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Comment by kbos87 | Hacker News Reader

Why would my employer pay me more for using their AI? I am already massively more productive at work using AI. I'm not getting paid more, and I'm not working fewer hours. The road we are headed down is one where all of the economic benefits go straight to the owning class.

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For the same reasons that, on average and in general, increases in productivity have lead to increases in wages across history. It's not universal and it's not instantaneous, but the base level assumption should be that increases in productivity will lead to increases in wages in the long run and we should have specific reasons why it won't happen for a given case to believe otherwise.

> For the same reasons that, on average and in general, increases in productivity have lead to increases in wages across history

Historically, increased productivity has almost literally never increased wages or benefits without worker uprisings

Seriously look into the history of labor and automation

Cool. What worker uprising occurred in the US in 1995? I (and basically every economist) disagree with your interpretation of historical events.

https://x.com/LettieriDC/status/1922704140834099370

Sub-6% unemployment: https://www.investopedia.com/historical-us-unemployment-rate...

Capital doesn't pay labor unless it has to.

Average wages = f(labor productivity, demand for labor, labor supply)

The AGI future is that demand for labor crashes.

US unemployment rate is currently 4.2%. There is no prospect of real AGI any time soon.

All three initials of "[A]rtificial [G]eneral [I]ntelligence" have multiple meanings.

For the sake of employment, consider what happens if we can show that some model is equal-or-better than an IQ 85 human on all tasks for which you can actually get paid, while on hardware such that it is at least real-time and costs no more than whatever minimum wage is where you are. At this point, 16% of the population are never, ever, worth paying for.

I think current models and cheapest hardware aren't quite that combination of generality and cost — but the best models can do it, and hardware of fixed performance is still getting cheaper.

We're a long, long way from having a reliable, inexpensive robot that can snake out a plugged toilet.

1) From what I've heard*, IQ 85 is about the lowest you can be and still function as a plumber. My statement stands about everyone less clever than the worst — not average, worst — plumber.

2) for all values of X in the last two years, every time someone suggests "robots/AI are nowhere near doing X", if X is coherent**, either an AI can already do X, or at most ends up doing it within six months.

So, anyway: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NmJIuns9nRk

* Which is really vague due to (1) how mediocre IQ tests are in practice and (2) the internet being full of oft-repeated nonsense since day zero

** The two things people end up correctly saying AI can't do, are (1) "solve the halting problem", and (2) reinvent literally everything starting from first principles.

There doesn't have to be to cause a substantial structural unemployment jump.

Even AI that's only borderline competent at fuzzy 'file these files into these systems' admin work would wipe out a class of middle income jobs.

And given that's basically here today technologically, we're in the digestion and expansion phase.

Perhaps someday, but so far that remains entirely speculative. The data doesn't show any structural unemployment jump.

I raise you this chart:

https://www.epi.org/productivity-pay-gap/

Change 1979q4–2025q1:

Productivity +86.0%

Hourly pay +32.0%

Productivity has grown 2.7x as much as pay

Luckily for me, I didn't claim (nor do I believe) that workers/wages capture 100% of productivity.

Where is worker productivity on that graph exactly?

Why does that matter? According to you, productivity is not what leads to increases in wages. You claimed that wages only ever go up with a worker uprising. I showed that worker wages went up starting in 1995. According to you, there must have been a worker uprising to explain that.

> You claimed that wages only ever go up with a worker uprising.

I'm not sure you really understood my original post. I never said or meant to imply that wages never grow ever

I was talking about how increases in productivity do not lead to proportionally increased wages

Look, here's an example. Let's say I'm a worker producing Widgets for $20/hour by hand, and I can produce 10 widgets an hour. The company sells widgets for $10 each

In one hour I have produced $100 worth of widgets. The company pays me $20, the company keeps $80

Now the company buys a WidgetMachine. Using the WidgetMachine I can now produce 20 widgets an hour

I now produce $200 worth of Widgets per hour. The company still pays me $20, the company has now earned $180

My productivity has doubled, but my wage hasn't

So next year inflation is $5. The company increases my income to $25, starts charging a couple of cents more per Widget so they can absorb my wage increase without any change to their bottom line

My wage matches inflation, it still "grows" but it is completely divorced from my productivity

More importantly, my wage growing to match inflation doesn't help my buying power even remotely. If my wage only goes up to match exactly inflation then all I'm ever doing is treading water. At best all I can do is keep the exact same standard of living and lifestyle

Increases in "real wages" should have "real" impact on your life, it should let you have a better life than before

I never claimed that workers get 100% of the increase in productivity. I said that increased productivity leads to increased wages. Increased productivity is in fact a _requirement_ for wages to go up (note that I am _not_ claiming that in increase in productivity _must_ result in increase wages. It is necessary, but not always sufficient), or else there is no where for those increases to come from. So when you claim that productivity increases _only_ result in worker wages increasing in the co-occurence of a worker uprising, that is the same thing as claiming that worker uprisings are a requirement.

So I showed you an increase in worker wages. If there is not corresponding worker uprising, your original claim is false.

And,again, you keep ignoring that the plot I showed is already inflation adjusted. It is a real increase, not a nominal increase.

> Increased productivity is in fact a _requirement_ for wages to go up

No it isn't. This is an extremely naive understanding of how any of this works

You even say it yourself, with the silly graph you keep posting

That graph doesn't show productivity it just shows "real inflation adjusted wages", like you keep harping on about.

But in general a person is not increasing their productivity year over year. So why would their wage go up to match inflation if, as you say, wages only go up when productivity increases? That doesn't make sense

The reality is that people already provide their employers with vastly more productivity than they are paid for. Their employers are capturing the majority of the value from that productivity. If someone's wage goes up to match inflation, their productivity hasn't increased, inflation has increase the value of their current productivity

You seriously don't seem to understand how any of this works

Given that economists almost universally agree with me, I'm going to have to suggest that it is in fact you who don't know know how any of this works.

You keep shifting the goal posts, you keep talking about unrelated things, and you keep not addressing the core claims, and you keep not responding to the main refutation of your own original claim. I'm done beating my head against this wall. I hope you have a nice day.

> Given that economists almost universally agree with me

I'm amazed you've found that all economists that can universally agree on anything. Economists don't know how any of this works either. Economics is not a science, and you can find data to support basically an unlimited number of arguments.

I don’t have a strong opinion on the topic, but bluefirebrand did not claim that wages only go up because of worker uprisings.

In the long term, the only thing that _can_ increase wages on average and in general is productivity. Productivity increases mean the pie is bigger, and without that, there is no where for increased wages to come _from_. So by saying that producity only results in increased wages in the case of the worker uprising, that is equivalent to saying that wages can only rise from a worker uprising. The only way this isn't true is for some other proposed mechanism for worker wages to go up, and the only other methods would be short time, single increases where all you are doing is taking from someone else (presumably capital I guess?)

Sustained rates of increase _require_ increasing productivity. So no, they didn't explicitly state it, what they explicitly said was that productivity only results in increased wages if a worker uprising forces it. But that's the logical requirement of that statement.

> there is no where for increased wages to come _from

The pie doesn't have to grow when the pie is already massive, but only 1% of people are taking 90% of the pie

You can get short term or one time increases by taking from somewhere else, but without productivity gains, it's an inherently limited, zero sum game.

It's not short-term or one-time if you're taking away and redistributing the economic rent that those people collect from the rest of us.

20-22% of the pie in the US.

Sure, whatever.

The point was not in the exact number

The point is that there is an answer to "Where could increased wages come from if we don't increase productivity"

We don't have to increase productivity to pay some of the population less and other parts of the population more

You could easily rephrase that as "Historically, worker uprisings have almost literally never increased wages or benefits, absent increased productivity" and it would be a lot closer to the truth of how automation impacts wages.

> For the same reasons that, on average and in general, increases in productivity have lead to increases in wages across history.

Not in the last 40 years in real income terms: https://www.epi.org/productivity-pay-gap/

This trend is likely to accelerate (productivity skyrocketing, wages stagnant)

you are confusing increases in profits with increases in wages :)

You need to switch jobs in order to get paid at market rate. Companies have found that they do not need to keep up with the market rate to retain employees.

It varies by company.

I know of at least one major company that continually benchmarks market rates and uses those as default raises.

Unsurprisingly, they have an average tenure of 10+ years...

> Why would my employer pay me more for using their AI?

We’re on HN. AI makes it easier for you to disrupt your employer.

* Unless your employer happens to have engineered a monopoly

Owning what? Your employer (likely) owns little of value in a world of cheap AI software generation. Open Source models are already the thing that you can use to code with, and will obviously get better. We have to believe some really weird stuff for this vision to be coherent, for example a nvidia-everything-world, where they are not only the sole provider of hardware but also control access to all relevant models, and all software products that any (non-tech) business needs to use AI.

If by "owning class" you actually mean "all people with agency" then, yeah, I agree.

> Your employer (likely) owns little of value in a world of cheap AI software generation.

That applies to you, not to your employer - in your hands, "cheap AI software generation" is, well... cheap. On the other hand, your employer owns patents, copyrights, distribution channels, politicians and connections - those become more valuable as the coding skills get cheaper. The "owning class" are those who own most of the high value items enumerated above.

I don't know who you are describing, but it's certainly nothing close to the median employer.

The median employer isn't in the software business either, so "cheap coding" has little direct effect on them and it doesn't help the agency-rocking small fish in any way. However, as customers, the median employers are highly dependent upon precisely the type of employer I described, not upon "people with agency".

Why would your employer pay you more for using Python/Java/JavaScript? You're massively more productive when using those languages instead of C for many common development tasks.

Did the introduction of Python drastically reduce software developer salaries?

{Total demand for software} is oddly not being mentioned by most people in this thread.

First approximation, there are two AI coding futures:

1. AI coding increases software development productivity, decreasing the cost of software, stimulating more demand for the now more efficient development.

2. AI coding increases software development productivity such that the existing labor pool is too large for demand.

I'd hazard (1) in the short term and (2) in the long term.

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