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Comment by Aurornis | Hacker News Reader

Automation is a broad topic. At home I save time because my dishwasher automates washing my dishes. The clothes washer and dryer are a lot easier than doing it by hand. The fruit and vegetable at the grocery store are a lot cheaper than they would be without automation.

I think individuals who get comfortable in their jobs don’t like automation arriving at their station because it upends the order of things just as they were feeling comfortable and stable. Being adaptable now is more important than ever.

> Products don't get better either, but that's more of a "shareholder value" problem than it is a specific technology problem.

This is broadly false. Your laptop is unquestionably better because it was constructed with the help of automated CNC machines and PCB assembly as opposed to workers manually populating PCBs.

Some companies can try to use automation to stay in place with lower headcount, but they’ll be left behind by competition that uses automation to move forward. Once that leap happens it becomes accepted as the new normal, so it never feels like automation is making changes.

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> Your laptop is unquestionably better because it was constructed with the help of automated CNC machines and PCB assembly as opposed to workers manually populating PCBs.

This is a fundamentally flawed analogy, because the problems are inverted.

CNC and automated PCB assembly work well because creating a process to accurately create the items is hard, but validation that the work is correct is easy. Due to the mechanics of CNC, we can't manufacture something more precise than we can measure.

LLMs are inverted; it's incredibly easy to get them to output something, and hard to validate that the output is correct.

The analogy falls apart if you apply that same constraint to CNC and PCB machines. If they each had a 10% chance of creating a faulty product in a way that can only be detected by the purchaser of the final product, we would probably go back to hand-assembling them.

> Some companies can try to use automation to stay in place with lower headcount, but they’ll be left behind by competition that uses automation to move forward.

I suspect there will be a spectrum, as there historically has been. Some companies will use AI heavily and get crazy velocity, but have poor stability as usage uncovers bugs in a poorly understood codebase because AI wrote most of it. Others will use AI less heavily and ship fewer features, but have fewer severe bugs and be more able to fix them because of deep familiarity with the codebase.

I suspect stability wins for many use cases, but there are definitely spaces where being down for a full day every month isn't the end of the world.

Validation that a PCB was manufactured correctly is... easy. Disagree, but how about VLSI. It's hugely automated. Moore's Law is exponential but team sizes aren't. That productivity gap is made up for with huge amounts of automation. And nothing is easy about manufacturing validation of an ASIC.

I do think one primary difference between physical objects and software is we bother to have precise specifications that one can validate against, and I think that's what you're trying to get at. If all software had that then software could have an "easy" validation story too, I suppose.

I have mixed feelings about precise specifications in software. On the one hand the hardware engineer in me thinks everything should have an exact specification. On the other hand, that's throws away the "soft" advantage which is important for some types of software. So there is a spectrum.

FWIW I don't think there's anything factually wrong with what you said, but I think misses the parent's point. They would be incredibly naïve to say that hardware is easy. But I think they were using "easy" as a relative word, not absolute. As is natural in these conversations, but also easily leads to misunderstanding.

  > I do think one primary difference between physical objects and software is we bother to have precise specifications that one can validate against

Having been on the hardware side and now on software (specifically ML) this is one of the biggest differences I've noticed. It's a lot harder to validate programs. But I think the part that concerns me more is the blasé or even defensive attitude. In physical engineering it often felt "it's the best we can do for now" with people often talking about ideas and trying to make it work. It seemed of concern to management too. But in software it feels a lot more like "it gives the right output" and "it passes the test cases" (hit test cases aren't always robust and don't have the same guarantees as in physical design) and call it done. The whole notion of Test Driven Development even seems absurd. Tests are a critical part of the process, but to drive the process is absurd. It just seems people are more concerned with speed than velocity. A lack of depth, and I even frequently see denial of depth. In physical it seems like we're always trying to go deeper. In software it seems like we're always trying to go wider.

This isn't to say that's the case everywhere, but it is frequent enough. There's plenty of bad physical engineering teams and plenty of great software teams. But there's definitely differences in approaches and importantly differences in thresholds. The culture too. I've never had a physical engineer ask me "what's the value?", clarifying that they mean monetary value. I've had managers do that, but not fellow engineers. The divide between the engineering teams and business teams was clearer. Which I think is a good thing. Engineers sacrifice profit for product. Business sacrifices product for profit. The adversarial nature keeps balance

Be careful of Lemon Markets[0]. The problem with them is that they create a stable low quality state. They tend to happen when product quality is not distinguishable at time of purchase.

Which I think we already see a fair amount of this in tech. Even as very tech literate people it can be hard to tell. But companies are definitely pushing to move fast and are willing to trade quality for that. If you're trying to find the minimum quality that a consumer is still willing to pay for, you're likely in a lemon market.

I mean look at Microsoft lately. They can't even get windows 11 right. There's clear quality control issues that are ruining the brand. Enough that us techies are joking that Microsoft is going to bring about the year of Linux, not because Linux has gotten better (also true) but because Microsoft keeps shooting itself in the foot. Or look at Apple with the new AirPods, they sound like shit. Same with Apple intelligence and liquid glass. A big problem (which helps lemon markets come into existence and be stable) is that competition is weak, with a very high barrier to entry. The market is centralized not only because the momentum and size of existing players (still major factor) but because it takes a lot of capital to even attempt to displace them. That's probably more money and more time than the vast majority of investors are willing to risk and the only ones with enough individual wealth are already tied to the existing space.

I think you also have it exactly right about LLMs and AI. A good tool makes failures clear and easy to identify. You design failure modes, even in code! But these machines are designed for human preference. Our methods that optimize for truth, accuracy, and human sounding language simultaneously optimize for deception. You can't penalize the network for wrong outputs if you don't recognize they are wrong.

A final note: you say velocity, I think that's inaccurate. Velocity has direction. It's more accurate to say speed.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Market_for_Lemons

I would not call validation of PCBs easy conceptually. We had to develop a lot of automation in validation to enable today production. Optical verification has been standard for many years, and X-ray is now getting commonplace also. Flying probes commonly used. Functional automated testing is standard for any non-hobby product. But you are right in that the automation overall was/is bottlenecks on the ability to do QA - which not only prevents defects from being sent out, but is also critical to systematic improvements in the production process (both tuning and new iteration). And I believe you are right to call out LLM based systems to be weak in this area, and it is a limiting factor. I believe that automated QA will be more and more critical to positive LLM impact.

>Being adaptable now is more important than ever.

I do actually plan on getting old, and as much as I would love to retire before I'm no longer adaptable, I'm not so sure my finances or my brain will comply.

>At home I save time because my dishwasher automates washing my dishes.

I don't think this fits my analogy, because you personally can go watch TV or read a book or exercise given the time that is saved by the dishwasher. At work, you must be at work doing something else, and the "something else" is seldom a real improvement. If I could automate my job and then go on a hike I'd be a lot more excited about it.

> At work, you must be at work doing something else, and the "something else" is seldom a real improvement. If I could automate my job and then go on a hike I'd be a lot more excited about it.

When you find an employer that is happy to pay people to not work, let me know because I also want to work there.

it's called being the employer. if you own the capital and you automate the labor then it's your call what to do with the extra time

> When you find an employer that is happy to pay people to not work, let me know because I also want to work there.

This was most employers during COVID :-)

I worked fewer hours, and still got more done than most of my team. Since I didn't come to office, no one knew. As long as I responded to emails/messages in a timely fashion, no one cared.

I fail to see the problem! "Time to lean, time to clean" is fine for someone billing/paid by the hour.

As someone on a salary, when the work is finished... I am too. What's overtime? I believe some paperwork had the word 'exempt' on it. My unvested shares are an incentive to save the place from immolation over the next N years. Where's this 'must be at work doing something else' in the contract, again?

"Where's the loyalty?" I hear someone ask. It passed with a family member and employers that had no compassion.

All this to say, I fully support your testing of the water. It's a strategy I've picked up/adapted, too. The poster above should enjoy the time saved by automation/hike. I shitpost.

The problem is as soon as everyone returned to office they did care. Even while remote many employers acted like they were being cheated because employees would work less or distribute their work throughout the day.

We have a tendency to scream crisis while stock prices and market caps rapidly rise. Every little downturn is evidence for the cry, but that doesn't change the trend. They keep saying that the share holders are the real customers and they seem to be doing perfectly fine regardless of if it's a hiring spree or firing. Regardless of if it's even a global pandemic.

There's 4 companies worth more than $3T, one more than $4T. 11 are worth more than $1T. It's only been 7 years since we broke that $1T barrier. Most of the growth has happened recently too. Even Apple has had bigger swings since the pandemic.

Idk, I don't think these companies are in trouble anywhere near what they claim. More concerning is this rapid growth in value without corresponding game changing products. Sure, we got AI but it hasn't changed the game like the iPhone did. I'd give up AI a lot sooner than I'd give up my smartphone, even if all it did was make calls, play music, and have a web browser. A pocket computer is very handy

On the cheat topic: don't forget things like 'r/overemployed'. People truly taking advantage of, and ruining, what could be a nice situation. Sure, some of it's made up, but the response is certainly genuine.

CEOs and middle-management are loud and clear: get back to the office/work yourselves to the bone. I've never had to attend so many pointless Teams calls just to prove presence... until this started making the rounds. I've been WFH for nearly ten years. I didn't stop caring until they started. Funny, isn't it?

Anyway, we're rambling a bit. Why such a soft apologist? They care. And? These still mean the same thing as fifty years ago: 'salary', 'exempt', and 'at will'. If you mean the peers: well, comparison remains the thief of joy. Management probably also wouldn't want us discussing comp, eh?

I hope my point is clear, it's not our place to worry. This is a business transaction, the terms were well-defined. A coworker being upset that you Did Good and Was Rewarded is insanity. Go after the employer, not your peer.

  > Why such a soft apologist?

To be clear, I'm not defending them. I'm doing the opposite...

  > I didn't stop caring until they started

I've never been a "loud laborer" but boy is it crazy how far those people go now. What little work they can get done as long as they do it loudly... (and I'm not criticizing the employee for this, I'm criticizing the one rewarding them. Same reason about comp. I've never been upset at a coworker who is making significantly more than me. I don't feel cheated by them. I feel cheated by the person who duped me into thinking my rate was the wage.)

> To be clear, I'm not defending them. I'm doing the opposite...

My mistake. Much of this read like an appeal, their finances, challenges, and so on are utterly irrelevant. We're employees. Beyond the ability to maintain their contracts, we should not care.

The employers can want with one hand and shit in the other, see which fills first.

Ah, I see. Yeah, I was saying what they want and claim but contrasting. Like how they scream that times are hard as their stock goes up. That tells me times are not so hard. I'm not sure why we continue to buy it.

Adversity and triumph make for a great story! Nevermind that is what's really manufactured. A worse form of construction.

I saw a very different perspective. Some of the people who got to WFH for the first time thought they were getting away with working less because they could bang out Slack replies on their phone when the notification bell came in, but it was really rather obvious that many weren’t working as much.

I’m still salty about it because the people who played this game poisoned the WFH situation for the rest of us who didn’t use COVID as an excuse to work less and try to pretend we were working more.

The key is to never let them know you're not working. Deliver the output they want. Whether you personally created that output or a machine is irrelevant.

Labor, just like any market relies on information asymmetry. Your company is in business because it manages to sell something at a higher price than the cost it incurs producing it. Your company will absolutely not give away its "secret sauce" to their customers so they can go off and do it themselves and stop paying.

You should act the same; if you have "secret sauce" that allows you to deliver the expected output quicker, enjoy the free time or put it to use elsewhere.

Let's say you could automate your job and go on a hike. Great! You can have a fun hike. But you wouldn't get paid for that.

I think it's broadly reasonable that you would only be paid for doing something someone else needs doing.

Of course, but then why would I be excited about automation? I can imagine that the executives and shareholders could be excited for automation, but I'm not sure that it benefits me whatsoever.

Automation reduces cost of goods sold, so in a market with multiple sellers, it leads to lower prices.

Also, almost everyone is a shareholder, directly or indirectly by being a taxpayer and shouldering the cost of pensions, which are invested in businesses.

The only advantage is that if the company is more efficient they'll be less likely to fire you because the business is failing. They'll just be firing you to eliminate a cost.

When a buyer shops at a lower priced store, they are also eliminating a cost. No one seems to bemoan that, but for some reason a buyer of labor qualified as “employee” eliminating costs is different than a buyer of say, a new roof shopping around or going to Costco to spend less than the full service grocery business.

people complain all the time that Walmart and dollar tree drive local groceries out of business though

I get that they're connected, but it isn't hard to see why people bemoan classifying humans as a cost and eliminating their ability to receive food and shelter.

The person shopping at Costco or choosing a cheaper roof installer who can work more efficiently with fewer humans is doing the same thing - “classifying humans as a cost”.

Choosing to clean your own house instead of hiring a house cleaner, cooking your own food, doing your own landscaping, driving your own car, all of these are “classifying humans as a cost”.

I probably could afford a maid and landscaper, but I don’t because I would rather keep the money. When an employer does that, it is somehow different.

Distilling everything to pure numbers in a spreadsheet is one of the problems of this type of economy.

The executives and shareholders will only be excited about the first order effects of widespread automation like this.

They will be less excited about the second order - a steady loss of revenue as whole professions are automated and people can't find a well paying job.

The third order will be even worse when no one has a job or money to buy anything.

People always point to the industrial revolution. But that created millions of jobs before it obsoleted millions of jobs - you needed workers to create tractors. This wave seems to be shaping up much more like what happened to the rust belt in the late 20th century, regions which still haven't recovered. However this time it'll hit pretty much everyone, everywhere.

Good luck with that capitalism.

I concur capitalism has it's problems but if this means we move back to feudalism I think we can safely say that will be worse.

I think the problem is if/when AGI enables "someone else" to not need human employees for ~anything. The people that own physical capital (land, farms, mines, etc.) would have robots and GPT-N to extract value from it. The people who survive based on their labor are SOL. I think it is reasonable that many people won't be excited about that kind of automation.

The problem is capitalism, not automation.

I don't disagree.

Social/economic stratification (to a certain degree) makes sense as long as there is a reasonable amount of social mobility. AGI paired with advanced robotics seems as though it would all but eliminate social mobility. What would your options be? Politics, celebrity, or a small number of jobs where the human element is essential? I think the economic system needs to dramatically change if/when we reach that point (and ideally before, so people don't suffer in the transition).

> But you wouldn't get paid for that.f

Maybe you wouldn't, but you definitely should. Knowledge workers aren't paid for their labor (in the form of me trading my time and effort for wages), knowledge workers are paid for impact. I'm trading my ability to reason, decide, and create value for the company.

I'm valuable not because I sit at a desk and type for 8 hours. I'm valuable because the outputs of my thinking help move the company forward. My employer isn't buying 8 hours of my time , they're buying the outputs that come from expertise and judgement.

So if I automate something, the company still receives the same value the pay me for whether I perform the task manually or build something that automates it. I work in ops, so if I use ansible and a script to automate patching 100 servers instead of doing it by hand, my employers gets the same result: patched systems. The automation didn't diminish my contribution, it proved it. I get paid the same either way.

In essence, my salary is a retainer. It's payment to keep my expertise availalbe, and working for my employers instead of someone else. It's not payment for activity or time.

>> My employer isn't buying 8 hours of my time , they're buying the outputs that come from expertise and judgement

I'm pretty sure your typical managers don't think so.

These are contradictory claims:

>In essence, my salary is a retainer. It's payment to keep my expertise availalbe, and working for my employers instead of someone else.

>It's not payment for activity or time.

If the latter statement is true, then you must not have any mandatory hours to be present.

If you do have mandatory hours to be present, then the latter statement is not true.

There are a few managers who think the same way, but not that many.

>> you would only be paid for doing something someone else needs doing

Right, like drinking coffee at the kitchen in the office.

> At work, you must be at work doing something else

Speak for yourself, salary means I'm done when the work is. I encourage you to enjoy the hike, book, whatever. That said, I truly hate the induced demand LLMs offer.

That works short-term. Long-term, expectations of productivity catch up, and you either deliver more or get laid off. It's a treadmill not a mountain.

Eh, it's worked well for a couple decades. Pointed effort beats toil, every time. Layoffs are like the tide, do you like the beach?

I thought the same... Then I got laid off. It can happen, not certain it will happen to you, and delivering quality certainly matters more than loc or stupid metrics. Glad you're in a good situation

You say this as if I've never been laid off before. I have, because of acquisitions and even poor performance after the loss of a family member.

My point is this: it's going to happen anyway. I refuse to over-extend [any more] to stave the inevitable. I'm in a good spot because I have a solid network (contacts/skills) and reasonable savings.

I'm sure the employer would be mad to know I'm posting right now, I don't care. Their fault for allowing me to automate!

Ok, we're 100% aligning. I was taking care of myself, because I was on the way to bad burnout, and wasn't delivering what I had during the "honeymoon" with that company. Despite feeling like a lynchpin in the organization, I was blindsided by a layoff. Now I'm a professional woodworker and don't give a shit about any of that anymore. Cheers!

The wood turns on you, but never like that. Cheers indeed! Enjoy and stay safe out there.

@bravetraveler You edited after I replied. Chill, we're not disagreeing

Totally fair, my emphasis remains though: protect yourself, not your role/position. edit: enjoy the woodworking, you're there already :)

I think "bottom up" or worker led automation works far, far better than top down. Leadership always comes up with "efficiency" ideas for automation without ever spending a day in the life of the people who will use the automation. And they almost always fail to realize any gains but disrupt everyone's workflow.

> I think individuals who get comfortable in their jobs don’t like automation arriving at their station because it upends the order of things just as they were feeling comfortable and stable. Being adaptable now is more important than ever.

Look at all the other threads with people’s experiences. They aren’t unhappy with automation because they were comfortable. They are unhappy with automation because the reward for being more productive is higher expectations and no compensation.

People think the Luddite movement was smashing looms because they inherently hated technology. They smashed the looms because the factories were producing more and the result of that productivity was the workers becoming destitute.

If the machines and progress only bring about a worse life for individuals, those individuals are going to be against the machines

You recoup the saving of home automation immediately as additional leisure time. But for most people, work automation neither reduces your working time nor increases your wage.

Are you sure you spend less time per week on clothes washing than people did before the clothes washer? I suspect that before, people would wash their clothes considerably more seldom - which might even out the efficiency gains of the machine.

It's an interesting analogy. But one difference between dishwashers and LLMs is that you don't need to check the dishes afterward (if you maintain and use it properly).

Yeah but to continue the analogy, the washer was JUST invented and your clothes will come out ruined for a while.

Oh man, remember how much bigger a deal it was that you had to separate your clothes into the exact right categories and run the machine with different kinds of loads? Modern detergent, it's basically all machine wash cold, with far fewer exceptions compared to 30 years ago.

I don't think it's just the detergent. Modern clothes are made of shitty, synthetic fabrics. This is also why most people don't have to iron anything anymore. The tradeoff is microplastics[1], comfort/breathability, and durability.

Classic example is jeans. Modern jeans are ridiculously stretchy compared to "real" cotton denim because they contain tons synthetic fibers. However I run through jeans at an alarming pace - even compared to when I was a kid. They wear quickly, tear easily, and generally don't last.

[1] https://www.pbs.org/newshour/science/laundry-is-a-top-source...

im not sure how youre getting around the physics of white lint on dark clothing. and i separate plastic clothing from cotton or wool clothing because cotton usually just gets machine dried but i dont want to put my wool or plastic clothing through that process because its not necessary.

True, but reaching intelligence is more complicated than cleaning some spoons.

Why are you putting your clothes in the dishwasher

Oh crap, maybe that's why they are coming out ruined.

The two other things that come immediately to mind are clothes; if a shirt cost $4,000 per, our closets would look way different, and cars. No matter your personal opinion on cars vs public transportation, if even if the cheapest vehicle cost $500,000, society would look way different. The real thing it exposes though, is which side of the capital vs labor you work on. If the widget factory suddenly is able to make 10x the widgets in the same amount of time thanks to a new automated widget machine, if you're capital, you now have 10x the widgets to sell. Awesome! However, if you're labor, you still have a 40/hr a week job, regardless of how many widgets you make in a week. And the boss is counting how many widgets you make on the new machine they bought. At the edges of this in the tech industry we have website building. The market haven't yet totally adjusted to the lower costs of labor. What used to take 10 hours to build and you'd charge a client $3,000 for, now takes 2 hours but since the client was previously paying $3,000 for that service, you're not going to charge them less, you're going to take on additional clients. Or spend more time at the beach. In this scenario, the programmer is capital, not labor, and gets to reap the rewards of automation. Until the market catches up, anyway. Given that the industrial machine in the website builder's factory is a laptop and a cloud hosting bill, it's unclear if the Marxist division between capital and labor, burgousie and proletariat is still the right place to draw the lines, but the trade off is still there. If you're selling your time in exchange for money, automation means a faster conveyor belt that you need to adapt to, but you're still working 40/h a week. If you're selling widgets, automation means more widgets to sell.

Petite bourgeoisie maybe?

The customer who was paying 3000 for a website may now be going to somewhere like Wix.

That client was going to use Wix before AI. B2B sales is a whole thing, and businesses pay to have a human to talk to, not a website.

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