Your Prize for Saving Time at Work with AI: More Work
wsj.com
wsj.com
Because capitalism/free market rewards companies that do this behaviour then a unified collective coordinated action among the workers will never happen, so the next best alternative we have is to discourage blind, jaded acceptance : and encourage the rebellious message that maybe, just maybe, SOME, nah, a decent chunk, of the rewards can go to the workforce itself.
You can view this as a negative, but it’s also an argument against layoffs. If AI makes a person 20% more productive, laying off 20% of the workforce is short sighted. If everyone is increasing productivity by 20%, they will need their full workforce to do that. Laying off 20%, or cutting back 20% of the hours, will leave the company at their old output.
Of course, in reality the saving probably won’t be 20%, at least not in the short-term. We could also probably cut 20% of our work week and maintain similar productivity by simply avoiding interruptions, pointless meetings, and other such nonsense. But that’s a harder culture change than saying, “go use AI.”
This also extends past tech. Forcing physical companies to set up a local subsidiary/do JVs has done the same. Examples abound, Starbucks being a big one. Forcing them to do a JV means a huge portion of the revenue of the biggest coffee chain in the country stays inside the country, as well as plenty of office jobs. Otherwise everything but the actual in-store jobs would have once again flowed to the US.
China of course has done the same, to similar success. Imagine if they hadn't, and just let e.g. Meta be their social media platform of choice, Google their search engine, Amazon their shopping platform. It'd be nothing but a massive net loss to everyone involved but those tech firms; including the Chinese public as the state would impose the exact same censorship and rules on those companies, as they currently do with the remaining ones.
That other countries haven't done so and just let SV walk over them in order to appease the US - who has now turned out not to be their friend after all, surprise surprise! - is very unfortunate.
This incredible imbalance is what has let the average HN FAANG employee make absolute bank at the cost of the rest of the world, so I'm not expecting this to be particularly popular here :)
The luddites literally attempted this, btw, and now everyone mocks them for trying to slow the inevitable exploitation of labor by technology.
A world-wide revolution may be the only way to change. Or wait for the inequality between nations to erase.
I think it's true for any worker that performing the same activity over and over can lead to issues that wouldn't occur if work was more varied. That isn't necessarily in a companies interest though since for them it's easier to train people on one task, and they're easier to measure or replace.
The predictable and measurable thing for developers is thinking and cranking out features.