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The Next Button

maxhodak.com

90 pointsfrisco73 comments

Hasn't the promise of technology always been the automation of labor to free us up to enjoy lives of leisure? Instead it seems we are hyper-concentrated on speeding up the treadmill of productivity. The invention that comes right after the "next" button is a tool to analyze your nexts-per-hour trends.

We have easier and safer jobs than anyone in history, and the highest quality of material life.

If you wanted to live the quality of life of a regularl worker in 1900 you can probably do it driving Uber 2 hours a day. We work more hours because we want the improving lifestyle

Where can you rent on ~$50 a day, and still have money left over for food and car payments (necessary for that job), let alone things that a regular worker could afford in 1900?

Pretty much most of northern England, outside London a lot of people get by on 18k a year salaries

You may be heavily overestimating lifestyles in 1900.

Here's a very interesting book written in the early 1900s looking at families with a father in solid employment, ~~renting for~~ (edit - living on) about 1 pound a week in London. They're poor, but not the poorest - not in the workhouses.

https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/58691/pg58691-images.ht...

Regardless of precise lines, I recommend reading this as an actual look (mixture of descriptive prose and figures & stats) at life for people of the time.

I also recommend Orwell's The Road To Wigan Pier for a report on workers in northern England in the 1930s and their living conditions (and the second part on why Socialism isn't being embraced in the UK, but that's a different topic). I'm pretty sure that's also easy to achieve today.

A regular worker hasn't seen a car in 1900 and lived in a tenament with 4 generations crammed into a room. You can afford that on 50 a day if you wanted to live that way. That's my point, we don't want to live that way so we work more.

You literally said "work as an Uber driver," which is why I said car payments. They're necessary for the job.

If you want to keep it in 1900's-speak, I could say "afford the payments on the overalls you need at the factory," but the idea would be ridiculous because the factory would provide the overalls.

Oh gotcha lol ok. Change that to "drive THREE hours Uber using someone else's car and give them a third of the pay for the use of the car" if that helps you connect to the idea better

The world is full of bullshit jobs and bullshit tasks that are unproductive. The next button sending that email for you will balloon the growing pile of bullshit, but look like productivity to passive analysis. So yes our lifestyles have improved, but our work on bullshit is not responsible for those improvements.

Now I'm just picturing AI generating and sending emails so another AI can craft and send a response back.

I keep hearing this but I never had a bs job, don't know anyone who's hired for one (also it doesn't make sense.)

What is your job that you do?

You should read the book on this if you’re really interested but here’s a review. https://www.mudamasters.com/en/personal-growth/bullshit-jobs...

I work in consulting so a large part of my job is acting as a box ticker or task master to use Graeber’s definition.

I recently worked for a company that I ultimately realized by the time I was leaving that the whole thing was a BS job. I was doing real, good work, but the entire org was so dysfunctional that the project was doomed to failure. And I'm not entirely sure that ultimately this wasn't known somehow from the top; idk, I really feel like the CIO who was running it had some significant problems, she did a lot of magical thinking/was delusional.

Wow, this exactly describes my work in a dysfunctional startup. We set impossible time goals and don't make them. We are making progress on our software project. The goal of this is a faster something, but our only demonstrated and tested scenarios were extremely optimized by us. I don't see us actually being useful in general cases. In such a situation, I am just trying to hang on until my options vest and then move on.

Ah. Well, if its that dysfunctional, will the options be worth anything?

I have thought about that. It's hard to estimate the value of unlikely to succeed company options. The answer of course is do your own startup, so you can be the one making foolish decisions and causing chaotic development, instead of someone else.

1900 is not the era I would choose. It's peak wealth disparity. How about the 15th century?

Ok lol 15th century it is...

What was the typical job? What was life expectancy? How warm was a typical home in the winter? How many books did an average person see (much less, read) in the lives? What was travel like?

Also wealth disparity is a stupid metric. If you and I are homeless under the bridge, it does me no good that we are equal. If I have a house and you have an even nicer house, I am fine. (though I'd rather have the nicer house)

Wealth disparity is important, because it also means power disparity.

I hear people who are pro-capitalism say “the poorest people in the US have it better than kings did 500 years ago”, which is only true if you’re considering the stuff those people have. If you’re considering the ability to self-actualize it’s not at all true.

I don’t think things are worse now than ever before, but that doesn’t excuse the concentration of power we have today.

// If you’re considering the ability to self-actualize it’s not at all true.

What does that mean? 500 years ago, did one have ability to speak to like-minded people globally? Could they travel as they wish? Could they pick their religion? Could they choose where to live? Could they pick a wife from another culture? Could they read about any topic they want? Did they have a shot at starting a business and having it grow into real wealth?

If you think you are more powerless than a serf 500 years ago because Bezos has more money then you, then you are the one who gave away your power for no reason

> If you think you are more powerless than a serf 500 years ago because Bezos has more money then you, then you are the one who gave away your power for no reason

That's not at all what GP was saying - I quote, with emphasis added:

> I hear people who are pro-capitalism say “the poorest people in the US have it better than kings did 500 years ago”, which is only true if you’re considering the stuff those people have. If you’re considering the ability to self-actualize it’s not at all true.

What is self actualization, aside from the part of my comment didn't quote?

> 500 years ago, did one have ability to speak to like-minded people globally? Could they travel as they wish? Could they pick their religion? Could they choose where to live? Could they pick a wife from another culture? Could they read about any topic they want? Did they have a shot at starting a business and having it grow into real wealth?

This is hindsight bias. Did they even care about these things? Or did they aspire to have the opposites?

> speeding up the treadmill of productivity

Productivity is for people with no leverage.

As an HN reader, you can likely escape that trap. Maybe not right away, but as a directional goal almost definitely.

What does leisure look like to you? To me it's highly technological and expensive. Computing, transport, comfort, energy, food. The things I do for leisure now are sometimes only possible because of the rich society I live in - a product of high productivity.

It's an important question. Leisure to me is to be freed of the obligations of productivity. I think framing it as "what do you DO for leisure" transforms leisure into consumption.

I don't agree that high productivity is the price of leisure. If that were the case, when do we get to cash that check? We've achieved record levels of productivity, so when do we get record levels of leisure?

I'm writing this as an American workaholic. So I'm in it as much as anybody. I'm just getting old and starting to ask a lot of questions. :)

We don't get to cash that check, the next generation does. Just like how we cashed it from our parents, and our parents cashed it from their parents.

We have far more leisure time than our parents did, and way more than our grandparents. Our kids will have far more leisure time than us.

And haven't we already partially cashed it? We have so much free time on our hands, we need Netflix and countless other things to fill it. #NotAll, of course, but if the average can spend 3 hours per day watching TV & Netflix, and an additional 2.5 hours on social media, then they must have that time.

My mother and father also both had the ability to spend 6+ hours a day watching TV or doing other hobbies in their working years. They're currently in their 80's, and my dad did blue-collar work as a telephone lineman.

Having leisure time isn't new to our generation (any of them).

This is an interesting article, because I "feel" like my leisure time is less than my parents and grandparents. This is in part because they retired at earlier ages than my current age, with pensions for my grandfather, and better financial situations overall. I feel like I have less leisure time than say people in the 1950s, up to 2000 maybe. But where is the data? This article says for the US, hours worked are around 40/week from 1960 through to 1988 (+/- 1 hour), table 5 https://eh.net/encyclopedia/hours-of-work-in-u-s-history/

It's hard to compare in part because there are very different lifestyles. As a member of the fortunate "programmer class" I have high pay, health insurance, easy job portability. This leads to pretty reasonable vacation schedules, good lifespan. Overwork expectations and stress are the downsides, but these are within my control somewhat and I can just get another job.

This research paper says leisure time increased noticeably from 1965 to 2003 - an increase of 6-8 hours per week for men and 4-8 for women. https://www.nber.org/papers/w12082. This is a surprise to me and goes against my intuition. Maybe we always feel like we are getting a bad deal.

Don't forget the sizable number of lower hourly wage Americans where some people work many hours at low pay and barely support themselves. Americans seem to work significantly more than our European peers https://20somethingfinance.com/american-hours-worked-product....

Just because someone is paid for 40hrs doesn't mean they are actually doing 40hrs of work. We are both posting on HN during a weekday after all

Hey, I'm compiling! I guess we need a new 2023 joke/true statement. How about "I am taking a break because chatGPT seems to be down". I can't translate that code from Java to Rust by myself.

>We have far more leisure time than our parents did

I dunno. When my parents got home from work, they were done with work except for rare exceptions.

Now a lot of people have to deal with working with technology that is supposed to have 100% uptime but of course that never happens so random freakout fix something. And even if you don't work directly in tech, everyone wants to be able to get ahold of you because nothing can possibly wait. We deal with things around the world timezones way more than in the past so that just increases the chance that someone needs to get ahold of you because something in another country where it's the work hours need something.

So I'm not really sure about your theory that we have more leisure time.. maybe(?) we have a little more time, but it's certainly not true disconnecting. I can't go on vacation without having to worry I will have to work or check in on things. Even it's only a little bit, it's still there.

> so when do we get record levels of leisure

"The children have inherited a world their ancestors could only dream of. A more equitable and luxurious existence. But the problems of the past have widely been forgotten, and their solutions have brought about new classes of problems."

Going to take America for example, since that is the culture I grew up in.

Children don't work in factories or sweep chimneys anymore. Childhood is now free of labor. School is broken but conflating that gulag with labor isn't fair.

Prime working age is 18-65. Mid-to-late 20's with extra school. Compare that to a few hundred years ago and 50% of humans were dead before the age of 5, and 50% of the ones who survived that were dead by 30. You lived to work and you worked until you died.

The amount of time we spend on food prep, house hold maintenance, etc. is down significantly. The "hours worked per unit X" for consumption is down substantially, meaning you work less to accumulate the same standard of living compared to 100 years ago. The 40 hour work week is also relatively novel.

Life generally sucked for our ancestors. Our world is a utopia in contrast and we take it for granted.

From video games, to TV, to art, to resteraunts, to climate control, etc. Luxury is everywhere. Luxury is more abundant. We just moved the goal posts.

> 50% of the ones who survived that were dead by 30

Not really, most people who survived childhood would easily live to 60/70

> most people who survived childhood would easily live to 60/70

"Excluding child mortality, the average life expectancy during the 12th–19th centuries was approximately 55 years...if a person survived childhood, they had about a 50% chance of living 50–55 years, instead of only 25–40 years" [1][a].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_expectancy

[a] http://sirguillaume.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/Old_Age-H...

>What does leisure look like to you?

Not having to worry about anything related to work. To be able to truly disconnect. Something that is nearly impossible for a massive chunk of workers.

That's a regular comment that's been written for many years already. But there's another aspect.. it might not be a simple graph, where zero work and 100% leisure is great. Maybe we need both but of better quality and balance.

There is this ideal that say society should aim to become productive enough that everyone can do what they enjoy, give what they can miss, and take what they need.

Though this ideal is not as popular nowadays.

I really thing this idea of joy / leisure is a bit of a smoke screen though, people are not great at knowing what they need. I firmly believe that we vibe and bounce our feelings against society which gives us balance, it's just that most of the time society is in the wrong paradigm (consumerism + bs jobs)

„Modern man no longer works at what cannot be abbreviated.“ —Paul Valery (as quoted by Walter Benjamin in “The Storyteller”)

There's no reason you couldn't use this "next button" idea to get work done quickly and then go hang out.

The reason that this won't work in the end is that they will reduce headcount once they understand the technology and then we'll be hanging out permanently. Factory workers didn't get extra time in the break room when robots were implemented to speed up the assembly line. They got replaced permanently.

That's potentially a good thing in the long run. People can do either higher-skill work and/or we'll reorganize society to account for less people working.

I think that's a little naive. We could do it now in the US but we don't. In countries like the US I expect widespread poverty after more jobs evaporate, because the wealthy won't want to just support those people, even if we can as a country. We won't need all those hourly workers to do basic things. But what will all those people who don't have a "real job" that does something a robot/ai can't perform do? The US will have chaos and maybe even actual fighting before the federal legislature approves UBI.

That is possible, but I feel like usually we take the middle-of-the-road approach later than we should. So it won't be an optimal transition but it will be OK. I'd advocate for figuring it out sooner and more generously though!

Every once in a while I think about this. I want a desktop environment that lets me organize things into "activities"/tasks; sets of tabs, different editors, different apps, which are essentially isolated from each other, shut down when I want and restore state when I want.

Roughly, I would prefer if my interaction with the computer was almost "reverse-repl"; the computer is consistently prompting me, and providing me suggested tools for how to proceed. I would love this. It would make a lot of things more straightforward imo (especially for someone with ADHD, like me).

A (very) short story on this subject: http://web.archive.org/web/20121008025245/http://squid314.li...

After analyzing your personal information, I propose this Next action:

> Launch the Next app uninstaller.

[Reject] [Accept]

> "It is well that we are so foolish, or what little freedom we have would be wasted on us."

A very good line.

First, if you think this is a good idea, please go watch James Mickens' USENIX Security '18-Q keynote speech: "Why Do Keynote Speakers Keep Suggesting That Improving Security Is Possible?" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ajGX7odA87k

It's brief, entertaining, and grounding.

- - - -

The ultimate question is What is good?. That question is an open-ended intelligence test.

See "Measuring the intelligence of an idealized mechanical knowing agent" https://philpapers.org/archive/ALEMTI-2.pdf

"Intuitive Ordinal Notations": https://github.com/semitrivial/IONs

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

(In case it's not clear the connection is that figuring out the "best" course of action requires a similar kind of infinite or at least unbounded intelligence as the ION task.)

AI Clippy - the true paperclip maximiser.

This could be really helpful for procrastination. Since sometimes the hardest part is just to start, this could generate helpful nudges towards productive outcome.

This makes the assumption that this Next Button can correctly identify most important (let alone remotely appropriate) thing for me to do next. Given how aggressively and confidently wrong ML tools often are, why would anybody trust this kind of tool at all?

Seems like it would have the ability to make any job into a "BS job" tool. Especially if any metrics are associated with it.

"Why haven't we released any new features, even though we're constantly closing tickets?"

"The Next Button is giving all the tickets to the PMs, and it's having our engineers do code reviews on closed PRs. The EMs and above are inundated with so many auto-generated email loops that they can't do anything else.

In the age of Desktop Siri, this feature could also be very risky to ship if it fails for the masses the same way as clippy, the MS word assistant, failed 20 years ago.

Apple bought Cue in order to bring the "surfacing what's temporally relevant to the user" experience to Siri. I don't really see much of what Cue worked on manifesting in Siri since the acquisition, except for the Siri watchface for Apple Watch.

https://www.cultofmac.com/248525/why-apple-bought-cue-hint-t...

There is a group working on this: https://www.adept.ai/act

My next button...is the one I need to repair my flannel shirt. I made sure all three of my milenial children had sewing boxes and could hand sew simple repairs. Can they choose to pay someone else, get a new shirt or ask Mom to do it because I am much faster, sure. But the point is they have that choice and more importantly no one is making assumptions for and about them and consequently taking their choices away in the process.Allowing tech to think and prioritize for me with a generic next button seems to me a recipe to become an automaton following the proscribed next thing. Maybe I'm just wary of being spoon fed, I like making my own choices like deciding to not be productive sometimes. For example, will this next button ever steer you to Hacker News so you can chase down some rabbit holes and attempt some existential commentary on buttons or will it be another way to keep you r nose to the proscribed grindstone with a sprinkling of sanctioned leisure?

Also known as DWIM in the 90's (80's? 70's?):

http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/D/DWIM.html

"it is also occasionally described as the single instruction the ideal computer would have."

I for one like this idea.

One problem with GTD is all the friction involved. The apps tend to absorb too much time/attention/effort with their fiddly UI bits, and then one must spend time & effort retrieving & restoring prior context (mental & otherwise) in order to get into the swing of something.

If the Next Button did what this article describes, whilst also presenting a shortlist of other things it could fire up and drop me into right away - frictionlessly - a sort of "batteries included" desktop - I'd be into it.

I think this was an interesting thought experiment but I actually think it is subtly off-base.

The Next Button would be just a little bit off too often to be useful. But I definitely think a bot will be able to take direct input along the lines of “open gmail and draft all responses” and then execute that.

It’s like self-driving. The bot either needs to be capable of doing everything or it will still need significant direction along the way.

This is not to quibble with the author - I think the future will be weird, but I don’t think we will be able to release a bot to choose its own adventure for quite some time.

I'd like something that is trained on StackOverflow and can help with network problems, installation errors, and such.

(and before an AI can do this flawlessly, programmers should not be worried too much about their jobs)

This is a very interesting idea, I'm sure it isn't going to happen, and while I won't quite promise I won't use it, I'm going to be very reluctant and slow to do so, for several reasons:

1. Imagine having a device that simply did whatever you needed, only, physically. Would you use? It would be hard not to. But the resulting atrophy would be very dangerous to you. There is a certain amount of effort you need to exert on your own, or you will lose the ability to exert any effort. But your effort is what you're getting paid for....

2. Extensive use of this tool would impact its own effectiveness, by depriving it of training data. It would eventually stereotype you into a rut, whether you liked it or not. This would be the equivalent of an over-stereotyped recommendation list for YouTube or TikTok, only converted into my work life. Not necessarily a good idea.

3. This would give more power than I particularly care for over to the person designing this tool. Defaults have a lot of power as it is; witness the power of the default search engine in a browser. Putting my entire computer life at the disposal of someone else's choice of defaults like that is even worse, especially with the amount of "intelligence", artificial or otherwise, that would be deployed in the choices. Yes, yes, in a perfect world it would just neutrally do what you want and the person developing it would simply ethically resist all offers to skew the answers for profit. In reality, well, basically, lol, no, that's not what will happen.

All that said, like I said, it is going to happen. Though it will take more than 12-18 months. It is not completely clear how to map a "language model" to this task, and I think it will take longer. (I mean "not completely clear" straight. I don't mean that as a rhetorically-lightened "I don't think it's possible"; I think it is. However, I suspect the stupid obvious ideas will need significant refinement before they work, and the development cycle is going to need some time to go around the loop a few times.) Also, this would be a lot easier if we lived in a world where something like Appletalk was still alive and everything was able to be interacted with in such a standard way. While the ML task for a tool like this is nontrivial, most likely the bulk of the work by person-hour is going to be hooking it to all the bespoke APIs and GUI automation and all the other crap work of trying to get this to work with actual tools correctly. (I mean, it's darned near "reimplementing Appletalk, except from the outside and without help from the OS vendor this time".)

Would you want it if it offered you control and transparency?

Like, how would you feel about someone taking care of the heavy lifting of API integration and GUI automation and then letting you as an individual choose how to extend or automate your workflow? Like through a developer API? Perhaps connectable to AI models with transparent inputs and outputs and that you can override or customize yourself?

I don't expect to be made that offer, so the point is somewhat moot. I might pay for it but it won't be available because the company offering the $100/month subscription that has those characteristics will be annihilated in the market by the company selling it for $9.99/month, if not free, and covering every square inch in advertising and "nudges" for sale.

I have a whole rant about GUIs that includes as a subset how Appletalk was still a good idea and I wish GUIs would have doubled down on that rather than writing it off, but that's a separate topic.

i need this, as a procrastinator who struggles to start. i looked at academic research into this space but came back pretty disillusioned.

Seems like the space is still very early ->

Fast Inference and Transfer of Compositional Task Structures for Few-shot Task Generalization: https://proceedings.mlr.press/v180/sohn22a/sohn22a.pdf

Learning to Navigate the Web: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1812.09195.pdf

A Dataset for Interactive Vision-Language Navigation with Unknown Command Feasibility: https://www.ecva.net/papers/eccv_2022/papers_ECCV/papers/136...

MiniWoB++: a web interaction benchmark for reinforcement learning: https://github.com/Farama-Foundation/miniwob-plusplus

I have a question: if current AI can or will shortly be able to replace or significantly augment knowledge workers, why would any company that posses such tech make it available for the public or other companies? Keeping it private, secret even, would allow taking over entire domains like IT, media, law consulting, etc and that would generate unimaginable wealth.

They are not giving it away, they are only giving access. Huge difference. Let the public figure out a good business model using your APIs, then shut them off once they have found it.

Could be too capital intensive to run.

Could be asking the wrong question. In AI we gave up in the 80s on top down lets write an expert system and now we're trying bottom up. What if we're asking the wrong question? People of a scientific analytical bent like to think they think in a scientific analytical bent, but most of the time they actually rehash old fads or do primate dominance rituals. As such making an AI that solves problems might not be what anyone wants. Take for example, ohms law, a very useful mathmatical construct; why hasn't it utterly revolutionized womens fashion? Turns out women's fashion has very little overlap with ohms law. Perhaps the "craft" of knowledge work is less analytical than people want to think and as such a perfect analytical tool might be of minimal use. Surely you can't argue that a pocket calculator app on a phone is not analytical, but it hasn't revolutionized much of anything either despite its remarkable analytical power; the world was built with slide rules, then CAD/CAM FEM simulation with minimal time in between and as such the calculator doesn't matter much.

Considering whole image detection subject stemmed from a homework which can be done in a summer break at most, the optimism of the post makes me chuckle.

I guess this will require at least one big breakthrough to realize, but this is again an overly optimistic take on the issue.

Coming next, mass layoffs!

That could be the output of big company's Next Button, after downloading Q2 report...

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