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Comment by mysterydip | Hacker News Reader

Remember when computers and automation promosed to give us all this free time? Turns out it just meant companies could pay one person to do the job of four.

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Another formulation is that technology augments the impact that a single individual can have. The productivity gains allowed by silicon are the greatest single economic advance in human history. Businesses become increasingly more productive to the degree that they are founded on, or can reorganize themselves to be in alignment with, this trajectory.

I say this while sipping my morning coffee, browsing HN and waiting for an amount of computation to finish on a single machine that required either a supercomputer or multi-million dollar cluster 20 years ago.

Well, TBF it gave three people more free time. Oh, you were expecting compensated free time??

Isn’t it what economists would call a 4x increase in productivity? Isn’t fall in productivity mean that you now need more people to do same job?

exactly!!!

We're hitting a ceiling based upon how many hours a single human can work without dropping dead from sleep deprivation, when you talk about 90 hours a week that means living at the office, over 90 hours a week and you're looking at only 90 minutes of rest per night 7 days a week.

We blew past the natural limit many many years ago, except the limit was artificially raised by the normalization of performance enhancing drugs (namely tea, coffee, etc.)

7 days * 24 hours = 168 hours per week. 90/168 is only 53% of the total hours in a week, and leaves 78 hours for non-work, or 11 hours per day.

Which is an insane amount of time and probably does not actually increase productivity. The math does not check out as you claimed though.

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