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There's an entire superstructure of people that exist in jobs that might not be necessary or valuable (the jobs, not the people.) The reports, the meetings, the evaluations, etc, are all constructed to fulfill the wants and needs of those jobs, and the jobs above them and so on. Does it meaningfully inform the work that is being done, or the product that's being made?

I think what this tends to reveal is just how much of a house of cards the modern business world is.

It's more simple than that. Most jobs don't need to exist, but most people need jobs for a society to function.

There is a basic conflict then between business (who optimize for cost) and government (who optimize for stability).

So why then would private business not eliminate those unnecessary jobs in order to control cost? If they are set in their ways, then why don't they get outcompeted by more efficient companies that skip those vestigial roles?

The simple answer is that the people who would make those decisions are the people who hold those jobs. It's a classic instance of "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it."

And it's systemic. The product of management is reports. The product of management is meetings. To them (and the people who ultimately run the company) these are the solutions. Have a meeting, write a report, do a review. Those are the tools they know. They have hammers. Everything is nails.

> The simple answer is that the people who would make those decisions are the people who hold those jobs.

We just went through a season of layoffs - I find it hard to believe that no one thought to get rid of the so-called bullshit jobs for greater efficiencies.

For arguments sake, lets say the conspiracy for bs jobs goes all the way to the top (C-suite, boards) in established companies: how about startups then? Where are the streamlined startups that are more efficient than incumbents by simply not creating those "unnecessary" roles?

I suspect that coordination problems necessitates these roles as companies grow larger - call it corporate carcinization if you will. If you were to start your streamlined org today, it will evolve into a crab-like form.

> how about startups then?

The business model of a startup is to work everyone you have beyond their natural limits, this doesn't scale to an entire economy.

I know a few startups that laid off most of the revenue drivers in sales and marketing, but kept expensive founders and coders. They are on paper leaner, but not necessarily more efficient.

Because it's a nonsense argument repeated ad nauseum by people in technical fields (and, to be fair, sometimes in other fields; but I see it more often in technical fields). Most of us don't understand the work being done by the people we claim don't understand our work; that's fine, it's normal, people on both sides have spent years and decades learning how to do their jobs, and it's unreasonable to expect someone in another field to fully understand your job.

The problem is that we often think that if we don't understand something, it must not be valuable; and I think this problem is exacerbated by high levels of education and/or intelligence, because we usually understand things, which must mean the things we don't intuitively understand are obviously not valuable.

The reality is, there is some bloat which gets introduced as businesses grow. But it's not as much as we often think.

They are (or will soon), and that will create massive problems for stability of society at large (which is why government will have to intervene).

Obligatory plug for the book “Bullshit Jobs.” But, what you’ve said is the mail on the head.

What blows my mind is how much engineering effort we collectively put into consumerism and business process, without taking a step back to the design phase and asking ourselves if we need a new architecture.

Almost every meeting you attend, almost every email you read, is pointless or irrelevant to you. If an AI can do it for you, you probably should have never been involved to begin with. If all this AI accomplishes nothing but filtering out several hours a week of pointless bullshit, then "mission accomplished", IMO.

> Humanity didn't develop emails, or have meetings, or communications because it some sort of ritual to a strange god

We do however have lots and lots of ritual as to how those communications occur in order to confer the proper respect and tone. In most cases its pretty much noise but you can't skip it because skipping it means offense was intended. We can all recognize this but we aren't really free to escape it.

Generating emails with AI lets a person avoid the appearance of intentional offense and summarizing emails with AI lets you cut to the point while acknowledging that you are dispensing with all of the ritual.

Who knows, maybe after long enough the cultural convention can shift to just sending your prompt straight to the other person!

Obviously I'm skipping over a ton of pitfalls but I think that captures the appeal for a lot of people.

If you want to learn how to be a digital hermit then that is probably not a bad idea. Directly interacting with humans means dealing with their humanity - and that needs practice.

Totally agreed, as I said, pitfalls. I don't think constantly generating slop with the real message embedded inside to send back and forth is the best way to do things, but it's the local maximum I think we are headed towards because of the incentives and social dynamics involved.

AI taking to AI to do things is not necessarily an exercise in futility.

This paper used 3.5, not even 4 and is basically a couple AI agents collaborating to create software.

https://arxiv.org/abs/2307.07924

This is another example at multi AI agent collaboration.

https://arxiv.org/abs/2307.02485

Getting relevant intelligent text to arbitrary previous text means generating text capable of making decisions. That is the end game here. Your machine can think for you now.

That's a good point. Still, I think that's different from an AI agent attending a meeting "for you" as a surrogate. If I were in a meeting where someone sent their personal AI assistant instead of attending, I would be insulted. I'd much rather someone send me a note explaining why they can't be there and letting me know anything they want from those of us in the meeting.

Well if I have it correctly right now for duet, the personal AI assistant act is only on the receiving end of the person missing the meeting. You can talk to the AI about the meeting but the AI won't talk to the attendees (only share generated notes)

This reminds me of the book priced at $23,698,655.93 (plus $3.99 shipping) by algorithms.

https://www.wired.com/2011/04/amazon-flies-24-million/

> Humanity didn't develop emails, or have meetings, or communications because it some sort of ritual to a strange god (barring the meetings produced by the priests of agile to appease the Agile God). We communicate in order to share information from one person to another for a reason. So if we have a workflow where someone uses AI to generate an email, that results in a meeting that is then summarized by AI, that is then sent to an inbox that is then scanned and the contents of which is summarized by AI. What was the point of any of it?

Because we didn't have a machine that can do this whole collective decision-making process. What if we make an AI that's powerful enough to replace a whole organization? A whole company? A whole industry?

One imagines an AI replacing an engineering company would not hold meetings, it'd produce plans, schematics and software.

I won't expect the robot manager to have a robot secretary, who complains to the RR department when manager makes inappropriate remarks.

Ya but I'm not talking about Skynet at this point, maybe when the AI gets more capable we'll get there, but I don't imagine that ChatGPT is going to be replacing most of the engineers on my team right now.

It's not even Skynet. Imagine if in a few years we can make a big LLM that reads and sends emails instead of an organization and can make decisions. I don't think that's that far off.

For a really fun exploration of this, read Avogadro Corp by William Hertling.

Thanks for the rec!

I had similar thoughts when I read a comment from a (non-technical) project manager in a discussion a few months ago. He said something like he uses ChatGPT to summarize the long winded emails of their developer. (He was working for/owning some kind of agency where apparently software developers weren't in the focus, really.)

He also mentioned writing emails with ChatGPT (though I can't remember if these were for communicating with the devs, but it doesn't really matter). I remember thinking that well, you my friend are pretty ignorant and not someone I'd like to work with. Even unethical.

So someone puts in the work to inform you about important details of their work/thought process and then this guy just ignores the whole thing. Even if the developer in question is really sharing more details than needed the right thing to do is to actually manage them and teach them to share less and make their own decision. (Hard to tell from the outside, of course, and the manager in question might be wrong too.)

Now if someone also blows up their own emails with generated details, especially if it's toward the same person whose email they have compressed with the AI then besides robbing the time of others, they may successfully deceive others and themselves and pretend that they have the knowledge what they don't have. And that will hurt the decisions made by them and by others. Basically the shared reality that you want to create with communication will not be a shared reality but out-of-sync views and you'll end up with a lot more "oh, but when I said that I thought you meant X...."

You raise a good point, and it reminds me of a sort of "Prisoners Dilemma" (sender uses/avoids LLM-verbosification and/or recipient filters all emails through LLM-summarization).

The worst-case scenario is that human communication becomes completely routed through this LLM-in-the-middle.

> everyone will be happy?

Shareholders will be happy the day a company produces a new product and no human ever worked on its development.

All of the profits, none of those pesky workers demanding silly things such as payments and OSHA protections.

> Humanity didn't develop emails, or have meetings, or communications because it some sort of ritual to a strange god

Yeah, you say this like it's obvious, but it's quite an honest and productive line of inquiry.

But whatever the history of meetings are, it's undeniable that a lot of the current ones are merely ritualistic.

And yes, the one single way to deal with the ritualistic meetings is to not attend them. I am nearly convinced that this headline is an attempt of modern art, instead of objective information. Even though the application looks like something with real goals.

I can't help but perceive the smell of a solution in search of a problem with all those ‘things that “AI” can do for you’.

We developed that stuff because we were paid to.

We were paid to make and use those technologies because we were taught that’s how society works.

Fiat economics is not solving human problems. It’s propagating fiat economics.

Humans have no divine purpose. The universe does not force social norms on us. We do that to each other.

You exist to pass the butt… dollars around. Fiat economics has filled the biological hole religion stumbled upon, probably helped evolve.

The only reason for any of this is deference to those who came before.

There is too much information flowing between humans right now. AI can help filter it.