12-hour days, no weekends: the anxiety driving AI's work culture is a warning

With all the tech-fueled multipliers on productivity that economists and market analysts have been touting over the past decades (not even counting LLMs), one might imagine that there's plenty of money going around to sustain a healthy margin with reduced working hours (or at the very least, the same amount). Seems like a lot of that "surplus value" just disappears or flips negative for many of us, though. It's almost as if a huge chunk of it is being diverted elsewhere beyond our reach. Wonder where that could be?

Where has the bulk of all that "value" our work has created in this industry gotten off to? I certainly see less and less of it these days.

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Another startup employee, who came to San Francisco to work for an early-stage AI company, showed me dismal photos from his office: a two-bedroom apartment in the Dogpatch, a neighborhood popular with tech workers. His startup’s founders live and work in this apartment – from 9am until as late as 3am, breaking only to DoorDash meals or to sleep, and leaving the building only to take cigarette breaks. The employee (who asked not to use his name, since he still works for this company) described the situation as “horrendous”. “I’d heard about 996, but these guys don’t even do 996,” he says. “They’re working 16-hour days.”

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