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Comment by epilys | Hacker News Reader

I strongly feel like this LLM hype should have revealed the bullshit job phenomenon [1] to the world. Instead nobody questions their bullshit reality, and assumes that if a program can perform in bullshit, it is as conscious as a person.

[1]: Graeber https://www.atlasofplaces.com/essays/on-the-phenomenon-of-bu...

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Alternatively, Graeber's whole thesis is bullshit: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/09500170211015...

This article seems to describe people unable to find meaning in their job, unable to understand why they exist. There is a big difference between "my job is meaningless", as in, "I am unable to find meaning in my job", and "my job is pointless and shouldn't exist".

The way "bullshit jobs" are described covers both actually pointless jobs, and people that don't understand why their job exist.

Graeber's claim about bullshit jobs can be trivially dismissed. If there were actually many bullshit jobs in some profitable company then eventually a competitor with fewer bullshit jobs and thus lower costs would come in and eat their lunch. While middle managers in some organizations do engage in empire building to inflate their own importance, senior executives generally don't hesitate to cut costs by laying off unproductive employees. Their own bonuses and equity values depend on this.

There are certainly some bullshit jobs, especially in the public sector and non-profit space. But they are a tiny minority.

Naïve dismissal. People, businesses, economies are not rational agents. And competitors eat companies' lunches all the time.

Ah, famously easy to measure knowledge worker productivity!

Bullshit Jobs isn’t about people doing nothing all day.

So what? I never claimed that it was.

If anyone wants us to believe that bullshit jobs are common then they need to explain why senior executives who are generally ruthless in conducting layoffs would choose to keep many employees who aren't contributing to profit margins. The number of bullshit jobs is more than zero, but as an economic concept it's just totally implausible on a large scale. This is one of those "just so" stories: it sounds truthy but when you dig in there's little hard data or reproducible experiments.

Again, it’s not about not contributing to the organization. You should read the book.

> There are certainly some bullshit jobs, especially in the public sector and non-profit space.

I don't think you understand the definition of a "public service"

Maybe LLMs can reduce the work week at least. 30 hours, 20 hours even?

It is shocking to me that people spend so little time thinking about the matter that they believe this would be a good thing.

Oh but they have.[0]

Would you like to share why you feel that it would be a bad thing for people to have more free time? Do you think that the current levels of free time that people have is optimal? Why or why not?

[0] https://harpers.org/archive/1932/10/in-praise-of-idleness/

I'm already working part time, happier than ever. I can't imagine a single scenario in which going from 40 to 30 hours work week would be negative, neither individually nor collectively.

At the end of the day how much work can be reduced doesn't matter as long as the people that we end up are the type that would bring the universe to an early heat death just so they could say they had one more dollar than another person.

Not solving greed before creating AI might be humanities final mistake.

lmao, this is what economists, industrials and politicians told us since the 40s

Meanwhile we work more hours and retire later than back then. It's never been about reducing the working hours, and probably won't be for a long while

And not only that but the jobs that were once fulfilling and stable are now absolutely miserable and everything but stable, we lost the meaning of work

I think it's incredibly naive to think that an increase in your productivity will result in a reduction of hours worked, especially at the same pay.

No, you'll just be given more work to do. If it takes you 20 hours/week to finish what took you 40 hours/week last year, you'll just be given double the work to complete and at the same salary/wage.

Make no mistake, the prime benefactor of increased automation won't be the workers, it'll be the owners.

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