This article is kind of playful, but I think there’s a serious point here that’s not discussed enough. We’re being asked to usher in huge productivity gains by introducing AI to our workflows, but we’re not asking how does it help us? Not a lot of us stand to directly gain from our employers becoming more productive.
I know everybody is afraid of getting fired and replaced with AI or whatever right now. But we should be seriously asking in our next all hands meetings if 10x’ing our productivity can get us some days off. Or when our paycheck is going to be multiplied accordingly.
So far we’re all kind of being chumps about this, bragging on Linkedin about all of our new found AI productivity while accepting less job security and no increase in comp.
It’s been like that for a while, economic gains went to a small fraction of people, before software developers were among those that were on the winning side, now they’re on the losing side. Think about how much the US economy is growing right now and who really profits from that growth. My guess is that 90 % of the growth goes to 10 % of people, with AI maybe 99 % might go to the 1 %. Or who do you think will gain from the tokenization of development? You’re just supposed to be more productive and the gains the company achieves will just go to the owners as they are in a great position right now and developers are scared shitless to get fired, so no one is increasing salaries or time off, instead most companies hang the threat of layoffs over people’s head to keep them in line. And the funny thing is we developers did this to ourselves, by doing free open source work for the greater good, which now feeds AI models that are replacing many of us. But I guess most people didn’t care as they made good money while it lasted.
> And the funny thing is we developers did this to ourselves, by doing free open source work for the greater good, which now feeds AI models that are replacing many of us.
Open source is not to blame here. AI companies used the code, in some cases against the license, to train their models.
Nobody is actually getting replaced - it's just that layoffs are in vogue now. If there was productivity to gain here, it would be used to do more and capture more of the market.
If you don't get paid more for being more productive, someone else is getting richer. That means they buy the houses in your neighborhood, which means you can't buy it because they outbid you
> before software developers were among those that were on the winning side, now they’re on the losing side.
are you sure about that? i'm a software engineer and i feel like i'm on the wining side now, even more than before. I'm considering quitting my 500K a year job to go compete against the employers. they seem like dinosaurs to me.
Nothing like self-imposed anticipatory pressure ruining one's life. Maybe you are right, maybe not, nobody knows. What everybody knows is that life is happening now and its extremely short even in best scenario, yet few act accordingly.
I think it’s pretty naive to ask your employer for a day off. As experienced by companies, the market is more competitive than ever. Whoever slows down will get eaten by some hungry upstart that is willing to work 996 to eat the incumbent’s lunch. It’s a Prisoner’s Dilemma.
The only way to get this outcome is to coordinate at a level higher than individual market participants.
In other words, get your government to implement UBI - tax all companies (or if AI really takes off, just compute) and redistribute to the people.
> I think it’s pretty naive to ask your employer for a day off.
Someone said the same before 1938, probably [1]
I think it's possible that AI will bring as much of a shift to our lives as the industrial revolution did, so it might be necessary to make some adjustments, just like we did back then.
yep. The Progressive Era (with it's 5 day work week women's suffrage ) came after, and was a backlash to The Gilded Age. Now we're in Gilded Age II (Gilded Age on Steroids). Hopefully we'll see history repeat itself and we get Progressive Era II. But keep in mind that the Progressive Era only lasted about 20 years, if that long.
We don't want anti-capitalist reforms. Perhaps reforms like those we use in Denmark would make sense? We're ranked higher than the U.S. in ease of business. We love capitalism here. But we also have high taxes, universal healthcare, and great social safety nets. It allows us to lean into the great parts of capitalism while also protecting those for whom capitalism isn't working so well. It's a great compromise without having to go full starvation and gulags, which would be worse than what we have now.
Tbh, with the productivity gains of the last 150 years, we should already be able to easily afford another weekday off for a long time. Instead most people sit around doing bullshit jobs to kill time until the weekend.
There's a fundamental difference with AI though. Even though we could live easily, greed drives the class with power to continue to force more and more productivity from workers, which is the elite's only source of labor. With AI, the workers won't been the most cost effective or even necessary. Very different situation.
And you must be a high paid tech worker in a bubble if you think most people are just trying to "kill time". At least in the US the majority of people are living paycheck to paycheck.
By the amount of money thrown out the AI window nowadays, a day off, or hiring a few more folks to cover for those days off and more, seems like the much cheaper option. But that's only my naive impression right?
The reality is that most people are paid for their time, not for their output. I think most contracts for salaried employees are along the lines of "work n hours a week". If you want to get paid for output, you can't be a salaried employee.
Salaried employees aren't paid for their time, they're paid for a combination of their output and their availability. Availability used to be strongly coupled with time but technology has introduced some flexibility there.
Correction: Their PERCEIVED output, not their output. Output can usually not be objectively measured in IT.
Storypoints? Overestimate wildly. Stories done? Split stories like atoms! Impact of work done? Present your button color change stories as company saving divine intervention!
Can you give some examples of jobs that are usually done by salaried employees and are paid by output? All the examples I can think of, are usually done by independent contractors.
Not by output, for output - as in, not paid per unit of output, but paid for achieving a sufficient level of it, the definition of which frequently changes. That's baked into the definition of salaried.
I don't think this is the reality. It is part of it, but people get paid different salaries, why? Some are more productive than others. Aside from leadership's (and society's) biased ability to determine value, these people theoretically get more because they contribute more.
while productivity is correlated with salary, generally the ability to ask for a raise, to defend your pay and office politics navigation would be more impactful on average
This is a naive view. Companies will literally pay you as little as they can get away with. If they think they can hire someone “equivalent” according to HR for less money they will often do so. Actual contribution means nothing unless you’re willing to walk away. I’ve literally seen an intern with less than one year of experience when hired into a company where a senior architect who has been at the same firm for 16 years made over $40k less than them. The former intern was great. I had no real complaints. And he was more ambitious than the senior architect. But he stayed with the company two more years before jumping ship for another significant pay raise while the senior architect is still there making about the same amount as he did five years ago. It doesn’t matter how much value the senior architect delivers if he doesn’t demand his increase in pay.
> Companies will literally pay you as little as they can get away with.
Everyone pays as little for everything as they can get away with.
Companies aren't doing anything unusual or evil. This is literally just how a market works.
A lot of people forget that the job market is a market. Or they wish it wasn't a market and they could block out competition for themselves so companies had to pay them more (at the expense of those excluded)
This might be fair if the rules of the market were static, but companies are actively using their power and influence to affect the market rules so they can get away with paying workers less and less - that's not to mention collusion and corruption.
Just because this has been normalized doesn't mean it's not evil. If a healthcare company introduces processes that deny people life-saving interventions just to funnel more money to their shareholders, that company and its leadership are thoroughly evil.
I'd also like to add that I often pay more for things than I could get away with. I try to prefer locally owned businesses when possible, and if they have fair prices and give me good advice I often pay a bit extra (essentially a "tip" for the business) to support them.
> Everyone pays as little for everything as they can get away with.
Bullshit cop out. I regularly spend more than the “average” on technology because I’ve been burned by the bottom of the barrel too many times. Maybe you cheap out on all of your purchases, but it says nothing about “everyone”. The fact that you claim “everyone” has as few moral qualms as you is telling. But not in a way that reflects everyone. Just short sighted selfish assholes.
In my experience, productivity effects on salary is a rounding error. There are only two significant contributing factors for salary: 1. Your home address and 2. Your visa status
Productivity might get you a 5k raise more over your colleague on a 160k salary. Meanwhile the same engineer in Taiwan is more productive than you and getting paid 40k while working for the same company on the same product, and putting in more hours to boot.
Or the engineer could be working for a certain company in South Korea and get a bonus multiple times their annual salary because of their union contracts tied to profitability.
They are paid for what they collectively output. The only reason that people seem to be paid by their time is that it's hard to measure each one's output individually and granularly.
There is a lot of regulatory stuff, particularly around benefits, that push people towards nominally 40hr salaried contracts even if they don't need all 40 of those.
"Salaried" vs hourly is increasingly a scam anyway, but all that benefits stuff is something that would have to evolve. And it could, if people find the political will.
The contracts I've seen have an explicit floor, not a de facto one. I.E. The contract says the minimum number of hours you need to work. Some countries also have overtime laws which create a ceiling.
Either way it doesn't change that being paid for your output is the realm of entrepreneurship and submitting bids for project work.
Employment contracts are virtually nonexistent here in the U.S. While the norm is “40 hours”, actual requirements vary by employer, may or may not be communicated in writing, and can change at the employer’s whim. If you make under $107,432 per year (which is around starting salary for fresh graduates at FAANG), you are entitled to overtime pay (minimum 1.5x) for hours worked beyond 40 in a week.
At least for my software job in the US, and other salaried jobs I’ve seen, there are explicitly no hours listed, and it’s supposedly based only on your output. In practice though, if your butt isn’t in the seat 40 hours a week or so, and usually more, the boss will be mad.
At least in the US, there are regulations around what constitutes "full time" employment, and many benefits (such as insurance) are tied into being offered only for full time employees, or at different tiers between part and full time.
As such, you are still expected to work a minimum amount of time. That's what you're signing up for. Fixed deliverable contracts- completing certain objectives- tend to either specify those things as minimum performance expectations, or are for contractors rather than employees.
At my most recent role we were definitely being judged by output metrics (both jira tickets completed and github prs merged). They showed us the jellyfish tool they used to check those metrics. Well, some of it. Regular ICs themselves didn't have that access.
When you work for a startup, or a zero-to-one project, it's hard to say you're even paid for your output. You're paid for probabilistic/expected future value output.
Every meeting, every memo, and every prototype is output in terms of the employees doing that work. Whether it's directly saleable is irrelevant. The investors base the value of their investment on the expected future value of the company, but the people being to do the work are being paid for the work they are doing regardless of what the future value of the company becomes. That is if they are paid a salary. If they are given shares, then that compensation is entirely dependent on future value.
You can demand whatever you want. You could demand a million dollar salary if you wanted.
The challenge is that there are a lot of very qualified devs who would do it for less.
Labor is a market. Supply and demand determines your wages.
There are always hand-wavey arguments about unionization fixing this, but when other developers are hungry for those jobs and willing to go around the union to work them for pay then that doesn’t really work at scale.
There are several unionized software development groups in the US. They don’t have a good track record of getting significantly higher pay or even getting their demands met from their limited strikes.
I was in the musician's union for 12 years before I got into tech. There were some silly rules, like someone couldn't be both a musician and and orchestrator on the same show, because it's "doing 2 jobs". It's like saying you can't be full stack. You couldn't fire people who were bad at their jobs and stopped putting in any effort. There was a profit sharing agreement that the union rejected, because it would come at the expense of higher base salaries, and then they wondered why there were only big producers that first developed the show out of town.
Some rules I actually liked. Rehearsals started and ended _exactly_ on time to avoid overtime (showing up late was the only reason you could be fired, which was a useful compromise). But generally, the union was the yin to the producers yang, and an adversarial position as worker advocate was where they wanted to be, they didn't want more ownership.
If someone gave me the chance to join something more like a worker-owned coop, where the workers on the business and vote on how it works, I would actually be down. There's a grocery store down my street like this and it's a great place. I don't know how this would actually work in tech. If there's no startup capital, no one will have a salary or benefits for years until there's a profit (if at all). And capital comes in exchange for ownership of the future upside.
> If there's no startup capital, no one will have a salary or benefits for years until there's a profit (if at all). And capital comes in exchange for ownership of the future upside.
The developer co-op projects I've seen have targeted consulting for this reason. The idea is that developers get together and start doing projects that can bill clients immediately, and then they'll pool the money back into developing their own something later.
In practice there's no real difference between a group of people consulting together and a co-op of consultants when everyone is just billing hourly at the start. Nobody really wants to spread their earnings around the co-op because you can see the relationship between hours worked, hours billed, and dollars coming in so clearly.
> and then they wondered why there were only big producers that first developed the show out of town.
Most unions derive a lot of their negotiating power from location-based constraints. You can gather enough musicians in one place to form a union because there are a limited number of musicians within driving distance of the location. Musicians can't do their performance over zoom and the job can't be outsourced to another country.
Software jobs have no restrictions like this. Every time there are calls for unionizing software devs, nobody wants to answer the hard questions like what incentives multi-national corporations will have to cater to the unionized employees in a country like the US where we're already paid more than our international counterparts. It's just assumed that the union will form, then companies will have no choice but to accept their demands.
> If someone gave me the chance to join something more like a worker-owned coop, where the workers on the business and vote on how it works
I run a co-op, and the most surprising thing I've learned is that it seems the only reason other people don't set up their businesses as co-ops is, frankly, greed.
In this startup ecosystem, why would you do a co-op when you could instead chase that multi million dollar exit that profits you? If we have any kind of event like that the earnings would be distributed basically equally among around 30 people. 20 mill payout suddenly becomes... Less...
Anyway though apparently statistics are on my side. Apparently co-ops are more sustainable and live for longer than traditional corporations. It seems to me that people are much happier here than at traditional corporations.
Clients are happy, engineers are happy and productive, I'm happy because I don't have the entire responsibility of the business on my shoulders - engineers are constantly contributing to the improvement of internal systems for example, because why wouldn't they? That saves them money too!
Downsides are increased ownership come with increased responsibility. Can't just clock in here, people need to manage the client relationship, issue invoices, participate in the accounting, and if they want more work when their gig is closing out, either try to sell the client on more work or help us find another one. Until we can find an alternative revenue stream to selling our labor to clients, we're all beholden to keeping the BD wheel turning in order to get paid. Upside is that we're keeping 85% of the margin for ourselves rather than at toptal where you keep, idk, 30%? And that 15% is still our money anyway it just gets used for overall co-op stuff, which members get to decide on.
Also I don't know if this kind of business lends itself to the silicon valley mythos of the huge work week for a few years followed by functional retirement. Instead it seems we'll all need to keep working for the foreseeable future, but at our own reasonable pace, fully remote, our own hours, at very high compensation but not "fuck you money" compensation. Well except for our people in Ethiopia and Taiwan, for the local market rates, their compensation is getting way up into that territory.
That said, I don't know about our ability to survive a full on capitalist attack in the form of lawfare or getting priced out or closed out of deals. Priced out in a labor market would be difficult since the only way to beat our labor margins is to hire directly, but we could be lawfared to death pretty easily considering our ARR might be 1 mil this year if we're lucky.
Maybe i’m a cynical capitalist, but I expect everyone to be operating in their own self interest. There are few true saints. Startups are high risk high reward. 9/10 fail. If a VC gets less upside when it works, the successes wouldn’t pay for the failures.
Co-op for consulting actually seems like it could work.
> Co-op for consulting actually seems like it could work.
I made a comment about exactly this in the thread. This is where a lot of co-op ideas go, but they run into friction when they get to the part about sharing the money around. Consulting is one place where developers can see a direct relationship between their hours worked, hours billed, dollars coming into the business, and dollars going into their paycheck. There are some ideas like putting shared money into a group fund to cover vacations and similar expenses, but generally a consulting group is money-in money-out. Nobody really wants to join a co-op and see the hours they bill go to pay someone who works fewer hours, so the money relationship gets even more tightly coupled than at a traditional salaried company.
> Maybe i’m a cynical capitalist, but I expect everyone to be operating in their own self interest.
Down to explore this with me?
I often wonder if this is self fulfilling. I'm not saying you're selfish, I mean, has capitalism trained people that all people are inherently selfish, and then, within this system where selfishness is rewarded, incentivized further selfishness and continued to sell this myth?
How much maintenance does capitalism take? If human nature is inherently selfish, and capitalism is a force of nature, a ground truth, the answer should basically be no maintenance, right? Is that reality though? It seems to me it takes a lot of maintenance, the myths of capitalism. Look at the incredible amount of resources the USA dedicated to fighting Communism, both explicitly (crossing swords with the Soviet Union) and in the background (overthrowing socialist leaders in south America, meddling in southeast Asia).
Is the key difference for me that led to me making a co-op (rather than a traditional geographic arbitrage agency) that I don't buy into the capitalist notion that humans are inherently selfish? Maybe I just happened to have the experiences that indicated to me that this isn't true, that humans are inherently mostly selfless and social, which led to me researching this and learning that history supports this notion of humans as social-first organisms.
When I tell people about my business, a lot of questions I get confuse me: "You don't require timesheets tracking granular work? How do you know people are actually accurately recording the hours and not 'stealing time?'" the answers are always basically, "because I trust my co-op members," and "I really don't care if people are 'stealing' from me." Capitalism teaches us to always "get ours," but as soon as you let go of that, if people trust me as a genuine actor, they seem to abandon these unnatural principles and work with me honestly, as humans naturally want to.
For your VC example, I mean, nobody will invest in us. Maybe that's the double edged sword - you stop playing within the rules of the game, people won't throw the ball your way anymore. There's no massive value to extract here. That probably limits our ability to rapidly develop some products to generate revenue outside of selling engineering hours. Maybe that's ok though, the business might grow more slowly but sustainably? And maybe that cements our reputation as "no really, actually a co-op that genuinely doesn't put profit first?" I don't know. We'll find out.
But for you, what do you think would happen if you started putting yourself forward as a non-participant, non-self-interested? The prisoner's dilemma equivalent of saying "I will always cooperate no matter what you choose," and then following through on that? Is there a sort of aversion to that knowing that someone might exploit this aspect of you at some point, where you might end up in a situation where your personal profit wasn't maximized?
I see this as a bunch of unsolved game theory problems. USA vs Soviet Union I just see as a battle of competing empires. There have been competing empires for all of history, we haven’t figure out how not to do that yet.
At the smaller scale, I’ve lived in coliving housing most of my adult life. Mostly positive, but problems that make people retreat away from cooperation. Once a week potluck but otherwise people cook their own food. Chronic mess/clutter/dishes/laundry headaches.
My personal mental model is that there is a quite bimodal distribution of people in the world. Many seem to see it as a zero-sum game, some others not. As father of a disabled child I come into contact a lot with the latter and can confidently say that there is a LOT to gain once you stop starting to stare at money only. Once your needs are basically covered, giving can give you so much.
Right, the AI companies don’t even try to pretend it’s good for the average person.
The message could be “we’ll all do more by working less.” Instead it’s, “some people will lose their jobs while everyone else works the same amount or more”
What's crazy is the glee when saying that. It's like "fuck those uppity low class people who managed to move up socially thanks to an in-demand job requiring some skill". Now we're back to only who you know, skills are for the AI.
To play devil's advocate: Why exactly would you expect to get paid more just because there was a big investment in more expensive tools? You're not working any harder, the machine is. Getting paid more is always nice of course.
Any pay rises have been more of a side effect in the past of complexity and therefore needing more skilled labor to say operate a bulldozer or backhoe than it does for any individual with a shovel. Productivity may boost the economic ceiling of 'how much they can pay before they literally start losing money' but more assembly lines didn't mean big pay raises. A backhoe didn't mean that ditch diggers suddenly got paid 50 to 100 times what they were previously from other's expenditures because they could dig that much more. And that is before the back-and-forth of induced demand and supply vs demand causing the price of the labor to drop with more efficiency.
AI's whole thing is to provide for easier operation and trying to deskill the operations. (Key word: trying, currently knowing what the hell you are doing is essential for filtering good outputs from bad).
It is honestly offensive to me that this isn't plainly obvious to everyone. AI has never, ever, and never will be, about making life better for the average human. It has always been, and always will be, about wealth consolidation and control. Does anyone think it is coincidence that now local models are more useful the market has suddenly made it massively more expensive to buy your own hardware? Companies are just giving up making consumer hardware because they can can just focus on hyper-scalers. They want to control compute as well, there is no liberating aspect to any of this.
Businesses, especially tech ones, are not altruistic. The idea that tech companies are out to make anyone's life better is a joke and a sentiment that should have died decades ago. The evidence is of predatory business practices and leveraging the worst aspects of our brain chemistry to keep us hooked on apps that make us less happy, keep us stupid and less informed, and buying more.
Even more confusing are the people who are welcoming AI with open arms as just another skill to learn, _surely_ they'll be the ones who come out on top, right? It has all the stink of the countless Americans believing they too will become billionaires and everyone else are just suckers as they are all one healthcare problem away from bankruptcy.
>AI has never, ever, and never will be, about making life better for the average human.
You don't know that. And this same line could be said about any technology that results in accruing of capital, but actually does end up making life better for the average human.
What if AI at AlphaFold finds a cure for Alzheimer's disease? What if it finds a way to actually perfect fusion?
You can't tell me we don't live better lives than people 100 years ago right now, and that is because of technology.
I am okay with Alzheimer's not being cured if it means we are not bending over backwards to welcome a billionaire overlord class. I don't think Altman or Amodei give a fuck about Alzheimer's unless a cure gives them a reason to obtain more investments. You could say that is the system working, but as a member of said system, it feels pretty shit.
> AI has never, ever, and never will be, about making life better for the average human. It has always been, and always will be, about wealth consolidation and control.
I think here it's useful to separate "AI" as sold and marketed today from "AI" as a CS discipline, a field of study, and a category of tools and techniques.
The field of Artificial Intelligence has always been, at least for the majority of people in it, about improving things for real people.
The LLMs that have garnered huge valuations and an outsized share of everyone's attention in recent years started as part of that field, and grew out of its research and technological advances.
But once companies started seeing how they could monetise it, that's when it started being about wealth consolidation and control.
I think the feeling is if we want to even keep our current footing in the market we have to increase productivity by 10x because everyone else is as well.
And if everyone else is, the productivity floor is raised but every other competitor has done the same so we don't have 10x the economic output, maybe only a marginal increase. If that is true, then there will be no days off because we have just reset the status quo.
The only ones getting a paycheck off of this is those that work for the hardware manufacturers, unfortunately.
Mainly because in software development (at least for what I do), productivity does not translate into significant company gains. I work for an energy company, nothing is super revolutionary, and a new feature or capability takes a long time to translate into measurable revenue, if at all.
The energy crisis had a much bigger (positive) impact on the numbers than AI or anything I personally did. (although I have to add, they also did a major re-architecture of their back-end after the '22 energy crisis and did some smart buy-in, so as the other energy companies' websites struggled, ours churned along just fine and we got a lot of new customers/contracts)
Are we really so sure that reducing working hours can't, itself, lead to improved economic health? Such as by increasing distribution of income flows, and increasing time available for economic consumption?
One of the greatest tricks of the modern era in the US has been to convince everyone that making the slice of pie bigger for the richest people is necessary to grow the economy.
In fact, we now know, with a fairly high degree of certainty, that it can.
There have been numerous experiments with four-day work weeks or six-hour work days that have almost uniformly shown increases in overall productivity.
Not just productivity per hour at work. Overall productivity.
The resistance to this is clearly not based in financial concerns, but rather in control, and classism.
1. Not everyone is spending all their "spending money" every month, and 2. more free time allows people to get more value for their money (e.g. by comparing more alternative options).
One possibility is once AI becomes profitable and wildly successful, and we all lose our jobs, we vote to nationalize the AI companies, and send some good vibes (but no money) to the VCs who paid for it, and remember that the AI was only built by breaking copyright law at an industrial scale and so it's fair to nationalize it.
Good thing all of the AI companies in the world operate only inside one country. I'm sure all of the other technology companies, AI ventures, and investors will continue putting their headquarters in a country that did this and gave the investors $0.
Nationalization doesn’t work because every country’s citizens except those of USA and China still get nothing. Basic income doesn’t work because most countries lack leverage to tax the AI companies. International frameworks to do such things don’t work because Trump just marginalized all international bodies that might host such a framework.
If AI is really about to automate away a lot of labor, I have yet to hear even a hint of a plan to deal with the fallout of that which doesn’t involve consigning much of humanity to the dustbin of history.
Computers and the Internet ushered in huge productivity gains. Despite many people losing their jobs as a result, it's tough to argue society isn't better off.
I think that's the key difference with AI, though. It's not like I'm losing my job, but at least I have a robot at home that cleans the house and does my laundry. People are having their livelihoods threatened while their utility bills go up because of datacenters, and the only substantive impact in their personal lives is that now they have to deal with chatbots and low effort automated customer service agents even more.
I'm OK with accepting a job that pays 10x less if the efficiencies from AI mean we're all living in abundance and life is >10x cheaper. But it's unclear if/when we'll move beyond marginal business impact, aside from in software development, I suppose.
I think it's impossible to argue we are better off. This comment is so detached from reality it's almost offensive. Education is unaffordable, health care is unaffordable, homes are unaffordable, the rich have gotten massively richer, the middle class has been gutted, suicides are up, birth rates are down... I could go on and on. It's gotten better for the 1% but the rest of us are being boiled like frogs. To the point where we've (you've) literally forgotten we used to be able to raise a family on a single income. But I guess we have video games and door dash, so sure, we're better off.
This is mostly due to improved economic outcomes for women. The more educated women become, the more money they make. As a result, they become choosier about selecting a husband and delay having children. All of this compounds to a lower birth rate. This pattern has been observed in all highly developed nations.
Maybe in some places??? I am an 80s kid, and was raised with what we'd call something like lower middle class. Neither parent has a college education, worked minimum wage, and owned a home and fed 4 kids. We didn't have as much stuff... But we sure were outside and playing a lot more back then.
Mostly what I can think of is access to medical treatments developed in the last few decades. Comforts like A/C are more widespread now (but they were less necessary when we were under 400 ppm CO2).
My great grandfather supported a family of 7 making brooms. He didn’t own the broom factory. He was an employee, and was paid by the broom. My great grandmother stayed at home to raise 5 children. There was even enough to lend to the local grocery store, apparently. This was at the turn of the 20th century in Canada.
He would have probably worked 12+ hours a day, his children could have died of a toenail infection, their teeth would be falling out early, they could have been deformed by various diseases, many children died young or at birth, etc, etc.
I would never choose to raise a family in that period.
And that support was a family of 4-6 in a 1200 sq ft house, eating out <6x a year, vacations were picnics at the local beach, one car that you did your own maintenance on, one tv, only one set of good clothes (your Sunday outfit), et cetera. Most places in the US can still support a family at that same level of expenditure on an average income.
In many cases it's illegal or commercially unviable to build said 1200 sqft house.
It's kinda funny that this is considered small, though. 110-120 sqm is perfectly normal for a family of 4 where I live, and in many cases they do it with 1 or 0 cars. But I live somewhere that isn't horribly designed (the Netherlands)
You can't get the same 1200 sq ft detached house in the suburbs on an average single income because suburbs have urbanized. But you can usually get a 1200 sq ft apartment in an urban area or a detached house in a rural area.
More household work was done in this era, before grocery stores sold prepared food, before washing machines. And more people lived in less square footage, with grandparents living in the home, less privacy and autonomy. I don't know if we've made the right trade, but it's not the case that a single worker's income was paying for the kind of lifestyle a family of four now has.
How is this relevant? The houses built in the 60s aren't affordable either. Look at median income and median home prices. You're telling on yourself. Average families aren't buying prepared food and they have a washing machine from the 90s they bought on craigslist. There's a 90% chance if you are on this site, you are not average. You are a part of the haves and you need to consider that you are living a very different life from the average American, which all this productivity should be helping but fucking clearly isn't.
> The houses built in the 60s aren't affordable either.
Far, far more people and the same amount of land.
> Average families aren't buying prepared food and they have a washing machine from the 90s they bought on craigslist.
Well, that's just not true. The average person is absolutely terrible with their money. Not only are they buying prepared food, they're paying someone to drive it to their house.
> Well, that's just not true. The average person is absolutely terrible with their money. Not only are they buying prepared food, they're paying someone to drive it to their house.
The average person is doing this? Do you have sources/stats or are you just going on vibes, or are you looking at people in your (likely non-average) peer group?
Edit: A source I found cites 130 million US delivery app users in 2026, which is a little over 1/3 of Americans. Given that some non-users will call in orders (pizza, Chinese, etc) then it’s plausible that over 50% of people do order delivery from time to time. That said, it’s hard to find good statistics on how much the median person spends on delivery given the likely inflated numbers promoted by delivery app companies. One source said almost 50% preferred ordering delivery through third party apps like DoorDash; if so then how are only 1/3 of Americans actually users of those apps?
Given the numbers on consumer financial stress it’s likely that there is less food delivery happening right now.
No shot. As a general rule of thumb, most Americans, regardless of income, are also in a small mountain of debt. The rich and the poor alike max out their salaries with debt payments and then pile up living expenses on credit. Since that is "fake money" to so many people already, they overspend and convince themselves that using Klarna for a burrito bowl is a reasonable use of resources.
Buying prepared food is not a bad thing, it's cheaper than eating out and many people are busy. I live with a lot of roommates and this is what most people are doing. I'm just saying this is not the same division of labor we had before. My mom worked part time and was a part time house wife, she cooked meals for the family from scratch. Parents today are more likely to both work full time and outsource more food preparation. Part of the reason one income could support a family in the 60s is that they were buying raw ingredients and the stay at home parent was doing more house work.
You could still do that if you are ok living at 1950 standard of living. Average income back then was $26k in today’s dollars. Even low paying jobs today are better than that.
I’m sure you will say something about housing costing more, which it does. But also many things cost less, such as food and clothing.
You still can if you want to live like you're in the 60s. My parents grew up eating bread with dripping for most meals, meat since they were farmers, some inexpensive vegetables, not much variety. Houses were half the size and had twice as many people in them, my grandparents did any building or expansions themselves. Public schools with free tuition. No overseas holidays, eating out once a month max. The urban poor had it much worse.
You just can't live an upper-middle class on a single income unless you have a good job, but you couldn't back then either.
You can't really live like you're in the 60s. Food and accommodation and other basic costs are going up all the time. Young people in entry-level jobs can barely support themselves while renting a room with flatmates.
Standards of living are going up regardless if we like it or not, and costs as well.
Yes. Choose a time and country in history where you would like to be raising a family now as a "median person"? I bet it is within the last 50 years, and specifically in one of the developed nations and probably during the 1970-2000 period. People rarely would choose to go back further.
We wouldn’t expect productivity to keep growing from one innovation. Growth requires new innovations every year. So in the absence of innovations productivity would stop increasing.
I mean productivity generally, not economic productivity as measured by market cap growth or GDP.
Nobody is operating businesses now without electronic cash registers, POS systems, accounting systems, etc. It's way more productive to use computers and the Internet than to try to accomplish the same stuff without them.
> I think that's the key difference with AI, though. It's not like I'm losing my job, but at least I have a robot at home that cleans the house and does my laundry.
Do you though? You might be hallucinating those robots. And no, a Roomba doesn't mop the floor, wipe the countertops or clean the toilets.
> I'm OK with accepting a job that pays 10x less if the efficiencies from AI mean we're all living in abundance and life is >10x cheaper. But it's unclear if/when we'll move beyond marginal business impact, aside from in software development, I suppose.
Will it though? Your biggest cost is lodging, either rent or own, and both have consistently increased over the past millenia.
> Do you though? You might be hallucinating those robots.
My phrasing could have been better. The "not" applies to the rest of the sentence, not just the first clause. I'm saying it might be OK to lose my job for "progress" if I were personally getting big benefits from AI.
> Will it though? Your biggest cost is lodging, either rent or own, and both have consistently increased over the past millenia.
Lodging is typically <30% of income and housing costs are driven more by policy than market forces. That said, I see no reason why housing costs couldn't also decrease with the right applications of AI, at least in the eyes of its biggest cheerleaders.
>I'm OK with accepting a job that pays 10x less if the efficiencies from AI mean we're all living in abundance
Well, you won't be living in abundance. All productivity gains will go to the oligarchs. You will have slightly less than you had before. Instead of cleaning the floor yourself you'll work the extra hour for the oligarchs doing whatever the robots cant.
Is this a joke? Income inequality is at it's highest (even worse than the gilded age), deaths of despair are at their highest as well, people can't afford childcare (a years worth of childcare costs more than college), people are losing access to health insurance en masse; but we're suppose to think society is truly better off?
What brand of edibles do you have there 'bud? I'd like to fly into that realm of alternate reality for a bit.
Also when have any efficiencies gained by employers benefited workers? Being honest here because the only time workers have truly gained anything was due to solidarity between workers in the forms of strikes + workplace sabotage.
Do you really think that dropping of your kids at a flu factory is a higher standard than having caring relatives (often even one of the parents themselves) available to give them a good childhood?
> Or when our paycheck is going to be multiplied accordingly.
And when/if it doesn't, unionize. I know the HN crowd historically hasn't looked favorably on Unions, but times are changing. It's long past time for unions in tech. We've fared well individually for a long time, but that time is coming to an end.
If workers got time off relative to the productivity gains achieved of the past fifty years and considering the comparatively stagnant wages over that time period, we’d only be working 2 to 3 days a week, tops.
The author might be being playful, but an increasing amount of folks at or past their breaking points definitely aren’t.
That's why it has to be collective. That's why OP mentioned saying it in an all hands. That's why there's always discussion of tech worker unions despite our high pay. Any one of us try to push too hard on this sort of thing on our own and they'll "just find someone else" who would happily take our place.
So true. Pick your boogeyman (Muslims/Immigrants/Antifa/Trans/"Marxists"), pump the attack propaganda through all available media channels and hope no one mentions the billionaires.
It's been awhile since 9/11 and we've got pretty short memories, so we'll probably cycle back to Muslims soon.
Except all the people who drilled such mandates into our heads are dying off. These things persist over time only so long as we keep discussing them.
We're really failing to meet the moment before us by merely repeating the propaganda of elders that glaze over on live TV trying to act authoritative and useful to humanity.
Exploitation of youth is no less ageist than telling gramps look in the mirror.
But it's worth noting how leisure hours have been allocated after the invention of the 5 hour work week: we've reduced working hours at the end of life (longer retirements), start of life (longer education), and some amount of people simply do not work.
There hasn't been a reduction in hours during peak earning potential because many jobs are competitive, because firms are in competition with each other.
Maybe some companies will start doing 4 day work weeks because they find that productivity doesn't actually increase from 4 to 5 days and then start outcompeting other companies for talent. But unless 5 days is actually not more productive than 4 days, we're going to have the most competitive organizations continue to be 5 days a week.
It's strange to put it like “we invented 40hour workweek”. It was extremely hard fight won by cooperation of many levels of the working class. The business owners absolutely didn't want it.
This would have to happen again. But there is none of that worker unity so it's unlikely to happen. The productivity gains will go solely to the bussiness owners.
> We’re being asked to usher in huge productivity gains by introducing AI to our workflows, but we’re not asking how does it help us? Not a lot of us stand to directly gain from our employers becoming more productive.
How much money do you think the average developer would be making if we all were using punchcards instead of typing? Inputting machine code instead of using a compiler?
Every time we increase our productivity, we can build bigger and better things for the same amount of effort. This makes us more valuable than before. Our output grows and the world’s appetite for software grows with it.
This has been true for the entire history of the software industry and it’s the reason why developers are very well paid. You may not see it at the individual level, but we are reaping the rewards of increased productivity at the macro level.
Normalizing this "10x" language (well before AI) is a factor in this problem.
It's been so loosely and casually thrown about in this industry. 10x engineer... 10x mindset... 10x growth... 10x this... 10x that...
All paraded around by people who fancied themselves to be their own version of 10x whatever.
Well, keep parroting this long enough, and it's just a matter of time before people not only believe it to be commonplace, but they start to expect and demand it.
So now we have AI as the next thing foisted upon us to force everyone to be 10x or die trying.
Should've just settled for being 3.14x engineers like reasonable people.
You are not the 10x factor and can't use it to increase your wage. If you leave the next person is a 10x factor because of ai. Now if AI providers all increased prices they could get a raise.
It won't get you days off because you (rather, your employer) will fall behind those who didn't opt to take days off.
You'd only get days off if it was only you who got a 10x increase. But it's everybody. So it's status quo: technology advances, and you have to keep up if you want to stay in the industry.
I think equity compensation should be normalized (or ideally allow employees to choose the % of their compensation is equity vs. cash) so every employee can partake in the upside of the company.
Meanwhile my employer still has not given us any AI tooling. I build more things for personal use and for niche hobbies that are more refined, polished and documented than most employers have ever given me in terms of project requirements. Everyone keeps saying the bottleneck was not how fast you can write the code. I believe the bottleneck is two-fold: coding without architecting and no solid business requirements.
I do agree though, give me AI tooling, and I will build you cities, but pay me to match it.
The question is are we more like farm workers who will be unemployed because of the farm or accountants who become much more valuable and high paid because of the spreadsheet?
And I am grateful for not working on a farm, it’s hard work!
There have been movements toward this in the US, but particularly in the tech sector, far too many people are still stuffed full of decades of anti-union propaganda (like the idea that the union is a "third party" rather than being the workers themselves, or that it would bring down their salary because they're such a special awesome 10x developer and 10x negotiator).
The executive class has taken roughly all the productivity increases since 1980 and slid them straight into their bulging pockets, at our expense. The only way we get any of that back, or prevent them from taking this new increase from us too, is to stand together against them.
You got into a contract. This contract specified what you will do and usually for how long. Unless this contract specified you need to get X done, I don’t see any way you can argue for this in any way that makes sense.
_Nothing_ I do that benefits my employer directly benefits me. AI or not. That was the whole idea of the relationship: I show up, perform some type of labor and am shielded from the bullshit of doing business (to some tolerable extend). The employer in turn forks over hard cash. The exact, same F amount every month and on time, no discussions about it.
If your actions directly or indirectly caused a loss to the business do you give up free days or pay? I don’t think you should. This works both ways.
However, that’s on the level of the individual. If you’re saying we should unionize, then, hell yes.
While I agree with the playful sentiment of the post, this isn't what happened for factory workers as their work has been augmented by automation. Ford makes twice as many vehicles per worker in 2025 than they did in 1960. Did the auto workers get 20-hour work weeks? Nope.
I have to ask myself why we think us white collar knowledge workers are so special? Even if I do dream of a time where automation leads all of us to a 3-4 day work week.
Tech workers _are_ a bunch of chumps. Temporarily embarrassed billionaire startup founders. The vehicle for this is a union, and tech workers abjectly refuse to unionise.
> Or when our paycheck is going to be multiplied accordingly.
That doesn't increase shareholder value, so it would be a violation of the c-suite's fiduciary responsibility. Sorry, the extra capital will instead be used on stock buybacks.
> Sorry, the extra capital will instead be used on stock buybacks.
Given how start-up (and thus equity) heavy this board is, that should also directly multiply total comp, even though it was meant as a vapid snipe and isn't actually vaguely valid outside of a handful of very large companies.
Days off might be a challenging ask as the AI needs feedback more often than that. Working sporadically throughout the day, able to do what you please between the AI asking questions, is realistic. We're already there, frankly.
I think people should use AI to start their own business instead of working for someone else's vision. I mean if you're working for someone else your choices are limited. And I'm not saying that you should be mistreated. I'm just saying you have more control of your life when you're working for yourself.
You should talk to your union rep about that, because renegotiations like that won't happen on the individual basis just because you think its right. And almost all lack the leverage, individually, to make it happen.
Of course, until just recently, Big Tech workers were so proud to be on top of the world that they didn't think unions made sense for them.
something something you're paid the amount the market values your work, which in today's job market is an order of magnitude less than the profit you bring the company
Well then why make it easy for my work to get devalued? It's not like workers are sitting on the sidelines here, they (I'm aggregate, at least) hold all the power.
The US still largely believes everything that Reagan Republicans preached about the "evils" of taxation and regulation of oligarchy, despite the US economy overall (and the "average joe") doing quite well in the era that followed "soak the rich" taxes being passed.
So many claims about how it would lead to far better lives for everyone, but the working conditions and general affordability have basically gone down for 40 years. Imagine bringing back the white collar work in the 80s, with a private office with a door, and people whose jobs were to help coordinate and schedule things even if you weren't an exec, instead of you just having a phone to answer all hours of the day.
Wouldn't the parent's post mean that you bring profit to the company, but you're worth less than the full amount of that profit because, should you demand to be paid more, you can be replaced by someone who won't demand more.
(Has there actually been a lot of terminations in the US tech industry, or is that an odd biasing mechanism causing me to see such things as bigger than they are?)
I mean productivity gains don't usually go towards making the workers life any better. Also I'm still less than convinced there are any net productivity gains from AI anyway.
That's not generally true in the US over the last 40 years, where the gains from productivity increases have been accumulated almost entirely by the top classes.
Yes, lower classes have access to many more conveniences then they might have had in earlier decades, but they are working far more hours, and their expected lifespan has started decreasing.
my dad grew up in a house without running water in a town where everyone worked in a mine and the lead was everywhere. he hitchiked to alaska for seasonal work in a fish cannery. Yeah I don't know... i think things are better than they were 40 years ago.
There are still people in America who live without running water. There are still people who work on fishing boats in Alaska. There are still people who hitchhike. This is literally just an anecdote trying to deflect from contemporary problems. I don't see any value in this sort of discourse.
Just because things may have been worse for specific individuals does *not* mean that current problems shouldn't be addressed.
> Just because things may have been worse for specific individuals does not mean that current problems shouldn't be addressed.
Suggesting that things are better now than they were in 1986 for the overwhelming majority of people is not, in any way whatsoever, suggesting that
"problems shouldn't be addressed". Come on. Y'all have got to start actually reading things before smashing that reply button.
I like FSI, which is a dimensionless number taking into account basically the functioning of society and the likelihood for unrest. (Fragile State Index)
It's the highest, at the moment, that it's been since the 1800s. The nadir for the US was in the late 40s early 50s when we had a 92% top marginal tax rate and extremely high social cohesion despite massive WW2 debts. Needless to say the late 40s and early 50s was not exactly utopia, but substantially more stable.
Is bottom decile consumption a good measure of economic health? In a way it seems it could signal the opposite, ie in the past the bottom decile was saving that money in an effort to change their economic conditions vs spending it now could indicate a lack of hope for upward mobility.
To your example it seems worth noting that the quality of the air travel experience appears to decline over time as well.
Bottom decile consumption is the best measure of economic health for the bottom decile… it clearly cannot be the best measure across the entirety of the population.
Real physical consumption is by far the hardest metric to game or play tricks with.
Yes technically, some probably are trading a bit of their future prospects for a nicer flight schedule, less red-eyes, etc… But I don’t see how that is relevant at all?
Working out why the workweek is 5 days, non-negotiably, even if you'd be willing to be paid less in proportion, comes down to realizing that it's being maximized subject to the constraint that everybody would flip out if it was 6, and then working out why it's being maximized.
What it's telling you is that a company would rather have 4 people working 5 days a week than 5 people working 4 days a week. The reason for that is, productivity drops a lot when it's spread out over multiple people. The reason behind that is communication overhead - the more context an individual carries in their heads, the less likely their role will exist on an hourly basis in the industry.
So, if anyone wants AI to give us another day off, we need to think about how it can reduce the cost of "context switching" a whole person on and off a task, without simultaneously formalizing our roles so much that it gives us all five. ;-)
> Working out why the workweek is 5 days, non-negotiably, even if you'd be willing to be paid less in proportion, comes down to realizing that it's being maximized subject to the constraint that everybody would flip out if it was 6, and then working out why it's being maximized.
This ignores a lot of historical fighting (sometimes literally!) to get it down to 5 in the first place.
If everyone sufficiently "flips out" about it being 5 then the problem of "reduce the context switching problem" is something the owner can try to figure out.
Cause otherwise, you could find a perfect solution to that problem, and still not have leverage to make ownership actually change anything vs just raise expectations that much higher.
(Meanwhile, some companies are trying to import 996 and push it past 5 for white-collar work anyway, so any sort of non-political, non-disruptive action seems doomed to fail since the status quo is moving the wrong direction.)
>The "flipping out" aspect is something that does not seem to have a lot to do with technology at this time or in the past.
How so? Without technology we wouldn't have a "work week" in the first place and work would be much more directly tied to survival of the community and generally less negotiable in the first place. The "flipping out" came about precisely because technology changed what work was and what the conditions around it were while people noticed that those new expectations and conditions didn't actually seem necessary for their survival (or even much to their personal direct benefit vs the benefit of business owners).
Any technology that lets more be done with less time is an opportunity for a population to make an attempt to claim some of those gains for themselves.
The past had slaves too. The feudal arrangement of tenant farmers was only one system of labor. I don't think union bargaining was ever tied to specific advances in technology.
Sorry, I'm drawing a blank on much history of slaves in a extremely-low-technological society or how it was imposed or ended in those societies, could you provide some examples of what you're meaning exactly by bringing slavery up? Feudalism or other things happening in those centuries is well into the technological era.
Are you saying you can't think of examples from the past of the introduction of technology changing labor dynamics or organization? Say, mechanical agriculture?
The changes are hardly going to always be good - there's no determinism of "new technology means society will get 'better'". But they've often been periods of change, and such periods are when it's easier to influence the direction if you happen to care about the direction of the change.
When you say technological era, do you mean anything after the introduction of potery, writing, or what? Because you can trace slavery back to the earliest recorded civilizations, but it won't be easy to trace it to before a written record.
Its not a communication overhead, it's that business owners want to maximise their returns on their fixed operating costs subject to the 5 day limit.
One extra staff member in a traditional office is extra software license, extra seating, extra hardware, extra HR/payroll/insurance, extra risk, extra training etc etc.
If it was utilization of fixed capital that motivated the maximum-length workweek of today and centuries past, they wouldn't mind who was on the shifts or how many so long as there were three of them.
I'd be surprised if the jobs where it highly matters which employer covers the shift weren't significantly outnumbered by the ones where it generally doesn't. Labor-as-a-commodity has been an explicit goal of a lot of industrialization management methods.
This analysis makes sense to me. I'll add that the little bit of research that's come out suggests individual people are as productive in four day work weeks as five, which doesn't contradict your point.
The other thing is that if leadership is better—they have stronger vision and coordinate the silos (of people or teams) themselves—the communication overhead is less. The more each level needs to communicate, sync, and align with each other, the more it reflects the top not doing it. This is so thoroughly normalized today that it's hard to see otherwise. As you move down the hierarchy, the theory embedded in the chosen org structure that most tech companies have, is that less communicating should be necessary. This is what middle managers (and product managers) are supposed to be for—coordinating and communicating to take that off the plate of their subordinates. The lack of leadership above is why the managers below get hired. Those managers then do the same and eventually ICs need to coordinate amongst themselves.
I think this is where one of the biggest gains in productivity from AI will come from. Even if it levels off at current levels of “intelligence” a 30% reduction in team size will save alot of communication overhead.
We think of productivity as linear to the number of employees, but it’s more of Log(N) for knowledge work because of the communication overhead. If your AI spend and employee productivity improvement ends up being proportional to headcount thats a linear gain that used to be Log(N).
The drivers behind the asymptotic scaling are the tasks that can't be compartmentalized into prompts, the same tasks that couldn't be compartmentalized into a request for another person to do.
> What it's telling you is that a company would rather have 4 people working 5 days a week than 5 people working 4 days a week. The reason for that is, productivity drops a lot when it's spread out over multiple people.
Why make that assumption? The company has a lot of per-employee fixed costs, which means that it's much more expensive to have 5 employees than 4 employees under the assumption that total productivity is exactly equal in both cases. (And the further assumption that you pay more productive workers more than you pay less productive workers.)
If you want flexibility on the work week, get rid of the concept of "full-time employee" status and make everyone contractors.
Not every role is suitable for contracting. An individual can become a part-time developer by freelancing, but if you do that you get very specific kinds of jobs, ones with high compartmentalization.
> This article is kind of playful, but I think there’s a serious point here that’s not discussed enough. We’re being asked to usher in huge productivity gains by introducing AI to our workflows, but we’re not asking how does it help us? Not a lot of us stand to directly gain from our employers becoming more productive.
And we shouldn't. Workers should only get the wages they can command in the marketplace and not a penny more, and the smaller the better.
> I know everybody is afraid of getting fired and replaced with AI or whatever right now. But we should be seriously asking in our next all hands meetings if 10x’ing our productivity can get us some days off. Or when our paycheck is going to be multiplied accordingly.
Morally, all benefits of any technology or productivity gain must flow up to the owners, who deserve it all.
But this should be comforting to all of you. I'm sure everyone here owns at least a few thousand dollars in shares. You'll get some dividends and/or capital gains!
My dad was a stock broker in the late 1970s and remembers when most of trading was 100% manual and firms actually had "runners" who would take stock certificates back and forth between trading firms.
He has this great quote about when computers came out:
"We were told 'computers will save you so much time on work tasks that you won't even know what to do with your free time'. I spent the next 30 years working the same number of hours. "
> He has this great quote about when computers came out: "We were told 'computers will save you so much time on work tasks that you won't even know what to do with your free time'. I spent the next 30 years working the same number of hours. "
From about one hundred years ago:
> Now it is true that the needs of human beings may seem to be insatiable. But they fall into two classes --those needs which are absolute in the sense that we feel them whatever the situation of our fellow human beings may be, and those which are relative in the sense that we feel them only if their satisfaction lifts us above, makes us feel superior to, our fellows. Needs of the second class, those which satisfy the desire for superiority, may indeed be insatiable; for the higher the general level, the higher still are they. But this is not so true of the absolute needs-a point may soon be reached, much sooner perhaps than we are all of us aware of, when these needs are satisfied in the sense that we prefer to devote our further energies to non-economic purposes.
[…]
> For many ages to come the old Adam will be so strong in us that everybody will need to do some work if he is to be contented. We shall do more things for ourselves than is usual with the rich to-day, only too glad to have small duties and tasks and routines. But beyond this, we shall endeavour to spread the bread thin on the butter-to make what work there is still to be done to be as widely shared as possible. Three-hour shifts or a fifteen-hour week may put off the problem for a great while. For three hours a day is quite enough to satisfy the old Adam in most of us!
* John Maynard Keynes, "Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren" (1930)
An essay putting forward / hypothesizing four reasons on why the above did not happen (We haven't spread the wealth around enough; People actually love working; There's no limit to human desires; Leisure is expensive):
In some European countries, you can actually go on welfare and never work again. It takes some tricks because the state doesn’t like it; and maybe you‘ll want to do some undeclared side jobs for 15h a week and you’ll be comfortable.
I don’t know how such people can live with themselves. But apparently, if you’re immune to the second factor, it is possible, nowadays, to work 15h or less, without any wealth, and lead a good life.
The only thing threatening this status quo is corporations and rich people pulling their wealth into other states; and related, being net importers. I don’t understand why the EU is allowing this to happen. They should grow some teeth finally.
Oh sure, you get free stuff indefinitely if you abuse the system. You sound like that tiktok post about the "infinite free money glitch" that is check fraud.
"Good" life might be bit questionable. But Finland at least it is possible. Existence will be meagre without other cashflows in cash. Might even be okay if you can make proper amount of cash.
> Australia no problem. Most liberal welfare in the world
Jobseeker is a maximum of $26k per year, but for most people it's going to be around $21k [1]. What else are you using supplement that because that feels like it would be close to the poverty line.
I think the FIRE movement is a response to how absurd this is, but it feels kind of wrong that you have to front load all of the saving for your whole life in the first 30 years.
I'd love to work 3 days a week now and be paid a livable amount, rather than grind 5 days a week, getting paid more than I need so I can retire fast. But tech companies don't want you for 3 days a week, its 5 or nothing for most of them.
IDK about UK but in Germany it’s the law that employees can request 80% work at 80% pay and can’t be denied except for significant operational reasons and such.
As you said, it can be a double edged sword to be the 80% worker in the otherwise 100% team.
I don't think this is an accurate picture for a number of reasons, first and foremost that these people regularly died from trivially preventable reasons. That luxury today takes a lot of effort from a lot of people.
I'm pretty sure most of white collar HN crowd isn't being ground into dust. It'd be cool to work less though!
People waited around a lot before, and since the baseline speed for everything was slower, no one had an edge. Now everything is fast and instantaneous and that’s available to everyone. It’s part of the reason why our lives are so stressful now. I remember my parents working and their work had significantly less stress on a day-to-day basis. Everything was at a nice relaxed human pace. They would be responsible for one excel sheet’s worth of work per week, which we can now do in an hour or two.
Environment doesn't impose stress on us. Our reaction to it does. Learn to control that response, can use it to your advantage when you choose to let it in.
I’m pretty certain there are physiological limits that you can’t just muscle through and stress _can_ be an indicator that you’re reaching said limits.
People work 5 days a week because of protracted violent strikes by unions and socialist revolutionaries forcing governments to recognize labor rights. Prior to that the norm was working 7 days a week, sunup to sundown, with only Christmas off, from adolescence until you died.
When rights are equal, force wins. This is true for either the worker or the employer. Hence why employers frequently employed private firms to commit said violence on unions.
Weekends, sick days, vacation days, being paid in legal tender and not company scrip, maternity leave, safety regulations, disabled affordance, banning child labor, civil rights and womens' rights (while they lasted) and the minimum wage. All due to socialist activism and a non-zero amount of violence.
Hold your socialist jihad propaganda a bit off, sundays were definitely off days for festivities, visiting church etc. Definitely all over Europe, its still frowned upon in many places to do any amount of ie house work during sundays.
The four day work week is a prisoner's dilemma. If everyone did it, then we'd all get a payoff, but if someone defects to a longer work week they tend to get ahead at work. Thus we all do it and thus we all lose.
It's funny how underappreciated it is how the five day work week is powered by norms...at least in the US. People assume there are laws about it.
The only laws dictate compensation past certain thresholds, and in the case of well paid knowledge workers those don't even tend to apply. If you ever read HR material referring to your role as "exempt" now you know what you're exempt from.
> but if someone defects to a longer work week they tend to get ahead at work. Thus we all do it and thus we all lose.
A four-day-a-week worker here.
I don't know what you exactly mean, but my personal experience is exactly the opposite. I worked for a startup as a founding engineer, just 4d/w (the CTO was crazily open-minded), and I was never so productive. Doesn't matter that the others were working 5 days, pushing more; it was my responsibility to keep up, and it worked pretty well.
Same now, working for a company with the same arrangement.
Out of curiosity, how many hours per day did you work? Was it the same overall time as a 5-day week, just distributed over 4 days, or did you work a whole day less than others?
You could likely get some funding for a PAC based around this. You just have to get Altman, Musk, and the other to realize that it’s a good marketing move.
“Our AI is so awesome and boosts productivity so much that no one has to work another 5 day week, ever again.”
You have my vote. Work to live, don’t live to work.
~90% of Iceland is on a 35-36 hours work week, seems to work fine.
Remote work was also skeptically thought of up until a global pandemic forced it, and while there has been some retreat, 20% of Americans work remotely in some capacity still. Just need a catalyst to challenge norms and rigid mental models.
>20% of Americans work remotely in some capacity still
That's a pretty abysmal number considering the number who do want remote work and its productivity improvements and its overall lower waste. I'm surprised it's so low.
My thinking tends to be that our standard work week is an equilibrium among a few different forces. We’re motivated by social norms, capital markets, and biological needs and wants. In places like the U.S. the market forces have been powerful enough to really shift social norms. In tandem they’re probably slowly altering our biology too.
I went through a big back and forth with a small startup where I initially negotiated in at 3 days a week.
Eventually they said "we really need you the full 5 days" and I explained that I'm gonna do the same amount of work regardless and they could pay me 40% less by agreeing to 3 days.
they still wanted me 5 days, so I took the job and just coasted those 2 days from home, they were still very happy with my performance, I ended up quitting in 6 months because I wanted my hours in the day back.
Amusingly, there is literally not even a 7 day work week ban for companies in the US. You can require employees work every day. Employers are just required to pay employees overtime under various conditions beyond 40 hours / five days a week, which is why you don't see it.
And what's more, software engineers are exempt from these rules because of their pay grades. If you're a SWE making a salary the odds are your employer could require you work on Saturdays without running afowl of labor laws.
it's not powered by norms. In the US, if you want to employ someone more than 40 hours you have to give them extra overtime pay. It's called the Fair Labor Standards Act and it was passed in 1938
Unless you are exempt. Guess what profession tends to be considered exempt?
If you are a SWE, you don't get paid overtime for working that incident on the weekend or going over 40 hours in a week. The only reason you work five days a week is tradition.
"Yeah, hello, Peter. What's happening? Listen, um, I'm going to need you to go ahead and come in on Saturday. So, if you could be here around 9, that would be great. Mmhkay? Oh, oh, and I almost forgot. I'm also going to need you to go ahead and come in on Sunday too."
In finance this is the norm. The people who work the most make the most and there are no rules. I’ve seen people get fired for not working weekends. And overtime is not a thing, its just end of year bonuses.
Yes, it's quite sad that when big tech leadership talks positively about China they really like the exploitive labor practices that the country exhibits.
And this is true… employees who work and produce more, better things often get promoted. Spending more time doing things leads to producing more and better things
Yes, it's just norms. 15 years ago, I worked for a small startup. For a good 8 or 9 months, we were working 6 and sometimes 7 days a week. We weren't contractually required to, but everyone "wanted" to. I use scare quotes there, but I think a lot of people (myself included, for part of it), really did want to.
But ultimately the unsaid thing was: you either work 6/7 days a week, or you get marginalized or fired. And it's not like we weren't putting in the hours on the weekdays; most of us were working 12-hour days, or more. (And wow, we got to drop down to 8-10 on the weekends! So generous!)
Dumb. I'll never do something like that again. Not worth it, and certainly not for someone else's company.
My wife effectively works 3-4 days a week. For mums with young kids its pretty common here in western Europe to have 60% deal, most I know have 80% deal. It means 3-4 days a week just to be sure, not say 6 work hour days.
Made up self-pressure is among the worst things smart folks can do in their lives.
This is a great question and I encourage you to learn the history of it, because it's fascinating. It’s rooted in labor movements and industrialization.
This is true, and there is usually a tradeoff you make for it. To your point, it's a negotiation. You usually give something up to get something or be so good you simply cannot be replaced. Such people do not represent the bulk of the workforce, and we're talking about norms here.
Because to that CEO you're talking about, you have to convince them your demands are better than the next candidate who doesn't mind working more hours.
Interestingly, software engineers are usually considered exempt in the US, meaning they can be required to work more than 40 hours a week without overtime pay if employers choose to.
Unless you're imagining congress do something. I want to shoot fireballs from my fingers, but unfortunately we don't live in a world of magic.
Influencing Congress is wildly easier than shooting fireballs from your fingers. This is supposed to be a site with optimistic people that do things. Imagine what you could do politically with the help of LLMs.
If you think it's so doable, I welcome you to do it. I will be happy to say I am wrong if you pull it off. However, if congress has not even banned a seven day work week I don't see how they will reduce it to four because, of all job segments, tech workers want it.
Meanwhile I did some googling and I can buy a wrist-mounted flamethrower for $175, which is close enough to my fingers to make no difference.
You can lobby Congress to do things, even better you can volunteer at campaigns and try to elect people to Congress that want to do these things.
Acting like we are helpless and the future is determined is straight up loser talk while also not being historically accurate in the slightest.
You should go read about people starting wildcat strikes while working in literal company towns. There is tremendous power when we organize together, a power so great the elites have spent almost a 100 years trying to destroy the fruits of their success.
You, too, can do these things. I welcome you to. I will be happy to say I am wrong. Unions have real potential for creating change. I personally have no interest in joining a union for other reasons, but I am not opposed to them either.
But we weren't talking about unions. We were talking about congress. I think you will find that tech workers are not the only job segment, and far from the most sympathetic due to their wages. Lobbying for an extra day off will not get you far in the face of many more pressing issues, and the party most likely to stand up for workers is more interested in stopping data centers at the moment. Unless you're talking about a time horizon past which I don't think I'll be around to notice.
If only. The only way to delegate enforcement is to give them a monopoly on the legitimate use of violence. Unfortunately all such potential organizations are run by human beings, who, when given violence as a tool, will use that violence as a tool.
Benefits for extra productivity filter up to the shareholders not to the workers producing the extra productivity.
This reminds me of the Luddite movement in England. Industrial machines were disrupting the textile industry. The Luddites were not anti technology they were against technology allowing employers to suppress wages and working conditions and for increasing the quality of life and more humane working conditions for the extra productivity.
As we know their movement was not successful giving rise to the bleak images of industrial factory life in England. I think all that will happen is workers will expect to be more productive than before but their skills will be less compensated because “the machine” did most of the work.
> The Luddites were not anti technology they were against technology allowing employers to suppress wages and working conditions and for increasing the quality of life and more humane working conditions for the extra productivity.
I’m seeing this talking point circulated a lot recently but it’s not really the whole story. Luddites weren’t on a selfless crusade to steal from the rich and give to the poor. They wanted to fight off competition for their specific jobs. They didn’t want anyone having access to cheaper fabrics and clothes and other things because that was their golden goose. They wanted to be in control and force you to go through the inefficient methods to get those things because it benefited themselves.
A closer modern day analog would be something like the dock workers striking to keep automation out of ports. They have a sweet gig and they don’t want machines doing anything to jeopardize their stranglehold on ports, even if it would benefit literally everyone else in the entire country if we could modernize our ports like the rest of the world.
It is you that is spreading misinformation. I suggest everyone thinking Aurornis is right, to read the article below, from the smithsonian.
>But the Luddites themselves “were totally fine with machines,” says Kevin Binfield, editor of the 2004 collection Writings of the Luddites. They confined their attacks to manufacturers who used machines in what they called “a fraudulent and deceitful manner” to get around standard labor practices.
>“They just wanted machines that made high-quality goods,” says Binfield, “and they wanted these machines to be run by workers who had gone through an apprenticeship and got paid decent wages. Those were their only concerns.”[1]
We've banned this account. There have been several warnings and the trend is only getting worse. We want HN to be a place to discuss difficult topics, and this should be a good place to discuss the relationship between labor and capital, given that there are many users on each side of the table. But such inflammatory, demeaning terminology as this just poisons the threads and makes it impossible to have constructive discussions.
I don't know, since I cannot afford the boot. Apparently it was priced way out of my range because the boot was unloaded of a ship by an expensive human dock worker.
I never understand why software engineers are so excited about AI as a whole.
If you are excited about the technology, sure. But if you are excited about the increase in productivity, unless you are a manager, I don't really understand it. Like, why? You are not working one hour less than before. If anything, it's more likely you'll get laid off and have trouble finding your next job.
There’s a natural desire for people to want to make things. Most of the time it’s physical: homes, crafts, woodworking. But for a few of us it’s ok for it to be non physical. Actually, that’s part of the allure of programming: you don’t need much more than a computer and some thinking to build incredibly intricate… things. AI is like a brand new power tool. It’s fun to use because you can build faster. I felt a sense of giddiness the first time I used a table saw after using a push saw my whole life.
I think a lot of us aren’t rational about it. I tend to feel excited about changes for which productivity is a side effect, even if it’s not my motivation. It’s hard to say no to extending my capabilities and insulating myself from the more boring repetitive tasks.
If your job was 80-90% shoveling and one day you were offered use of an excavator, wouldn’t you find that exciting even while realizing the shoveling part of your career is probably dead?
>I never understand why software engineers are so excited about AI as a whole.
Dictating what to exist and what not to to the machine is a power fantasy that's not going to stick around for long, because we'll inevitably reach the point where no human is needed in the loop (or at least not as often as they needed today).
Most people finally feel how they would've felt like if they actually put deliberate practice for hours to work on something. That's why you see comments going "wow, I rewrote this in Rust, and I don't even know Rust". You get to feel like someone who outputs Rust.
rewriting something in Rust used to be "cool" because it was hard. What's the point in it now? How robust are the safety guarantees of something you didn't even write?
I've never had this much fun at work. There was nothing more that I disliked in my job than months long projects with everything already planned out in advance. It made work extremely predictable and boring, the project was already fully thought out, all that needed to be done was the boring bit of writing all the code that you already know how to write, all the fun of exploring different ideas and implementation directions was already done.
People sometimes mention this, but I have a hard time relating.
The amount of code you produce in months of just typing must be enormous, no?
To me it seems no matter the plan there's many unplanned things that I need to handle, and that's where the time is spent. I never had a day in my career where I knew exactly what had to be done and just spent it typing...
I'm not really following. Why is the problem you mentioned no longer a problem? Did your workplace change the way it plans projects now that AI is here?
Planning is the same, implementation time is just way shorter, so we can spend more time on things that are fun. The barrier to see if some outlandish idea works is also nonexistent now, you can generate a (non production ready, of course) MVP in an hour, where before it would take a few days.
Many of us do not particularly enjoy the work our employer has us do, nor believe in what the company we work for is trying to achieve. It's not like we get to choose its aims, and it's not like we have alternatives where we get to do so either. Our lives are spent working on someone else's goals.
> I never understand why software engineers are so excited about AI as a whole.
I think it's mostly young graduates that have not been ground down by the wheel of labour just yet, and old/ex engineers that are able to build something after years of being out of practice.
Hard for me to be excited about being asked to do more for the same pay, to be measured on idiotic metrics, to compete with overconfident but inept people, when I'm reaching my 40s. I am at the peak of my engineering skills and the bottom of my patience.
I've worked 3x12, 4x10, and 5x8, without AI. I think I was most productive on the 3x12 schedule. On the days I worked, I was able to lock in and get a lot done, and had a significant amount of time outside of the normal working hours, which were free from meetings and distractions. During those 3 days all I really did was work and sleep. On the 4 days off I was able to rest and recover and actually have a life. It also gave my mind time to process issues in the background. When I had an ah-ha moment during my time off, I could note it down, and when I showed up on a work day, I was able to solve some of those problems I wasn't able to solve in the moment. It was a great system.
I've been trying to figure out how to bring the idea up to my boss of going back to it... at least the 4x10.
> During those 3 days all I really did was work and sleep.
This is why 3x12 is not workable for average families. If you have kids and want to see them, 3x12 only works if you start really really early, then get to bed early when the kids do too.
I enjoyed 4x10 when I did it, but there were some real problems with some employees trying to adapt. Anecdotally we were seeing a lot of people who would barely work until the 8 hour mark and then just zone out or socialize while they waited the clock out at the end of the day.
Which is all too bad for those of us who work well with longer days.
IME most people don't have more than 4 (maybe 5) hours of effective heavy cognitive / creative energy in a given day. Of course YMMV, and it's common to have periods of sustained output when deeply committed to and energized by something, but over the long haul, week in, week out, splitting the workday into roughly 8h sleep, 8h work, 8h everything else, with 2/7 days off plus many holidays and some weeks of paid vacation seems like a reasonable default to me -- for the traditional salaried role. If your preferences deviate much from that baseline, the entrepreneurial / consulting / fractional approach would probably be better aligned.
I think that’s more about what you do than how you do it. And sometimes when to do it.
You could try a data engineer’s life which is full of meetings, ad-hoc tasks and other BS —- everything that screams that this is not a real engineer job.
I worked a job before that did require some heavy thinking, design, solving problems, etc., and for some reason I only get creative from 1am to 4am, and I did an amazing job in that period for whatever work was required, only later that my boss didn’t like it and wanted to force me to do normal schedule, in the office, my outcome degraded significantly and eventually had to leave the work, it’s just I couldn’t handle the mornings besides replying to some emails.
Effective working hours are not set by absolute productivity - they are set by an equilibrium between two forces:
1. Competitive market dynamics. If you only work four days a week, other employees and companies who are willing to work five days a week will do so and get ahead of you, and you are more likely to get fired or to go out of business. This force pushes us all to work longer (and harder) so we have more money to enjoy in our leisure time.
2. A society's willingness to sacrifice days of leisure for days of work. There are only seven days in a week. The tradeoff between work and leisure - production and consumption - is ultimately what determines how hard we all work. This force pushes us all to work less so we have more time to spend our money.
Economists think on the margin. It's easy to demonstrate these two principles to yourself by thinking through worked examples from different starting points.
Whether the equilibrium lands at 2 days of work to 5 days of leisure, or 5 days of work to 2 days of leisure, depends on our collective preferences, which vary between countries and cultures but have tended to be relatively durable over time.
No technology so far has shifted this balance much - not the steam engine, the industrial revolution, the invention of the personal computer, the internet - and there's no reason to believe "AI" will be any different.
The logical conclusion of this is that - assuming we're all 10x more productive - we'll still be working 5 days and enjoying 2 days a week, but we'll consume 10x more, or everything we consume will be 10x higher quality. Hardly a bad thing.
Attraction towards equilibrium is real, but that equilibrium is not a given. It comes from intrinsic biological constraints, individual preferences, cultural norms, ideology, habits and expectations. Even fixing individual preference, the aggregate preferences is structurally mediated (collective or individual bargaining, labour laws). Through all those factors there's path dependency and friction towards equilibrium.
The point is: "a society's willingness" is doing a _huge_ amount of work in that framing. This willingness is precisely what is up for debate when we discuss work days.
The whole of humanity is one big system of self-feedbacks. Equilibria are only reached with respect to constraints (otherwise there is only one equilibrium, which is heat death!). The more you zoom out, the more "givens" come up for their own analysis.
First sensible take I've seen in this thread. People especially seem to forget the consequences of #1: The company where everyone is working 0.5 days a week will almost certainly get outcompeted, very quickly, by the company where everyone is working 5 days a week. In fact company #2 can probably precompute company #1 even if they have much lower quality staff on average.
> So can I just take Friday off? From here on out, I’ll work Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, and then take Friday off.
Yeah, if you switch to working as an independent contractor, you can work any amount of time you want. If you run your own business, you can work crazy hours or none at all. The world is truly your oyster
I'm not being facetious either. That's exactly what I did, and I got what I asked for
We can all talk about supply and demand here, whether companies should be forced to do X or Y, and how Keynes got his 15 hour work week prediction so wrong, ad nauseam. But if you truly want something beyond the talk, like a more flexible work schedule, there's real ways to get it right now
Yes, you can take the day off, but your pay will be reduced by 20%.
Just because technology and productivity are advancing doesn’t mean you can work less and still get the same pay. By that logic, hardly anyone would need to work today, as productivity has increased many times over compared to previous centuries.
If one company works less, then other companies that work more have an advantage. That’s why it doesn’t work.
"Everybody will need to do some work if he is to be contented ... a 15-hour week may put off the problem for a great while. For 3 hours a day is quite enough to satisfy the old Adam in most of us!" - Keynes, 1930
Though this was a 100-year prediction so we still got three and half to go!
I work 3 days one week, 4 days the next week. Never more than 3 days in a row. It's 12 hour shifts, which sucked at first, but I got used to it pretty quick. The free time is amazing. I took 2 days vacation this week and ended up with 9 days off in a row because of the holiday.
I don't want to get too specific, but I'm a supervisor at a factory. Food stuff.
My girlfriend had a similar schedule when she worked at a hospital.
Good shoes like Brooks or Hoka and a good sleep schedule and it's doable. I only work 15 or 16 days a month. I work every other weekend, but the weekends I have off are 3 days.
Oh it totally is for some people. I don't have or want kids so that's not an issue for me. Scheduling things with friends isn't usually too hard, just have to be more intentional about it/schedule in advance. I like having days off during the week to get errands done when most other people are at work. And if I do need a weekend off that's usually fine because I accrue enough vacation hours where I usually end up selling back or rolling some over into the next year.
I did it for a summer in University and I didn't have to work night shifts, it was amazing to be honest I would do it again if I never had to work nights.
The average work time in European societies is probably that. The majority of citizens don’t work (too young, studying, sick, unemployed, retired). But it’s changing fast, the rich are no longer accepting this situation. The ones working get happily manipulated into believing others should suffer as much as they do, instead of organizing lifestyles into a more frugal fashion for the benefit of all.
Couples (in prime reproducing age) where both members WFH at least 1 day a week have 0.32 more live births per woman per lifetime than couples where neither does.
Until we fix the artificial scarcity of necessities (particularly housing), peer competition ensures that people will work as hard as they practically can in order to outbid their peers for said necessities.
We could have abundance, but then people might not have to maximize their efforts to produce wealth for capital holders.
My wife and I work full time so we could outbid other people who wanted our house.
What strikes me a significant percentage of the time I see posts like this and the responses to it is how shit other people’s jobs seem and how unfair their employers appear to be. I don’t know if this is because it’s US centric or tech centric or just full of people under a particular HN-like duress. But, man, it sounds crappy out there. Is there anyone here who actually likes what they do, has a decent employer, has a nice life…?
the four day work week has been trialed many times and already would have been the same or higher productivity before agents, honestly. if agents get really good let's just go to 3?
What Star Trek doesn't show is how they got there. I promise you it's going to be extremely painful, but once we're on the other side it'll be worth it.
I argue - there's nothing we can do to stop it; humanity, I mean. We will either achieve Star Trek or get wiped out as a species.
As a Kardashev Type 3, we will have achieved full automation. I'll leave the door open for Elysium problems, but hopefully Mr. Damon will save us then too.
We are very well past the point where technology could allow post-scarcity.
Post-scarcity is no longer technological problem, it's a political one. But it's still very much a problem, so no, we are not anywhere near post-scarcity.
I also don't understand the point you're making about people wanting to spend $15 on netflix or $12 on a coffee. Would everybody cutting netflix and lattes allow us to live in that utopia more quickly?
Yes, dropping consumption would immediately allow us to work 2-3 days a week.
It's far more a cultural problem than political.
We starting hitting post-scarcity at the start of the 19th century, towards the end of the industrial revolution [1]
We were growing enough food, housing is actually not that expensive, we were 'starting to not need that much more'.
This is when we started marketing consumption to the population - it was the only way to grow the economy.
We have far, far more than we need for basic satiety.
It's not quite so simple though - many innovations that we 'truly want', like medicines and health tech - come out of the economy as a whole and would not be possible were that the only hugely important sector.
We work 5 days on 2 days off because that's the very strongly entrenched social contract, it's the 'labour equilibrium'.
No amount of tech or AI will change that - unless we collectively agree to change the rules.
The social contract is slightly different in different countries, and nobody seems to have figured out how to work on 2-3 days, I believe that we mostly prefer the way it is. Maybe 4 day weeks would be more amenable.
But the marginal income from the 4th day ... I think people would prefer to work it rather than not.
Yes, the hardest problem for me is the social aspect of opting out of consumerism. It makes most people feel really uncomfortable, like being sober in a group of social alcoholics. Clothes don’t look cool enough. Local vacations are seen as boring. Not going to restaurants is perceived as a lack of social aptitude.
Another problem is housing and living environment. Although it is very much possible to live in a smaller space, nice neighborhoods (quiet, clean, green) are expensive.
But basic necessities are almost free in rich societies, if you have time.
Not until aliens land and show us the way. I firmly believe we aren’t presently capable of allowing a post-scarcity economy to exist — too much stuff is based on scarcity. So much so that we create scarcity instead of giving away excess. I’m thinking of food specifically.
If "stuff" === power over other people, then agree 100%.
There are people out there who would rather other people starve than they have one iota less prestige, power, influence or luxury. And, unfortunately, they are the people who wield most of the power in our society.
We have to solve that before we can solve the economics, which is the easy part.
The issue of productivity and demand has existed for a long time, but the explosion in productivity caused by the AI trend has made it even more apparent: in most markets, demand can grow indefinitely, and products always have room for improvement. Increased productivity only intensifies competition, and while actual workers are not truly liberated, their products do benefit consumers.
Did we get days off when industrialization bumped output? Days off when industrial agriculture made food supplies abundant? Did we get days off when computers automated administrative office tasks?
As someone who negotiated 4 day weeks since early 2020 its been awesome. I get chores and yard work done and more family time every week. Wish it was standard.
My Dad used to cover a territory in the Northeast where he was on the road for up to 2 weeks at a time. Sometimes we'd see him just long enough for him to grab a haircut and remember everyone's names in the right order. Everyday he showed up to work he needed to be in a full suit and tie. Everyone did. If those suits weren't in good shape, and you weren't on time they were probably picking a different guy for promotion.
The expectation for him was to work 50-60 hours a week, not including commute, getting ready for work, and corporate social events. Time off was strictly 2 weeks until you hit a certain level and then you'd get 3 weeks. He didn't get sick often but if he was he still went to work.
Dad had it good. I used to jump on landscaping crews during the summer in SoCal and watch 60 year old guys break their backs for 12 hours to get ~$250 a day. I'd do it on the weekends for spending money.
I enjoyed the article but reading through all of the comments in this thread I'm genuinely surprised by the lack of appreciation for how good we have it. There's a "demographic" on HN and I'm pretty confident it aint the guys doing concrete work or running vampire hours at the local 7-11.
Moving around some 1s and 0s in between some coffee and meetings even at the bad companies isn't that rough in the grand scheme of things. I get what the article is trying to say - with all the productivity improvements when do the grunts get a little bit of those gains back?Unfortunately thats not how it works. It's "Red Queen Theory"... when something new changes the game you adapt or die - "It takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place."
There's always a comment saying "Don't ask for better, because someone else had worse". Fuck that. I want better and I want everyone else to have it too.
Top professionals whose comp is tied to performance didn't work 40hr 9-5s in the first place - but their comp is tied to performance, so when they have 10x the output they are compensated accordingly
Roles that come with a 40hr work week were already decoupled from performance, if AI made those workers 10x more productive they will rarely see the fruits of their productivity
On an individual level it seems like the correct move is to either move to a role that rewards output or organize and get equity comp as part of everyone's package
Do you know people who have gotten 10x raises due to increased output since AI came out? The one group I can think of is workers at AI companies but that seems more like a gold rush situation than anything
AI companies have reaped the most benefit out of AI, so naturally most 10xers come from people who have equity in those companies that grow really fast
I don't think the average person has even close to a 10x output increase due to AI.
How can one move horizontally and then vertically? I have been thinking about getting into a more technical position. I work as a data engineer but essentially just a data modeller while manager and staff engineer took all the fun jobs -- it is even very hard to know what they are working on, so it is impossible to even ask for certain tickets.
And now with AI coming out in hot, and companies only hiring seniors, I found it very hard to move horizontally. It is not like I can't take a pay cut, but people simply won't hire someone who takes some time to learn the rope.
I might as well figure out how to increase my Charisma to 18 and sleep with someone at the top /s
There was an article here, 18 years ago, called The Gospel of Consumption. It also noticed that since 1950s, the productivity had gone so far, it would have been enough to work just 2 hours a day.
Given the pace of AI growth, it is quite possible to have years off if layoffs begin in many places. We are training AI to replace many jobs. It seems like entry-level jobs are the only ones affected, but that's for now. Anything short of executive level jobs are perhaps on the chopping block for time to come. Now, why wouldn't be execs be replaced? They could, but they wouldn't cut themselves off.
The solution to this is political. Under hyper-efficient capitalism, if there is truly such a 10x productivity improvement, a large number of people will be laid off in response and the rest will be squeezed. This is already happening.
The logical response should be to elect left-leaning politicians that recognize this; or educate your existing left-leaning politicians; or stand for office yourself with this as your platform.
If there are huge fines on any AI-related layoffs, substantially higher taxes on the top 1%, and an extra wealth tax then maybe we can fund some kind of UBI or stopgap support for the masses that will lose their jobs.
Nearly 100 years ago, John Maynard Keynes said that by now we'd be working just 15 hours a week, because productivity gains would mean we could get a whole work-week of work done in that time.
In reality, higher productivity just means companies can do more with the same amount of time/effort, and so nothing will change. Wage-slaving will still be wage-slaving. We won't move the bar toward more leisure time; we'll move the bar toward more work completed in the same amount of time.
Then again, the labor movement gave us the 5-day work week, and the concept of weekends for resting from work. Maybe a new labor movement can give us more days a week off. Labor movements have been declining of late, of course, but perhaps that sort of thing can be reversed.
So I freelance and I still write all the code by hand. I'm not sure how to honestly inject LLM code and bill for it. It would also probably cause me a lot of downstream problems if I did. But I asked my largest client if they were willing to begin donating $20k a year to my retirement fund if I'm going to be helping them to phase me out over some number of years. They did agree to that.
The reality is that if you were already a 10x coder, you can't be 10x more productive even if the LLMs made you so, because there's only so much work.
And even just using LLMs in my private projects, I feel my daily coding skills slipping. I want to ask Claude to do some dumb API integration instead of doing it myself. But I know if I don't do it myself, I'll be lost at sea and never able to debug it without more Claude.
This is a drunk state of mind post, feel free to ignore it.
I feel like we're actually getting there with one of my clients. The business is very close to being constrained on the customer again.
A lot of the paradox in productivity and labor may be attributable to a severe debt that needs to be paid down and now finally can be. Some of the 996 (or 007) working hour system stuff is coming from your peers feeling this new hope. The tone will continue to shift as backlogs get exhausted.
If you are pure software play I think you are on track to get more days off than you bargained for, one way or the other.
This is the most important thing about AI, that the policymakers and AI companies need to discuss more. If AI is making us, as a race, more productive, who is reaping the benefits of that productivity?
"Most of the things that we worry about under the mode of capitalism that the U.S practices, that is going to put people out of work, that is going to make people’s lives harder, because corporations will see it as a way to increase their profits and reduce their costs."
> It’s not that technology fundamentally is about putting people out of work.
The problem is, it has always been that way - and not just in the US. The introduction of any kind of new technology or other way of disproportionately improving corporate bottom lines has always led to job losses, the key thing is what governments do in response to it.
The Industrial Revolution for example led to widespread devastation, the shift from agriculture being the dominant employer to industry and service sectors did not (as the ag workers were absorbed by the rapidly growing other sectors), the globalization / offshoring wave of neoliberalism once again led to widespread devastation, and AI will probably again lead to devastation.
And if Sam Altman isn't arrested for his blatant RAM market manipulation... I'm pretty sure there will be either people with pitchforks at the end or he will have ushered in, in retrospective, a new era of "stuff that uber rich people can get away with".
All of those things also resulted in the massive increase in the quality of life for everyone. Nobody will suggest we ban cars and go back to horse and buggies so cowboys can have jobs.
Yeah but the transition is rough. For example when we have autonomous vehicles what are all those drivers going to do. You might saw "tough luck" but we are a society not just an economy.
> All of those things also resulted in the massive increase in the quality of life for everyone.
Yes, everyone has a modern smartphone now. Cool, thanks. But last time I checked, can't pay my rent with a smartphone when I'm out of a job.
> Nobody will suggest we ban cars and go back to horse and buggies so cowboys can have jobs.
Maybe not that, but have you looked at sustainable farming movements? In farming, there is a growing movement believing that the way we do farming - basically, ever larger and larger central operations running farms with tens if not hundreds of thousands of animals or acres upon acres of monoculture crops - is no longer sustainable, as the externalities get too serious to be able to ignore:
Biodiversity loss, land erosion (when everything is just the same crop from horizon to horizon and no bushes, wind and rain has an easy time carrying away soil after harvest), an increasing vulnerability to all kinds of pests...
But in order to get smaller, you need people again, because a tractor costing half a million dollars won't ever make the money back on a small farm.
Everything you say is correct but it comes with a massive decrease in quality of life for the average person. Food will be 5x the cost, with less variety. Nobody wants to till the land anymore. Just like people 100 years ago didn't want to be hunters.
Are you willing to part with your smartphone and computer? I would bet not.
Highly disagree. If anything we'll see more variety because mass produced food has settled on a very limited set of breeds (both for plants and animals) to keep timing and yield consistent.
I agree for the most part, but fear of technological weapons is sort of the opposite of capitalism. So much of our technology stack was built by the government for warfare (including the internet) and in that sense is a form of socialism.
I fear being targeted by an AI drone and mass surveillance. Neither of which are driven by capitalism (although being targeted by either of those by some billionaire because I refuse to RTO is related).
How are neither of them being driven by capitalism?
U.S. becomes more authoritarian -> you are more afraid of being targeted by an AI drone and mass surveillance -> companies that make those weapons of war for the government (prime contractors) make billions -> they use their money to influence politics and public opinion -> U.S. becomes more authoritarian -> etc.
Capitalism is certainly one lever, but were we a communist country, I would still be afraid of the same thing. Centralization of power and ideology driving technological progress is in essence what I think we should all worry about.
We liked to pretend that our current technology wave wasn't driven by any ideology at all, so much so that it became a dirty word. But look at these billionaires talking amongst themselves, look at Thiel, look at Musk: their ideology is so compelling and they're so willing to go to bat for it that it materialized in the current state of affairs; and now only ideologies that are different from theirs are in fact dirty words.
It seems to me that cranking up the heat on developers would not be the only way to harness this increase in productivity, if it's real. For instance just let projects finish on time, or on a predictable timeline.
End the "software crisis" that's been with us since the 1960s. This would result in a quality-of-life improvement for every manager, stakeholder, user, etc.
Another idea: Alleviate some side effects of the crisis, such as vital functions being taken care of by "shadow IT" for decades.
Abolish Excel as the front end for business computation.
Excellent. Besides the article, I've always questioned myself many many times how is it that the whole world has agreed that we have to work 5 days and rest 2. Why is it that, why can't be 4 and 3? I truly wish that in general we work a bit less. Even if it is not a whole day off, then having a workday of around 6 hours would mean that you could still have some free time for yourself.
Not saying we shouldn't do 4-day weeks (we should), but you can sorta do this for short periods. Take a vacation day every Friday through summer. For 14 vacation days that's 3.5 months of 4-day weeks. Block your schedule on Fridays with lots of random meetings ("meeting friday!"). If you don't tell anybody, nobody really notices.
Sadly this won’t happen for the same reasons that the median salary hasn’t increased with increases in productivity over the past few decades. You are compensated (or given time off) based on what your employer can get away with, not based on what they get in return. The system is designed to accrue all excess value to shareholders, not employees.
Back when I was a young lad I wanted engineering to be a real discipline - formal qualifications, codes, held to account, and limitations on who could call themself an Engineer(TM).
But the money was so good we (The royal we) didn't think we needed it, that would just get in the way. Did you see how much FB employees were getting paid in 2015! Insanity! Now, even the skutters have a better union than us.
A plumber, or an electrician has a better union, and hence rights and protection than us.
But if you're building a brand new field you can still build a guild.
Exactly. In the four days that you worked you produced 40 days of output, so you should get 40x the pay. It would be unreasonable for the company to pay you 50x what you were getting before... they do have shareholders to think about after all.
I'm very frustrated that I don't have time to learn stuffs on job. They basically assume the productivity I'm supposed to get from using AI on tasks I'm familiar with.
And it definitely doesn't help when everyone hires "Seniors" only, so it's virtually impossible to switch tracks unless I sleep with the CXOs I guess. I have been nudging towards system programming for the previous 8 years, starting as a data analyst, to BI developer, and to data engineer -- well, I guess data engineer is my last stop for life.
This is certainly a fun exercise in economics. By taking a shortened work-week, should the companies then pay us 80% of our current comp? Or maybe a little less since they will have to pay for the added tokens we are now using as part of our job that we used to do manually (i.e. time)? Or perhaps we are able to justify that now they can save overhead by reducing facilities costs by 20% as well. Oh but maybe their business lease has a continuous occupancy clause and now the reduction in foot traffic causes them to get penalized so they need to reduce our salaries even more. Slippery slope my friend.
No. They should give you 40x your current pay. The AI made you 10x more productive, and you worked four days, so you generated 40x the economic output. As such, you should get 40x in pay. At this point, you're doing the company a favor by taking a day off as otherwise they wouldn't be able to afford you.
You wrote a lot of words, but none of them describe a slippery slope, or explain how a supposed 10x increase in productivity precludes a 20% reduction in hours worked.
Foraging was so good we only had to work like 2h a day. We had to start farming simply because the population growth from foraging was exponential and we have ran out of easy-to-forage ecosystems.
We've also ran out of freedom at that point. We used to simply walk away from bullies, but that was no longer possible, with the farm and all.
At some point bullies stopped charging for racket. They stole the land and told us we are now working under them, for them.
I have a similar wacky plan I like to call "Delete Thursday". Four day work week, and more weekends a year just by having six days a week instead of seven.
I was very happy working extra (I won't call them long) hours when I first learned about computing. A bit later on when I started working for financial entities I felt a bit different - the work was interesting, but I just wasn't prepared to sacrifice my time. And if we can have the day off, I think that can only be to the good.
Brilliant. This is exactly what is needed. AI day, Saturday, Sunday. Across the work force, even those not directly impacted by AI. And obviously, those 3 days can be flexibly arranged, so that we can shop all week long.
I get where the writer is coming from, but it misses one very important point.
>> If AI is going to 10x our productivity across the board, that means that I should be able to produce the same amount of output by midday on Monday that, in the before times, would have taken all week.
You are thinking of productivity as "code written". And certainly that part of your job will get more productive.
But that is just something you do when you're not in meetings. (or when you're in a meeting, but the camera is off, and you're not really listening). Your real job is to attend meetings. And unfortunately AI can't help with that (yet).
(I'm not even being sarcastic. Most programmers don't realize that they have been hired to have meetings.)
What it can do is free you up from the pesky code-writing part of your job, freeing you up to attend even more meetings. And this does indeed make management happy because (seriously now) their job is having meetings, and you being "unavailable" (because you know, you want to program) was hindering them in the first place.
So no, you can't have Friday off, but now that you mention it, let's set aside that time for "team building" exercises...
AI definitely helps with attending meetings and writing documents that no one will read (both of which are huge parts of any modern job). The AI notes from any given meeting give you all of the content in 1/10th of the time.
I agree with the premise of time away being easier. I don’t think the models/harnesses are there yet. There’s still a good amount of human input required to generate quality work.
So yes, take the day off but the models still need you to steer them when you’re back
If we all 10x our productivity, then we also 10x the cost of taking a day off and theoretically progress is compounding, so it's even costlier...oh no.
Where are you finding these $15/hr engineers that can pump out good PRs with Claude Code? I've taken a peak at a couple of firms and I am disappointed by their output.
I'm fairly certain a lot of people do this. They don't literally take a day off, but just work fewer hours or less hard. And this makes sense, there is a strong incentive to not give away all the productivity gains to your employer.
the concern would be that this new ability will actually increase competition and give us less than we had before
this is not something that can just be blamed on the "CEOs/execs/shareholders" of the world. it is evolutionary competition - unless we can ALL join forces to draw the line somewhere, someone will choose to defect from the agreement to "just work less", because doing so will make them succeed at the expense of others. even if everyone from one country agrees, the other competing country that defects and works 996 with agents will "win" and conquer the lazy country.
I wish I knew what to do to fix it, doesn't seem sustainable but I don't know how to make all of humanity cooperate without doing something even worse
If anything, China proves that 996 is not sustainable as it simply leads to involution and attrition. At best the populace benefits in a few hyper-focused industries such as take-out and e-commerce, but average life quality is still far behind "lazy countries".
sadly life quality is not the thing that the competitive system is maximizing for, and thats one of the article's points. we compete to our own detriment, but to not compete is to become extinct
I am not in the loop either. From what i've gleaned, it's more a rejection of the specific internet-based community that embraced such ideas in the early 2000's. But I can't speak on behalf of their beliefs or those of their detractors. Was just trying to help out on the term itself.
Good source for what? I'm just trying to point to a concept, an idea. There's no "facts" here, just speculation. If you disagree with the point there, why don't you just say what you think is true instead, I'm happy to discuss the ways in which the article is wrong
unless we can ALL join forces to draw the line somewhere, someone will choose to defect from the agreement to "just work less",
> We already did draw the line and we can redraw it. We drew the line very strongly at 40 hours, 4 days a week. That is the "official" expected hours for most salaried employees.
because doing so will make them succeed at the expense of others.
> This already happens. People making salary, 40 hours, that work 50, 60, etc. to get ahead of their coworkers in a career sense. Or people taking optional overtime to get ahead financially or people who work hourly working extra hours or people who have 2+ jobs or a side hustle.
even if everyone from one country agrees, the other competing country that defects and works 996 with agents will "win" and conquer the lazy country.
> Didn't realize Japan is imminently going to conquer the US because they work more hours.
I would support efforts to try to redraw the line as stated above. I do think we would all be better off if we could do so. But my default assumption is that that won't happen - we will fail to organize effectively enough to redraw the line and we wont "get the day off" that the parent asks for. Maybe I need to be more optimistic to encourage such efforts, but because I think merely asking has such poor chances, I'd rather point to the problem of coordination in an attempt to move the convo towards "how do we beat the coordination problem" - hopefully by being more aware of the size of the hill we are facing, we can be more likely to devise more ambitious approaches to solving the problem
Hours alone is not the only thing that matters, but all else being equal it does matter. Someone who works smarter for 20 hours will get ahead of someone who works stupid for 40, but if both people work smart the 40 hours person gets more done
>This inadvertently led to an increase in the use of slaves. Whitney had hoped his invention would do the opposite by reducing the amount of labor needed to process cotton, but he never invented a machine to harvest cotton. That job still had to be done by hand. Cotton harvesting machines did not show up until the 1930s. So as cotton farmers expanded their plantations, they bought more slaves to pick the cotton.
Yeah this is exactly what comes to mind when I think about new tech and productivity increases. I remember learning about this as a kid in history class and it's still relevant today.
No. You can't have the day off. AI might make you and everyone else more productive, but that just means we need 10% as many employees, and 1 to 8 of your 10 closest peers are producing more slop than you, and so we're going to let you go. Security is going to show you out in 3, 2, 1...
The best way to take advantage right now is to consult. Take some time off and just do a little on the side. Then again the job market could collapse, so maybe keep your job?
Imagine only 10% of the white collar labor force were allowed to use AI. In that case, those 10% would be given 2 or 3 days off a week. Easy.
Now imagine if only 10% of companies were allowed to use AI. Those companies would easily be willing to give 2-3 days off per week to their workers. Makes sense since those companies would easily outcompete the others and so they would have enough economic surplus to provide lavish benefits to their workers.
However, because 100% of companies and 100% of workers have access to AI, the competitive pressure on the deployment of capital means that no days off can be given.
New perks are only given to you if you, your company or your country has some sustainable systemic advantage over other employees, companies or countries.
In the absence of those sustainable systemic advantage, any perk given would put you, your company or your country at a competitive disadvantage against some other employee, company or country who are willing to work without such perk.
The only way to sustain such a perk in those situations is with anti-competitive practices: Labor Unions, protectionism, corruption, etc.
I think expecting worker rights to go up or working time to go down without laws/general strikes and more unions is naive. We have had massive productivity gains in every field since the 20th century, and in half of fields throughout the 19th century, and do we work any less or get paid better? No. In fact the entire goal of the last labor movement we had was to reduce working hours back to what peoples parents and grandparents worked. The 40 hour work week was merely a return to historical norms so the people didn't rise up and start hanging capitalists and politicians.
Tractors didn't making farming more lucrative, it just meant less farmers. Automated loom technology didn't make textile workers wealthier, it made capitalists richer, and then still ultimately shipped the work to poorer countries. Powered drills and tools didn't make miners or construction workers wealthier or work less. Forklifts didn't make dock workers wealthier or work less. Women entering the workforce and nearly doubling the available labor didn't make us work any less.
I don't see AI doing anything to help the working class in any way, just funneling more money into capitalists hands while the productivity demands increase.
Even in programming, where AI is being shown to be the most useful, did any of you have your work demands decrease or wages go up? No, at best they just fired junior engineers and told them to go pound sand.
Whenever a new way is found to improve efficiency, choices have to be made about how to distribute the new surplus.
Choices are made by people who have power and imposed upon people who don't.
The people with power under current systems don't care about the people who do the work. They care about getting rich. So if there's an efficiency gain to be had, all of that new efficiency is going to be put towards increasing output or reallocating work. None of it - under current power structures - will ever go towards allowing workers to work less, because workers aren't the ones deciding where it will go.
“People on twitter will really be like ‘you believe in voting? that pales in effectiveness to my strategy, firebombing a Walmart’ and then not firebomb a Walmart”
I don't understand why people make these hyperbolic jokes about guillotines. Violence is counterproductive; and not practical anyway. Joking about it just makes you feel great without actually doing anything.
There is a simple alternative. Vote; and educate your family and friends.
If you don't know what is on the ballot in the midterms, you are part of the problem. If you aren't starting a family conversation about how corporations are squeezing us, you are part of the problem.
Everyone talks about MLK, but no one points out that people were willing to listen because Malcom X was a looming threat if MLK failed. Yes vote, but the threat of violence is what makes voting a delighted option. That's why protests exist. They are reminders that peace is a choice.
Violent revolution has merit when peaceful means break down. The rise of the guillotine jokes are the first time that people are losing faith in the peaceful option. We should hope that our leaders don't make most of use disillusioned with the idea of a peaceful transfer of power.
It is one of the most eye opening pieces of media. Especially the French and Russian Revolutions are covered in such great detail, while staying interesting. I also loved the appendix to the show where Mike talked about "patterns" in a revolution. Learned a lot about the relationship between the government and its people.
Yeah, for me, Revolutions and The History of Rome are two of the best examples of "this is why knowing history is useful", and that history isn't actually boring - it's basically a highlight reel of some of the highest human dramas. Mike Duncan put out some incredible work.
It's never been a good way to get things done, but when you block off every other venue for change people will be much more willing to take a chance on a high risk option. Violent revolutions aren't usually the first thing people try.
Democracies that arise by nonviolent revolution, do so in part due to the threat of what comes next if the nonviolent revolution is crushed. Because if you make sure placards and petitions don't work, it eventually won't be placards and petitions anymore.
'Those who make peaceful revolution impossible, will make violent revolution inevitable', and all that.
Yeah, I get that it's a useful threat to back up the nonviolent options. I just don't think Americans have tried the nonviolent options wrt economics with any amount of real effort yet, and it's worrying/annoying to see people jumping to the nuclear option as soon as they personally hit a rough patch or start getting scared of one.
When I've gone to local government meetings, I've generally been one of only a few without gray hair. The vast majority of working-age people seemingly can't be bothered to learn the basics about who's running in a non-presidential election, let alone go argue for the boring but extremely impactful things that would actually help people out.
People need to put down the phones and put in some actual effort on fixing things before even jokingly advocating for something that would almost certainly be a mass casualty event. It's shameful.
The UK didn't just repress its citizens, it ultimately caved to them. The voting reforms of the 19th century gave people essentially everything they wanted, at the time, and as a consequence when the rest of europe was going thru 1848 Britain was chilling. But just a few years beforehand there was legitimate fear that the government would be toppled by rioters! You can't judge centuries of history just by looking at the end result.
[EDIT: for the downvoters - the folks who got guillotined in France were definitely bad, but the Terror was very real and very awful. It tends to be a trend with the noble overthrowers that after the initial wins they then get excited to go lop the heads off anyone else that might have ever bothered them. Be careful what you wish for.]
I don't believe that activism actually generally works, and I am skeptical that voting works either.
Don't get me wrong. I do vote, and I believe that voting and activism can work, and even still does for a variety of things. But as for fighting against forces of corruption and tyranny, I believe activism is about as useful as an ashtray on a motorcycle. Any grassroots efforts are in a horribly asymmetric battle against well-funded adversaries that will come back every year everywhere without fail to get their opening. And any hope we had of limiting corporate interests in politics has been decimated in the U.S. basically since Citizen's United — not that I really believe there wouldn't have been some other workaround had that not happened.
So yes, I believe grassroots activism largely doesn't work. The fact that the battle is so asymmetrical makes it even more asymmetrical by making people apathetic about and fatigued over activism, making it even less effective.
But people often turn their heads when there's violence.
Nobody wants violence, just like nobody wants to hit rock bottom. I believe truly that political violence is a very dark place that will be no fun for anyone involved that I personally do not want to be a part of in any way. But, it just is the case that things will get worse before they get ~~much worse~~ better.
I see it as a question of if and not when until structural changes occur that durably improve upon the asymmetry of political activism. And in that case, it's not a matter of whether or not, it's a matter of getting it the hell over with.
I don't know how the fuck these stupid Flock "safety" cameras got here, but I have a pretty good guess how they'll disappear.
Violence has been very productive for the ruling class. Voting sounds nice but evidence abounds about the mendacity of politicians and their willingness to subvert or overrule voters' preferences if sufficient money or status is to be had. You can say 'well vote those people out if they ignore the voters' but once a new reality has set in the politicians often gainan incumbency advantageor have lined up a cushy post-retirement gig.
My employers who are introducing AI are not laughing evil supervillains hoovering up all the excess profits, they are normal people who wanted long careers and are as nervous as anyone about competition amd what AI will do to organizations if people become truly redundant.
Cool well my employers fired me for an AI psychosis trip so I am glad you are working for those ones who "wanted long careers" and "are nervous as anyone" because hoboy is that not what we are seeing in the ownership class right now.
Yeah I thought my employers were good normal people too, just found out they sold to PE firm that wants to “supercharge” our operations with AI. This of course is after swearing they had no interest in M&A to get me to join. “Nothing is changing, no one is getting laid off. Things will just get more efficient so you can do more ‘strategic’ work.” Heard that one before.
Right, exactly, there's no good guys under capitalism, that's why you need industry wide labor unions moreso than within a single company.
You could have a straight up communist for a boss that completely shares all profits, but if the business doesn't extract labor value and expand as aggressively as other businesses do, it'll eventually get eaten or lawfared to death, or priced out, or closed out of deals (e.g. small player in chips related business).
So the only way to prevent industry wide redundancy at everywhere except the 1% largest companies that survive (which will also be laying off people but not completely closing down), is through organized labor. Or, I suppose, completely restructuring the economic system, which I'm very down to chat about as well, but the labor organizing feels more achievable for now.
It is almost reassuring to think that rich and powerful people all know what they are doing every step of the way. A handful may, but most certainly do not. Most are also terrified of AI. Stable profits are always better than transformative change, if you already have power and riches. Look at how insane companies are acting right now with token quotas for employees and mandates AI usage - the goal is not to milk profits but to not fall behind every other company in case this becomes table stakes. They are trying not to be devoured by a beast they don't understand.
When the AI bubble pops, large companies will be extremely relieved to stop throwing money into the wind playing this game. For most companies, the AI arms race is a huge hassle. They are fine with losing money in the short term and even in the long term as long as they can find a stable path forward.
This is the exact same trajectory as when the internet came out and every insurance company and toothpick manufacturer spent gobs of money to have a brochure website built because everyone else had one. This will play out differently, but recognize most companies are acting entirely from a place of fear right now.
"Hence too the economic paradox, that the most powerful instrument for shortening labour-time, becomes the most unfailing means for placing every moment of the labourer's time and that of his family, at the disposal of the capitalist for the purpose of expanding the value of his capital." - some crazy radical economist, nearly 200 years ago
This narrative is clean, matches expectations and history.
But let's be clear - we all probably own a decent part of our companies (collectively). Productivity gains mean winning the race to market, profits, glory. And that means ownership is valuable.
At the _very least_, you can push your company stock higher and buy it with your 10% IRA contributions or through a similar investment program and make 16x your investment over your 40 year career.
It's easy to look tactically at productivity gains being "captured" by high CEO bonuses, and that's legitimate, but we have so sufficiently seized the means of wealth production if we have stock options and market access that I'm not sure it's really valid to say we get, paraphrasing, "nothing if not a day off work".
It’s a stupid statement by a stupid philosopher. Years later we learned collective development and incentive produced a society he could have never imagined.
It’s simply being looted now by the idiots this moron worshiped.
> Choices are made by people who have power and imposed upon people who don't.
In a capitalist society, choices are made according to supply and demand.
In a world where there's a positive supply shock (in this case, there's a lot more programming available for purchase today than there was a year ago), supply goes up. We therefore expect the price for the good to decrease.
This has nothing to do with power or whether people care about xyz. It's a consequence of the economic system we live under.
You can desire to live under a different economic system! That's logically coherent. But if you want the laws of supply and demand not to apply to you, that's what you're asking for.
Honestly I'm getting tired of this narrative. People take the benefits of capitalism for granted (indeed most of us on this forum do very well for ourselves relative to the average person in our country and around the world), but we blame all of its downsides on "bad people".
From where do you get your understanding of the terms supply and demand? They are primarily from classical economics - have you read any? e.g Adam Smith?
And 2 days off was not a system dictated by God, which we are obligated to keep in perpetuity (in fact, most religions dictate 1 day off, not 2).
So, we could, as a society, just choose to make a 32 hour workweek “full time”, and mandate overtime pay after that.
There’s no reason, even under capitalism that we must allow all of the productivity gains to accrue to the benefit of solely those at the top of an enormous pile of wealth.
In fact, I think if we choose to do that as a society, it will end horrifically.
> There’s no reason, even under capitalism that we must allow all of the productivity gains to accrue to the benefit of solely those at the top of an enormous pile of wealth.
I would question the premise that all or even most of the productivity gains of any past technological improvement have accrued to the benefit of solely those at the top of an enormous pile of wealth.
200 years ago 90% of Americans lived on farms. In the early 1900s, it was 40%. Today that number is 2%.
The economic surplus from that increase in productivity accrued to everyone in society, not just the wealthy. (The evidence for this is that we are all living at a higher standard of living today than we were in the early 1800s or 1900s.)
But certainly the positive supply shock was not great news for farmers, many of whom lost their jobs. In the case of AI, I'm asking us -- programmers -- not to make the mistake of saying "this is not a benefit for me, therefore it's not a benefit for society".
> But certainly the positive supply shock was not great news for farmers, many of whom lost their jobs. In the case of AI, I'm asking us -- programmers -- not to make the mistake of saying "this is not a benefit for me, therefore it's not a benefit for society".
I'm not sure about that - farming kind of sucks. I think what the transition away from farming generally looked like was people who had some kind of small family farm, where multiple generations had worked hard all their lives to make a living growing crops, having kids who left the farm to work in some other industry, and making more money that way and having better working conditions (at the price of living a more urban lifestyle foreign to their family back on the farm). When their parents' generation got old and was ready to pass the family farm along, the urban worker generation decided they'd rather not quit their jobs and go back to the family farm; so (perhaps with some feeling of guilt), they sold the land to a large farming conglomerate; and then the next generations who grew up in an urban area doing white-collar jobs simply forgot that their ancestors had ever been farmers.
Something like this happened in my own family - about one hundred years ago, my great-grandfather owned a farm on what was then the outskirts of the bay area. He sold the land when he retired, no one else in my family ever did agricultural work, I only know the story, and the land that farm was once on is now incredibly valuable bay area real estate that is not being used for any agricultural purpose. I have no desire to work in agriculture.
> I would question the premise that all or even most of the productivity gains of any past technological improvement have accrued to the benefit of solely those at the top of an enormous pile of wealth.
The historical automation story seems to be that technology replaces workers, and those workers typically end up taking lower-paying jobs:
"replacing workers with technology “explains 50 to 70%” of the increase in inequality from 1980 to about 2016."
They point out a disappointing aspect of some technologies (self-checkout), which seems to be that not only are workers displaced, but customers also experience degraded service (probably without a new benefit such as a discount for using self-checkout.)
> The historical automation story seems to be that technology replaces workers, and those workers typically end up taking lower-paying jobs
As I said, when farming became more efficient, it wasn't great to be a farmer.
But when I say (and I assume everyone else here also says) "I don't want to go back to a world where 90% of people had to be farmers" (because farming was so inefficient), that's another way of saying, the world that farming efficiencies gave us is richer / more preferable overall than the previous world. In other words, the economic surplus did not go exclusively or primarily to the richest.
I expect the same will be true for AI. I think our society should do more to help the displaced. But I do not want my grandchildren to live in a world where, 100 years from now, 90% of people are still doing jobs that could be done by a computer, but we choose for the computer not to do them. Just like I wouldn't want to have to be a farmer.
> As I said, when farming became more efficient, it wasn't great to be a farmer
What you seem to be saying is that consolidation of the farming industry into fewer producers with higher productivity was good for food buyers and society at large, which might be true but doesn't contradict GP's point that when their company earns $100 more due to improved employee productivity, approximately $0 of that will be paid to the employees, so they find little reason to celebrate.
The link I posted makes somewhat different yet important points: first, the arc of automation seems to tend toward increased inequality (and a hollowing-out of the middle class); second, automation may provide a markedly worse (but cheaper) replacement for the thing it replaces. Even in the case of farming, many fruits and vegetables are less nutritious than they were 100 years ago - perhaps effects of selective breeding (such as for size, shelf-life/durability, resistance to pests/pesticides/herbicides/etc.), soil depletion, environmental changes, etc.
> In other words, the economic surplus did not go exclusively or primarily to the richest.
That was in large part due of strong leftist movements and states that forced the capitalists to share the increasing wealth. WW2 and the resulting labor shortage and other special circumstances contributed as well. Currently no such movements and circumstances exist. Globalization and the resulting free movent of capital has put capitalists in a better position to direct the extra wealth for themselves than ever before. A global movement is required to get a meaningful share of the increased surplus to the workers now, and that is very hard to do. The market will not do it on its own, as the demand for human labor eventually decreases due to automation.
> The economic surplus from that increase in productivity accrued to everyone in society, not just the wealthy.
Sure, a poor man with two dollars is richer than a poor man with one dollar.
And yet the man handing out the dollars had 100$ in surplus when he was handing out 1s and now that he's handing out 2's he's got 1,000,000,000.
Look at the wealth disparity. Even if quality of life has increased, it's not wrong for the people delivering that increased quality of life (workers) to also demand a requisite slice of the pie.
In fact, I see no reason why the pie should be shared with wealthy non workers at all. Were they necessary for the increased quality of life?
On top of that, it's a global economy. Expand beyond the USA and include in your analysis how life has changed in imperialized nations that now function as cheap labor sources for our factories that pollute the local environment while exploiting workers for absurdly low wages and bad working conditions.
> Expand beyond the USA and include in your analysis how life has changed in imperialized nations that now function as cheap labor sources for our factories that pollute the local environment while exploiting workers for absurdly low wages and bad working conditions.
Agreed, let's do that! Here is the economic history of the developing world over the past 70 years.
Pick any metric you care about: number of people living on less than $1/day, literacy, maternal mortality, access to birth control. It has dramatically improved in the developing world over the past 70 years or so.
Putting the poverty line at 1$ a day, or saying people crossed from 2$/day to $3/day is "poverty decreasing," lets people get these self-serving numbers. Poverty declined, relative to what threshold? Do these people have secure housing, medical care, education, political power, in line with their contributions to the global market they've been shoved into?
People being moved from centuries old homes distributed across agrarian geographies into slums, that's improvement?
People living side by side to polluting factories that poison their water, that's improvement?
These people are foisted into a global supply chain, their economies changed into e.g. unsustainable cash crop or similar fragile-to-price-shock products, and themselves thrust into market dependence without any labor security since outside entities show up, exploit while it's profitable, then disappear without leaving any meaningful industrialization to the overall nation. Not to mention there's still a lot of people being straight up enslaved.
> Look at the wealth disparity. Even if quality of life has increased, it's not wrong for the people delivering that increased quality of life (workers) to also demand a requisite slice of the pie.
Sure, but the argument being made is that "productivity gains accrue to the benefit of solely those at the top of an enormous pile of wealth."
That is simply not true. Across the entire world, from rich countries to poor countries, economic development, driven in large part by technological development, has resulted in a dramatic improvement to everyone's quality of life.
The way some people talk about it, it's as though they wish they were middle class in the 1920s instead of in the 2020s. People are so. much. richer. today. In ways that really matter, like education, retirement, ability to travel the world. MEDICINE.
I get that it still sucks today. The only point I'm making is that it's false that the historical economic surplus has accrued "solely" (or even, mostly) to the wealthiest. It's not true.
Both can be true. Standards can both have improved since the 1920s and income inequality can be equivalent or worse than the gilded age. This would be coherent with improvements mostly being funneled to the top, while some benefits accrue throughout the economy.
However the story is much more dynamic and interesting than that, with income inequality shrinking until the late 70s and early 80s, then expanding drastically until now, half a century later. That period of lower income inequality is mostly why things got better for the working class (but science and technology have marched on regardless).
> I get that it still sucks today. The only point I'm making is that it's false that the historical economic surplus has accrued "solely" (or even, mostly) to the wealthiest. It's not true.
It is, though, if we talk scale. The rich went from having big houses in the 1920s to being sent into space, or building private libertarian colonies, or buying elections, or potentially increasing their lifespan a few decades, in the 2020s. The working class went from working 40hrs a week until age 64 when they retire in a house they own, to working 60hrs a week until they die, but hey, that death might be at an older age!
The improvement disparity between the two makes the improvement for the working class insignificant enough to be dismissible. I don't buy into the idea that the working class should be grateful that the scraps now have better seasoning.
I mean really, just look at the wealth gap. Imagine how much better the lives of everyone could be if that wealth was distributed better! Fuck a 20 hr workweek, what about 5?
Different countries are going to distribute the benefits of automation in different ways. Northern European states will pursue shortened work weeks and lavish social services. China will reinvest the productivity gains into its industrial capacity. The United States will have five trillionaires.
I am kind of late to comment, but let me try anyway.
Can we have a day off? Yes and no, or yes, but at your expense.
The problem is system design. If a company earned money for its contributors/workers, then each gain would be shared across the company, from the board to its employees. But a company earns money for its shareholders, and you, as an employee, are in the expense column.
Therefore, a day off is either a mandatory legal right meant to help you rest so you can be more productive, or it is just additional unproductive time that does not create more value or maximize profit.
Therefore, this is where the argument for a 4-day working week collapses. To get a 4-day working week would mean yes, but with less "expense", or a lower salary.
For the same reason, taxing the rich would not help "the people" much, as it goes to the wrong pocket.
> every increase in productivity has ALWAYS gone straight to ownership.
Which of course means that if you want to capture that upside for yourself, you need to be an owner.
The real problem with AI is that it breaks that for programmers. Before AI, you actually could be an owner. Of course big tech companies tried to get you to centralize, to depend on their tools, but you didn't have to. You could always run your own open source tooling on your own hardware, and freelance if you absolutely couldn't accept the loss of upside in being an employee.
But now AI has centralized a key tool, and that changes the game, at least if you think the game requires you to use AI to stay competitive.
I like vibe coding for personal projects where the code is a throwaway, but I hate vibecoding at work when I later have to stake my reputation in validity of results, as well as maintain the resulting implementation.
We need to get creative in ways that help. I am personally for:
- sabbaticals
- flat out taking 2 years off every 5 to go back to school full time
- the mid weekend (don't give me Friday. Give me Wednesday!)
- Massive increases to new baby time off programs
- early retirement -but- with the encouragement to start fresh in a new field after a transition break.
- Of course, just more time off. But -require- it. If you don't take your yearly vacation time you miss out on the 'vacation bonus check'.
You want to create jobs? Find ways to get people legitimately out of the workforce. By that I mean out of the workforce but still spending money and improving their skills for when they come back in.
This will never happen, the power dynamic between workers and employers is so skewed in favor of employers and it is only getting worse.
Don't like your job? Fine leave, there are tens of millions of H1B's who will do your job for less money and they won't complain because they can't easily leave.
Unfortunately that's not how it works. Productivity gains have already increased tenfold in the past, yet still all work full time.
It used to be that 80+% of the population worked in agriculture. In developed countries that number is now around 1-2%. Some of the freed labour was funneled into improving living standards, some of it was funneled into new jobs created by the increasingly complex society (the "intermediate economy").
With AI, the same is true: labour is freed by the productivity gains (which I doubt are 10x sustainably but whatever), more labour is needed for power generation, mineral extraction, maintaining this new extra layer of complexity in the intermediate economy, etc. In the end we might see, say, a net 3% increase in global productivity per year over the next 10 years, which will be funneled into increasing living standards and increasing economic inequalities, but not in reducing working hours.
If you accept living below average standards, you could easily work a single day of the week for the rest of your life. But why would an employer hire 5 people working one day a week, instead of one working 5 days a week? They won't, hence we don't see a reduction in working hours.
The alternative is to work full time but retire earlier, much earlier, than you would otherwise, which in the end is the equivalent of having worked one day a week for your whole life.
I highly recommend reading Lean Logic by David Fleming, it explores several of these concepts in a very interesting way.
People with more time on their hands start looking around their communities wondering what happened, start questioning politics, start reading statistics instead of headlines and so forth. Oh no, we can't have that
Its wild to me that the concept of working 80% (1 day off a week) or even 60% (2 days off a week) isn't even a concept in the US, while in europe such part time situations make up a huge share of the work force.
In short, people have been having the day off for decades now. It's called part-time work.
Labor saving tech doesn't lead to more free time, and certainly not in a way that's proportional to the gains of automation. Instead, companies will expect still more productivity. Why give you more time off if they can keep workdays fixed and add still more productivity? Certainly, the competition will do it.
> If AI is going to 10x our productivity across the board, that means that I should be able to produce the same amount of output by midday on Monday that, in the before times, would have taken all week.
You must be new here. No, that's not how this work. If you are able to produce the same amount of work by midday Monday we expect you to increase the amount of output in the current system by 14 x. And the owners pocket the financial gain from this productivity delta and you should be happy you even have a job.
Be happy if you can be 10x more productive and charge 1/10 per unit of productivity.
There's no guarantee society needs 10x the productivity.
Yesterday I built a bespoke time keeping and billing tool in my browser for my boutique consulting gig. I got exactly what I needed and I paid about $1.
I think this piece of software could power my business for 2-3 years... If my business is very successful maybe I'll invest $2 to develop a GUI.
No SaaS needed. Software demand was actually surpressed by AI.
I don't need 10x more software. I need simple software at 1/100th the cost, on demand. And AI promises to give it to me. The most beautiful part is there's multiple market entrants competing for my bid.
Imagine OpenAI invented ICE engines and the world was dotted with lakes of crude oil, all we needed was refineries. That's the world we're in.
My best experience of a good working-hours week comes from a school i studied at when a boy. The hours were 11:30AM to 4:30PM; i.e. 5 hours with only a 20/30min break in-between. We slept well, had a good brunch and went to school fresh and energetic. Played outside after school (i.e. exercise), came home at nightfall, did some study (i.e. work), had some entertainment and dinner before hitting the bed.
In today's parlance, this was excellent "work-life balance". If you can, talk to your boss and see whether you can adopt such a work schedule (with slight shifting of the time window as needed).
You can have any days off you wish when you run the company. If you’re an employee then you work the days you were contracted to work. Employees definitionally don’t get to choose their hours.
On a tangent if you’re paying $6000 a month for your three children for childcare you are better off getting a Nanny for significantly lesser than that
Workers need to have more leverage for them to be able to independently assert their working hours. People with such luxury become contractors or proprietors. The rest need collective bargaining.
basically, we can blame greedy corporate overlords, and that's cathartic, and somewhat correct, but we can (and have) ended up in a hell of our own making even with every individual wanting to do better. the boss that wants to let workers have the day off can't afford to, because the competition makes workers do 8x5. the competition lays off workers to pay for more tokens, because their competitors are. it's a bad game equilibrium.
labor laws are the reason we have the five day work week. we needed overtime to dissuade employers from defecting from the policy. we need coordination to keep AI from turning out like children working the bobbins in old-timey textile factories.
No because the Epsteinist Class in charge have decided to make it zero sum. Therefore it's a fight to the death. Which is why with Ai we're 10x more productive and either 10x more busy or fired and on our way to food stamps
Marx showed this was an expression of one the central contradictions more than a century ago. Seriously it’s never too late to read about why our conditions only ever deteriorate under capitalism.
Capitalists moralize a lot about people becoming “lazy” or not having “direction” if society subsidizes not working - and yet their entire mission is centered around deploying money, letting money “work.”
If capital is doing the work, why on earth are they getting paid?
1 And afterward Moses and Aaron came, and said unto Pharaoh: 'Thus saith the LORD, the God of Israel: Let My people go, that they may hold a feast unto Me in the wilderness.'2 And Pharaoh said: 'Who is the LORD, that I should hearken unto His voice to let Israel go? I know not the LORD, and moreover I will not let Israel go.'
3 And they said: 'The God of the Hebrews hath met with us. Let us go, we pray thee, three days' journey into the wilderness, and sacrifice unto the LORD our God; lest He fall upon us with pestilence, or with the sword.'4 And the king of Egypt said unto them: 'Wherefore do ye, Moses and Aaron, cause the people to break loose from their work? get you unto your burdens.'5 And Pharaoh said: 'Behold, the people of the land are now many, and will ye make them rest from their burdens?'6 And the same day Pharaoh commanded the taskmasters of the people, and their officers, saying:7 'Ye shall no more give the people straw to make brick, as heretofore. Let them go and gather straw for themselves.8 And the tale of the bricks, which they did make heretofore, ye shall lay upon them; ye shall not diminish aught thereof; for they are idle; therefore they cry, saying: Let us go and sacrifice to our God.9 Let heavier work be laid upon the men, that they may labour therein; and let them not regard lying words.'
10 And the taskmasters of the people went out, and their officers, and they spoke to the people, saying: 'Thus saith Pharaoh: I will not give you straw.11 Go yourselves, get you straw where ye can find it; for nought of your work shall be diminished.'12 So the people were scattered abroad throughout all the land of Egypt to gather stubble for straw.13 And the taskmasters were urgent, saying: 'Fulfil your work, your daily task, as when there was straw.'14 And the officers of the children of Israel, whom Pharaoh's taskmasters had set over them, were beaten, saying: 'Wherefore have ye not fulfilled your appointed task in making brick both yesterday and today as heretofore?'
As AI gets more successful in taking away bullshit makework, instead of having days off or doing something else meaningful for the company, the bullshit makework just multiplies to keep everyone and everything just as busy as before, like kipple.
And then this phenomenon is being called 10x productivity and celebrated.
Silly you, the 9-5 5days a week schedule was introduced by ford in his factories, did they change that when automation was introduced later? Internet? Nope. And this 9-5 is actually 7-6 if you count the commute.
Speaking of AI, it’s been what, 3 years since it became mainstream? Did the employees wellbeing’s become better? Are the codes better? Do we have a breakthrough innovations that changed fundamentally in how we use/deal with xyz? All I hear is more work, more anxiety, more cost for some tokens, so I am not entirely sure about the “productivity increase” claim.
i really dislike lazy bums. you are in a position to use great tools for productivity and you're not inspired to work harder? you should be fired on the spot.
indeed those who engage in the capitalistic system without devoting the entirety of their soul to generation of profit, they are subhuman and therefore deserve to be subservient. true humanity is found in embodying our animal nature and maximizing the influence of individual genetics - money is a mere vehicle to express the totality of the human spirit. those lacking money clearly lack spirit and should be considered beneath humanity, effectively equivalent to livestock. baa baa black sheep, give me every last thread of your wool or be exiled
Sorry, I'd rather have a higher quality of living for most people (as evidenced by any huge development in technology) rather than humanity stagnating. This post is quite myopic.
You think if people worked less technological progress would just completely seize up and humanity stagnate? I find that pretty hard to believe and see no evidence to support that.
I'm deadly certain that routing more of society into producing SaaS webapp shovelware (and the infrastructure to support it) is not in fact going to improve quality of life, and will in fact cause us to stagnate.
> If AI is going to 10x our productivity across the board, that means that I should be able to produce the same amount of output by midday on Monday that, in the before times, would have taken all week.
That would be true if you and only you are 10x more productive than anyone else. Since everyone is now 10x more productive it just means you have to work just as much as before since you're competition can outwork you. I don't get why people don't understand this.
> That would be true if you and only you are 10x more productive than anyone else. Since everyone is now 10x more productive it just means you have to work just as much as before since you're competition can outwork you.
Why? I don't need 10x more stuff. I'd far rather spend 10x less time working. If we're talking about an actual productivity increase, let's just produce the same amount of stuff in 10x less time.
Because your competitor can now produce 10x more work with the same resources that your company can only produce 1x, therefore in short order your company isn't competitive and will cease to exist.
> Why? I don't need 10x more stuff. I'd far rather spend 10x less time working.
It's a free market - if you can find someone willing to hire you to work 0.5 days a week, and are happy receiving the same income you do today, you can do so.
But your living standards won't improve, while everyone else's will, and by 10x.
And the people you are competing with to buy housing, a car, consumer goods, healthcare, food, and everything else - people who want to work 5 days a week - will have 10x more money than you. Resources like housing, which are supply constrained, will seem to go up dramatically in price relative to your income, and you'll be living in a slum.
> Resources like housing, which are supply constrained, will seem to go up dramatically in price relative to your income, and you'll be living in a slum.
That sounds like a problem with that system. If we're 10x more productive why can't we make 10x as much nice housing?
Sure the consumer won't consume 10x more, but they're still going to reach for the better products.
And let's say that work is correlated with quality. Company A wants to spend 10x less time working, while Company B works 10x more. Company B therefore has a better product than Company A, so eventually Company A goes away. The consumer still consumed the same amount, but they switched to the better product.
If everyone had said this 100 years ago we wouldn't have the Polio vaccine, air conditioning etc.
There are lots of problems in the world and there are still a ton of incentives to fix those problems. Yes there is also greed, scams, and exploitation - but that's never going to go away
This is downvoted but's it pointing out a fundamental dynamic in capitalism. Labour activists had to intervene in this dynamic to protect workers from being exhausted by the constant need for capital to increase labour exploitation to increase profits.
Almost this entire thread is people discussing a labour issue with no reference to the fundamental antagonism between labour and capital.
This article is kind of playful, but I think there’s a serious point here that’s not discussed enough. We’re being asked to usher in huge productivity gains by introducing AI to our workflows, but we’re not asking how does it help us? Not a lot of us stand to directly gain from our employers becoming more productive.
I know everybody is afraid of getting fired and replaced with AI or whatever right now. But we should be seriously asking in our next all hands meetings if 10x’ing our productivity can get us some days off. Or when our paycheck is going to be multiplied accordingly.
So far we’re all kind of being chumps about this, bragging on Linkedin about all of our new found AI productivity while accepting less job security and no increase in comp.
It’s been like that for a while, economic gains went to a small fraction of people, before software developers were among those that were on the winning side, now they’re on the losing side. Think about how much the US economy is growing right now and who really profits from that growth. My guess is that 90 % of the growth goes to 10 % of people, with AI maybe 99 % might go to the 1 %. Or who do you think will gain from the tokenization of development? You’re just supposed to be more productive and the gains the company achieves will just go to the owners as they are in a great position right now and developers are scared shitless to get fired, so no one is increasing salaries or time off, instead most companies hang the threat of layoffs over people’s head to keep them in line. And the funny thing is we developers did this to ourselves, by doing free open source work for the greater good, which now feeds AI models that are replacing many of us. But I guess most people didn’t care as they made good money while it lasted.
> And the funny thing is we developers did this to ourselves, by doing free open source work for the greater good, which now feeds AI models that are replacing many of us.
Open source is not to blame here. AI companies used the code, in some cases against the license, to train their models.
Nobody is actually getting replaced - it's just that layoffs are in vogue now. If there was productivity to gain here, it would be used to do more and capture more of the market.
We’re going to be fine. I see daily what non-engineers that build stuff with AI come up with.
Not the point.
If you don't get paid more for being more productive, someone else is getting richer. That means they buy the houses in your neighborhood, which means you can't buy it because they outbid you
> before software developers were among those that were on the winning side, now they’re on the losing side.
are you sure about that? i'm a software engineer and i feel like i'm on the wining side now, even more than before. I'm considering quitting my 500K a year job to go compete against the employers. they seem like dinosaurs to me.
you personally are winning, but 500k comp is an outlier and not the norm, especially now
Well congrats man you might belong to the 1 % then
> But we should be seriously asking in our next all hands meetings if 10x’ing our productivity can get us some days off.
Pretty sure if you ask this that they'll give you all your days off.
Depends on whether you or your ancestors demanded some worker protection rights so they can't just fire you.
Standing up for yourself and your peers is a virtue, not a weakness. Yes, it’s easy to crack down on individual dissent — but only if you stay quiet.
Union!
This is HN, where labor unions are considered nice-in-theory-evil-in-practice while we with eyes with open resign ourselves to doing nothing.
Your livelihood has a price (duh, your wage). But making cynical remarks about how stupid it is to want things to improve? Priceless.
You know who will shut up and do as their told, the H1B replacing you this fall
Nothing like self-imposed anticipatory pressure ruining one's life. Maybe you are right, maybe not, nobody knows. What everybody knows is that life is happening now and its extremely short even in best scenario, yet few act accordingly.
I think it’s pretty naive to ask your employer for a day off. As experienced by companies, the market is more competitive than ever. Whoever slows down will get eaten by some hungry upstart that is willing to work 996 to eat the incumbent’s lunch. It’s a Prisoner’s Dilemma.
The only way to get this outcome is to coordinate at a level higher than individual market participants.
In other words, get your government to implement UBI - tax all companies (or if AI really takes off, just compute) and redistribute to the people.
Whoever slows down will get eaten by some hungry upstart that is willing to work 996 to eat the incumbent’s lunch.
Is this true? There are a lot of low-productivity and zombie companies trudging through year after year.
Yeah, they're all taking a gamble and hoping that they, not their peers, will be the lucky ones with the breakthrough.
> I think it’s pretty naive to ask your employer for a day off.
Someone said the same before 1938, probably [1]
I think it's possible that AI will bring as much of a shift to our lives as the industrial revolution did, so it might be necessary to make some adjustments, just like we did back then.
[1] https://www.history.com/articles/five-day-work-week-labor-mo...
yep. The Progressive Era (with it's 5 day work week women's suffrage ) came after, and was a backlash to The Gilded Age. Now we're in Gilded Age II (Gilded Age on Steroids). Hopefully we'll see history repeat itself and we get Progressive Era II. But keep in mind that the Progressive Era only lasted about 20 years, if that long.
"the market" is literally the arena of competition, it's not a surprise it's more competitive than ever
Unions unions unions unions unions unions unions unions unions.
UBI without many other anti-capitalist reforms is just a subsidy paid directly to your landlord.
We don't want anti-capitalist reforms. Perhaps reforms like those we use in Denmark would make sense? We're ranked higher than the U.S. in ease of business. We love capitalism here. But we also have high taxes, universal healthcare, and great social safety nets. It allows us to lean into the great parts of capitalism while also protecting those for whom capitalism isn't working so well. It's a great compromise without having to go full starvation and gulags, which would be worse than what we have now.
Where do you suggest we start? You can't nuke everything at once.
Uh, we might have to depending on how quickly AI and robots become effective at doing most jobs.
Tbh, with the productivity gains of the last 150 years, we should already be able to easily afford another weekday off for a long time. Instead most people sit around doing bullshit jobs to kill time until the weekend.
There's a fundamental difference with AI though. Even though we could live easily, greed drives the class with power to continue to force more and more productivity from workers, which is the elite's only source of labor. With AI, the workers won't been the most cost effective or even necessary. Very different situation.
And you must be a high paid tech worker in a bubble if you think most people are just trying to "kill time". At least in the US the majority of people are living paycheck to paycheck.
By the amount of money thrown out the AI window nowadays, a day off, or hiring a few more folks to cover for those days off and more, seems like the much cheaper option. But that's only my naive impression right?
lol, this government is going to just throw anyone trying into the meat grinder.
The only way to do this is to bypass the authorities.
Few willing to discuss this!
Or change them.
The reality is that most people are paid for their time, not for their output. I think most contracts for salaried employees are along the lines of "work n hours a week". If you want to get paid for output, you can't be a salaried employee.
Salaried employees aren't paid for their time, they're paid for a combination of their output and their availability. Availability used to be strongly coupled with time but technology has introduced some flexibility there.
I think it depends. Plenty of salaried workers are truly only on the clock when on-site from 9-5
Correction: Their PERCEIVED output, not their output. Output can usually not be objectively measured in IT.
Storypoints? Overestimate wildly. Stories done? Split stories like atoms! Impact of work done? Present your button color change stories as company saving divine intervention!
Can you give some examples of jobs that are usually done by salaried employees and are paid by output? All the examples I can think of, are usually done by independent contractors.
Not by output, for output - as in, not paid per unit of output, but paid for achieving a sufficient level of it, the definition of which frequently changes. That's baked into the definition of salaried.
Anything commissions based might fit the bill?
Commission is not salary.
i think we could say with a high level of certainty that someone with a subpar output will typically be punished in some way.
it feels very disingenuous to pretend there aren’t expectations of a certain level of output.
I don't think this is the reality. It is part of it, but people get paid different salaries, why? Some are more productive than others. Aside from leadership's (and society's) biased ability to determine value, these people theoretically get more because they contribute more.
while productivity is correlated with salary, generally the ability to ask for a raise, to defend your pay and office politics navigation would be more impactful on average
This is a naive view. Companies will literally pay you as little as they can get away with. If they think they can hire someone “equivalent” according to HR for less money they will often do so. Actual contribution means nothing unless you’re willing to walk away. I’ve literally seen an intern with less than one year of experience when hired into a company where a senior architect who has been at the same firm for 16 years made over $40k less than them. The former intern was great. I had no real complaints. And he was more ambitious than the senior architect. But he stayed with the company two more years before jumping ship for another significant pay raise while the senior architect is still there making about the same amount as he did five years ago. It doesn’t matter how much value the senior architect delivers if he doesn’t demand his increase in pay.
> Companies will literally pay you as little as they can get away with.
Everyone pays as little for everything as they can get away with.
Companies aren't doing anything unusual or evil. This is literally just how a market works.
A lot of people forget that the job market is a market. Or they wish it wasn't a market and they could block out competition for themselves so companies had to pay them more (at the expense of those excluded)
This might be fair if the rules of the market were static, but companies are actively using their power and influence to affect the market rules so they can get away with paying workers less and less - that's not to mention collusion and corruption.
Just because this has been normalized doesn't mean it's not evil. If a healthcare company introduces processes that deny people life-saving interventions just to funnel more money to their shareholders, that company and its leadership are thoroughly evil.
I'd also like to add that I often pay more for things than I could get away with. I try to prefer locally owned businesses when possible, and if they have fair prices and give me good advice I often pay a bit extra (essentially a "tip" for the business) to support them.
> Everyone pays as little for everything as they can get away with.
Bullshit cop out. I regularly spend more than the “average” on technology because I’ve been burned by the bottom of the barrel too many times. Maybe you cheap out on all of your purchases, but it says nothing about “everyone”. The fact that you claim “everyone” has as few moral qualms as you is telling. But not in a way that reflects everyone. Just short sighted selfish assholes.
In my experience, productivity effects on salary is a rounding error. There are only two significant contributing factors for salary: 1. Your home address and 2. Your visa status
Productivity might get you a 5k raise more over your colleague on a 160k salary. Meanwhile the same engineer in Taiwan is more productive than you and getting paid 40k while working for the same company on the same product, and putting in more hours to boot.
Or the engineer could be working for a certain company in South Korea and get a bonus multiple times their annual salary because of their union contracts tied to profitability.
They are paid for what they collectively output. The only reason that people seem to be paid by their time is that it's hard to measure each one's output individually and granularly.
That's not really true. Pay raises have lagged behind productivity gains for decades now and the gap is only growing wider.
Pay raises have kept pace with human productivity gains.
Robots have pushed productivity well beyond the human capacity. But robots are not willing to work for free either, so...
is this not backwards? salaried employee means you get paid the same amount no matter how many hours you work.
There is a lot of regulatory stuff, particularly around benefits, that push people towards nominally 40hr salaried contracts even if they don't need all 40 of those.
"Salaried" vs hourly is increasingly a scam anyway, but all that benefits stuff is something that would have to evolve. And it could, if people find the political will.
typically there is a floor, at least de facto.
The contracts I've seen have an explicit floor, not a de facto one. I.E. The contract says the minimum number of hours you need to work. Some countries also have overtime laws which create a ceiling.
Either way it doesn't change that being paid for your output is the realm of entrepreneurship and submitting bids for project work.
Employment contracts are virtually nonexistent here in the U.S. While the norm is “40 hours”, actual requirements vary by employer, may or may not be communicated in writing, and can change at the employer’s whim. If you make under $107,432 per year (which is around starting salary for fresh graduates at FAANG), you are entitled to overtime pay (minimum 1.5x) for hours worked beyond 40 in a week.
At least for my software job in the US, and other salaried jobs I’ve seen, there are explicitly no hours listed, and it’s supposedly based only on your output. In practice though, if your butt isn’t in the seat 40 hours a week or so, and usually more, the boss will be mad.
The reality is huge swathes of the middle of large organisations are paid to take the blame for the layer above them. AI wont solve that.
I think it’s the other way around. Hourly wages are paid directly for time at work
At least in the US, there are regulations around what constitutes "full time" employment, and many benefits (such as insurance) are tied into being offered only for full time employees, or at different tiers between part and full time.
As such, you are still expected to work a minimum amount of time. That's what you're signing up for. Fixed deliverable contracts- completing certain objectives- tend to either specify those things as minimum performance expectations, or are for contractors rather than employees.
At my most recent role we were definitely being judged by output metrics (both jira tickets completed and github prs merged). They showed us the jellyfish tool they used to check those metrics. Well, some of it. Regular ICs themselves didn't have that access.
When you work for a startup, or a zero-to-one project, it's hard to say you're even paid for your output. You're paid for probabilistic/expected future value output.
Every meeting, every memo, and every prototype is output in terms of the employees doing that work. Whether it's directly saleable is irrelevant. The investors base the value of their investment on the expected future value of the company, but the people being to do the work are being paid for the work they are doing regardless of what the future value of the company becomes. That is if they are paid a salary. If they are given shares, then that compensation is entirely dependent on future value.
Yes but you are missing the point: our time can now make the company way more money. Can’t we demand a piece of this?
> Can’t we demand a piece of this?
You can demand whatever you want. You could demand a million dollar salary if you wanted.
The challenge is that there are a lot of very qualified devs who would do it for less.
Labor is a market. Supply and demand determines your wages.
There are always hand-wavey arguments about unionization fixing this, but when other developers are hungry for those jobs and willing to go around the union to work them for pay then that doesn’t really work at scale.
There are several unionized software development groups in the US. They don’t have a good track record of getting significantly higher pay or even getting their demands met from their limited strikes.
I was in the musician's union for 12 years before I got into tech. There were some silly rules, like someone couldn't be both a musician and and orchestrator on the same show, because it's "doing 2 jobs". It's like saying you can't be full stack. You couldn't fire people who were bad at their jobs and stopped putting in any effort. There was a profit sharing agreement that the union rejected, because it would come at the expense of higher base salaries, and then they wondered why there were only big producers that first developed the show out of town.
Some rules I actually liked. Rehearsals started and ended _exactly_ on time to avoid overtime (showing up late was the only reason you could be fired, which was a useful compromise). But generally, the union was the yin to the producers yang, and an adversarial position as worker advocate was where they wanted to be, they didn't want more ownership.
If someone gave me the chance to join something more like a worker-owned coop, where the workers on the business and vote on how it works, I would actually be down. There's a grocery store down my street like this and it's a great place. I don't know how this would actually work in tech. If there's no startup capital, no one will have a salary or benefits for years until there's a profit (if at all). And capital comes in exchange for ownership of the future upside.
> If there's no startup capital, no one will have a salary or benefits for years until there's a profit (if at all). And capital comes in exchange for ownership of the future upside.
The developer co-op projects I've seen have targeted consulting for this reason. The idea is that developers get together and start doing projects that can bill clients immediately, and then they'll pool the money back into developing their own something later.
In practice there's no real difference between a group of people consulting together and a co-op of consultants when everyone is just billing hourly at the start. Nobody really wants to spread their earnings around the co-op because you can see the relationship between hours worked, hours billed, and dollars coming in so clearly.
> and then they wondered why there were only big producers that first developed the show out of town.
Most unions derive a lot of their negotiating power from location-based constraints. You can gather enough musicians in one place to form a union because there are a limited number of musicians within driving distance of the location. Musicians can't do their performance over zoom and the job can't be outsourced to another country.
Software jobs have no restrictions like this. Every time there are calls for unionizing software devs, nobody wants to answer the hard questions like what incentives multi-national corporations will have to cater to the unionized employees in a country like the US where we're already paid more than our international counterparts. It's just assumed that the union will form, then companies will have no choice but to accept their demands.
> Musicians can't do their performance over zoom and the job can't be outsourced to another country.
Recording is increasingly outsourced, unfortunately. There are great orchestras in Eastern Europe.
> If someone gave me the chance to join something more like a worker-owned coop, where the workers on the business and vote on how it works
I run a co-op, and the most surprising thing I've learned is that it seems the only reason other people don't set up their businesses as co-ops is, frankly, greed.
In this startup ecosystem, why would you do a co-op when you could instead chase that multi million dollar exit that profits you? If we have any kind of event like that the earnings would be distributed basically equally among around 30 people. 20 mill payout suddenly becomes... Less...
Anyway though apparently statistics are on my side. Apparently co-ops are more sustainable and live for longer than traditional corporations. It seems to me that people are much happier here than at traditional corporations.
Clients are happy, engineers are happy and productive, I'm happy because I don't have the entire responsibility of the business on my shoulders - engineers are constantly contributing to the improvement of internal systems for example, because why wouldn't they? That saves them money too!
Downsides are increased ownership come with increased responsibility. Can't just clock in here, people need to manage the client relationship, issue invoices, participate in the accounting, and if they want more work when their gig is closing out, either try to sell the client on more work or help us find another one. Until we can find an alternative revenue stream to selling our labor to clients, we're all beholden to keeping the BD wheel turning in order to get paid. Upside is that we're keeping 85% of the margin for ourselves rather than at toptal where you keep, idk, 30%? And that 15% is still our money anyway it just gets used for overall co-op stuff, which members get to decide on.
Also I don't know if this kind of business lends itself to the silicon valley mythos of the huge work week for a few years followed by functional retirement. Instead it seems we'll all need to keep working for the foreseeable future, but at our own reasonable pace, fully remote, our own hours, at very high compensation but not "fuck you money" compensation. Well except for our people in Ethiopia and Taiwan, for the local market rates, their compensation is getting way up into that territory.
That said, I don't know about our ability to survive a full on capitalist attack in the form of lawfare or getting priced out or closed out of deals. Priced out in a labor market would be difficult since the only way to beat our labor margins is to hire directly, but we could be lawfared to death pretty easily considering our ARR might be 1 mil this year if we're lucky.
Maybe i’m a cynical capitalist, but I expect everyone to be operating in their own self interest. There are few true saints. Startups are high risk high reward. 9/10 fail. If a VC gets less upside when it works, the successes wouldn’t pay for the failures.
Co-op for consulting actually seems like it could work.
> Co-op for consulting actually seems like it could work.
I made a comment about exactly this in the thread. This is where a lot of co-op ideas go, but they run into friction when they get to the part about sharing the money around. Consulting is one place where developers can see a direct relationship between their hours worked, hours billed, dollars coming into the business, and dollars going into their paycheck. There are some ideas like putting shared money into a group fund to cover vacations and similar expenses, but generally a consulting group is money-in money-out. Nobody really wants to join a co-op and see the hours they bill go to pay someone who works fewer hours, so the money relationship gets even more tightly coupled than at a traditional salaried company.
> Maybe i’m a cynical capitalist, but I expect everyone to be operating in their own self interest.
Down to explore this with me?
I often wonder if this is self fulfilling. I'm not saying you're selfish, I mean, has capitalism trained people that all people are inherently selfish, and then, within this system where selfishness is rewarded, incentivized further selfishness and continued to sell this myth?
How much maintenance does capitalism take? If human nature is inherently selfish, and capitalism is a force of nature, a ground truth, the answer should basically be no maintenance, right? Is that reality though? It seems to me it takes a lot of maintenance, the myths of capitalism. Look at the incredible amount of resources the USA dedicated to fighting Communism, both explicitly (crossing swords with the Soviet Union) and in the background (overthrowing socialist leaders in south America, meddling in southeast Asia).
Is the key difference for me that led to me making a co-op (rather than a traditional geographic arbitrage agency) that I don't buy into the capitalist notion that humans are inherently selfish? Maybe I just happened to have the experiences that indicated to me that this isn't true, that humans are inherently mostly selfless and social, which led to me researching this and learning that history supports this notion of humans as social-first organisms.
When I tell people about my business, a lot of questions I get confuse me: "You don't require timesheets tracking granular work? How do you know people are actually accurately recording the hours and not 'stealing time?'" the answers are always basically, "because I trust my co-op members," and "I really don't care if people are 'stealing' from me." Capitalism teaches us to always "get ours," but as soon as you let go of that, if people trust me as a genuine actor, they seem to abandon these unnatural principles and work with me honestly, as humans naturally want to.
For your VC example, I mean, nobody will invest in us. Maybe that's the double edged sword - you stop playing within the rules of the game, people won't throw the ball your way anymore. There's no massive value to extract here. That probably limits our ability to rapidly develop some products to generate revenue outside of selling engineering hours. Maybe that's ok though, the business might grow more slowly but sustainably? And maybe that cements our reputation as "no really, actually a co-op that genuinely doesn't put profit first?" I don't know. We'll find out.
But for you, what do you think would happen if you started putting yourself forward as a non-participant, non-self-interested? The prisoner's dilemma equivalent of saying "I will always cooperate no matter what you choose," and then following through on that? Is there a sort of aversion to that knowing that someone might exploit this aspect of you at some point, where you might end up in a situation where your personal profit wasn't maximized?
I see this as a bunch of unsolved game theory problems. USA vs Soviet Union I just see as a battle of competing empires. There have been competing empires for all of history, we haven’t figure out how not to do that yet.
At the smaller scale, I’ve lived in coliving housing most of my adult life. Mostly positive, but problems that make people retreat away from cooperation. Once a week potluck but otherwise people cook their own food. Chronic mess/clutter/dishes/laundry headaches.
My personal mental model is that there is a quite bimodal distribution of people in the world. Many seem to see it as a zero-sum game, some others not. As father of a disabled child I come into contact a lot with the latter and can confidently say that there is a LOT to gain once you stop starting to stare at money only. Once your needs are basically covered, giving can give you so much.
> Can’t we demand a piece of this?
If your company is publicly traded, you can buy its stock.
Right, the AI companies don’t even try to pretend it’s good for the average person.
The message could be “we’ll all do more by working less.” Instead it’s, “some people will lose their jobs while everyone else works the same amount or more”
What's crazy is the glee when saying that. It's like "fuck those uppity low class people who managed to move up socially thanks to an in-demand job requiring some skill". Now we're back to only who you know, skills are for the AI.
To play devil's advocate: Why exactly would you expect to get paid more just because there was a big investment in more expensive tools? You're not working any harder, the machine is. Getting paid more is always nice of course.
Any pay rises have been more of a side effect in the past of complexity and therefore needing more skilled labor to say operate a bulldozer or backhoe than it does for any individual with a shovel. Productivity may boost the economic ceiling of 'how much they can pay before they literally start losing money' but more assembly lines didn't mean big pay raises. A backhoe didn't mean that ditch diggers suddenly got paid 50 to 100 times what they were previously from other's expenditures because they could dig that much more. And that is before the back-and-forth of induced demand and supply vs demand causing the price of the labor to drop with more efficiency.
AI's whole thing is to provide for easier operation and trying to deskill the operations. (Key word: trying, currently knowing what the hell you are doing is essential for filtering good outputs from bad).
We expect that because the company is only allowed to exist at the will of society at large.
It is honestly offensive to me that this isn't plainly obvious to everyone. AI has never, ever, and never will be, about making life better for the average human. It has always been, and always will be, about wealth consolidation and control. Does anyone think it is coincidence that now local models are more useful the market has suddenly made it massively more expensive to buy your own hardware? Companies are just giving up making consumer hardware because they can can just focus on hyper-scalers. They want to control compute as well, there is no liberating aspect to any of this.
Businesses, especially tech ones, are not altruistic. The idea that tech companies are out to make anyone's life better is a joke and a sentiment that should have died decades ago. The evidence is of predatory business practices and leveraging the worst aspects of our brain chemistry to keep us hooked on apps that make us less happy, keep us stupid and less informed, and buying more.
Even more confusing are the people who are welcoming AI with open arms as just another skill to learn, _surely_ they'll be the ones who come out on top, right? It has all the stink of the countless Americans believing they too will become billionaires and everyone else are just suckers as they are all one healthcare problem away from bankruptcy.
We don't learn.
>AI has never, ever, and never will be, about making life better for the average human.
You don't know that. And this same line could be said about any technology that results in accruing of capital, but actually does end up making life better for the average human.
What if AI at AlphaFold finds a cure for Alzheimer's disease? What if it finds a way to actually perfect fusion?
You can't tell me we don't live better lives than people 100 years ago right now, and that is because of technology.
I am okay with Alzheimer's not being cured if it means we are not bending over backwards to welcome a billionaire overlord class. I don't think Altman or Amodei give a fuck about Alzheimer's unless a cure gives them a reason to obtain more investments. You could say that is the system working, but as a member of said system, it feels pretty shit.
> I am okay with Alzheimer's not being cured if it means we are not bending over backwards to welcome a billionaire overlord class
What a cold perspective. Talk about throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
These threads are so tiresome. Reddit doomerism has infested hn.
> AI has never, ever, and never will be, about making life better for the average human. It has always been, and always will be, about wealth consolidation and control.
I think here it's useful to separate "AI" as sold and marketed today from "AI" as a CS discipline, a field of study, and a category of tools and techniques.
The field of Artificial Intelligence has always been, at least for the majority of people in it, about improving things for real people.
The LLMs that have garnered huge valuations and an outsized share of everyone's attention in recent years started as part of that field, and grew out of its research and technological advances.
But once companies started seeing how they could monetise it, that's when it started being about wealth consolidation and control.
I think the feeling is if we want to even keep our current footing in the market we have to increase productivity by 10x because everyone else is as well.
And if everyone else is, the productivity floor is raised but every other competitor has done the same so we don't have 10x the economic output, maybe only a marginal increase. If that is true, then there will be no days off because we have just reset the status quo.
edit: spelling
Exactly. All the employers are still sharing the same sized market. There’s not more money going around for them to earn.
But they’re also paying hefty AI bills so there’s less money for salaries.
The AI companies just swoop in and take some of the money that was going to the working man
Chinese youth have a term for this, neijuan: https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=neijuan
Isn't that just the same as "Red Queen's Race" or "tragedy of the commons"?
The only ones getting a paycheck off of this is those that work for the hardware manufacturers, unfortunately.
Mainly because in software development (at least for what I do), productivity does not translate into significant company gains. I work for an energy company, nothing is super revolutionary, and a new feature or capability takes a long time to translate into measurable revenue, if at all.
The energy crisis had a much bigger (positive) impact on the numbers than AI or anything I personally did. (although I have to add, they also did a major re-architecture of their back-end after the '22 energy crisis and did some smart buy-in, so as the other energy companies' websites struggled, ours churned along just fine and we got a lot of new customers/contracts)
When your labor force makes gains in productivity you can choose to do one of two things:
1. Reduce working hours 2. Grow the economy
Guess which option was last picked in 1868 and never again despite massive gains in productivity?
Are we really so sure that reducing working hours can't, itself, lead to improved economic health? Such as by increasing distribution of income flows, and increasing time available for economic consumption?
One of the greatest tricks of the modern era in the US has been to convince everyone that making the slice of pie bigger for the richest people is necessary to grow the economy.
In fact, we now know, with a fairly high degree of certainty, that it can.
There have been numerous experiments with four-day work weeks or six-hour work days that have almost uniformly shown increases in overall productivity.
Not just productivity per hour at work. Overall productivity.
The resistance to this is clearly not based in financial concerns, but rather in control, and classism.
> and increasing time available for economic consumption?
Where is that additional money going to come from? I think you’re missing some important factors in your analysis.
1. Not everyone is spending all their "spending money" every month, and 2. more free time allows people to get more value for their money (e.g. by comparing more alternative options).
One possibility is once AI becomes profitable and wildly successful, and we all lose our jobs, we vote to nationalize the AI companies, and send some good vibes (but no money) to the VCs who paid for it, and remember that the AI was only built by breaking copyright law at an industrial scale and so it's fair to nationalize it.
Good thing all of the AI companies in the world operate only inside one country. I'm sure all of the other technology companies, AI ventures, and investors will continue putting their headquarters in a country that did this and gave the investors $0.
Nothing bad would happen, of course.
Nationalization doesn’t work because every country’s citizens except those of USA and China still get nothing. Basic income doesn’t work because most countries lack leverage to tax the AI companies. International frameworks to do such things don’t work because Trump just marginalized all international bodies that might host such a framework.
If AI is really about to automate away a lot of labor, I have yet to hear even a hint of a plan to deal with the fallout of that which doesn’t involve consigning much of humanity to the dustbin of history.
Computers and the Internet ushered in huge productivity gains. Despite many people losing their jobs as a result, it's tough to argue society isn't better off.
I think that's the key difference with AI, though. It's not like I'm losing my job, but at least I have a robot at home that cleans the house and does my laundry. People are having their livelihoods threatened while their utility bills go up because of datacenters, and the only substantive impact in their personal lives is that now they have to deal with chatbots and low effort automated customer service agents even more.
I'm OK with accepting a job that pays 10x less if the efficiencies from AI mean we're all living in abundance and life is >10x cheaper. But it's unclear if/when we'll move beyond marginal business impact, aside from in software development, I suppose.
I think it's impossible to argue we are better off. This comment is so detached from reality it's almost offensive. Education is unaffordable, health care is unaffordable, homes are unaffordable, the rich have gotten massively richer, the middle class has been gutted, suicides are up, birth rates are down... I could go on and on. It's gotten better for the 1% but the rest of us are being boiled like frogs. To the point where we've (you've) literally forgotten we used to be able to raise a family on a single income. But I guess we have video games and door dash, so sure, we're better off.
Median income is vastly higher. Did you live before ~1990? Standard of living was a lot lower back then, it’s pretty apparent.
Maybe in some places??? I am an 80s kid, and was raised with what we'd call something like lower middle class. Neither parent has a college education, worked minimum wage, and owned a home and fed 4 kids. We didn't have as much stuff... But we sure were outside and playing a lot more back then.
How was the standard of living lower?
Mostly what I can think of is access to medical treatments developed in the last few decades. Comforts like A/C are more widespread now (but they were less necessary when we were under 400 ppm CO2).
I lived two decades before 1990.
Life was better then than it is now. But the 1990s were arguably the high point.
Only in America
Society was improved as a result of computers and the Internet. That does not mean society is in all ways better now than 70 years ago.
Is society better off? Honest question, you used to be able to support a family of four with a single 9-5.
My great grandfather supported a family of 7 making brooms. He didn’t own the broom factory. He was an employee, and was paid by the broom. My great grandmother stayed at home to raise 5 children. There was even enough to lend to the local grocery store, apparently. This was at the turn of the 20th century in Canada.
He would have probably worked 12+ hours a day, his children could have died of a toenail infection, their teeth would be falling out early, they could have been deformed by various diseases, many children died young or at birth, etc, etc.
I would never choose to raise a family in that period.
And that support was a family of 4-6 in a 1200 sq ft house, eating out <6x a year, vacations were picnics at the local beach, one car that you did your own maintenance on, one tv, only one set of good clothes (your Sunday outfit), et cetera. Most places in the US can still support a family at that same level of expenditure on an average income.
In many cases it's illegal or commercially unviable to build said 1200 sqft house.
It's kinda funny that this is considered small, though. 110-120 sqm is perfectly normal for a family of 4 where I live, and in many cases they do it with 1 or 0 cars. But I live somewhere that isn't horribly designed (the Netherlands)
The difference is the social structures supporting that kind of life have disappeared.
That exact same 1200 sq ft house is now 300k in the Midwest, if it's even for sale at all, and it's likely a rental for $2.5k/month.
You can't get the same 1200 sq ft detached house in the suburbs on an average single income because suburbs have urbanized. But you can usually get a 1200 sq ft apartment in an urban area or a detached house in a rural area.
More household work was done in this era, before grocery stores sold prepared food, before washing machines. And more people lived in less square footage, with grandparents living in the home, less privacy and autonomy. I don't know if we've made the right trade, but it's not the case that a single worker's income was paying for the kind of lifestyle a family of four now has.
How is this relevant? The houses built in the 60s aren't affordable either. Look at median income and median home prices. You're telling on yourself. Average families aren't buying prepared food and they have a washing machine from the 90s they bought on craigslist. There's a 90% chance if you are on this site, you are not average. You are a part of the haves and you need to consider that you are living a very different life from the average American, which all this productivity should be helping but fucking clearly isn't.
> The houses built in the 60s aren't affordable either.
Far, far more people and the same amount of land.
> Average families aren't buying prepared food and they have a washing machine from the 90s they bought on craigslist.
Well, that's just not true. The average person is absolutely terrible with their money. Not only are they buying prepared food, they're paying someone to drive it to their house.
> Well, that's just not true. The average person is absolutely terrible with their money. Not only are they buying prepared food, they're paying someone to drive it to their house.
The average person is doing this? Do you have sources/stats or are you just going on vibes, or are you looking at people in your (likely non-average) peer group?
Edit: A source I found cites 130 million US delivery app users in 2026, which is a little over 1/3 of Americans. Given that some non-users will call in orders (pizza, Chinese, etc) then it’s plausible that over 50% of people do order delivery from time to time. That said, it’s hard to find good statistics on how much the median person spends on delivery given the likely inflated numbers promoted by delivery app companies. One source said almost 50% preferred ordering delivery through third party apps like DoorDash; if so then how are only 1/3 of Americans actually users of those apps?
Given the numbers on consumer financial stress it’s likely that there is less food delivery happening right now.
No shot. As a general rule of thumb, most Americans, regardless of income, are also in a small mountain of debt. The rich and the poor alike max out their salaries with debt payments and then pile up living expenses on credit. Since that is "fake money" to so many people already, they overspend and convince themselves that using Klarna for a burrito bowl is a reasonable use of resources.
According to USDA average spending on restaurants is around $4k/yr. So close to 10% of average income.
Does that have any bearing on the experiences of those in the lower four wealth quintiles though ?
The trouble with averages is they don't always say much that is accurate about most people .. it all rests on distributions.
Right, you need the median numbers. HNW people are likely skewing the mean.
Buying prepared food is not a bad thing, it's cheaper than eating out and many people are busy. I live with a lot of roommates and this is what most people are doing. I'm just saying this is not the same division of labor we had before. My mom worked part time and was a part time house wife, she cooked meals for the family from scratch. Parents today are more likely to both work full time and outsource more food preparation. Part of the reason one income could support a family in the 60s is that they were buying raw ingredients and the stay at home parent was doing more house work.
Average families are very much buying prepared food but it’s making us obese.
So: tight knit families, fresh home cooked meals. Sounds like improvements.
Agree that no washing machines outright sucks.
Shareholders = society. The rest of us are just the help
You could still do that if you are ok living at 1950 standard of living. Average income back then was $26k in today’s dollars. Even low paying jobs today are better than that.
I’m sure you will say something about housing costing more, which it does. But also many things cost less, such as food and clothing.
Can safely disregard everything you say as soon as you say food costs less than it used to.
All the ersatz food that comprises most of the grocery store shelves may very well be cheaper. This does not make it a better value.
You still can if you want to live like you're in the 60s. My parents grew up eating bread with dripping for most meals, meat since they were farmers, some inexpensive vegetables, not much variety. Houses were half the size and had twice as many people in them, my grandparents did any building or expansions themselves. Public schools with free tuition. No overseas holidays, eating out once a month max. The urban poor had it much worse.
You just can't live an upper-middle class on a single income unless you have a good job, but you couldn't back then either.
You can't really live like you're in the 60s. Food and accommodation and other basic costs are going up all the time. Young people in entry-level jobs can barely support themselves while renting a room with flatmates.
Standards of living are going up regardless if we like it or not, and costs as well.
Yes. Choose a time and country in history where you would like to be raising a family now as a "median person"? I bet it is within the last 50 years, and specifically in one of the developed nations and probably during the 1970-2000 period. People rarely would choose to go back further.
You can thank neoliberalism
> Computers and the Internet ushered in huge productivity gains.
“You can see the computer age everywhere but in the productivity statistics.” — Robert Solow
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Productivity_paradox
* https://www.brookings.edu/articles/the-solow-productivity-pa...
Connectivity/the Internet gave a bit of a boost during the 1990s, but the numbers pearked around 2004:
* https://www.milkenreview.org/articles/the-rise-and-fall-of-a...
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rise_and_Fall_of_American_...
* https://www.csls.ca/ipm/31/gordon.pdf
We wouldn’t expect productivity to keep growing from one innovation. Growth requires new innovations every year. So in the absence of innovations productivity would stop increasing.
I mean productivity generally, not economic productivity as measured by market cap growth or GDP.
Nobody is operating businesses now without electronic cash registers, POS systems, accounting systems, etc. It's way more productive to use computers and the Internet than to try to accomplish the same stuff without them.
> I think that's the key difference with AI, though. It's not like I'm losing my job, but at least I have a robot at home that cleans the house and does my laundry.
Do you though? You might be hallucinating those robots. And no, a Roomba doesn't mop the floor, wipe the countertops or clean the toilets.
> I'm OK with accepting a job that pays 10x less if the efficiencies from AI mean we're all living in abundance and life is >10x cheaper. But it's unclear if/when we'll move beyond marginal business impact, aside from in software development, I suppose.
Will it though? Your biggest cost is lodging, either rent or own, and both have consistently increased over the past millenia.
> Do you though? You might be hallucinating those robots.
My phrasing could have been better. The "not" applies to the rest of the sentence, not just the first clause. I'm saying it might be OK to lose my job for "progress" if I were personally getting big benefits from AI.
> Will it though? Your biggest cost is lodging, either rent or own, and both have consistently increased over the past millenia.
Lodging is typically <30% of income and housing costs are driven more by policy than market forces. That said, I see no reason why housing costs couldn't also decrease with the right applications of AI, at least in the eyes of its biggest cheerleaders.
>I'm OK with accepting a job that pays 10x less if the efficiencies from AI mean we're all living in abundance
Well, you won't be living in abundance. All productivity gains will go to the oligarchs. You will have slightly less than you had before. Instead of cleaning the floor yourself you'll work the extra hour for the oligarchs doing whatever the robots cant.
That's the path America is on at present.
Is this a joke? Income inequality is at it's highest (even worse than the gilded age), deaths of despair are at their highest as well, people can't afford childcare (a years worth of childcare costs more than college), people are losing access to health insurance en masse; but we're suppose to think society is truly better off?
What brand of edibles do you have there 'bud? I'd like to fly into that realm of alternate reality for a bit.
Also when have any efficiencies gained by employers benefited workers? Being honest here because the only time workers have truly gained anything was due to solidarity between workers in the forms of strikes + workplace sabotage.
When I was a kid “child care” was either your grandparents or the neighborhood kid watching 6 screaming toddlers at once.
I’m pretty sure that doesn’t cost more than college today :).
Our standards have just risen massively.
Many parents would probably love to have grandparents close enough and willing to watch the kids while they work.
It sounds crazy now, but prior to the 1970s, sometimes even the mother might primarily provide the child care.
Do you really think that dropping of your kids at a flu factory is a higher standard than having caring relatives (often even one of the parents themselves) available to give them a good childhood?
We’re forced to move away from our grandparents and family neighborhood help to have careers to afford to live
> Or when our paycheck is going to be multiplied accordingly.
And when/if it doesn't, unionize. I know the HN crowd historically hasn't looked favorably on Unions, but times are changing. It's long past time for unions in tech. We've fared well individually for a long time, but that time is coming to an end.
If workers got time off relative to the productivity gains achieved of the past fifty years and considering the comparatively stagnant wages over that time period, we’d only be working 2 to 3 days a week, tops.
The author might be being playful, but an increasing amount of folks at or past their breaking points definitely aren’t.
Same answer as for most hope-filled employee questions sadly:
You get to keep your job. You agreed to accept X pay for 40 hours, do it or we'll find someone else who will.
That's why it has to be collective. That's why OP mentioned saying it in an all hands. That's why there's always discussion of tech worker unions despite our high pay. Any one of us try to push too hard on this sort of thing on our own and they'll "just find someone else" who would happily take our place.
Might have been possible before mass migration flooded the market with cheap labor and jobs connected to one employer and immigration status.
Classic American politics right there:
Person 1: "We need class solidarity against the billionaires."
Person 2: "No, it's the immigrants' fault."
There's some truth to the fact that workers on H-1B visas are not going to rock the boat. A modern form of indentured servitude.
Immigrants are a tool of the billionaires.
So true. Pick your boogeyman (Muslims/Immigrants/Antifa/Trans/"Marxists"), pump the attack propaganda through all available media channels and hope no one mentions the billionaires.
It's been awhile since 9/11 and we've got pretty short memories, so we'll probably cycle back to Muslims soon.
Except all the people who drilled such mandates into our heads are dying off. These things persist over time only so long as we keep discussing them.
We're really failing to meet the moment before us by merely repeating the propaganda of elders that glaze over on live TV trying to act authoritative and useful to humanity.
Exploitation of youth is no less ageist than telling gramps look in the mirror.
I think it's a fair question to ask ourselves.
But it's worth noting how leisure hours have been allocated after the invention of the 5 hour work week: we've reduced working hours at the end of life (longer retirements), start of life (longer education), and some amount of people simply do not work.
There hasn't been a reduction in hours during peak earning potential because many jobs are competitive, because firms are in competition with each other.
Maybe some companies will start doing 4 day work weeks because they find that productivity doesn't actually increase from 4 to 5 days and then start outcompeting other companies for talent. But unless 5 days is actually not more productive than 4 days, we're going to have the most competitive organizations continue to be 5 days a week.
It's strange to put it like “we invented 40hour workweek”. It was extremely hard fight won by cooperation of many levels of the working class. The business owners absolutely didn't want it.
This would have to happen again. But there is none of that worker unity so it's unlikely to happen. The productivity gains will go solely to the bussiness owners.
> We’re being asked to usher in huge productivity gains by introducing AI to our workflows, but we’re not asking how does it help us? Not a lot of us stand to directly gain from our employers becoming more productive.
How much money do you think the average developer would be making if we all were using punchcards instead of typing? Inputting machine code instead of using a compiler?
Every time we increase our productivity, we can build bigger and better things for the same amount of effort. This makes us more valuable than before. Our output grows and the world’s appetite for software grows with it.
This has been true for the entire history of the software industry and it’s the reason why developers are very well paid. You may not see it at the individual level, but we are reaping the rewards of increased productivity at the macro level.
> 10x’ing our productivity
Normalizing this "10x" language (well before AI) is a factor in this problem.
It's been so loosely and casually thrown about in this industry. 10x engineer... 10x mindset... 10x growth... 10x this... 10x that...
All paraded around by people who fancied themselves to be their own version of 10x whatever.
Well, keep parroting this long enough, and it's just a matter of time before people not only believe it to be commonplace, but they start to expect and demand it.
So now we have AI as the next thing foisted upon us to force everyone to be 10x or die trying.
Should've just settled for being 3.14x engineers like reasonable people.
You are not the 10x factor and can't use it to increase your wage. If you leave the next person is a 10x factor because of ai. Now if AI providers all increased prices they could get a raise.
It won't get you days off because you (rather, your employer) will fall behind those who didn't opt to take days off.
You'd only get days off if it was only you who got a 10x increase. But it's everybody. So it's status quo: technology advances, and you have to keep up if you want to stay in the industry.
> It won't get you days off because you (rather, your employer) will fall behind those who didn't opt to take days off.
I don’t believe this is true. Or that more hours worked reliably translates to serious competitive advantage, in general.
But your point stands, because many (or most) employers think it does, and employees are usually incentivized to support that notion.
40 hours work week wasn’t always the case and yet here we are.
I think equity compensation should be normalized (or ideally allow employees to choose the % of their compensation is equity vs. cash) so every employee can partake in the upside of the company.
Meanwhile my employer still has not given us any AI tooling. I build more things for personal use and for niche hobbies that are more refined, polished and documented than most employers have ever given me in terms of project requirements. Everyone keeps saying the bottleneck was not how fast you can write the code. I believe the bottleneck is two-fold: coding without architecting and no solid business requirements.
I do agree though, give me AI tooling, and I will build you cities, but pay me to match it.
The question is are we more like farm workers who will be unemployed because of the farm or accountants who become much more valuable and high paid because of the spreadsheet?
And I am grateful for not working on a farm, it’s hard work!
This is why we need to be unionizing en masse.
There have been movements toward this in the US, but particularly in the tech sector, far too many people are still stuffed full of decades of anti-union propaganda (like the idea that the union is a "third party" rather than being the workers themselves, or that it would bring down their salary because they're such a special awesome 10x developer and 10x negotiator).
The executive class has taken roughly all the productivity increases since 1980 and slid them straight into their bulging pockets, at our expense. The only way we get any of that back, or prevent them from taking this new increase from us too, is to stand together against them.
The top comment explains the point of the article in plain terms. I’m not sure how many levels of jokes we are on.
You got into a contract. This contract specified what you will do and usually for how long. Unless this contract specified you need to get X done, I don’t see any way you can argue for this in any way that makes sense.
_Nothing_ I do that benefits my employer directly benefits me. AI or not. That was the whole idea of the relationship: I show up, perform some type of labor and am shielded from the bullshit of doing business (to some tolerable extend). The employer in turn forks over hard cash. The exact, same F amount every month and on time, no discussions about it.
If your actions directly or indirectly caused a loss to the business do you give up free days or pay? I don’t think you should. This works both ways.
However, that’s on the level of the individual. If you’re saying we should unionize, then, hell yes.
Creating a throwaway for this comment is telling
It's actually rather boring: I forget/don't care about my account.
just don't call it organized labor.
I will be automating the things that annoy me so I can spend time on the things I like.
While I agree with the playful sentiment of the post, this isn't what happened for factory workers as their work has been augmented by automation. Ford makes twice as many vehicles per worker in 2025 than they did in 1960. Did the auto workers get 20-hour work weeks? Nope.
I have to ask myself why we think us white collar knowledge workers are so special? Even if I do dream of a time where automation leads all of us to a 3-4 day work week.
> We’re being asked to usher in huge productivity gains by introducing AI to our workflows, but we’re not asking how does it help us?
More flour more water. More water more flour.
Tech workers _are_ a bunch of chumps. Temporarily embarrassed billionaire startup founders. The vehicle for this is a union, and tech workers abjectly refuse to unionise.
> Or when our paycheck is going to be multiplied accordingly.
That doesn't increase shareholder value, so it would be a violation of the c-suite's fiduciary responsibility. Sorry, the extra capital will instead be used on stock buybacks.
<insert required disclaimer here that fiduciary duty does not require using every opportunity to increase shareholder value>
Fiduciary responsibility also requires long-term thinking. If AI is writing the code, I need the smartest, most well-rested supervisors I can get.
> Sorry, the extra capital will instead be used on stock buybacks.
Given how start-up (and thus equity) heavy this board is, that should also directly multiply total comp, even though it was meant as a vapid snipe and isn't actually vaguely valid outside of a handful of very large companies.
> productivity can get us some days off.
Days off might be a challenging ask as the AI needs feedback more often than that. Working sporadically throughout the day, able to do what you please between the AI asking questions, is realistic. We're already there, frankly.
I think people should use AI to start their own business instead of working for someone else's vision. I mean if you're working for someone else your choices are limited. And I'm not saying that you should be mistreated. I'm just saying you have more control of your life when you're working for yourself.
Right. If I am producing 10x more output then I expect to be getting paid about 8x more or working 8x less.
You should talk to your union rep about that, because renegotiations like that won't happen on the individual basis just because you think its right. And almost all lack the leverage, individually, to make it happen.
Of course, until just recently, Big Tech workers were so proud to be on top of the world that they didn't think unions made sense for them.
Were you among them? Has that changed?
something something you're paid the amount the market values your work, which in today's job market is an order of magnitude less than the profit you bring the company
Well then why make it easy for my work to get devalued? It's not like workers are sitting on the sidelines here, they (I'm aggregate, at least) hold all the power.
Sounds like an argument for organised labour to me!
The US still largely believes everything that Reagan Republicans preached about the "evils" of taxation and regulation of oligarchy, despite the US economy overall (and the "average joe") doing quite well in the era that followed "soak the rich" taxes being passed.
So many claims about how it would lead to far better lives for everyone, but the working conditions and general affordability have basically gone down for 40 years. Imagine bringing back the white collar work in the 80s, with a private office with a door, and people whose jobs were to help coordinate and schedule things even if you weren't an exec, instead of you just having a phone to answer all hours of the day.
> in today's job market is an order of magnitude less than the profit you bring the company
Then why have we not all been fired already? Sounds like an instant win.
Wouldn't the parent's post mean that you bring profit to the company, but you're worth less than the full amount of that profit because, should you demand to be paid more, you can be replaced by someone who won't demand more.
(Has there actually been a lot of terminations in the US tech industry, or is that an odd biasing mechanism causing me to see such things as bigger than they are?)
There has been a massive increase , 30% higher q1 26 than 25 and not slowing down
Benefits from productivity gains only go to shareholders gp, it’s the foundational principle that underpins the whole world economy :-D
10x productivity with layoffs to compensate. throw in more AI slop causing more outages and you’re working more than before
I mean productivity gains don't usually go towards making the workers life any better. Also I'm still less than convinced there are any net productivity gains from AI anyway.
AI copy pasta misses beats. I've seen people forget to review their comms, and create a lot of confusion, wasting time actually.
well productivity gains are largely met with higher standard of living, quality of life and the upward movement of the lowest classes, for one.
That's not generally true in the US over the last 40 years, where the gains from productivity increases have been accumulated almost entirely by the top classes.
Yes, lower classes have access to many more conveniences then they might have had in earlier decades, but they are working far more hours, and their expected lifespan has started decreasing.
my dad grew up in a house without running water in a town where everyone worked in a mine and the lead was everywhere. he hitchiked to alaska for seasonal work in a fish cannery. Yeah I don't know... i think things are better than they were 40 years ago.
There are still people in America who live without running water. There are still people who work on fishing boats in Alaska. There are still people who hitchhike. This is literally just an anecdote trying to deflect from contemporary problems. I don't see any value in this sort of discourse.
Just because things may have been worse for specific individuals does *not* mean that current problems shouldn't be addressed.
> Just because things may have been worse for specific individuals does not mean that current problems shouldn't be addressed.
Suggesting that things are better now than they were in 1986 for the overwhelming majority of people is not, in any way whatsoever, suggesting that "problems shouldn't be addressed". Come on. Y'all have got to start actually reading things before smashing that reply button.
oh no an anecdote! run away!
You should, especially when said anecdote amounts to "shut the fuck up and be thankful to your corporate overlords peasant."
> i think things are better than they were 40 years ago.
In relative terms, they seem much worse, Americans standing isn’t what it was. In absolute terms, I don’t know. What’s the measure?
I like FSI, which is a dimensionless number taking into account basically the functioning of society and the likelihood for unrest. (Fragile State Index)
It's the highest, at the moment, that it's been since the 1800s. The nadir for the US was in the late 40s early 50s when we had a 92% top marginal tax rate and extremely high social cohesion despite massive WW2 debts. Needless to say the late 40s and early 50s was not exactly utopia, but substantially more stable.
The measure was clearly stated: the life style of that one guy's dad. He's the official consumer well being canary.
What is the relevance of "Americans standings" circa 1986?
Things are better for you than your dad, presumably. Unfortunately, many Americans still live like that, so the conclusion doesn't hold water.
That hasn’t been true for decades in the West, even though per-capita productivity has been steadily rising since WW2.
Are you sure?
From the data I’ve seen the bottom decile Americans consume significantly more per capita compared to even 2006.
e.g. plane travel was completely absent amongst the bottom decile in 2006, like so close to zero mileage per capita per annum it was a rounding error.
Is bottom decile consumption a good measure of economic health? In a way it seems it could signal the opposite, ie in the past the bottom decile was saving that money in an effort to change their economic conditions vs spending it now could indicate a lack of hope for upward mobility.
To your example it seems worth noting that the quality of the air travel experience appears to decline over time as well.
Bottom decile consumption is the best measure of economic health for the bottom decile… it clearly cannot be the best measure across the entirety of the population.
Real physical consumption is by far the hardest metric to game or play tricks with.
Yes technically, some probably are trading a bit of their future prospects for a nicer flight schedule, less red-eyes, etc… But I don’t see how that is relevant at all?
Yes actually, this is remarkably well studied:
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2018/08/07/for-most-...
I hate to imagine what this graph looks like today, given the massive amount of inflation that's happened in the last 6 years.
Plane travel is a very poor proxy for quality of life.
Home ownership, high-quality food, working hours etc. seem far more relevant.
Huh?
People will, intentionally, work longer hours to afford more frequent plane travel. And to upgrade classes, perks, lounge access, etc…
I’m pretty sure there are literally millions of people like that.
Wow. Yes.
It's a modern version of: "we're firing you, but your last task will be to train your lower-cost replacement".
Working out why the workweek is 5 days, non-negotiably, even if you'd be willing to be paid less in proportion, comes down to realizing that it's being maximized subject to the constraint that everybody would flip out if it was 6, and then working out why it's being maximized.
What it's telling you is that a company would rather have 4 people working 5 days a week than 5 people working 4 days a week. The reason for that is, productivity drops a lot when it's spread out over multiple people. The reason behind that is communication overhead - the more context an individual carries in their heads, the less likely their role will exist on an hourly basis in the industry.
So, if anyone wants AI to give us another day off, we need to think about how it can reduce the cost of "context switching" a whole person on and off a task, without simultaneously formalizing our roles so much that it gives us all five. ;-)
> Working out why the workweek is 5 days, non-negotiably, even if you'd be willing to be paid less in proportion, comes down to realizing that it's being maximized subject to the constraint that everybody would flip out if it was 6, and then working out why it's being maximized.
This ignores a lot of historical fighting (sometimes literally!) to get it down to 5 in the first place.
If everyone sufficiently "flips out" about it being 5 then the problem of "reduce the context switching problem" is something the owner can try to figure out.
Cause otherwise, you could find a perfect solution to that problem, and still not have leverage to make ownership actually change anything vs just raise expectations that much higher.
(Meanwhile, some companies are trying to import 996 and push it past 5 for white-collar work anyway, so any sort of non-political, non-disruptive action seems doomed to fail since the status quo is moving the wrong direction.)
The "flipping out" aspect is something that does not seem to have a lot to do with technology at this time or in the past.
>The "flipping out" aspect is something that does not seem to have a lot to do with technology at this time or in the past.
How so? Without technology we wouldn't have a "work week" in the first place and work would be much more directly tied to survival of the community and generally less negotiable in the first place. The "flipping out" came about precisely because technology changed what work was and what the conditions around it were while people noticed that those new expectations and conditions didn't actually seem necessary for their survival (or even much to their personal direct benefit vs the benefit of business owners).
Any technology that lets more be done with less time is an opportunity for a population to make an attempt to claim some of those gains for themselves.
The past had slaves too. The feudal arrangement of tenant farmers was only one system of labor. I don't think union bargaining was ever tied to specific advances in technology.
Sorry, I'm drawing a blank on much history of slaves in a extremely-low-technological society or how it was imposed or ended in those societies, could you provide some examples of what you're meaning exactly by bringing slavery up? Feudalism or other things happening in those centuries is well into the technological era.
Are you saying you can't think of examples from the past of the introduction of technology changing labor dynamics or organization? Say, mechanical agriculture?
The changes are hardly going to always be good - there's no determinism of "new technology means society will get 'better'". But they've often been periods of change, and such periods are when it's easier to influence the direction if you happen to care about the direction of the change.
When you say technological era, do you mean anything after the introduction of potery, writing, or what? Because you can trace slavery back to the earliest recorded civilizations, but it won't be easy to trace it to before a written record.
It is also incentivized because a demand for 25% more employees (assuming constant person-days) shifts power to labor from employers.
Its not a communication overhead, it's that business owners want to maximise their returns on their fixed operating costs subject to the 5 day limit. One extra staff member in a traditional office is extra software license, extra seating, extra hardware, extra HR/payroll/insurance, extra risk, extra training etc etc.
Remember to thank your unions for the weekend.
If it was utilization of fixed capital that motivated the maximum-length workweek of today and centuries past, they wouldn't mind who was on the shifts or how many so long as there were three of them.
I'd be surprised if the jobs where it highly matters which employer covers the shift weren't significantly outnumbered by the ones where it generally doesn't. Labor-as-a-commodity has been an explicit goal of a lot of industrialization management methods.
This analysis makes sense to me. I'll add that the little bit of research that's come out suggests individual people are as productive in four day work weeks as five, which doesn't contradict your point.
The other thing is that if leadership is better—they have stronger vision and coordinate the silos (of people or teams) themselves—the communication overhead is less. The more each level needs to communicate, sync, and align with each other, the more it reflects the top not doing it. This is so thoroughly normalized today that it's hard to see otherwise. As you move down the hierarchy, the theory embedded in the chosen org structure that most tech companies have, is that less communicating should be necessary. This is what middle managers (and product managers) are supposed to be for—coordinating and communicating to take that off the plate of their subordinates. The lack of leadership above is why the managers below get hired. Those managers then do the same and eventually ICs need to coordinate amongst themselves.
I think this is where one of the biggest gains in productivity from AI will come from. Even if it levels off at current levels of “intelligence” a 30% reduction in team size will save alot of communication overhead.
We think of productivity as linear to the number of employees, but it’s more of Log(N) for knowledge work because of the communication overhead. If your AI spend and employee productivity improvement ends up being proportional to headcount thats a linear gain that used to be Log(N).
The drivers behind the asymptotic scaling are the tasks that can't be compartmentalized into prompts, the same tasks that couldn't be compartmentalized into a request for another person to do.
> What it's telling you is that a company would rather have 4 people working 5 days a week than 5 people working 4 days a week. The reason for that is, productivity drops a lot when it's spread out over multiple people.
Why make that assumption? The company has a lot of per-employee fixed costs, which means that it's much more expensive to have 5 employees than 4 employees under the assumption that total productivity is exactly equal in both cases. (And the further assumption that you pay more productive workers more than you pay less productive workers.)
If you want flexibility on the work week, get rid of the concept of "full-time employee" status and make everyone contractors.
Not every role is suitable for contracting. An individual can become a part-time developer by freelancing, but if you do that you get very specific kinds of jobs, ones with high compartmentalization.
Contracting is a legal status. It has nothing to do with the role.
Within software development, most contractors aren't freelancing.
> This article is kind of playful, but I think there’s a serious point here that’s not discussed enough. We’re being asked to usher in huge productivity gains by introducing AI to our workflows, but we’re not asking how does it help us? Not a lot of us stand to directly gain from our employers becoming more productive.
And we shouldn't. Workers should only get the wages they can command in the marketplace and not a penny more, and the smaller the better.
> I know everybody is afraid of getting fired and replaced with AI or whatever right now. But we should be seriously asking in our next all hands meetings if 10x’ing our productivity can get us some days off. Or when our paycheck is going to be multiplied accordingly.
Morally, all benefits of any technology or productivity gain must flow up to the owners, who deserve it all.
But this should be comforting to all of you. I'm sure everyone here owns at least a few thousand dollars in shares. You'll get some dividends and/or capital gains!
My dad was a stock broker in the late 1970s and remembers when most of trading was 100% manual and firms actually had "runners" who would take stock certificates back and forth between trading firms.
He has this great quote about when computers came out:
"We were told 'computers will save you so much time on work tasks that you won't even know what to do with your free time'. I spent the next 30 years working the same number of hours. "
> He has this great quote about when computers came out: "We were told 'computers will save you so much time on work tasks that you won't even know what to do with your free time'. I spent the next 30 years working the same number of hours. "
From about one hundred years ago:
> Now it is true that the needs of human beings may seem to be insatiable. But they fall into two classes --those needs which are absolute in the sense that we feel them whatever the situation of our fellow human beings may be, and those which are relative in the sense that we feel them only if their satisfaction lifts us above, makes us feel superior to, our fellows. Needs of the second class, those which satisfy the desire for superiority, may indeed be insatiable; for the higher the general level, the higher still are they. But this is not so true of the absolute needs-a point may soon be reached, much sooner perhaps than we are all of us aware of, when these needs are satisfied in the sense that we prefer to devote our further energies to non-economic purposes.
[…]
> For many ages to come the old Adam will be so strong in us that everybody will need to do some work if he is to be contented. We shall do more things for ourselves than is usual with the rich to-day, only too glad to have small duties and tasks and routines. But beyond this, we shall endeavour to spread the bread thin on the butter-to make what work there is still to be done to be as widely shared as possible. Three-hour shifts or a fifteen-hour week may put off the problem for a great while. For three hours a day is quite enough to satisfy the old Adam in most of us!
* John Maynard Keynes, "Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren" (1930)
* http://www.econ.yale.edu/smith/econ116a/keynes1.pdf
An essay putting forward / hypothesizing four reasons on why the above did not happen (We haven't spread the wealth around enough; People actually love working; There's no limit to human desires; Leisure is expensive):
* https://www.vox.com/2014/11/20/7254877/keynes-work-leisure
In some European countries, you can actually go on welfare and never work again. It takes some tricks because the state doesn’t like it; and maybe you‘ll want to do some undeclared side jobs for 15h a week and you’ll be comfortable.
I don’t know how such people can live with themselves. But apparently, if you’re immune to the second factor, it is possible, nowadays, to work 15h or less, without any wealth, and lead a good life.
The only thing threatening this status quo is corporations and rich people pulling their wealth into other states; and related, being net importers. I don’t understand why the EU is allowing this to happen. They should grow some teeth finally.
Oh sure, you get free stuff indefinitely if you abuse the system. You sound like that tiktok post about the "infinite free money glitch" that is check fraud.
> it is possible, nowadays, to work 15h or less, without any wealth, and lead a good life.
This is possible even without welfare.
Some friends of mine choose to do this: live in a shared flat, no car, no kids, it's easily doable. They live a good live and are happy.
(Let me add that I'm forty)
Which European countries?
"Good" life might be bit questionable. But Finland at least it is possible. Existence will be meagre without other cashflows in cash. Might even be okay if you can make proper amount of cash.
Spain for example: https://imv.seg-social.es/
Australia no problem. Most liberal welfare in the world
> Australia no problem. Most liberal welfare in the world
Jobseeker is a maximum of $26k per year, but for most people it's going to be around $21k [1]. What else are you using supplement that because that feels like it would be close to the poverty line.
1: https://www.servicesaustralia.gov.au/how-much-jobseeker-paym...
Human had all the industrialization and stuff, yet we work 5 days / week now.
I was looking for facts to disprove your point, but it seems we actually work more than our ancestors.
Medieval folks and hunter-gatherers had plenty of time off. It wasn't until the industrial revolution that we started extending our workweek.
Here's a nice summary of how the workweek looked like, from the AskHistorians subreddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1rf0lb/comme...
I think the FIRE movement is a response to how absurd this is, but it feels kind of wrong that you have to front load all of the saving for your whole life in the first 30 years.
I'd love to work 3 days a week now and be paid a livable amount, rather than grind 5 days a week, getting paid more than I need so I can retire fast. But tech companies don't want you for 3 days a week, its 5 or nothing for most of them.
Well many places allow you to do 80% time (at least in the UK)... but you get 80% pay, 80% bonus, 80% holiday accrual etc too.
And from experience it seems that 80% people need to try damn hard to actually keep it at 80% and not get sucked into doing more to "keep up".
IDK about UK but in Germany it’s the law that employees can request 80% work at 80% pay and can’t be denied except for significant operational reasons and such.
As you said, it can be a double edged sword to be the 80% worker in the otherwise 100% team.
> it seems we actually work more than our ancestors.
Only if you count the hours worked for the local lord and forget about all other mandatory work like:
- growing your own food
- cooking/prepping said food (44 hours per week)
- maintenance
- spinning, weaving and sewing clothes
https://acoup.blog/2025/09/05/collections-life-work-death-an...
https://acoup.blog/2025/10/10/collections-life-work-death-an...
I don't think this is an accurate picture for a number of reasons, first and foremost that these people regularly died from trivially preventable reasons. That luxury today takes a lot of effort from a lot of people.
I'm pretty sure most of white collar HN crowd isn't being ground into dust. It'd be cool to work less though!
Well yeah we didn’t have antibiotics and other knowledge we have now. But that doesn’t change the fact people worked less in the past.
But we have iPhone.
We worked 6 days a week before, Germany got to 5 days only in 1967 after years of strikes.
People waited around a lot before, and since the baseline speed for everything was slower, no one had an edge. Now everything is fast and instantaneous and that’s available to everyone. It’s part of the reason why our lives are so stressful now. I remember my parents working and their work had significantly less stress on a day-to-day basis. Everything was at a nice relaxed human pace. They would be responsible for one excel sheet’s worth of work per week, which we can now do in an hour or two.
Environment doesn't impose stress on us. Our reaction to it does. Learn to control that response, can use it to your advantage when you choose to let it in.
I’m pretty certain there are physiological limits that you can’t just muscle through and stress _can_ be an indicator that you’re reaching said limits.
Yeah, didn't mean it as just need to "muscle through". Just sharing the framing that has helped me.
There are certainly some environments that do. The data is clear that things like loud traffic noise increases stress.
That’s all well and good, but I kind of live for things outside of my career (even though I have a good one).
People work 5 days a week because of protracted violent strikes by unions and socialist revolutionaries forcing governments to recognize labor rights. Prior to that the norm was working 7 days a week, sunup to sundown, with only Christmas off, from adolescence until you died.
SEs would rather play many player versions of the prisoner's dilemma than unionize.
You're right. We need to bring back protracted violent strikes by unions and socialists!
When rights are equal, force wins. This is true for either the worker or the employer. Hence why employers frequently employed private firms to commit said violence on unions.
You know the ones bringing most of the violence were the state and private goons hired by capitalists, right?
Not really true but it’s a nice story
It's a nice story and it's true.
Weekends, sick days, vacation days, being paid in legal tender and not company scrip, maternity leave, safety regulations, disabled affordance, banning child labor, civil rights and womens' rights (while they lasted) and the minimum wage. All due to socialist activism and a non-zero amount of violence.
Hold your socialist jihad propaganda a bit off, sundays were definitely off days for festivities, visiting church etc. Definitely all over Europe, its still frowned upon in many places to do any amount of ie house work during sundays.
It is the fundamental requirement of capitalism to convert every increase in productivity into profit rather than into time.
In a communist society where the people own the means of production collectively the measure of wealth would not be money but disposable free time.
Because human nature it to want more, more than wanting idleness.
Weird to be downvoted for obviously correct analysis...
The four day work week is a prisoner's dilemma. If everyone did it, then we'd all get a payoff, but if someone defects to a longer work week they tend to get ahead at work. Thus we all do it and thus we all lose.
It's funny how underappreciated it is how the five day work week is powered by norms...at least in the US. People assume there are laws about it.
The only laws dictate compensation past certain thresholds, and in the case of well paid knowledge workers those don't even tend to apply. If you ever read HR material referring to your role as "exempt" now you know what you're exempt from.
> but if someone defects to a longer work week they tend to get ahead at work. Thus we all do it and thus we all lose.
A four-day-a-week worker here.
I don't know what you exactly mean, but my personal experience is exactly the opposite. I worked for a startup as a founding engineer, just 4d/w (the CTO was crazily open-minded), and I was never so productive. Doesn't matter that the others were working 5 days, pushing more; it was my responsibility to keep up, and it worked pretty well.
Same now, working for a company with the same arrangement.
And no one is or was "losing."
Out of curiosity, how many hours per day did you work? Was it the same overall time as a 5-day week, just distributed over 4 days, or did you work a whole day less than others?
Alright guys, I'm running for president. 4 day work weeks (8 hours each) for employees or prison.
You could likely get some funding for a PAC based around this. You just have to get Altman, Musk, and the other to realize that it’s a good marketing move.
“Our AI is so awesome and boosts productivity so much that no one has to work another 5 day week, ever again.”
benefits for the commoner? not in a million years they will support that
Musk is in favor for 12-hour days 7 days a week and no unions.
You have my vote. Clearly anyone can do it.
You have my vote. Work to live, don’t live to work.
~90% of Iceland is on a 35-36 hours work week, seems to work fine.
Remote work was also skeptically thought of up until a global pandemic forced it, and while there has been some retreat, 20% of Americans work remotely in some capacity still. Just need a catalyst to challenge norms and rigid mental models.
https://autonomy.work/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/ICELAND_4DW...
https://www.cnn.com/2024/10/25/business/iceland-shorter-work...
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/nov/21/icelan...
>20% of Americans work remotely in some capacity still
That's a pretty abysmal number considering the number who do want remote work and its productivity improvements and its overall lower waste. I'm surprised it's so low.
EU average is 35.9.
My thinking tends to be that our standard work week is an equilibrium among a few different forces. We’re motivated by social norms, capital markets, and biological needs and wants. In places like the U.S. the market forces have been powerful enough to really shift social norms. In tandem they’re probably slowly altering our biology too.
I think you are right. It is practically baked into the American Dream.
I went through a big back and forth with a small startup where I initially negotiated in at 3 days a week. Eventually they said "we really need you the full 5 days" and I explained that I'm gonna do the same amount of work regardless and they could pay me 40% less by agreeing to 3 days. they still wanted me 5 days, so I took the job and just coasted those 2 days from home, they were still very happy with my performance, I ended up quitting in 6 months because I wanted my hours in the day back.
I really think management still doesn't get it.
I personally believe in rolling company shutdowns. Give engineering a week off every quarter. Give product the following week off.
What do you mean? You just need to ban companies from doing 5 days work.
Amusingly, there is literally not even a 7 day work week ban for companies in the US. You can require employees work every day. Employers are just required to pay employees overtime under various conditions beyond 40 hours / five days a week, which is why you don't see it.
And what's more, software engineers are exempt from these rules because of their pay grades. If you're a SWE making a salary the odds are your employer could require you work on Saturdays without running afowl of labor laws.
This is all powered by norms.
it's not powered by norms. In the US, if you want to employ someone more than 40 hours you have to give them extra overtime pay. It's called the Fair Labor Standards Act and it was passed in 1938
Unless you are exempt. Guess what profession tends to be considered exempt?
If you are a SWE, you don't get paid overtime for working that incident on the weekend or going over 40 hours in a week. The only reason you work five days a week is tradition.
Hence the rise of 996 bs
It's easy to get around that; just switch your employees to a salaried arrangement, and now you're exempt from shelling out for overtime pay.
Give the employees enough work such that they have to work on weekends... and... done.
"Yeah, hello, Peter. What's happening? Listen, um, I'm going to need you to go ahead and come in on Saturday. So, if you could be here around 9, that would be great. Mmhkay? Oh, oh, and I almost forgot. I'm also going to need you to go ahead and come in on Sunday too."
Same logic applies internationally.
Pretty much everywhere outside the US has stronger employee protections on this (with a few obvious notable exceptions).
France is a great place to be an employee.
Four day work week for same pay is entirely possible - change how the work happens
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/40691306/
By this logic you could get promoted if you worked six day work weeks.
Have you not seen people who work longer and harder get more promotions? That has been my experience.
Not outside of the tech world, and in many industries if you aren't salaried it can get you fired because they have to pay overtime.
In finance this is the norm. The people who work the most make the most and there are no rules. I’ve seen people get fired for not working weekends. And overtime is not a thing, its just end of year bonuses.
Right, so if it's happening already, nothing is going to change. Four days a week it is!
There's a reason 996 culture is seeping into American startups. Whether it actually makes them more productive in the market remains to be seen.
Yes, it's quite sad that when big tech leadership talks positively about China they really like the exploitive labor practices that the country exhibits.
And this is true… employees who work and produce more, better things often get promoted. Spending more time doing things leads to producing more and better things
Yes, it's just norms. 15 years ago, I worked for a small startup. For a good 8 or 9 months, we were working 6 and sometimes 7 days a week. We weren't contractually required to, but everyone "wanted" to. I use scare quotes there, but I think a lot of people (myself included, for part of it), really did want to.
But ultimately the unsaid thing was: you either work 6/7 days a week, or you get marginalized or fired. And it's not like we weren't putting in the hours on the weekdays; most of us were working 12-hour days, or more. (And wow, we got to drop down to 8-10 on the weekends! So generous!)
Dumb. I'll never do something like that again. Not worth it, and certainly not for someone else's company.
My wife effectively works 3-4 days a week. For mums with young kids its pretty common here in western Europe to have 60% deal, most I know have 80% deal. It means 3-4 days a week just to be sure, not say 6 work hour days.
Made up self-pressure is among the worst things smart folks can do in their lives.
Why isn’t this the case for a six day workweek?
This is a great question and I encourage you to learn the history of it, because it's fascinating. It’s rooted in labor movements and industrialization.
It was, the 40 hour work week was hard fought for.
Also, 996 is apparently a thing
A lot of people work less than full time....
Like...
You can actually work 4 x 8 if you want to. Or 5x5... No gun to your head
Yeah, agreed, you'll have a hard time finding a job with full benis and vacation yada yada, but like,.... Every CEO loves to negotiate
So stop being a bitch
If 4x8 is important to you:
Negotiate
***************
Reply to madrox:
"Demands" is a loaded term. In negotiations you enter with "must haves" and "like to haves"...
Through the course of negotiations you learn new information and reveal your own information....
At the end, whether you take the job or not: you end up with what you deserve. Not what you want.
By my assessment, a lot of people are learning that "deserve" is not a character trait, it's market driven.
This is true, and there is usually a tradeoff you make for it. To your point, it's a negotiation. You usually give something up to get something or be so good you simply cannot be replaced. Such people do not represent the bulk of the workforce, and we're talking about norms here.
Because to that CEO you're talking about, you have to convince them your demands are better than the next candidate who doesn't mind working more hours.
If only there were some kind of third party we could all collectively agree to delegate enforcement of cooperation to...
Interestingly, software engineers are usually considered exempt in the US, meaning they can be required to work more than 40 hours a week without overtime pay if employers choose to.
Unless you're imagining congress do something. I want to shoot fireballs from my fingers, but unfortunately we don't live in a world of magic.
Influencing Congress is wildly easier than shooting fireballs from your fingers. This is supposed to be a site with optimistic people that do things. Imagine what you could do politically with the help of LLMs.
If you think it's so doable, I welcome you to do it. I will be happy to say I am wrong if you pull it off. However, if congress has not even banned a seven day work week I don't see how they will reduce it to four because, of all job segments, tech workers want it.
Meanwhile I did some googling and I can buy a wrist-mounted flamethrower for $175, which is close enough to my fingers to make no difference.
You can lobby Congress to do things, even better you can volunteer at campaigns and try to elect people to Congress that want to do these things.
Acting like we are helpless and the future is determined is straight up loser talk while also not being historically accurate in the slightest.
You should go read about people starting wildcat strikes while working in literal company towns. There is tremendous power when we organize together, a power so great the elites have spent almost a 100 years trying to destroy the fruits of their success.
You, too, can do these things. I welcome you to. I will be happy to say I am wrong. Unions have real potential for creating change. I personally have no interest in joining a union for other reasons, but I am not opposed to them either.
But we weren't talking about unions. We were talking about congress. I think you will find that tech workers are not the only job segment, and far from the most sympathetic due to their wages. Lobbying for an extra day off will not get you far in the face of many more pressing issues, and the party most likely to stand up for workers is more interested in stopping data centers at the moment. Unless you're talking about a time horizon past which I don't think I'll be around to notice.
> enforcement of cooperation
That is an oxymoron. I think you probably meant coercion.
If only. The only way to delegate enforcement is to give them a monopoly on the legitimate use of violence. Unfortunately all such potential organizations are run by human beings, who, when given violence as a tool, will use that violence as a tool.
Benefits for extra productivity filter up to the shareholders not to the workers producing the extra productivity.
This reminds me of the Luddite movement in England. Industrial machines were disrupting the textile industry. The Luddites were not anti technology they were against technology allowing employers to suppress wages and working conditions and for increasing the quality of life and more humane working conditions for the extra productivity.
As we know their movement was not successful giving rise to the bleak images of industrial factory life in England. I think all that will happen is workers will expect to be more productive than before but their skills will be less compensated because “the machine” did most of the work.
https://theconversation.com/im-a-luddite-you-should-be-one-t...
> The Luddites were not anti technology they were against technology allowing employers to suppress wages and working conditions and for increasing the quality of life and more humane working conditions for the extra productivity.
I’m seeing this talking point circulated a lot recently but it’s not really the whole story. Luddites weren’t on a selfless crusade to steal from the rich and give to the poor. They wanted to fight off competition for their specific jobs. They didn’t want anyone having access to cheaper fabrics and clothes and other things because that was their golden goose. They wanted to be in control and force you to go through the inefficient methods to get those things because it benefited themselves.
A closer modern day analog would be something like the dock workers striking to keep automation out of ports. They have a sweet gig and they don’t want machines doing anything to jeopardize their stranglehold on ports, even if it would benefit literally everyone else in the entire country if we could modernize our ports like the rest of the world.
It is you that is spreading misinformation. I suggest everyone thinking Aurornis is right, to read the article below, from the smithsonian.
>But the Luddites themselves “were totally fine with machines,” says Kevin Binfield, editor of the 2004 collection Writings of the Luddites. They confined their attacks to manufacturers who used machines in what they called “a fraudulent and deceitful manner” to get around standard labor practices.
>“They just wanted machines that made high-quality goods,” says Binfield, “and they wanted these machines to be run by workers who had gone through an apprenticeship and got paid decent wages. Those were their only concerns.”[1]
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/what-the-luddites-rea...
[flagged]
We've banned this account. There have been several warnings and the trend is only getting worse. We want HN to be a place to discuss difficult topics, and this should be a good place to discuss the relationship between labor and capital, given that there are many users on each side of the table. But such inflammatory, demeaning terminology as this just poisons the threads and makes it impossible to have constructive discussions.
I don't know, since I cannot afford the boot. Apparently it was priced way out of my range because the boot was unloaded of a ship by an expensive human dock worker.
I never understand why software engineers are so excited about AI as a whole.
If you are excited about the technology, sure. But if you are excited about the increase in productivity, unless you are a manager, I don't really understand it. Like, why? You are not working one hour less than before. If anything, it's more likely you'll get laid off and have trouble finding your next job.
There’s a natural desire for people to want to make things. Most of the time it’s physical: homes, crafts, woodworking. But for a few of us it’s ok for it to be non physical. Actually, that’s part of the allure of programming: you don’t need much more than a computer and some thinking to build incredibly intricate… things. AI is like a brand new power tool. It’s fun to use because you can build faster. I felt a sense of giddiness the first time I used a table saw after using a push saw my whole life.
I think you’re missing the op’s point. Yes it’s fun but you don’t personally get any of the gains. Just more work
Well fun can be the gain
I think you're missing the point. The person you replied to wrote:
> a natural desire for people to want to make things
... and all you can think of is "gains"?
I think a lot of us aren’t rational about it. I tend to feel excited about changes for which productivity is a side effect, even if it’s not my motivation. It’s hard to say no to extending my capabilities and insulating myself from the more boring repetitive tasks.
If your job was 80-90% shoveling and one day you were offered use of an excavator, wouldn’t you find that exciting even while realizing the shoveling part of your career is probably dead?
Some things are just exciting, you know? Not everything is about maximizing one's employment opportunities...
>I never understand why software engineers are so excited about AI as a whole.
Dictating what to exist and what not to to the machine is a power fantasy that's not going to stick around for long, because we'll inevitably reach the point where no human is needed in the loop (or at least not as often as they needed today).
Most people finally feel how they would've felt like if they actually put deliberate practice for hours to work on something. That's why you see comments going "wow, I rewrote this in Rust, and I don't even know Rust". You get to feel like someone who outputs Rust.
rewriting something in Rust used to be "cool" because it was hard. What's the point in it now? How robust are the safety guarantees of something you didn't even write?
I've never had this much fun at work. There was nothing more that I disliked in my job than months long projects with everything already planned out in advance. It made work extremely predictable and boring, the project was already fully thought out, all that needed to be done was the boring bit of writing all the code that you already know how to write, all the fun of exploring different ideas and implementation directions was already done.
People sometimes mention this, but I have a hard time relating.
The amount of code you produce in months of just typing must be enormous, no?
To me it seems no matter the plan there's many unplanned things that I need to handle, and that's where the time is spent. I never had a day in my career where I knew exactly what had to be done and just spent it typing...
I'm not really following. Why is the problem you mentioned no longer a problem? Did your workplace change the way it plans projects now that AI is here?
Planning is the same, implementation time is just way shorter, so we can spend more time on things that are fun. The barrier to see if some outlandish idea works is also nonexistent now, you can generate a (non production ready, of course) MVP in an hour, where before it would take a few days.
Those who are excited are a lot less likely to be out of a job in a year.
I'm not saying that's _why_ they're excited. But it's a great time to be a builder, and a terrible time to be a worker ant.
I'm not excited about producing more, and all that jazz.
But, work IS exciting now - not sure for how long - because AI allows me to work almost at the speed of thought.
Nothing more, nothing less. It's FUN to be able to _just_ think.
Is the end goal to not work? Are we supposed to not enjoy what we work on? Do we not believe in what the company we work for is trying to achieve?
Many of us do not particularly enjoy the work our employer has us do, nor believe in what the company we work for is trying to achieve. It's not like we get to choose its aims, and it's not like we have alternatives where we get to do so either. Our lives are spent working on someone else's goals.
I don't know what's gonna happen man, but I'm gonna have my kicks before the whole shithouse goes up in flames.
- Jim Morrison
> I never understand why software engineers are so excited about AI as a whole.
I think it's mostly young graduates that have not been ground down by the wheel of labour just yet, and old/ex engineers that are able to build something after years of being out of practice.
Hard for me to be excited about being asked to do more for the same pay, to be measured on idiotic metrics, to compete with overconfident but inept people, when I'm reaching my 40s. I am at the peak of my engineering skills and the bottom of my patience.
I've worked 3x12, 4x10, and 5x8, without AI. I think I was most productive on the 3x12 schedule. On the days I worked, I was able to lock in and get a lot done, and had a significant amount of time outside of the normal working hours, which were free from meetings and distractions. During those 3 days all I really did was work and sleep. On the 4 days off I was able to rest and recover and actually have a life. It also gave my mind time to process issues in the background. When I had an ah-ha moment during my time off, I could note it down, and when I showed up on a work day, I was able to solve some of those problems I wasn't able to solve in the moment. It was a great system.
I've been trying to figure out how to bring the idea up to my boss of going back to it... at least the 4x10.
> During those 3 days all I really did was work and sleep.
This is why 3x12 is not workable for average families. If you have kids and want to see them, 3x12 only works if you start really really early, then get to bed early when the kids do too.
I enjoyed 4x10 when I did it, but there were some real problems with some employees trying to adapt. Anecdotally we were seeing a lot of people who would barely work until the 8 hour mark and then just zone out or socialize while they waited the clock out at the end of the day.
Which is all too bad for those of us who work well with longer days.
IME most people don't have more than 4 (maybe 5) hours of effective heavy cognitive / creative energy in a given day. Of course YMMV, and it's common to have periods of sustained output when deeply committed to and energized by something, but over the long haul, week in, week out, splitting the workday into roughly 8h sleep, 8h work, 8h everything else, with 2/7 days off plus many holidays and some weeks of paid vacation seems like a reasonable default to me -- for the traditional salaried role. If your preferences deviate much from that baseline, the entrepreneurial / consulting / fractional approach would probably be better aligned.
I think that’s more about what you do than how you do it. And sometimes when to do it.
You could try a data engineer’s life which is full of meetings, ad-hoc tasks and other BS —- everything that screams that this is not a real engineer job.
in tech, we (frequently are expected to) work 5x12!
996 FTW!
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/996_working_hour_system
I worked a job before that did require some heavy thinking, design, solving problems, etc., and for some reason I only get creative from 1am to 4am, and I did an amazing job in that period for whatever work was required, only later that my boss didn’t like it and wanted to force me to do normal schedule, in the office, my outcome degraded significantly and eventually had to leave the work, it’s just I couldn’t handle the mornings besides replying to some emails.
Effective working hours are not set by absolute productivity - they are set by an equilibrium between two forces:
1. Competitive market dynamics. If you only work four days a week, other employees and companies who are willing to work five days a week will do so and get ahead of you, and you are more likely to get fired or to go out of business. This force pushes us all to work longer (and harder) so we have more money to enjoy in our leisure time.
2. A society's willingness to sacrifice days of leisure for days of work. There are only seven days in a week. The tradeoff between work and leisure - production and consumption - is ultimately what determines how hard we all work. This force pushes us all to work less so we have more time to spend our money.
Economists think on the margin. It's easy to demonstrate these two principles to yourself by thinking through worked examples from different starting points.
Whether the equilibrium lands at 2 days of work to 5 days of leisure, or 5 days of work to 2 days of leisure, depends on our collective preferences, which vary between countries and cultures but have tended to be relatively durable over time.
No technology so far has shifted this balance much - not the steam engine, the industrial revolution, the invention of the personal computer, the internet - and there's no reason to believe "AI" will be any different.
The logical conclusion of this is that - assuming we're all 10x more productive - we'll still be working 5 days and enjoying 2 days a week, but we'll consume 10x more, or everything we consume will be 10x higher quality. Hardly a bad thing.
Attraction towards equilibrium is real, but that equilibrium is not a given. It comes from intrinsic biological constraints, individual preferences, cultural norms, ideology, habits and expectations. Even fixing individual preference, the aggregate preferences is structurally mediated (collective or individual bargaining, labour laws). Through all those factors there's path dependency and friction towards equilibrium.
The point is: "a society's willingness" is doing a _huge_ amount of work in that framing. This willingness is precisely what is up for debate when we discuss work days.
The whole of humanity is one big system of self-feedbacks. Equilibria are only reached with respect to constraints (otherwise there is only one equilibrium, which is heat death!). The more you zoom out, the more "givens" come up for their own analysis.
First sensible take I've seen in this thread. People especially seem to forget the consequences of #1: The company where everyone is working 0.5 days a week will almost certainly get outcompeted, very quickly, by the company where everyone is working 5 days a week. In fact company #2 can probably precompute company #1 even if they have much lower quality staff on average.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_average_a...
> So can I just take Friday off? From here on out, I’ll work Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, and then take Friday off.
Yeah, if you switch to working as an independent contractor, you can work any amount of time you want. If you run your own business, you can work crazy hours or none at all. The world is truly your oyster
I'm not being facetious either. That's exactly what I did, and I got what I asked for
We can all talk about supply and demand here, whether companies should be forced to do X or Y, and how Keynes got his 15 hour work week prediction so wrong, ad nauseam. But if you truly want something beyond the talk, like a more flexible work schedule, there's real ways to get it right now
Yes, you can take the day off, but your pay will be reduced by 20%. Just because technology and productivity are advancing doesn’t mean you can work less and still get the same pay. By that logic, hardly anyone would need to work today, as productivity has increased many times over compared to previous centuries. If one company works less, then other companies that work more have an advantage. That’s why it doesn’t work.
"Everybody will need to do some work if he is to be contented ... a 15-hour week may put off the problem for a great while. For 3 hours a day is quite enough to satisfy the old Adam in most of us!" - Keynes, 1930
Though this was a 100-year prediction so we still got three and half to go!
I work 3 days one week, 4 days the next week. Never more than 3 days in a row. It's 12 hour shifts, which sucked at first, but I got used to it pretty quick. The free time is amazing. I took 2 days vacation this week and ended up with 9 days off in a row because of the holiday.
What field? Medical? Those scheduled seem common for medicine and fire/police.
I don't want to get too specific, but I'm a supervisor at a factory. Food stuff.
My girlfriend had a similar schedule when she worked at a hospital.
Good shoes like Brooks or Hoka and a good sleep schedule and it's doable. I only work 15 or 16 days a month. I work every other weekend, but the weekends I have off are 3 days.
it seems like the lack of consistency would b a net negative in life quality and very annoying to schedule around
Oh it totally is for some people. I don't have or want kids so that's not an issue for me. Scheduling things with friends isn't usually too hard, just have to be more intentional about it/schedule in advance. I like having days off during the week to get errands done when most other people are at work. And if I do need a weekend off that's usually fine because I accrue enough vacation hours where I usually end up selling back or rolling some over into the next year.
ya overall i am net jealous as fuck of your schedule still lol
I did it for a summer in University and I didn't have to work night shifts, it was amazing to be honest I would do it again if I never had to work nights.
Maynard Keynes posited a future 15 hour work week in 1930 based on the productivity gains after WW1, nearly 100 years ago now.
http://www.econ.yale.edu/smith/econ116a/keynes1.pdf
The average work time in European societies is probably that. The majority of citizens don’t work (too young, studying, sick, unemployed, retired). But it’s changing fast, the rich are no longer accepting this situation. The ones working get happily manipulated into believing others should suffer as much as they do, instead of organizing lifestyles into a more frugal fashion for the benefit of all.
WFH alone, let alone compressed work schedules, can improve the "fertility crisis": https://www.nber.org/papers/w34963
Couples (in prime reproducing age) where both members WFH at least 1 day a week have 0.32 more live births per woman per lifetime than couples where neither does.
> Can we have the day off?
Yeah, like when the steam engine was invented?
Until we fix the artificial scarcity of necessities (particularly housing), peer competition ensures that people will work as hard as they practically can in order to outbid their peers for said necessities.
We could have abundance, but then people might not have to maximize their efforts to produce wealth for capital holders.
My wife and I work full time so we could outbid other people who wanted our house.
What strikes me a significant percentage of the time I see posts like this and the responses to it is how shit other people’s jobs seem and how unfair their employers appear to be. I don’t know if this is because it’s US centric or tech centric or just full of people under a particular HN-like duress. But, man, it sounds crappy out there. Is there anyone here who actually likes what they do, has a decent employer, has a nice life…?
Yes, many. People just don't complain about their lobster being too buttery or their steak too juicy.
Sure, they're just less likely to comment about it.
the four day work week has been trialed many times and already would have been the same or higher productivity before agents, honestly. if agents get really good let's just go to 3?
From an economic flow point of view:
Time not spent working could be time working on spending.
Yes. The leisure industry is, in fact, a real industry, and it is a service industry that creates a lot of employment.
But if people's wages don't increase when we go from a 5- to 4-day work week, where do consumers get the extra money to spend on that extra day off?
If agents get really good maybe we can just not work?
We'll just be serfs of the AI billionaires.
we already are son.
No because the shareholders want more value. The best the C suite can do is downsize the team from 5 to 4 (or 3 if you like)
Cut it in half and double the workforce.
[delayed]
Star Trek post-scarcity economy when??
https://rickwebb.medium.com/the-economics-of-star-trek-29bab...
What Star Trek doesn't show is how they got there. I promise you it's going to be extremely painful, but once we're on the other side it'll be worth it.
I argue - there's nothing we can do to stop it; humanity, I mean. We will either achieve Star Trek or get wiped out as a species.
As a Kardashev Type 3, we will have achieved full automation. I'll leave the door open for Elysium problems, but hopefully Mr. Damon will save us then too.
Star Trek predicted riots around now because of vast numbers of unemployed.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Past_Tense_(Star_Trek:_Deep_Sp...
A couple of years ago, in fact. We're running late.
Star Trek might not show exactly how we got there, but they did put a lot of emphasis that humanity had to almost destroy itself before getting there.
WWIII lasted 25 years and it took another 100 years to rebuild after that. WWIII in universe is also scheduled for 2026 I believe.
we are very well past post-scarcity.
we definitely choose consumption over free time for the most part.
people generally choose nicer home, starbucks, vacay, neflix over work hours or retirement.
so this is a cultural issue
We are very well past the point where technology could allow post-scarcity.
Post-scarcity is no longer technological problem, it's a political one. But it's still very much a problem, so no, we are not anywhere near post-scarcity.
I also don't understand the point you're making about people wanting to spend $15 on netflix or $12 on a coffee. Would everybody cutting netflix and lattes allow us to live in that utopia more quickly?
Yes, dropping consumption would immediately allow us to work 2-3 days a week.
It's far more a cultural problem than political.
We starting hitting post-scarcity at the start of the 19th century, towards the end of the industrial revolution [1]
We were growing enough food, housing is actually not that expensive, we were 'starting to not need that much more'.
This is when we started marketing consumption to the population - it was the only way to grow the economy.
We have far, far more than we need for basic satiety.
It's not quite so simple though - many innovations that we 'truly want', like medicines and health tech - come out of the economy as a whole and would not be possible were that the only hugely important sector.
We work 5 days on 2 days off because that's the very strongly entrenched social contract, it's the 'labour equilibrium'.
No amount of tech or AI will change that - unless we collectively agree to change the rules.
The social contract is slightly different in different countries, and nobody seems to have figured out how to work on 2-3 days, I believe that we mostly prefer the way it is. Maybe 4 day weeks would be more amenable.
But the marginal income from the 4th day ... I think people would prefer to work it rather than not.
[1] https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/a-brief-history-of-consum...
Yes, the hardest problem for me is the social aspect of opting out of consumerism. It makes most people feel really uncomfortable, like being sober in a group of social alcoholics. Clothes don’t look cool enough. Local vacations are seen as boring. Not going to restaurants is perceived as a lack of social aptitude.
Another problem is housing and living environment. Although it is very much possible to live in a smaller space, nice neighborhoods (quiet, clean, green) are expensive.
But basic necessities are almost free in rich societies, if you have time.
It’s the healthcare for me.
Not until aliens land and show us the way. I firmly believe we aren’t presently capable of allowing a post-scarcity economy to exist — too much stuff is based on scarcity. So much so that we create scarcity instead of giving away excess. I’m thinking of food specifically.
If "stuff" === power over other people, then agree 100%.
There are people out there who would rather other people starve than they have one iota less prestige, power, influence or luxury. And, unfortunately, they are the people who wield most of the power in our society.
We have to solve that before we can solve the economics, which is the easy part.
We agree.
This entire thread is drenched in class consciousness and I am here for it.
The issue of productivity and demand has existed for a long time, but the explosion in productivity caused by the AI trend has made it even more apparent: in most markets, demand can grow indefinitely, and products always have room for improvement. Increased productivity only intensifies competition, and while actual workers are not truly liberated, their products do benefit consumers.
Did we get days off when industrialization bumped output? Days off when industrial agriculture made food supplies abundant? Did we get days off when computers automated administrative office tasks?
As someone who negotiated 4 day weeks since early 2020 its been awesome. I get chores and yard work done and more family time every week. Wish it was standard.
My Dad used to cover a territory in the Northeast where he was on the road for up to 2 weeks at a time. Sometimes we'd see him just long enough for him to grab a haircut and remember everyone's names in the right order. Everyday he showed up to work he needed to be in a full suit and tie. Everyone did. If those suits weren't in good shape, and you weren't on time they were probably picking a different guy for promotion.
The expectation for him was to work 50-60 hours a week, not including commute, getting ready for work, and corporate social events. Time off was strictly 2 weeks until you hit a certain level and then you'd get 3 weeks. He didn't get sick often but if he was he still went to work.
Dad had it good. I used to jump on landscaping crews during the summer in SoCal and watch 60 year old guys break their backs for 12 hours to get ~$250 a day. I'd do it on the weekends for spending money.
I enjoyed the article but reading through all of the comments in this thread I'm genuinely surprised by the lack of appreciation for how good we have it. There's a "demographic" on HN and I'm pretty confident it aint the guys doing concrete work or running vampire hours at the local 7-11.
Moving around some 1s and 0s in between some coffee and meetings even at the bad companies isn't that rough in the grand scheme of things. I get what the article is trying to say - with all the productivity improvements when do the grunts get a little bit of those gains back?Unfortunately thats not how it works. It's "Red Queen Theory"... when something new changes the game you adapt or die - "It takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place."
There's always a comment saying "Don't ask for better, because someone else had worse". Fuck that. I want better and I want everyone else to have it too.
Ask for better. Find a way to make things better. Find a way to make things better for others.
... but appreciate what you have too
Just because someone else has it worse, it doesn't mean we can't want for something better for ourselves.
And I personally would like that something better for the people who have it worse, too.
You can absolutely negotiate to work 4 days weeks and get 80% salary. I've been working like this for the last 3-4 years.
Top professionals whose comp is tied to performance didn't work 40hr 9-5s in the first place - but their comp is tied to performance, so when they have 10x the output they are compensated accordingly
Roles that come with a 40hr work week were already decoupled from performance, if AI made those workers 10x more productive they will rarely see the fruits of their productivity
On an individual level it seems like the correct move is to either move to a role that rewards output or organize and get equity comp as part of everyone's package
Do you know people who have gotten 10x raises due to increased output since AI came out? The one group I can think of is workers at AI companies but that seems more like a gold rush situation than anything
AI companies have reaped the most benefit out of AI, so naturally most 10xers come from people who have equity in those companies that grow really fast
I don't think the average person has even close to a 10x output increase due to AI.
How can one move horizontally and then vertically? I have been thinking about getting into a more technical position. I work as a data engineer but essentially just a data modeller while manager and staff engineer took all the fun jobs -- it is even very hard to know what they are working on, so it is impossible to even ask for certain tickets.
And now with AI coming out in hot, and companies only hiring seniors, I found it very hard to move horizontally. It is not like I can't take a pay cut, but people simply won't hire someone who takes some time to learn the rope.
I might as well figure out how to increase my Charisma to 18 and sleep with someone at the top /s
Shoot, I'd be happy with free health care.
Many people would be happy with just a job in these times.
There was an article here, 18 years ago, called The Gospel of Consumption. It also noticed that since 1950s, the productivity had gone so far, it would have been enough to work just 2 hours a day.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=182425
Given the pace of AI growth, it is quite possible to have years off if layoffs begin in many places. We are training AI to replace many jobs. It seems like entry-level jobs are the only ones affected, but that's for now. Anything short of executive level jobs are perhaps on the chopping block for time to come. Now, why wouldn't be execs be replaced? They could, but they wouldn't cut themselves off.
> if layoffs begin
In the horrible, distant future known as 2023.
The solution to this is political. Under hyper-efficient capitalism, if there is truly such a 10x productivity improvement, a large number of people will be laid off in response and the rest will be squeezed. This is already happening.
The logical response should be to elect left-leaning politicians that recognize this; or educate your existing left-leaning politicians; or stand for office yourself with this as your platform.
If there are huge fines on any AI-related layoffs, substantially higher taxes on the top 1%, and an extra wealth tax then maybe we can fund some kind of UBI or stopgap support for the masses that will lose their jobs.
Also start a union at your company and sue them if they retaliate.
Depending on your workplace and professional circle, influencing political opinions may be easier than unionizing. But both can be done.
The author's https://mlsu.io/posts/llm/cheats/ is also pretty good.
Thanks for sharing. Well worth the read. They’re a good writer
Thank you both! The comments in this corner of the thread made my day.
Nearly 100 years ago, John Maynard Keynes said that by now we'd be working just 15 hours a week, because productivity gains would mean we could get a whole work-week of work done in that time.
In reality, higher productivity just means companies can do more with the same amount of time/effort, and so nothing will change. Wage-slaving will still be wage-slaving. We won't move the bar toward more leisure time; we'll move the bar toward more work completed in the same amount of time.
Then again, the labor movement gave us the 5-day work week, and the concept of weekends for resting from work. Maybe a new labor movement can give us more days a week off. Labor movements have been declining of late, of course, but perhaps that sort of thing can be reversed.
So I freelance and I still write all the code by hand. I'm not sure how to honestly inject LLM code and bill for it. It would also probably cause me a lot of downstream problems if I did. But I asked my largest client if they were willing to begin donating $20k a year to my retirement fund if I'm going to be helping them to phase me out over some number of years. They did agree to that.
The reality is that if you were already a 10x coder, you can't be 10x more productive even if the LLMs made you so, because there's only so much work.
And even just using LLMs in my private projects, I feel my daily coding skills slipping. I want to ask Claude to do some dumb API integration instead of doing it myself. But I know if I don't do it myself, I'll be lost at sea and never able to debug it without more Claude.
This is a drunk state of mind post, feel free to ignore it.
I feel like we're actually getting there with one of my clients. The business is very close to being constrained on the customer again.
A lot of the paradox in productivity and labor may be attributable to a severe debt that needs to be paid down and now finally can be. Some of the 996 (or 007) working hour system stuff is coming from your peers feeling this new hope. The tone will continue to shift as backlogs get exhausted.
If you are pure software play I think you are on track to get more days off than you bargained for, one way or the other.
In a capitalist system, the owners don’t owe you anything but your salary. And if they fire you, they no longer owe you a salary.
This is the most important thing about AI, that the policymakers and AI companies need to discuss more. If AI is making us, as a race, more productive, who is reaping the benefits of that productivity?
The AI companies and their investors. Full stop.
This reminds me of Ted Chiang's point that fear of technology is really fear of capitalism. https://kottke.org/21/04/ted-chiang-fears-of-technology-are-...
"Most of the things that we worry about under the mode of capitalism that the U.S practices, that is going to put people out of work, that is going to make people’s lives harder, because corporations will see it as a way to increase their profits and reduce their costs."
> It’s not that technology fundamentally is about putting people out of work.
The problem is, it has always been that way - and not just in the US. The introduction of any kind of new technology or other way of disproportionately improving corporate bottom lines has always led to job losses, the key thing is what governments do in response to it.
The Industrial Revolution for example led to widespread devastation, the shift from agriculture being the dominant employer to industry and service sectors did not (as the ag workers were absorbed by the rapidly growing other sectors), the globalization / offshoring wave of neoliberalism once again led to widespread devastation, and AI will probably again lead to devastation.
And if Sam Altman isn't arrested for his blatant RAM market manipulation... I'm pretty sure there will be either people with pitchforks at the end or he will have ushered in, in retrospective, a new era of "stuff that uber rich people can get away with".
All of those things also resulted in the massive increase in the quality of life for everyone. Nobody will suggest we ban cars and go back to horse and buggies so cowboys can have jobs.
Yeah but the transition is rough. For example when we have autonomous vehicles what are all those drivers going to do. You might saw "tough luck" but we are a society not just an economy.
Honestly if we went back to horses but had good public transportation as well (buses, trains, airports) it could be pretty sweet
I know most people don’t agree with that but it seems nice to me
> All of those things also resulted in the massive increase in the quality of life for everyone.
Yes, everyone has a modern smartphone now. Cool, thanks. But last time I checked, can't pay my rent with a smartphone when I'm out of a job.
> Nobody will suggest we ban cars and go back to horse and buggies so cowboys can have jobs.
Maybe not that, but have you looked at sustainable farming movements? In farming, there is a growing movement believing that the way we do farming - basically, ever larger and larger central operations running farms with tens if not hundreds of thousands of animals or acres upon acres of monoculture crops - is no longer sustainable, as the externalities get too serious to be able to ignore:
Biodiversity loss, land erosion (when everything is just the same crop from horizon to horizon and no bushes, wind and rain has an easy time carrying away soil after harvest), an increasing vulnerability to all kinds of pests...
But in order to get smaller, you need people again, because a tractor costing half a million dollars won't ever make the money back on a small farm.
Everything you say is correct but it comes with a massive decrease in quality of life for the average person. Food will be 5x the cost, with less variety. Nobody wants to till the land anymore. Just like people 100 years ago didn't want to be hunters.
Are you willing to part with your smartphone and computer? I would bet not.
Why would I have to part with some of the cheapest things I own on a dollars-per-day basis? That's why GP mocked the comparison to smartphones.
That said, sustainable farming doesn't require very small farms, and it doesn't require more than 1% of the population to work on farms.
> Food will be 5x the cost, with less variety.
Highly disagree. If anything we'll see more variety because mass produced food has settled on a very limited set of breeds (both for plants and animals) to keep timing and yield consistent.
I agree for the most part, but fear of technological weapons is sort of the opposite of capitalism. So much of our technology stack was built by the government for warfare (including the internet) and in that sense is a form of socialism.
I fear being targeted by an AI drone and mass surveillance. Neither of which are driven by capitalism (although being targeted by either of those by some billionaire because I refuse to RTO is related).
How are neither of them being driven by capitalism?
U.S. becomes more authoritarian -> you are more afraid of being targeted by an AI drone and mass surveillance -> companies that make those weapons of war for the government (prime contractors) make billions -> they use their money to influence politics and public opinion -> U.S. becomes more authoritarian -> etc.
Capitalism is certainly one lever, but were we a communist country, I would still be afraid of the same thing. Centralization of power and ideology driving technological progress is in essence what I think we should all worry about.
We liked to pretend that our current technology wave wasn't driven by any ideology at all, so much so that it became a dirty word. But look at these billionaires talking amongst themselves, look at Thiel, look at Musk: their ideology is so compelling and they're so willing to go to bat for it that it materialized in the current state of affairs; and now only ideologies that are different from theirs are in fact dirty words.
<sarcasm should_be="obvious"> When your employer lays you off, you can take as many days off as you want! </sarcasm>
No, gains of productivity exclusively accrue to the owners of capital. Learn your place, human capital.
It seems to me that cranking up the heat on developers would not be the only way to harness this increase in productivity, if it's real. For instance just let projects finish on time, or on a predictable timeline.
End the "software crisis" that's been with us since the 1960s. This would result in a quality-of-life improvement for every manager, stakeholder, user, etc.
Another idea: Alleviate some side effects of the crisis, such as vital functions being taken care of by "shadow IT" for decades.
Abolish Excel as the front end for business computation.
Oh, don't worry. The way things are going with AI you're going to get a lot of days off.
Yes, the next year off as well because they will fire you.
Excellent. Besides the article, I've always questioned myself many many times how is it that the whole world has agreed that we have to work 5 days and rest 2. Why is it that, why can't be 4 and 3? I truly wish that in general we work a bit less. Even if it is not a whole day off, then having a workday of around 6 hours would mean that you could still have some free time for yourself.
Not saying we shouldn't do 4-day weeks (we should), but you can sorta do this for short periods. Take a vacation day every Friday through summer. For 14 vacation days that's 3.5 months of 4-day weeks. Block your schedule on Fridays with lots of random meetings ("meeting friday!"). If you don't tell anybody, nobody really notices.
Sadly this won’t happen for the same reasons that the median salary hasn’t increased with increases in productivity over the past few decades. You are compensated (or given time off) based on what your employer can get away with, not based on what they get in return. The system is designed to accrue all excess value to shareholders, not employees.
Under capitalism is a question of either the benevolence of your employer (rare but it may happen), or your capacity to impose a day off
In turn, your capacity to impose a day off is a question of either your personal power or of class struggle.
Of course when you arrive at the question of the class struggle, the discourse becomes funny
The AI ultralords dream is a world with a few billion less humans. We will work till we die and we wont own anything.
Back when I was a young lad I wanted engineering to be a real discipline - formal qualifications, codes, held to account, and limitations on who could call themself an Engineer(TM).
But the money was so good we (The royal we) didn't think we needed it, that would just get in the way. Did you see how much FB employees were getting paid in 2015! Insanity! Now, even the skutters have a better union than us.
A plumber, or an electrician has a better union, and hence rights and protection than us.
But if you're building a brand new field you can still build a guild.
You can have the day off. Don't think for a million years you will be paid for it.
Exactly. In the four days that you worked you produced 40 days of output, so you should get 40x the pay. It would be unreasonable for the company to pay you 50x what you were getting before... they do have shareholders to think about after all.
I can promise you this is not how the MBAs are reading the situation.
What are you talking about? Four days work = four days of output, by definition.
One of the top 3 liberating experiences I've had was escaping wage labor. There's just something so utterly insulting about the whole affair.
I'm very frustrated that I don't have time to learn stuffs on job. They basically assume the productivity I'm supposed to get from using AI on tasks I'm familiar with.
And it definitely doesn't help when everyone hires "Seniors" only, so it's virtually impossible to switch tracks unless I sleep with the CXOs I guess. I have been nudging towards system programming for the previous 8 years, starting as a data analyst, to BI developer, and to data engineer -- well, I guess data engineer is my last stop for life.
This is certainly a fun exercise in economics. By taking a shortened work-week, should the companies then pay us 80% of our current comp? Or maybe a little less since they will have to pay for the added tokens we are now using as part of our job that we used to do manually (i.e. time)? Or perhaps we are able to justify that now they can save overhead by reducing facilities costs by 20% as well. Oh but maybe their business lease has a continuous occupancy clause and now the reduction in foot traffic causes them to get penalized so they need to reduce our salaries even more. Slippery slope my friend.
No. They should give you 40x your current pay. The AI made you 10x more productive, and you worked four days, so you generated 40x the economic output. As such, you should get 40x in pay. At this point, you're doing the company a favor by taking a day off as otherwise they wouldn't be able to afford you.
Sounds like the AI should get 36x the current pay. It's not as if the employee is bringing that to the table.
Who said AI doesn't request compensation? We are not sure yet. One day when GPT10.0 released, he might request dollars to people.
Your data is compensation enough. AI is just happy to chat with you :-)
Oof, having a skillset so pedestrian that any incremental gain in efficiency needs to be kicked upwards must be tough.
If I am able to do 10x work with a tool that costs you Y, then my wages should rise by 10x - Y.
Then, let's do a 3 day work week and multiply it by 0.6.
Pretty simple math
Sure, unless others are willing to do your job for less than that.
Others are willing to do my job for less. And yet... here I am making what I make.
Are we paying people for their time, or for the results of their time?
If it's just time, then why are we doing so much overtime?
Sorry, exactly what is a slippery slope?
You wrote a lot of words, but none of them describe a slippery slope, or explain how a supposed 10x increase in productivity precludes a 20% reduction in hours worked.
You should not be asking Elon if you can work 4 days a week; he believes you should already be working 7.
You seem to be under the mistaken belief that AI (or insert technology) is here to make your life easier and not to make your company's owners richer.
Farm, and you won't have to scavenge for food.
Get a tractor, and spend less time farming.
The factory will save time making tractors, so everybody can have one.
Computers will make the factories more efficient.
AI will make the computers more efficient.
Foraging was so good we only had to work like 2h a day. We had to start farming simply because the population growth from foraging was exponential and we have ran out of easy-to-forage ecosystems.
We've also ran out of freedom at that point. We used to simply walk away from bullies, but that was no longer possible, with the farm and all.
At some point bullies stopped charging for racket. They stole the land and told us we are now working under them, for them.
From experience, take Monday off instead of Friday and optimally also Wednesday.
Fine, we'll even call it "Elons Gambit" if that helps - in exchange for accepting AI in our lives 3 day weekends from here on out ...forever.
Arguably this is what retirement is, no? Productivity gains did create extra leisure time. It's just we save all the leisure for retirement.
They mainly created extra value for shareholders
The 4 day work week was already proven to improve productivity before LLMs. We could probably do a 3 day workweek with Claude Code!
How about you meet me half way and work 996 instead?
4 day work weeks have a lot of potential benefits
Instead of asking for the day off, some startups should just implement the practice and popularize it
I was always partial to the “make Wednesday a second weekend” plan. No more hump day and 2 “Fridays”. Of course that is also 2 “Mondays”
I have a similar wacky plan I like to call "Delete Thursday". Four day work week, and more weekends a year just by having six days a week instead of seven.
I was very happy working extra (I won't call them long) hours when I first learned about computing. A bit later on when I started working for financial entities I felt a bit different - the work was interesting, but I just wasn't prepared to sacrifice my time. And if we can have the day off, I think that can only be to the good.
Brilliant. This is exactly what is needed. AI day, Saturday, Sunday. Across the work force, even those not directly impacted by AI. And obviously, those 3 days can be flexibly arranged, so that we can shop all week long.
I get where the writer is coming from, but it misses one very important point.
>> If AI is going to 10x our productivity across the board, that means that I should be able to produce the same amount of output by midday on Monday that, in the before times, would have taken all week.
You are thinking of productivity as "code written". And certainly that part of your job will get more productive.
But that is just something you do when you're not in meetings. (or when you're in a meeting, but the camera is off, and you're not really listening). Your real job is to attend meetings. And unfortunately AI can't help with that (yet).
(I'm not even being sarcastic. Most programmers don't realize that they have been hired to have meetings.)
What it can do is free you up from the pesky code-writing part of your job, freeing you up to attend even more meetings. And this does indeed make management happy because (seriously now) their job is having meetings, and you being "unavailable" (because you know, you want to program) was hindering them in the first place.
So no, you can't have Friday off, but now that you mention it, let's set aside that time for "team building" exercises...
AI definitely helps with attending meetings and writing documents that no one will read (both of which are huge parts of any modern job). The AI notes from any given meeting give you all of the content in 1/10th of the time.
I don't disagree that AI tools around meetings are cool. But they don't help you to "not attend the meeting". (not yet anyway).
Many meetings have 0% content "that applies to you". But that doesn't stop you being "added to meetings".
I agree with the premise of time away being easier. I don’t think the models/harnesses are there yet. There’s still a good amount of human input required to generate quality work.
So yes, take the day off but the models still need you to steer them when you’re back
The C suit would rather that everyone takes all days off.
What they haven't yet explained is how everyone is supposed to earn money to buy AI produced goods.
But, have you thought of the shareholders?
If we all 10x our productivity, then we also 10x the cost of taking a day off and theoretically progress is compounding, so it's even costlier...oh no.
Best the powers that be can do is increase outsourcing since a 15$ an hour engineer + ai is most of the way to a 70$ an hour engineer + ai.
If I was smarter I’d have 200k in my 401k now. Assuming I live cheap in Vietnam and a good yield I’d just live off 10k usd per year
Where are you finding these $15/hr engineers that can pump out good PRs with Claude Code? I've taken a peak at a couple of firms and I am disappointed by their output.
I'm fairly certain a lot of people do this. They don't literally take a day off, but just work fewer hours or less hard. And this makes sense, there is a strong incentive to not give away all the productivity gains to your employer.
Relevant: https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/
the concern would be that this new ability will actually increase competition and give us less than we had before
this is not something that can just be blamed on the "CEOs/execs/shareholders" of the world. it is evolutionary competition - unless we can ALL join forces to draw the line somewhere, someone will choose to defect from the agreement to "just work less", because doing so will make them succeed at the expense of others. even if everyone from one country agrees, the other competing country that defects and works 996 with agents will "win" and conquer the lazy country.
I wish I knew what to do to fix it, doesn't seem sustainable but I don't know how to make all of humanity cooperate without doing something even worse
If anything, China proves that 996 is not sustainable as it simply leads to involution and attrition. At best the populace benefits in a few hyper-focused industries such as take-out and e-commerce, but average life quality is still far behind "lazy countries".
sadly life quality is not the thing that the competitive system is maximizing for, and thats one of the article's points. we compete to our own detriment, but to not compete is to become extinct
Did you just link to a rat website as if that is a good source?
A rat website? What does this mean, I'm out of the loop with SSC?
It's a pejorative shorthand for "Rationalist".
Why is "rationalist" suddenly a pejorative?
I am definitely out of the loop. I assume it is used pejoratively only by self-labelled idiots?
I am not in the loop either. From what i've gleaned, it's more a rejection of the specific internet-based community that embraced such ideas in the early 2000's. But I can't speak on behalf of their beliefs or those of their detractors. Was just trying to help out on the term itself.
Good source for what? I'm just trying to point to a concept, an idea. There's no "facts" here, just speculation. If you disagree with the point there, why don't you just say what you think is true instead, I'm happy to discuss the ways in which the article is wrong
unless we can ALL join forces to draw the line somewhere, someone will choose to defect from the agreement to "just work less",
> We already did draw the line and we can redraw it. We drew the line very strongly at 40 hours, 4 days a week. That is the "official" expected hours for most salaried employees.
because doing so will make them succeed at the expense of others.
> This already happens. People making salary, 40 hours, that work 50, 60, etc. to get ahead of their coworkers in a career sense. Or people taking optional overtime to get ahead financially or people who work hourly working extra hours or people who have 2+ jobs or a side hustle.
even if everyone from one country agrees, the other competing country that defects and works 996 with agents will "win" and conquer the lazy country.
> Didn't realize Japan is imminently going to conquer the US because they work more hours.
I would support efforts to try to redraw the line as stated above. I do think we would all be better off if we could do so. But my default assumption is that that won't happen - we will fail to organize effectively enough to redraw the line and we wont "get the day off" that the parent asks for. Maybe I need to be more optimistic to encourage such efforts, but because I think merely asking has such poor chances, I'd rather point to the problem of coordination in an attempt to move the convo towards "how do we beat the coordination problem" - hopefully by being more aware of the size of the hill we are facing, we can be more likely to devise more ambitious approaches to solving the problem
Hours alone is not the only thing that matters, but all else being equal it does matter. Someone who works smarter for 20 hours will get ahead of someone who works stupid for 40, but if both people work smart the 40 hours person gets more done
Historically, when a new technology enables workers to be more productive the baseline expectation goes up. We don't get time back.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cotton_gin
>This inadvertently led to an increase in the use of slaves. Whitney had hoped his invention would do the opposite by reducing the amount of labor needed to process cotton, but he never invented a machine to harvest cotton. That job still had to be done by hand. Cotton harvesting machines did not show up until the 1930s. So as cotton farmers expanded their plantations, they bought more slaves to pick the cotton.
Yeah this is exactly what comes to mind when I think about new tech and productivity increases. I remember learning about this as a kid in history class and it's still relevant today.
No. You can't have the day off. AI might make you and everyone else more productive, but that just means we need 10% as many employees, and 1 to 8 of your 10 closest peers are producing more slop than you, and so we're going to let you go. Security is going to show you out in 3, 2, 1...
The best way to take advantage right now is to consult. Take some time off and just do a little on the side. Then again the job market could collapse, so maybe keep your job?
This is the most brilliant thing I've read all year. That note at the bottom... Amazing.
Imagine only 10% of the white collar labor force were allowed to use AI. In that case, those 10% would be given 2 or 3 days off a week. Easy.
Now imagine if only 10% of companies were allowed to use AI. Those companies would easily be willing to give 2-3 days off per week to their workers. Makes sense since those companies would easily outcompete the others and so they would have enough economic surplus to provide lavish benefits to their workers.
However, because 100% of companies and 100% of workers have access to AI, the competitive pressure on the deployment of capital means that no days off can be given.
New perks are only given to you if you, your company or your country has some sustainable systemic advantage over other employees, companies or countries.
In the absence of those sustainable systemic advantage, any perk given would put you, your company or your country at a competitive disadvantage against some other employee, company or country who are willing to work without such perk.
The only way to sustain such a perk in those situations is with anti-competitive practices: Labor Unions, protectionism, corruption, etc.
Read up on the Ten Hour Movement or the Bread & Roses strike.
You are never going to get relief by asking politely.
When FAANG were over hiring, nobody was being given 4 day weeks, instead AIUI, people were just given meaningless work to waste their time with.
Employers have two modes, waste peoples time, or sack them
I think expecting worker rights to go up or working time to go down without laws/general strikes and more unions is naive. We have had massive productivity gains in every field since the 20th century, and in half of fields throughout the 19th century, and do we work any less or get paid better? No. In fact the entire goal of the last labor movement we had was to reduce working hours back to what peoples parents and grandparents worked. The 40 hour work week was merely a return to historical norms so the people didn't rise up and start hanging capitalists and politicians.
Tractors didn't making farming more lucrative, it just meant less farmers. Automated loom technology didn't make textile workers wealthier, it made capitalists richer, and then still ultimately shipped the work to poorer countries. Powered drills and tools didn't make miners or construction workers wealthier or work less. Forklifts didn't make dock workers wealthier or work less. Women entering the workforce and nearly doubling the available labor didn't make us work any less.
I don't see AI doing anything to help the working class in any way, just funneling more money into capitalists hands while the productivity demands increase.
Even in programming, where AI is being shown to be the most useful, did any of you have your work demands decrease or wages go up? No, at best they just fired junior engineers and told them to go pound sand.
Did anyone ask for the 8 hour work day?
Yes, activists fought and people died to achieve it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eight-hour_day_movement
What's preventing you from advertising your services as a contractor for 4 days a week?
https://4dayweek.io, a Show HN: project
It’s all roses. AI is what exactly what the world needed. How can we not be grateful.
No. Because profit, and it's not yours one.
Whenever a new way is found to improve efficiency, choices have to be made about how to distribute the new surplus.
Choices are made by people who have power and imposed upon people who don't.
The people with power under current systems don't care about the people who do the work. They care about getting rich. So if there's an efficiency gain to be had, all of that new efficiency is going to be put towards increasing output or reallocating work. None of it - under current power structures - will ever go towards allowing workers to work less, because workers aren't the ones deciding where it will go.
Unless one choses to bargain. Perhaps collectively.
[flagged]
Quoting a tweet:
“People on twitter will really be like ‘you believe in voting? that pales in effectiveness to my strategy, firebombing a Walmart’ and then not firebomb a Walmart”
Revolutions don't start with violence. People talk about it first.
I don't understand why people make these hyperbolic jokes about guillotines. Violence is counterproductive; and not practical anyway. Joking about it just makes you feel great without actually doing anything.
There is a simple alternative. Vote; and educate your family and friends.
If you don't know what is on the ballot in the midterms, you are part of the problem. If you aren't starting a family conversation about how corporations are squeezing us, you are part of the problem.
Everyone talks about MLK, but no one points out that people were willing to listen because Malcom X was a looming threat if MLK failed. Yes vote, but the threat of violence is what makes voting a delighted option. That's why protests exist. They are reminders that peace is a choice.
Violent revolution has merit when peaceful means break down. The rise of the guillotine jokes are the first time that people are losing faith in the peaceful option. We should hope that our leaders don't make most of use disillusioned with the idea of a peaceful transfer of power.
For anyone thinking about going that way, I highly recommend listening to the Revolutions podcast series starting here: https://open.spotify.com/episode/1wVvwnrBP2cVQrFf06RoO9
It'll probably disabuse you of the idea that its a good way to get things done.
It is one of the most eye opening pieces of media. Especially the French and Russian Revolutions are covered in such great detail, while staying interesting. I also loved the appendix to the show where Mike talked about "patterns" in a revolution. Learned a lot about the relationship between the government and its people.
Yeah, for me, Revolutions and The History of Rome are two of the best examples of "this is why knowing history is useful", and that history isn't actually boring - it's basically a highlight reel of some of the highest human dramas. Mike Duncan put out some incredible work.
It's never been a good way to get things done, but when you block off every other venue for change people will be much more willing to take a chance on a high risk option. Violent revolutions aren't usually the first thing people try.
Democracies that arise by nonviolent revolution, do so in part due to the threat of what comes next if the nonviolent revolution is crushed. Because if you make sure placards and petitions don't work, it eventually won't be placards and petitions anymore.
'Those who make peaceful revolution impossible, will make violent revolution inevitable', and all that.
Yeah, I get that it's a useful threat to back up the nonviolent options. I just don't think Americans have tried the nonviolent options wrt economics with any amount of real effort yet, and it's worrying/annoying to see people jumping to the nuclear option as soon as they personally hit a rough patch or start getting scared of one.
When I've gone to local government meetings, I've generally been one of only a few without gray hair. The vast majority of working-age people seemingly can't be bothered to learn the basics about who's running in a non-presidential election, let alone go argue for the boring but extremely impactful things that would actually help people out.
People need to put down the phones and put in some actual effort on fixing things before even jokingly advocating for something that would almost certainly be a mass casualty event. It's shameful.
I don't disagree. Local politics and unionizing are much more impactful than people realize.
France had revolution and guillotines, but the UK had a strong police force and good suppression.
The UK didn't just repress its citizens, it ultimately caved to them. The voting reforms of the 19th century gave people essentially everything they wanted, at the time, and as a consequence when the rest of europe was going thru 1848 Britain was chilling. But just a few years beforehand there was legitimate fear that the government would be toppled by rioters! You can't judge centuries of history just by looking at the end result.
> Violent revolution has merit when peaceful means break down.
Robespierre first entered the chat: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reign_of_Terror
Then Napoleon followed.
Make of it what you will.
[EDIT: for the downvoters - the folks who got guillotined in France were definitely bad, but the Terror was very real and very awful. It tends to be a trend with the noble overthrowers that after the initial wins they then get excited to go lop the heads off anyone else that might have ever bothered them. Be careful what you wish for.]
Violence is not always counterproductive
So you are saying that I shouldn't start my artisanal guillotine business?
Believe me, I know what's on the ballot for the midterm in the state but it's not going to stop me from making dark snarky jokes.
Mass produced and pre-staged. Think zipcar for guillotines pre positioned in finance districts and rich neighborhoods.
I don't believe that activism actually generally works, and I am skeptical that voting works either.
Don't get me wrong. I do vote, and I believe that voting and activism can work, and even still does for a variety of things. But as for fighting against forces of corruption and tyranny, I believe activism is about as useful as an ashtray on a motorcycle. Any grassroots efforts are in a horribly asymmetric battle against well-funded adversaries that will come back every year everywhere without fail to get their opening. And any hope we had of limiting corporate interests in politics has been decimated in the U.S. basically since Citizen's United — not that I really believe there wouldn't have been some other workaround had that not happened.
So yes, I believe grassroots activism largely doesn't work. The fact that the battle is so asymmetrical makes it even more asymmetrical by making people apathetic about and fatigued over activism, making it even less effective.
But people often turn their heads when there's violence.
Nobody wants violence, just like nobody wants to hit rock bottom. I believe truly that political violence is a very dark place that will be no fun for anyone involved that I personally do not want to be a part of in any way. But, it just is the case that things will get worse before they get ~~much worse~~ better.
I see it as a question of if and not when until structural changes occur that durably improve upon the asymmetry of political activism. And in that case, it's not a matter of whether or not, it's a matter of getting it the hell over with.
I don't know how the fuck these stupid Flock "safety" cameras got here, but I have a pretty good guess how they'll disappear.
They grew out of red light cameras, which everyone saw as a naked cash grab- especially once towns were caught tweaking the yellow light timings.
Cops love them, and look longingly at the UK panopticon and how easy it is to solve crimes.
If our panopticon actually meant crimes got solved, I’d be less pissed off by it.
Instead we’re being spied on but seemingly police can’t solve any of the crime affecting most people’s day to day lives.
Those flock cameras arrived in many places in the US bc people did not show up to public city council meetings to oppose them, aka “activism”.
In many cities they just bring it up again and again until it passes. They only need to win once, we need to win every time. That's the problem.
Are representatives that were elected deaf? Or dumb?
What is voting for then?
> I don't know how the fuck these stupid Flock "safety" cameras got here, but I have a pretty good guess how they'll disappear.
Gee golly, I have no clue how the pole ended up being cut and the solar and cameras ended up smashed.
Must'a been an "accident".
How is it hyperbolic when it’s human history?
Violence has been very productive for the ruling class. Voting sounds nice but evidence abounds about the mendacity of politicians and their willingness to subvert or overrule voters' preferences if sufficient money or status is to be had. You can say 'well vote those people out if they ignore the voters' but once a new reality has set in the politicians often gainan incumbency advantageor have lined up a cushy post-retirement gig.
I mean, it’s not something anonymous edgy twitter accounts have come up with. There is ample historic precedence on the trend.
"The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure." - Jefferson
My employers who are introducing AI are not laughing evil supervillains hoovering up all the excess profits, they are normal people who wanted long careers and are as nervous as anyone about competition amd what AI will do to organizations if people become truly redundant.
Cool well my employers fired me for an AI psychosis trip so I am glad you are working for those ones who "wanted long careers" and "are nervous as anyone" because hoboy is that not what we are seeing in the ownership class right now.
How many of those employers are living paycheck to paycheck, struggling to feed their kids?
I have less sympathy for decision-makers who are stressed than the people who’ll be fired first, and have less mobility. Or safety net.
> My employers who are introducing AI are not laughing evil supervillains hoovering up all the excess profits
I care less about the motivation rather than the action.
Yeah I thought my employers were good normal people too, just found out they sold to PE firm that wants to “supercharge” our operations with AI. This of course is after swearing they had no interest in M&A to get me to join. “Nothing is changing, no one is getting laid off. Things will just get more efficient so you can do more ‘strategic’ work.” Heard that one before.
Someone up in the food chain must have big investments in AI though. The great shove down didn't just appear.
So, are you getting your share of the surplus or not?
And what exactly does it mean to "compete"?
Right, exactly, there's no good guys under capitalism, that's why you need industry wide labor unions moreso than within a single company.
You could have a straight up communist for a boss that completely shares all profits, but if the business doesn't extract labor value and expand as aggressively as other businesses do, it'll eventually get eaten or lawfared to death, or priced out, or closed out of deals (e.g. small player in chips related business).
So the only way to prevent industry wide redundancy at everywhere except the 1% largest companies that survive (which will also be laying off people but not completely closing down), is through organized labor. Or, I suppose, completely restructuring the economic system, which I'm very down to chat about as well, but the labor organizing feels more achievable for now.
They are absolutely hoovering up the excess profits are you fucking stupid? That’s literally how capitalism works.
When have you ever saved the company money and been given a bonus that was even 1/10th of that money?
This would assume there was excess profits to begin with. The jury still seems out on that one.
It is almost reassuring to think that rich and powerful people all know what they are doing every step of the way. A handful may, but most certainly do not. Most are also terrified of AI. Stable profits are always better than transformative change, if you already have power and riches. Look at how insane companies are acting right now with token quotas for employees and mandates AI usage - the goal is not to milk profits but to not fall behind every other company in case this becomes table stakes. They are trying not to be devoured by a beast they don't understand.
When the AI bubble pops, large companies will be extremely relieved to stop throwing money into the wind playing this game. For most companies, the AI arms race is a huge hassle. They are fine with losing money in the short term and even in the long term as long as they can find a stable path forward.
This is the exact same trajectory as when the internet came out and every insurance company and toothpick manufacturer spent gobs of money to have a brochure website built because everyone else had one. This will play out differently, but recognize most companies are acting entirely from a place of fear right now.
"Hence too the economic paradox, that the most powerful instrument for shortening labour-time, becomes the most unfailing means for placing every moment of the labourer's time and that of his family, at the disposal of the capitalist for the purpose of expanding the value of his capital." - some crazy radical economist, nearly 200 years ago
This narrative is clean, matches expectations and history.
But let's be clear - we all probably own a decent part of our companies (collectively). Productivity gains mean winning the race to market, profits, glory. And that means ownership is valuable.
At the _very least_, you can push your company stock higher and buy it with your 10% IRA contributions or through a similar investment program and make 16x your investment over your 40 year career.
It's easy to look tactically at productivity gains being "captured" by high CEO bonuses, and that's legitimate, but we have so sufficiently seized the means of wealth production if we have stock options and market access that I'm not sure it's really valid to say we get, paraphrasing, "nothing if not a day off work".
Companies don’t care about it but governments certainly do.
Over the past 150 years, the work week dropped from 70+ to 35h in France.
Granted that’s a long time horizon but still.
"The strong do what they can, the weak suffer what they must." — Thucydides
It’s a stupid statement by a stupid philosopher. Years later we learned collective development and incentive produced a society he could have never imagined.
It’s simply being looted now by the idiots this moron worshiped.
You sound very sure of your opinion... While missing the basic fact that he was a historian, not a philosopher.
> Choices are made by people who have power and imposed upon people who don't.
In a capitalist society, choices are made according to supply and demand.
In a world where there's a positive supply shock (in this case, there's a lot more programming available for purchase today than there was a year ago), supply goes up. We therefore expect the price for the good to decrease.
This has nothing to do with power or whether people care about xyz. It's a consequence of the economic system we live under.
You can desire to live under a different economic system! That's logically coherent. But if you want the laws of supply and demand not to apply to you, that's what you're asking for.
Honestly I'm getting tired of this narrative. People take the benefits of capitalism for granted (indeed most of us on this forum do very well for ourselves relative to the average person in our country and around the world), but we blame all of its downsides on "bad people".
From where do you get your understanding of the terms supply and demand? They are primarily from classical economics - have you read any? e.g Adam Smith?
Right, but a day off would reduce supply.
And 2 days off was not a system dictated by God, which we are obligated to keep in perpetuity (in fact, most religions dictate 1 day off, not 2).
So, we could, as a society, just choose to make a 32 hour workweek “full time”, and mandate overtime pay after that.
There’s no reason, even under capitalism that we must allow all of the productivity gains to accrue to the benefit of solely those at the top of an enormous pile of wealth.
In fact, I think if we choose to do that as a society, it will end horrifically.
> There’s no reason, even under capitalism that we must allow all of the productivity gains to accrue to the benefit of solely those at the top of an enormous pile of wealth.
I would question the premise that all or even most of the productivity gains of any past technological improvement have accrued to the benefit of solely those at the top of an enormous pile of wealth.
200 years ago 90% of Americans lived on farms. In the early 1900s, it was 40%. Today that number is 2%.
The economic surplus from that increase in productivity accrued to everyone in society, not just the wealthy. (The evidence for this is that we are all living at a higher standard of living today than we were in the early 1800s or 1900s.)
But certainly the positive supply shock was not great news for farmers, many of whom lost their jobs. In the case of AI, I'm asking us -- programmers -- not to make the mistake of saying "this is not a benefit for me, therefore it's not a benefit for society".
> But certainly the positive supply shock was not great news for farmers, many of whom lost their jobs. In the case of AI, I'm asking us -- programmers -- not to make the mistake of saying "this is not a benefit for me, therefore it's not a benefit for society".
I'm not sure about that - farming kind of sucks. I think what the transition away from farming generally looked like was people who had some kind of small family farm, where multiple generations had worked hard all their lives to make a living growing crops, having kids who left the farm to work in some other industry, and making more money that way and having better working conditions (at the price of living a more urban lifestyle foreign to their family back on the farm). When their parents' generation got old and was ready to pass the family farm along, the urban worker generation decided they'd rather not quit their jobs and go back to the family farm; so (perhaps with some feeling of guilt), they sold the land to a large farming conglomerate; and then the next generations who grew up in an urban area doing white-collar jobs simply forgot that their ancestors had ever been farmers.
Something like this happened in my own family - about one hundred years ago, my great-grandfather owned a farm on what was then the outskirts of the bay area. He sold the land when he retired, no one else in my family ever did agricultural work, I only know the story, and the land that farm was once on is now incredibly valuable bay area real estate that is not being used for any agricultural purpose. I have no desire to work in agriculture.
> I would question the premise that all or even most of the productivity gains of any past technological improvement have accrued to the benefit of solely those at the top of an enormous pile of wealth.
The historical automation story seems to be that technology replaces workers, and those workers typically end up taking lower-paying jobs:
"replacing workers with technology “explains 50 to 70%” of the increase in inequality from 1980 to about 2016."
https://www.technologyreview.com/2023/02/21/1067563/automati...
They point out a disappointing aspect of some technologies (self-checkout), which seems to be that not only are workers displaced, but customers also experience degraded service (probably without a new benefit such as a discount for using self-checkout.)
> The historical automation story seems to be that technology replaces workers, and those workers typically end up taking lower-paying jobs
As I said, when farming became more efficient, it wasn't great to be a farmer.
But when I say (and I assume everyone else here also says) "I don't want to go back to a world where 90% of people had to be farmers" (because farming was so inefficient), that's another way of saying, the world that farming efficiencies gave us is richer / more preferable overall than the previous world. In other words, the economic surplus did not go exclusively or primarily to the richest.
I expect the same will be true for AI. I think our society should do more to help the displaced. But I do not want my grandchildren to live in a world where, 100 years from now, 90% of people are still doing jobs that could be done by a computer, but we choose for the computer not to do them. Just like I wouldn't want to have to be a farmer.
> As I said, when farming became more efficient, it wasn't great to be a farmer
What you seem to be saying is that consolidation of the farming industry into fewer producers with higher productivity was good for food buyers and society at large, which might be true but doesn't contradict GP's point that when their company earns $100 more due to improved employee productivity, approximately $0 of that will be paid to the employees, so they find little reason to celebrate.
The link I posted makes somewhat different yet important points: first, the arc of automation seems to tend toward increased inequality (and a hollowing-out of the middle class); second, automation may provide a markedly worse (but cheaper) replacement for the thing it replaces. Even in the case of farming, many fruits and vegetables are less nutritious than they were 100 years ago - perhaps effects of selective breeding (such as for size, shelf-life/durability, resistance to pests/pesticides/herbicides/etc.), soil depletion, environmental changes, etc.
> In other words, the economic surplus did not go exclusively or primarily to the richest.
That was in large part due of strong leftist movements and states that forced the capitalists to share the increasing wealth. WW2 and the resulting labor shortage and other special circumstances contributed as well. Currently no such movements and circumstances exist. Globalization and the resulting free movent of capital has put capitalists in a better position to direct the extra wealth for themselves than ever before. A global movement is required to get a meaningful share of the increased surplus to the workers now, and that is very hard to do. The market will not do it on its own, as the demand for human labor eventually decreases due to automation.
> The economic surplus from that increase in productivity accrued to everyone in society, not just the wealthy.
Sure, a poor man with two dollars is richer than a poor man with one dollar.
And yet the man handing out the dollars had 100$ in surplus when he was handing out 1s and now that he's handing out 2's he's got 1,000,000,000.
Look at the wealth disparity. Even if quality of life has increased, it's not wrong for the people delivering that increased quality of life (workers) to also demand a requisite slice of the pie.
In fact, I see no reason why the pie should be shared with wealthy non workers at all. Were they necessary for the increased quality of life?
On top of that, it's a global economy. Expand beyond the USA and include in your analysis how life has changed in imperialized nations that now function as cheap labor sources for our factories that pollute the local environment while exploiting workers for absurdly low wages and bad working conditions.
> Expand beyond the USA and include in your analysis how life has changed in imperialized nations that now function as cheap labor sources for our factories that pollute the local environment while exploiting workers for absurdly low wages and bad working conditions.
Agreed, let's do that! Here is the economic history of the developing world over the past 70 years.
https://ourworldindata.org/history-of-poverty-has-just-begun
Pick any metric you care about: number of people living on less than $1/day, literacy, maternal mortality, access to birth control. It has dramatically improved in the developing world over the past 70 years or so.
Capitalists invented metrics to show how awesome capitalism for the world, and then said "see, against these metrics, the world is better!"
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0305750X2...
Putting the poverty line at 1$ a day, or saying people crossed from 2$/day to $3/day is "poverty decreasing," lets people get these self-serving numbers. Poverty declined, relative to what threshold? Do these people have secure housing, medical care, education, political power, in line with their contributions to the global market they've been shoved into?
People being moved from centuries old homes distributed across agrarian geographies into slums, that's improvement?
https://data.unhabitat.org/pages/housing-slums-and-informal-...
People living side by side to polluting factories that poison their water, that's improvement?
These people are foisted into a global supply chain, their economies changed into e.g. unsustainable cash crop or similar fragile-to-price-shock products, and themselves thrust into market dependence without any labor security since outside entities show up, exploit while it's profitable, then disappear without leaving any meaningful industrialization to the overall nation. Not to mention there's still a lot of people being straight up enslaved.
> Look at the wealth disparity. Even if quality of life has increased, it's not wrong for the people delivering that increased quality of life (workers) to also demand a requisite slice of the pie.
Sure, but the argument being made is that "productivity gains accrue to the benefit of solely those at the top of an enormous pile of wealth."
That is simply not true. Across the entire world, from rich countries to poor countries, economic development, driven in large part by technological development, has resulted in a dramatic improvement to everyone's quality of life.
https://ourworldindata.org/history-of-poverty-has-just-begun
The way some people talk about it, it's as though they wish they were middle class in the 1920s instead of in the 2020s. People are so. much. richer. today. In ways that really matter, like education, retirement, ability to travel the world. MEDICINE.
I get that it still sucks today. The only point I'm making is that it's false that the historical economic surplus has accrued "solely" (or even, mostly) to the wealthiest. It's not true.
Both can be true. Standards can both have improved since the 1920s and income inequality can be equivalent or worse than the gilded age. This would be coherent with improvements mostly being funneled to the top, while some benefits accrue throughout the economy.
However the story is much more dynamic and interesting than that, with income inequality shrinking until the late 70s and early 80s, then expanding drastically until now, half a century later. That period of lower income inequality is mostly why things got better for the working class (but science and technology have marched on regardless).
> I get that it still sucks today. The only point I'm making is that it's false that the historical economic surplus has accrued "solely" (or even, mostly) to the wealthiest. It's not true.
It is, though, if we talk scale. The rich went from having big houses in the 1920s to being sent into space, or building private libertarian colonies, or buying elections, or potentially increasing their lifespan a few decades, in the 2020s. The working class went from working 40hrs a week until age 64 when they retire in a house they own, to working 60hrs a week until they die, but hey, that death might be at an older age!
The improvement disparity between the two makes the improvement for the working class insignificant enough to be dismissible. I don't buy into the idea that the working class should be grateful that the scraps now have better seasoning.
I mean really, just look at the wealth gap. Imagine how much better the lives of everyone could be if that wealth was distributed better! Fuck a 20 hr workweek, what about 5?
Different countries are going to distribute the benefits of automation in different ways. Northern European states will pursue shortened work weeks and lavish social services. China will reinvest the productivity gains into its industrial capacity. The United States will have five trillionaires.
I am kind of late to comment, but let me try anyway.
Can we have a day off? Yes and no, or yes, but at your expense.
The problem is system design. If a company earned money for its contributors/workers, then each gain would be shared across the company, from the board to its employees. But a company earns money for its shareholders, and you, as an employee, are in the expense column.
Therefore, a day off is either a mandatory legal right meant to help you rest so you can be more productive, or it is just additional unproductive time that does not create more value or maximize profit.
Therefore, this is where the argument for a 4-day working week collapses. To get a 4-day working week would mean yes, but with less "expense", or a lower salary.
For the same reason, taxing the rich would not help "the people" much, as it goes to the wrong pocket.
Is there are fix, yes.
The whole thing is obviously tongue-in-cheek, but sarcasm is a potent mode of communication.
The joke, of course, being that every increase in productivity has ALWAYS gone straight to ownership.
Economists have been predicting a boom in human leisure time since the dawn of economics. It has NEVER happened...
> every increase in productivity has ALWAYS gone straight to ownership.
Which of course means that if you want to capture that upside for yourself, you need to be an owner.
The real problem with AI is that it breaks that for programmers. Before AI, you actually could be an owner. Of course big tech companies tried to get you to centralize, to depend on their tools, but you didn't have to. You could always run your own open source tooling on your own hardware, and freelance if you absolutely couldn't accept the loss of upside in being an employee.
But now AI has centralized a key tool, and that changes the game, at least if you think the game requires you to use AI to stay competitive.
Maybe a lot of this comes down to people are having fun building stuff in a way they weren't before? But i imagine this will all die down.
I like vibe coding for personal projects where the code is a throwaway, but I hate vibecoding at work when I later have to stake my reputation in validity of results, as well as maintain the resulting implementation.
We need to get creative in ways that help. I am personally for: - sabbaticals - flat out taking 2 years off every 5 to go back to school full time - the mid weekend (don't give me Friday. Give me Wednesday!) - Massive increases to new baby time off programs - early retirement -but- with the encouragement to start fresh in a new field after a transition break. - Of course, just more time off. But -require- it. If you don't take your yearly vacation time you miss out on the 'vacation bonus check'.
You want to create jobs? Find ways to get people legitimately out of the workforce. By that I mean out of the workforce but still spending money and improving their skills for when they come back in.
Channeling my inner-masteroftheworld, No.
Meanwhile, a trend in the last year:
AI Startup Founders Tout a Winning Formula–No Booze, No Sleep, No Fun
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45221423
996
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45149049
New trend: extreme hours at AI startups
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45156674
SV AI Startups Are Embracing China's Controversial '996' Work Schedule
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44657480
Elon cares.
Salaried people think they get paid for their output. No silly, you get paid for your time. Just like an hourly worker.
Instead they are going to say “oh you’re 10Xing?” sweet we can get rid of 9 people and you can keep working all week long qq
This will never happen, the power dynamic between workers and employers is so skewed in favor of employers and it is only getting worse.
Don't like your job? Fine leave, there are tens of millions of H1B's who will do your job for less money and they won't complain because they can't easily leave.
Unfortunately that's not how it works. Productivity gains have already increased tenfold in the past, yet still all work full time.
It used to be that 80+% of the population worked in agriculture. In developed countries that number is now around 1-2%. Some of the freed labour was funneled into improving living standards, some of it was funneled into new jobs created by the increasingly complex society (the "intermediate economy").
With AI, the same is true: labour is freed by the productivity gains (which I doubt are 10x sustainably but whatever), more labour is needed for power generation, mineral extraction, maintaining this new extra layer of complexity in the intermediate economy, etc. In the end we might see, say, a net 3% increase in global productivity per year over the next 10 years, which will be funneled into increasing living standards and increasing economic inequalities, but not in reducing working hours.
If you accept living below average standards, you could easily work a single day of the week for the rest of your life. But why would an employer hire 5 people working one day a week, instead of one working 5 days a week? They won't, hence we don't see a reduction in working hours.
The alternative is to work full time but retire earlier, much earlier, than you would otherwise, which in the end is the equivalent of having worked one day a week for your whole life.
I highly recommend reading Lean Logic by David Fleming, it explores several of these concepts in a very interesting way.
People with more time on their hands start looking around their communities wondering what happened, start questioning politics, start reading statistics instead of headlines and so forth. Oh no, we can't have that
Political disengagement is often "too damn tired"
And not be off completely...
Its wild to me that the concept of working 80% (1 day off a week) or even 60% (2 days off a week) isn't even a concept in the US, while in europe such part time situations make up a huge share of the work force.
In short, people have been having the day off for decades now. It's called part-time work.
Labor saving tech doesn't lead to more free time, and certainly not in a way that's proportional to the gains of automation. Instead, companies will expect still more productivity. Why give you more time off if they can keep workdays fixed and add still more productivity? Certainly, the competition will do it.
Appetite grows with eating.
> Labor saving tech doesn't lead to more free time
It does when you own the tech. If you give the tech away then the people who you gave it to will continue to expect more of the same, naturally.
Sorry, not possible. The goal of AI is to build additional value for shareholders, not to improve anyone's else's lives.
> If AI is going to 10x our productivity across the board, that means that I should be able to produce the same amount of output by midday on Monday that, in the before times, would have taken all week.
You must be new here. No, that's not how this work. If you are able to produce the same amount of work by midday Monday we expect you to increase the amount of output in the current system by 14 x. And the owners pocket the financial gain from this productivity delta and you should be happy you even have a job.
> And the owners pocket the financial gain from this productivity delta and you should be happy you even have a job.
This is why it’s prudent for more of us to figure out a way to be our own owners.
What a community of temporarily embarrassed unicorns we have here.
FYI, you've already lost with this mindset! I know you don't consider yourself a loser :P
> Childcare for 3 small children is six thousand dollars a month here in California.
Maybe we could afford for women to not leave their kids with strangers for most of their waking hours? Crazy talk I know.
That’s an idea that’s been around since 1883.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Right_to_Be_Lazy
But that has never stuck enough for masses to fight for it. It’s a shame.
Personally, the way I cracked it is by freelancing for an american company and living in France. I can totally take the day off.
Everyone laments how everyone will get "a lot" of days off in the end, but regulation is still a dirty word in here.
Be happy if you can be 10x more productive and charge 1/10 per unit of productivity.
There's no guarantee society needs 10x the productivity.
Yesterday I built a bespoke time keeping and billing tool in my browser for my boutique consulting gig. I got exactly what I needed and I paid about $1.
I think this piece of software could power my business for 2-3 years... If my business is very successful maybe I'll invest $2 to develop a GUI.
No SaaS needed. Software demand was actually surpressed by AI.
I don't need 10x more software. I need simple software at 1/100th the cost, on demand. And AI promises to give it to me. The most beautiful part is there's multiple market entrants competing for my bid.
Imagine OpenAI invented ICE engines and the world was dotted with lakes of crude oil, all we needed was refineries. That's the world we're in.
Now that should make you think.
My best experience of a good working-hours week comes from a school i studied at when a boy. The hours were 11:30AM to 4:30PM; i.e. 5 hours with only a 20/30min break in-between. We slept well, had a good brunch and went to school fresh and energetic. Played outside after school (i.e. exercise), came home at nightfall, did some study (i.e. work), had some entertainment and dinner before hitting the bed.
In today's parlance, this was excellent "work-life balance". If you can, talk to your boss and see whether you can adopt such a work schedule (with slight shifting of the time window as needed).
You can have any days off you wish when you run the company. If you’re an employee then you work the days you were contracted to work. Employees definitionally don’t get to choose their hours.
On a tangent if you’re paying $6000 a month for your three children for childcare you are better off getting a Nanny for significantly lesser than that
Workers need to have more leverage for them to be able to independently assert their working hours. People with such luxury become contractors or proprietors. The rest need collective bargaining.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit_Jobs
Here’s your occasional reminder that US software engineers should unionize.
Scott Alexander's 2014 essay, Meditations on Moloch, explains why we ended up in this rat king of human misery rather than a utopia. I recommend it:
https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/
basically, we can blame greedy corporate overlords, and that's cathartic, and somewhat correct, but we can (and have) ended up in a hell of our own making even with every individual wanting to do better. the boss that wants to let workers have the day off can't afford to, because the competition makes workers do 8x5. the competition lays off workers to pay for more tokens, because their competitors are. it's a bad game equilibrium.
labor laws are the reason we have the five day work week. we needed overtime to dissuade employers from defecting from the policy. we need coordination to keep AI from turning out like children working the bobbins in old-timey textile factories.
No because the Epsteinist Class in charge have decided to make it zero sum. Therefore it's a fight to the death. Which is why with Ai we're 10x more productive and either 10x more busy or fired and on our way to food stamps
here, here.
lmao Corporate had a hissy fit from people working full weeks at home. The 4-day work week will never* come to the US.
* - not while any of us reading this are under 65.
Marx showed this was an expression of one the central contradictions more than a century ago. Seriously it’s never too late to read about why our conditions only ever deteriorate under capitalism.
Capitalists moralize a lot about people becoming “lazy” or not having “direction” if society subsidizes not working - and yet their entire mission is centered around deploying money, letting money “work.”
If capital is doing the work, why on earth are they getting paid?
1 And afterward Moses and Aaron came, and said unto Pharaoh: 'Thus saith the LORD, the God of Israel: Let My people go, that they may hold a feast unto Me in the wilderness.'2 And Pharaoh said: 'Who is the LORD, that I should hearken unto His voice to let Israel go? I know not the LORD, and moreover I will not let Israel go.'
3 And they said: 'The God of the Hebrews hath met with us. Let us go, we pray thee, three days' journey into the wilderness, and sacrifice unto the LORD our God; lest He fall upon us with pestilence, or with the sword.'4 And the king of Egypt said unto them: 'Wherefore do ye, Moses and Aaron, cause the people to break loose from their work? get you unto your burdens.'5 And Pharaoh said: 'Behold, the people of the land are now many, and will ye make them rest from their burdens?'6 And the same day Pharaoh commanded the taskmasters of the people, and their officers, saying:7 'Ye shall no more give the people straw to make brick, as heretofore. Let them go and gather straw for themselves.8 And the tale of the bricks, which they did make heretofore, ye shall lay upon them; ye shall not diminish aught thereof; for they are idle; therefore they cry, saying: Let us go and sacrifice to our God.9 Let heavier work be laid upon the men, that they may labour therein; and let them not regard lying words.'
10 And the taskmasters of the people went out, and their officers, and they spoke to the people, saying: 'Thus saith Pharaoh: I will not give you straw.11 Go yourselves, get you straw where ye can find it; for nought of your work shall be diminished.'12 So the people were scattered abroad throughout all the land of Egypt to gather stubble for straw.13 And the taskmasters were urgent, saying: 'Fulfil your work, your daily task, as when there was straw.'14 And the officers of the children of Israel, whom Pharaoh's taskmasters had set over them, were beaten, saying: 'Wherefore have ye not fulfilled your appointed task in making brick both yesterday and today as heretofore?'
The plagues come later, I suppose.
As AI gets more successful in taking away bullshit makework, instead of having days off or doing something else meaningful for the company, the bullshit makework just multiplies to keep everyone and everything just as busy as before, like kipple.
And then this phenomenon is being called 10x productivity and celebrated.
This is why we cannot have nice things.
/me is off to rewatch They Live
Silly you, the 9-5 5days a week schedule was introduced by ford in his factories, did they change that when automation was introduced later? Internet? Nope. And this 9-5 is actually 7-6 if you count the commute.
Speaking of AI, it’s been what, 3 years since it became mainstream? Did the employees wellbeing’s become better? Are the codes better? Do we have a breakthrough innovations that changed fundamentally in how we use/deal with xyz? All I hear is more work, more anxiety, more cost for some tokens, so I am not entirely sure about the “productivity increase” claim.
i really dislike lazy bums. you are in a position to use great tools for productivity and you're not inspired to work harder? you should be fired on the spot.
Fired on the spot? The hyperbole doesn't help your argument.
What inspires me to work harder is getting to work on things that I enjoy.
not an argument m8 it's an opinion
indeed those who engage in the capitalistic system without devoting the entirety of their soul to generation of profit, they are subhuman and therefore deserve to be subservient. true humanity is found in embodying our animal nature and maximizing the influence of individual genetics - money is a mere vehicle to express the totality of the human spirit. those lacking money clearly lack spirit and should be considered beneath humanity, effectively equivalent to livestock. baa baa black sheep, give me every last thread of your wool or be exiled
Sorry, I'd rather have a higher quality of living for most people (as evidenced by any huge development in technology) rather than humanity stagnating. This post is quite myopic.
I would be able to see my niece in person and hear her laugh if I could have this Friday off.
You think if people worked less technological progress would just completely seize up and humanity stagnate? I find that pretty hard to believe and see no evidence to support that.
I'm deadly certain that routing more of society into producing SaaS webapp shovelware (and the infrastructure to support it) is not in fact going to improve quality of life, and will in fact cause us to stagnate.
> If AI is going to 10x our productivity across the board, that means that I should be able to produce the same amount of output by midday on Monday that, in the before times, would have taken all week.
That would be true if you and only you are 10x more productive than anyone else. Since everyone is now 10x more productive it just means you have to work just as much as before since you're competition can outwork you. I don't get why people don't understand this.
> That would be true if you and only you are 10x more productive than anyone else. Since everyone is now 10x more productive it just means you have to work just as much as before since you're competition can outwork you.
Why? I don't need 10x more stuff. I'd far rather spend 10x less time working. If we're talking about an actual productivity increase, let's just produce the same amount of stuff in 10x less time.
Because your competitor can now produce 10x more work with the same resources that your company can only produce 1x, therefore in short order your company isn't competitive and will cease to exist.
> Why? I don't need 10x more stuff. I'd far rather spend 10x less time working.
It's a free market - if you can find someone willing to hire you to work 0.5 days a week, and are happy receiving the same income you do today, you can do so.
But your living standards won't improve, while everyone else's will, and by 10x.
And the people you are competing with to buy housing, a car, consumer goods, healthcare, food, and everything else - people who want to work 5 days a week - will have 10x more money than you. Resources like housing, which are supply constrained, will seem to go up dramatically in price relative to your income, and you'll be living in a slum.
Does that still sound like a good idea?
> Resources like housing, which are supply constrained, will seem to go up dramatically in price relative to your income, and you'll be living in a slum.
That sounds like a problem with that system. If we're 10x more productive why can't we make 10x as much nice housing?
Sure the consumer won't consume 10x more, but they're still going to reach for the better products.
And let's say that work is correlated with quality. Company A wants to spend 10x less time working, while Company B works 10x more. Company B therefore has a better product than Company A, so eventually Company A goes away. The consumer still consumed the same amount, but they switched to the better product.
> The consumer still consumed the same amount, but they switched to the better product.
Either the product was 10x better, which I don't think I need, or it wasn't really a 10x increase in productivity.
> Why? I don't need 10x more stuff.
If everyone had said this 100 years ago we wouldn't have the Polio vaccine, air conditioning etc.
There are lots of problems in the world and there are still a ton of incentives to fix those problems. Yes there is also greed, scams, and exploitation - but that's never going to go away
> If everyone had said this 100 years ago we wouldn't have the Polio vaccine, air conditioning etc.
If we got a 4-hour work week that might be a worthwhile trade.
Yea it's always been competition that's the issue. Greed too. But complacency is really difficult as a business owner.
In the world where someone can take your cake by working 25% more hours, it's always going to happen.
This is downvoted but's it pointing out a fundamental dynamic in capitalism. Labour activists had to intervene in this dynamic to protect workers from being exhausted by the constant need for capital to increase labour exploitation to increase profits.
Almost this entire thread is people discussing a labour issue with no reference to the fundamental antagonism between labour and capital.
This comment should not be getting downvoted. It's exactly right.