Using standardisation to improve productivity has been the backbone of the industrial revolution ever since we first standardised screw threads in the 19th century.
It's undeniable that we've lost some cultural richness in the process, but if that means I don't have to work a field for 12 hours a day just to get enough food to survive like my ancestors did, then I'll accept the tradeoff.
For example, we have standardized schooling/exams, because that's the proven scalable way we can have for children - essentially a factory spitting out different grade levels/seniority.
But LLMs can break this standardization by being able to tailor student needs in a scalable manner.
However this takes a huge amount of action, and that's going to be the pain point in the near future as we humans tend towards the easy/greedy paths.
Cultural richness - LLMs are also very bad in this regard due to the bias towards majority viewpoints. This reminds me of a recent HN thread [0] discussing how AI is hindering the adoption of new technologies. In some ways, this happens because AI tends to favor mainstream perspectives, making it biased against "new" or "fringe" viewpoints.
People talk about the glory of Rome, but it was utterly vile. They either enslaved or exterminated whoever they conquered. If they had an LLM, they might keep you alive and brainwash you with it. Maybe.
Per gpt:
"In the military of ancient Rome, decimation (from Latin decimatio 'removal of a tenth') was a form of military discipline in which every tenth man in a group was executed by members of his cohort."
This was done to thwart desertion.
This is similar to:
- PIP.
- Email me what you did last week or your fired.
- Blanket 10% layoffs in high profit environments
- Blanket 10% cuts in general
I'm less scared about AI than the culture of dominance utilizing it. We are not the only people that ever lived on planet fucking earth, everything has been done already in some other form of matter. The wicked animals you see now days in power have lived many times over in past histories, we've seen these exact people many times. We simply get hoodwinked when they seduce us with casual talk about space, science, and the world. Decent people begin to think they are just like us. Nope, they are not like us.
Sometimes you just have to connect the dots and accept it. History precedes us and owns us.
Not disagreeing with your overall point but this isn't correct. Medieval peasants worked about 150 days a year, and while they were obviously very busy during planting and harvesting times, they had lighter workloads at other points in the year.
Laborer wages were 2p/day in the 14th century. https://thehistoryofengland.co.uk/resource/medieval-prices-a...
In that first link it says 2 dozen eggs is 1 pence (1d, denarius meaning pence). That works out to half a pence per dozen, not 6.
If it actually cost 3 days wages for a dozen eggs it seems pretty clear everyone would have starved to death.
Eggs, like all meat, was a luxury. They didn't starve, they lived on gruel.
The relevant part of the legend at the top says:
1 pound (L) = 20 shillings (s)
...
1 shilling = 12 pence (d)
Meaning:
pound = livre = liber = L
shilling = sou = solidus = s
pence = denier = denarius = d
Reference: https://www.adamsmith.org/blog/regulation-industry/medieval-...
My own personal take is that, first off, I'm not at all trying to make peasant life as some sort of panacea - far from it. If anything, life before the Industrial Revolution was certainly much more precarious: obviously tons of childhood deaths (not to mention deaths from things like smallpox and the plague), and all it took was a bad harvest to cause major famine. War was much more commonplace. But the lack of a lot of tools that the Industrial Revolution provided meant that, in many ways, there was simply less possible time to do productive work. When the lights went out, it's hard to do a lot by candlelight/torches. The work really did ebb and flow with the seasons. Yes, there was ton to do during the offseason, but I think the analogy with the modern world is that is like the time after a tough deadline and big release - lots of "OK, let clean up some of this code now that we have time".
Plus, a lot of the tasks that your reference mentioned would have been clearly divided by the sexes. There is a paragraph from your link that states:
> We might also point to the amount of household labour that had to be performed. Yarn had to be spun, cloth to be weaved. Cooking was over open fires: and that firewood had to be collected. Bread baked and so on and on. There was a recent report (rather exagerrated but still) which claimed that in the 1930s it took 65 hours of human labour a week to run a household. Today it takes 3. Things were worse back in medieval days.
And nearly all of that work would have been done by women while men worked the fields. There was certainly much more total work to be done to run a household, but the division of labor was more clear cut.
So again, I think the reality is probably somewhere in the middle. Life was certainly "harder" back then, but from everything I've read there was undeniably more "downtime", even if there wasn't a ton to do during that downtime. The "having to work 12 hours a day just to keep food on the table" that I was responding to clearly seems to be false from just about every source I've read.
Which just makes the whole thing of looking at the life of peasants and talking about how much free time they had compared to us all the sillier. The point about what else you need to do to live (cook, mend clothes, etc.) is important, but makes it even more difficult to compare to our modern lives, even variation aside.
Before your ancestors would have kept a large herd of mammals and lived nomadically moving to fresh pastures when the grass and vegetation was eaten
It's rare but there are some modern nomadic people who live like this camels and goats in the desert
Old diets were primarily carnivore and plants were struggle foods
That's why Europeans killed all the buffalo and why the Japanese on average are shorter because they had long periods where meat was restricted for religious reasons
Don't compare yourself to a people under exploitation, independence was taken by force
I’m not going to try to compare it to pre-neolithic nomadic tribes because nobody knows for sure why the neolithic revolution occurred, but my guess would be that climate shocks were more likely to wipe out small nomadic tribes over the long run.
I think tech does have the drive to make things legible, and is falling into the same trap as described in the book where efficiencies or processes that cannot be described in the format desired at the top leads to them being discarded. And the legibility issues mean that the impact of discarding these types of things is not properly understood
That misunderstanding is something that causes a lot of grief in SAP introductions.
When working with large enterprise software, customization is your enemy - and every time you have to customize something there, you should ask yourself if you shouldn't re-think your business processes instead. Often enough IBM, SAP or whatever have considerably more experience than you.
This is also why Salesforce was so successful and why it killed on-prem enterprise deployments in a lot of places. No longer a ton of different essentially unique versions to manage that make it nearly impossible to upgrade. Salesforce obviously supports customization but in a much more controlled fashion than was common at the time, and it's why it won out over Seibel Systems in the early 00s.
1: It locks you into a vendor. The vendor strongly encourages customisation for this reason (and for other reasons that are mostly against a business' interests)
2: onboarding staff is expensive because they need to learn your unique systems. If you're using a package/service off the shelf you can often advertise for people with knowledge of the package/service e.g. AWS versus inhouse e.g. known payroll system versus custom.
3: internal costs to upgrade. With stock standard systems your upgrades are cheap because the costs are amortised across many companies e.g. mobile app development in 2010's. With custom systems you pay for everything. The costs are often invisible e.g. horrific Mobile support (watching friends fight desktop websites on mobile is painful). Another cost is that internal development teams are often shit and certainly can never compete with Darwinian best-available-on-market software.
4: shitty custom internal systems. Sometimes the customisation provides business benefits but we have all worked with crappy internal systems where the benefits versus costs were slim.
Two examples of bad customisation requests:
A) HR systems in small companies. For some reason HR managers demand fractally complex systems and they all want different things so developing common features is really hard.
B) larger customers with demanding internal rules/regulations e.g. a client asking us to conform our UI to their UI standard. No way it was worth it for us or for them. Plus dealing with their UI despots would have been hell. I think their internal software teams decided to build inhouse instead (I bet the outcome was shit).
So when it came time to think about next steps. There was real appeal in being able to say, "No it's not supported in xyz software we just adopted". This prevents us from looking like the bad guy who's just getting in the way and should be laid off because we didn't want to spend 2 months implementing a hair brained idea that would only give us a net return of like four or five thousand dollars.
After the went live and the dust had settled, they thanked us and said they were glad we had pushed back. It had forced them to rethink how they worked but the result was much better and more optimized processes.
I've heard this as "the best flavor is vanilla". It referred to a hospital aligning healthcare business processes with industry-standard software workflows.
The main issue today is that the techologies shaping reality are in the control of private, non-democratic institutions, selling this power to the highest bidder (including hostile foreign powers).
Ever since that was posted[0] a week ago (reposted, but it was the first time I saw it), I've been filtering almost everything I see or do through that lens. It's really eye opening.
There's also Bit's About Money describing this effect in banks https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/seeing-like-a-bank/
Another lesson is that users can be taught to use appropriate protocols if those protocols are specified and the users believe in the mission/purpose of the site/organization/association.