point, employer doesn't care why you're sick, only that you are. You create "problems", you will get replaced.
- archagon 4mo ago
  That is when you unionize and make them do what you want.
abc123abc123 4mo ago
As always... no AI-hypester ever talks about Amdahls law (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amdahl%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amdahl%27s_law).
tombot 4mo ago
Most people don’t have jobs they enjoy, programmers have somehow escaped this; better pay and more “protected” time instead of doing what the rest of us were doing all along
- thedevilslawyer 4mo ago
  They did till 2025. Now more than half don't enjoy it as the technical puzzles/plumbing is gone. The outcome oriented folks find it fun (and amplified up).
juleiie 4mo ago
Many successful people in their 40s could quit work already if they only decreased their monthly costs. I think it is more important than ever to manage your wealth in a way that sustains you from capital alone in a world where employment gets progressively more toxic. The way to achieve it is buying maintenance efficient and cheap car, make renovations smart, make good choices all around to minimise expenses. Operate your life like a corporation. First, cut the expenditures. For me the ability to do whatever I am interested in at the moment, is worth almost any sacrifice. Then I can seek one time contracts or short time jobs that fulfil my mental needs. My monthly expenses are no more than 5000 dollars and mostly consistently less than that. Which is okay because the money spending doesn’t bring me any joy nowadays. The money isn’t what gives me happiness. Only other people can provide that and activities that are dirt cheap usually, like reading or broadly understood hacking Consumption is a short lived and deceptive joy that causes more guilt than whatever dopamine it is worth really. Governments hate people like me which means I must be doing something right.
- ashkulz 4mo ago
  I think that's a very simplistic take, it doesn't account for people who need to support children's education and/or healthcare for parents. Both are areas where costs are going up at a rate which is much higher than official inflation rates, and comp increases often don't even match inflation! So the need for working till you're forced to give up still remains.
  - juleiie 4mo ago
    Also disregard this because I don't live in USA with its ridiculous healthcare costs even if my conversion of numbers accounted for purchasing power parity, it did not calculate monthly healthcare expenses that in my locale are only 1/7 of median national wage per month flat which I assume is a much better ratio than in USA and very predictable. As per children, contraception exists and you should use it as kid is a dubious and too risky investment. You could for instance raise a little sociopath or two. Healthcare for parents is for me at least letting them into a boat in the ocean when they get first alzheimer's symptoms like in Hemingway Old man and the sea. Native Americans used to do it. They just released their old guys to the forest or steppes. Which reinforces my point about the kids being rather bad investment. Do not count on that. It's objectively more wise to save 500k-1mil from raising a kid to invest that money and spend it when old, hiring a professional caretaker. Have friends, spouse, not kids. In any case it probably only matters that USA healthcare costs are so exorbitant. This is the crux to why it could never work for americans unless you are at much higher financial level than any sort of frugal upper middle class specialist in 40s. It's the only western country where retiring earlier is so expensive. I thought maybe it would make up in the extra money you can make and save in taxes without VAT but no, after research I think that healthcare is so much pricier that it is incomparable. So it is not simplistic but it's different environment altogether, one in which it actually works and I am really grateful for that.
sanderjd 4mo ago
Yeah I definitely agree with this. AI has become very useful to me, but it has also definitely automated some of what used to be my favorite parts of my work. I am having some success in working to acquire a taste for different parts of the work. But I suspect that this won't be an option for most people.
torginus 4mo ago
I mean that sucks, but I have many tales of people, who were passionate and outstanding in what they did, and were rewarded with a leadership position for their efforts. Now they get to fill out excel sheets, babysit people and sit in planning meetings.
solfox 4mo ago
I think this is a larger question we should be asking. YES, we can build this world: a world where robots do our chores, serve our coffee, check us out at the grocery store, and let the AI agents do the parts of our jobs we love. But SHOULD we? With great power comes great responsibility - and I'm getting the impression we're (quickly) building a world that isn't very fun to live in. We technically have a choice here - DO we want bots writing our prose and responding to our customer service inquiries?
- thwarted 4mo ago
  I remember a book I read as a pre-teen, 40 or so years ago, about a kid who wanted to be "perfect". A wear a tree of broccoli on a string around your neck to learn how to overcome embarrassment. A perfect person never makes mistakes, and the best way to not make mistakes is to not do anything. Similar "requirements" of perfection and their expression are presented. The kid eventually finds himself in an empty room, by himself, doing nothing, wearing broccoli. Perfection was achieved, but at the cost of an extremely boring life.
- NietzscheanNull 4mo ago
  I'm of the opinion that "true art"/cultural artifacts can't be automated by definition, as they derive their value from the human experience embedded in them by their creators. OTOH, I think we absolutely SHOULD automate necessary "drudgery" type work wherever we can, but we're going to need a radical reconceptualization of how we distribute the spoils of economic productivity as a result. Unfortunately, I think the type of reconceptualization we'd need would entail a complete overhaul of many long-established and deeply-internalized concepts (rights and duties of ownership of intellectual and private property, decoupling of identity and occupation, etc.), and from everything I've seen, that will be a long and painful process assuming it's even achievable. (Especially in the US, where decades of pro-business messaging has yielded a culture that equates income-earning ability/entrepreneurial success with individual human worth. I really struggle to imagine a path toward unwinding that, but there's little chance it'll be a smooth ride.)
YorgishBorg 4mo ago
[dead]
jorblumesea 4mo ago
anecdotal but a good number of people have clearly stopped working as much or quiet quit. some even left the company or the industry. CEOs are also telling everyone to 5x their output, AI will replace them. Whatever productivity gains models are giving us is being eaten away by other factors.
lenerdenator 4mo ago
Then they'll fire you, find someone who will work for the wage that the now-degraded productivity justifies, and get them to use the AI.
wnevets 4mo ago
> That's going to give back the productivity gain and more, while also decreasing my quality of life. but did we increase our EBITDA for the quarter?
wayeq 4mo ago
> What's a 20% productivity gain if I constantly feel deflated by work that used to energize me? I think it's called 'capitalism'
bmitc 4mo ago
> What's a 20% productivity gain if I constantly feel deflated by work that used to energize me? That's going to give back the productivity gain and more, while also decreasing my quality of life. This has been the story of humanity since the industrial revolution.

add-sub-mul-div 4mo ago

It's like if your career switched from solving puzzles to filling out TPS reports.

strken 4mo ago
For me it feels less like filling out reports, and more like mentoring an intern who can search for stuff really quickly but forgets everything at the end of the day due to anterograde amnesia. Except the intern is trapped inside an iron lung and must communicate entirely by text. And also has zero real creativity or self-motivation.

jader201 4mo ago

> What's a 20% productivity gain Where did the 20% number come from? I’d argue it’s way more than that (or variable, i.e. dependent on who’s using it/how it’s being used/what it’s being used on). Having said that, the number, to me, doesn’t even matter. You could replace that with 200%, and it’d be just as true.

data-ottawa 4mo ago

The cynic in me has learned one is measurable and can go on a slide deck, the other is vague and hard to measure.

ge96 4mo ago

When I was given a semi-ultimatum "use AI or get fired" kind of thing for writing code I had a brief bout of depression/sadness. Whereas my friend doesn't care/says "I get paid to not work". I have gotten past it, now I'm just like, I'll do what I need to do to get paid since unfortunately I'm in a lot of debt so I need this job. I learned to code in 2013 so I like typing the code myself but now it seems like a waste of time. I still write my own code for myself/hardware hobby.

halfmatthalfcat 4mo ago
FWIW, I was just like you but then completely gave in and found enjoyment in the act of simply ideating and shipping. The gap now between idea and implementation is so small. At first I was depressed but now I'm in the acceptance phase of grief. We aren't going back, for better or for worse.
- falcor84 4mo ago
  What we're seeing now reminds me of that pub dialogue about running in Back to the Future 3, paraphrased: > Jeb: "If everybody's got one of these auto-whatsits, does anybody code anymore?" > Doc Brown: "Of course we code. But for recreation. For fun." > Jeb: "Code for fun? What the hell kind of fun is that?"
ffsm8 4mo ago
Heh, my employer kept pushing us to use Copilot. And over the last months the cli has actually gotten halfway decent... So I did start using it. Albeit sparingly because the token allotment was always pretty low. Then they announced that they removed the limit/making further request just cost extra for them. That's when I started using it as I did for my personal projects I pay subscriptions for... Then Copilot increased their pricing. Announced in April I think? But took effect this month. This Monday they announced that the limits are back in effect. So I guess I'll be going back to hand coding next week, as my tokens are about to run out ಥ ‿ ಥ Corporate is always so silly. I mean I know how it happens: everyone just wants to get their bonus, so different management roles try to coerce the employees to do whatever best serves their bottomline - rarely related to whatever is good for the corporation... But it's always silly to live through it.

mullingitover 4mo ago

> customer-service employees who enjoy building relationships but are increasingly expected to supervise AI agents instead. It sucks for the employees, otoh it might be the only way we're going to beat Baumol's Cost Disease. In the past few decades productivity has exploded, but service employees have largely failed to increase productivity in any way because it's harder to automate these tasks. It's the reason the costs of things like education and healthcare are downright extortionate, the reason you're paying back your college well into your fifties, the reason you don't call an ambulance for someone in the US because you don't want to ruin their life financially. We may have to trade the personal fulfillment in these jobs for the broader affordable access to these services.

haritha-j 4mo ago
Education and healthcare are both ridiculously overpriced in the US for reasons that have little to do with service costs. Questionable financial systems behind these services are much more to blame.
- curuinor 3mo ago
  finance is a service.
hoppyhoppy2 4mo ago
As a former first responder, I'm interested in hearing more about how AI-powered ambulance services would work. (related question: will the 911 dispatchers be AI?)
- wang_li 4mo ago
  As a person who drives on a daily basis, I want to know why we don't have AI controlled stop lights and overall traffic control.
- mullingitover 4mo ago
  I don't think first responders are ever going to be at risk. Administrators, on the other hand, are a massive part of the costs in the health sector (IIRC the Obama administration chickened out on truly reforming healthcare exactly because the number of administrators that would be made redundant would tank the economy). A significant amount of administrative work can be automated.

krapp 4mo ago

Most people don't have the luxury of finding joy and meaning in their work. You aren't hired to have fun, you're hired to create value and wealth for your employer. Just do what literally everyone else does and grind through it until you get a pension and hope it's enough to let you die with a bit of dignity.

erikerikson 4mo ago
Here in stupid town we stab ourselves with knives. It hurts and we get infections but everybody does it. We don't even remember why we do it any more but we do so you have to as well. The real problem is the amount of value that gets left on the table. Also, mental health is just as much a part of health and well-being as the physical.
- krapp 4mo ago
  We know why we do it. We do it because we live under a system that requires most of us to bleed for our supper. And now tech is being normalized to work like every other job, and techies get to feel the knife. A lot of people are going to be shocked to realize what their actual relationship to capital has always been.
  - erikerikson 4mo ago
    If we know, why would a lot of us be shocked? Seems contradictory. That's probably too much a troll so while I get that you are grinding your anti-capitalism axe, you're also seeding hopelessness and trapped falsely fatalistic thinking. It has gone this way but it doesn't have to and the whole arrangement is a local optimum with much higher global optima available. In fact there are many of us who have created a parallel life and extend ladders all the time (within our capacity) for others to join us.
arcatech 4mo ago
That is definitely not what everybody else does. Some people try harder to find the things that they enjoy doing that provide value to others.

2OEH8eoCRo0 4mo ago

Don't worry. They'll find some freak that actually enjoys it and is even willing to be paid less!

dist-epoch 4mo ago

The vast majority of jobs are not full-filling or enjoyable. Because there were way more job seekers than jobs. Programming was one of the ones which was, because there were fewer programmers than openings. Now that's flipping, thus naturally, the enjoyment is going to be sucked out of it.

graphime 4mo ago

[flagged]

matkoniecz 4mo ago
People are definitely entitled to complaining about decreasing quality of life and not liking causes of such changes.
n4r9 4mo ago
One imagines that quality of life ought to increase as technology evolves and the economy grows.
- YorgishBorg 4mo ago
  [dead]
_verandaguy 4mo ago
Driving everyone's QoL to be as bad as possible will lead to increasing enshittiffication in the entire market. Consumers will be spoiled for choice between deeply mediocre options. Besides, what's the point of adopting new technologies if it's not to increase the quality of life? If everyone just exists in service of the product development lifecycle, who and what are the products actually for?
- rob74 4mo ago
  In my experience, for every customer support agent that really wants to help people and cares about their problems, there are at least ten who don't even read what you wrote and answer with prefabricated blocks of text that have little to do with what you asked. If AI customer support actually tries to understand what I ask of it and help me, and there are still (motivated) humans available for the more tricky cases that AI can't handle, that might be a win...
- graphime 4mo ago
  > If everyone just exists in service of the product development lifecycle, who and what are the products actually for? Anyone holding passive index ETFs in their brokerage / 401k / pension accounts.

kqr 4mo ago

This is an important point. My light-bulb moment was when I talked to a product owner in a previous job, and I expressed surprise around an expensive planned change, because it didn't seem that valuable to our customers. He said, "Almost half of what we do is not that valuable to our customers, but it's valuable to him, and her, and him", pointing through the conference-room window at my fellow programmers, "and that's why we do it. If we only did things that were very valuable to our customers, we wouldn't have nearly as many good engineers on the team as we do."

threetonesun 4mo ago
Do the engineers not derive enjoyment in their jobs from making the customer experience better? This does track with what I've experience in my career, where we've gone from everything being to better the user experience to tech companies sort of trying to out-do each other in their technical solutions while the software continuously gets worse and more antagonistic.
- lubujackson 4mo ago
  This is the danger of isolating engineering from customers, or even internal customer-interfacing employees. If all they see is code, they will get satisfaction from tidy code, not user happiness. One good thing about AI is it elevates product engineers because they more directly bridge the customer-product-code divide.
  - busterarm 4mo ago
    Not just isolating them from customers but also from engineering-adjacent work that isn't code. I've been at a place that is basically microservices slop (several dozen services per engineer). They're all poorly maintained and at least a solid 40% of all this code that they've written could have been just a traefik or nginx configuration/container. When you have a lot of inexperienced (relative to industry) and overworked software engineers, the solution to every problem becomes to write code and writing new code should be a last resort. Worse still, there's just a poor general understanding of the internet protocols they're working with and of how to do distributed systems right. Unfortunately with LLMs I've been seeing this get worse, not better. They use the LLMs for code generation but not architecture review. Bad ideas are getting fully-baked quickly before anyone with good sense can intervene.

StefanBatory 4mo ago

> That's going to give back the productivity gain and more, while also decreasing my quality of life. Unfortunately though, what does that matter? Your employer does not care how do you feel. You are paid to bring them benefits, they aren't running a charity. If you do feel down, that is your issue and you shouldn't let that influence how you work. Just to be clear, I don't like that either. But it is what it is.

banannaise 4mo ago
Mental health is health. Negative mental health impacts are particularly significant when your job is to perform mental labor. It's not defiance, it's reality: if you drag down my motivation, that's going to drag down my productivity. I don't really have much active control over that.
- StefanBatory 4mo ago
  But that's the point, employer doesn't care why you're sick, only that you are. You create "problems", you will get replaced.
archagon 4mo ago
That is when you unionize and make them do what you want.

abc123abc123 4mo ago

As always... no AI-hypester ever talks about Amdahls law (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amdahl%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amdahl%27s_law).

tombot 4mo ago

Most people don’t have jobs they enjoy, programmers have somehow escaped this; better pay and more “protected” time instead of doing what the rest of us were doing all along

thedevilslawyer 4mo ago
They did till 2025. Now more than half don't enjoy it as the technical puzzles/plumbing is gone. The outcome oriented folks find it fun (and amplified up).

juleiie 4mo ago

Many successful people in their 40s could quit work already if they only decreased their monthly costs. I think it is more important than ever to manage your wealth in a way that sustains you from capital alone in a world where employment gets progressively more toxic. The way to achieve it is buying maintenance efficient and cheap car, make renovations smart, make good choices all around to minimise expenses. Operate your life like a corporation. First, cut the expenditures. For me the ability to do whatever I am interested in at the moment, is worth almost any sacrifice. Then I can seek one time contracts or short time jobs that fulfil my mental needs. My monthly expenses are no more than 5000 dollars and mostly consistently less than that. Which is okay because the money spending doesn’t bring me any joy nowadays. The money isn’t what gives me happiness. Only other people can provide that and activities that are dirt cheap usually, like reading or broadly understood hacking Consumption is a short lived and deceptive joy that causes more guilt than whatever dopamine it is worth really. Governments hate people like me which means I must be doing something right.

ashkulz 4mo ago
I think that's a very simplistic take, it doesn't account for people who need to support children's education and/or healthcare for parents. Both are areas where costs are going up at a rate which is much higher than official inflation rates, and comp increases often don't even match inflation! So the need for working till you're forced to give up still remains.
- juleiie 4mo ago
  Also disregard this because I don't live in USA with its ridiculous healthcare costs even if my conversion of numbers accounted for purchasing power parity, it did not calculate monthly healthcare expenses that in my locale are only 1/7 of median national wage per month flat which I assume is a much better ratio than in USA and very predictable. As per children, contraception exists and you should use it as kid is a dubious and too risky investment. You could for instance raise a little sociopath or two. Healthcare for parents is for me at least letting them into a boat in the ocean when they get first alzheimer's symptoms like in Hemingway Old man and the sea. Native Americans used to do it. They just released their old guys to the forest or steppes. Which reinforces my point about the kids being rather bad investment. Do not count on that. It's objectively more wise to save 500k-1mil from raising a kid to invest that money and spend it when old, hiring a professional caretaker. Have friends, spouse, not kids. In any case it probably only matters that USA healthcare costs are so exorbitant. This is the crux to why it could never work for americans unless you are at much higher financial level than any sort of frugal upper middle class specialist in 40s. It's the only western country where retiring earlier is so expensive. I thought maybe it would make up in the extra money you can make and save in taxes without VAT but no, after research I think that healthcare is so much pricier that it is incomparable. So it is not simplistic but it's different environment altogether, one in which it actually works and I am really grateful for that.

sanderjd 4mo ago

Yeah I definitely agree with this. AI has become very useful to me, but it has also definitely automated some of what used to be my favorite parts of my work. I am having some success in working to acquire a taste for different parts of the work. But I suspect that this won't be an option for most people.

torginus 4mo ago

I mean that sucks, but I have many tales of people, who were passionate and outstanding in what they did, and were rewarded with a leadership position for their efforts. Now they get to fill out excel sheets, babysit people and sit in planning meetings.

solfox 4mo ago

I think this is a larger question we should be asking. YES, we can build this world: a world where robots do our chores, serve our coffee, check us out at the grocery store, and let the AI agents do the parts of our jobs we love. But SHOULD we? With great power comes great responsibility - and I'm getting the impression we're (quickly) building a world that isn't very fun to live in. We technically have a choice here - DO we want bots writing our prose and responding to our customer service inquiries?

thwarted 4mo ago
I remember a book I read as a pre-teen, 40 or so years ago, about a kid who wanted to be "perfect". A wear a tree of broccoli on a string around your neck to learn how to overcome embarrassment. A perfect person never makes mistakes, and the best way to not make mistakes is to not do anything. Similar "requirements" of perfection and their expression are presented. The kid eventually finds himself in an empty room, by himself, doing nothing, wearing broccoli. Perfection was achieved, but at the cost of an extremely boring life.
NietzscheanNull 4mo ago
I'm of the opinion that "true art"/cultural artifacts can't be automated by definition, as they derive their value from the human experience embedded in them by their creators. OTOH, I think we absolutely SHOULD automate necessary "drudgery" type work wherever we can, but we're going to need a radical reconceptualization of how we distribute the spoils of economic productivity as a result. Unfortunately, I think the type of reconceptualization we'd need would entail a complete overhaul of many long-established and deeply-internalized concepts (rights and duties of ownership of intellectual and private property, decoupling of identity and occupation, etc.), and from everything I've seen, that will be a long and painful process assuming it's even achievable. (Especially in the US, where decades of pro-business messaging has yielded a culture that equates income-earning ability/entrepreneurial success with individual human worth. I really struggle to imagine a path toward unwinding that, but there's little chance it'll be a smooth ride.)

YorgishBorg 4mo ago

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jorblumesea 4mo ago

anecdotal but a good number of people have clearly stopped working as much or quiet quit. some even left the company or the industry. CEOs are also telling everyone to 5x their output, AI will replace them. Whatever productivity gains models are giving us is being eaten away by other factors.

lenerdenator 4mo ago

Then they'll fire you, find someone who will work for the wage that the now-degraded productivity justifies, and get them to use the AI.

wnevets 4mo ago

> That's going to give back the productivity gain and more, while also decreasing my quality of life. but did we increase our EBITDA for the quarter?

wayeq 4mo ago

> What's a 20% productivity gain if I constantly feel deflated by work that used to energize me? I think it's called 'capitalism'

bmitc 4mo ago

> What's a 20% productivity gain if I constantly feel deflated by work that used to energize me? That's going to give back the productivity gain and more, while also decreasing my quality of life. This has been the story of humanity since the industrial revolution.