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Comment by intended | Hacker News Reader

There was a recent Stanford study which showed that AI enthusiasts and experts and the normies had very different sentiment when it came to AI.

I think most people are going to say they dont want it. I mean, why would anyone want a tool that can screw up their bank account? What benefit does it gain them?

Theres lots of cases of great highly useful LLM tools, but the moment they scale up you get slammed by the risks that stick out all along the long tail of outcomes.

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I agree, in general we are going to find that ultimately most employee end users don't want it. Assuming it actually makes you more productive. I mean, who the hell wants to be 10X more productive without a commensurate 10X compensation increase? You're just giving away that value to your employer.

On the other hand, entrepreneurs and managers are going to want it for their employees (and force it on them) for the above reason.

If everyone becomes 10x more productive it won’t mean the companies cash flow 10x’s. Where value is loose there is competition, so in theory everyone should win. Unless nobody else can compete to capture that loose 10x value, in which case congratulations, you are now a unicorn.

Of course in reality in the short term what happens is companies lay off people to increase margins. Times will be tough for workers, and equity keeps gravitating towards those who already had it.

Tasks have value because they take effort to complete.

If you remove the effort from those tasks, they will have no value.

10x the value of 0 is 0

Eh, I’d say the premiums drop, and that there is a residual value that is still left. So maybe 0.1 or 0.2 instead of 0.

> I mean, who the hell wants to be 10X more productive without a commensurate 10X compensation increase? You're just giving away that value to your employer.

Those are productivity increases that got our standard of living to where it is. Fewer people doing the same amount of work has, historically speaking, freed people from their current job, allowing them to work on something else.

It's that analogy of the horse, they used to be farm animals. Now, fewer of them are 'employed' but they're much nicer jobs. I'm not sure if the same is true for us this time around though as new jobs being created have increasingly been highly skilled which means the majority can't apply.

There was a long and great ravine of suffering between the advent of the Industrial Revolution and our time of bounty.

Yep, all those artists, musicians, designers and coders will finally do something productive!

It's interesting how differently people can think.

I couldn't imagine thinking "I'm gonna do this 0.1x as fast as I could, wasting my life away with pointless extra work, to spite my employer"

I want. If I get 10X more productive, I can unilaterally increase my compensation 10X by doing my stuff in 1 unit of time instead of 10 it took, and splitting the remaining 9 units of time into, say, 4 units of time doing more work, securing my position and setting myself up for promotion, and 5 units of time doing whatever the fuck I want. Not all compensation shows up in a bank account - working less, or under less stress, are also valuable.

Of course, such situation is only temporary - if I can suddenly be 10X productive, then so can everyone else, and then the baseline shifts so 10X is the new 1X.

You want it, but then you closed by explaining exactly why you shouldn't want it. Plus, the new baseline isn't neutral (as in, everyone is the same again). If humans can now do 10x the work as before, the employer doesn't need the same number of humans to carry out its work. So the new baseline is actually "let's keep 1 employee and fire the other 9", unless the business can find a way to suddenly expand 10x so that it needs 10x as much work done.

> So the new baseline is actually "let's keep 1 employee and fire the other 9", unless the business can find a way to suddenly expand 10x so that it needs 10x as much work done.

If they have any surplus of money (or loans) they'll try, so those 9 employees may end up becoming team leads or middle management, trying to start new initiatives to get the 10x expansion (and 100x improvement).

The market isn't anywhere near efficient enough to directly translate productivity improvements into labor reductions. Thankfully, because everything that's nice and hopeful and human lives within the market inefficiency; a fully efficient market would be a hell worse than any writer or preacher ever imagined.

lol that has nothing to do with market efficiency.

I’ve seen a number of your posts where you talk about topics you clearly are not all that well versed in, with such confidence when you’re plain wrong.

Of course it does have to do with market efficiency, of which the inertia and surplus within companies (especially large ones) is a part.

> I’ve seen a number of your posts where you talk about topics you clearly are not all that well versed in, with such confidence when you’re plain wrong.

I'm sure it's true. However, since you brought it up, can you be more specific and name three?

Yes, but in the long run, the market expects growth and innovation, not just doing the same thing with fewer workers. Especially when every other company can just buy the exact same advantage for the same price.

Good point. My rant assumed that "10x productivity" meant 10x output in 1x time, rather than 1x output in 0.1x time. Only one of those are actually objectionable.

Your first paragraph is so short sighted that its message didn't even make it beyond the next one. It's a race to the bottom and your "doing whatever the fuck I want" will obviously never materialize.

The typical work week today is 40 hours. Just like it was 80 years ago. The typical worker is dramatically more productive than 80 years ago yet "doing whatever the fuck I want" time has not increased. Why would it? Employers don't need to pay such that 20 hour work weeks give you the same income. Because everybody around you is ok with working 40 hours.

This won't be different with AI, no matter if the overall effect is 1.1x or 10x or 100x productivity. Because it's not a technological problem but a sociological one.

>Assuming it actually makes you more productive. I mean, who the hell wants to be 10X more productive without a commensurate 10X compensation increase?

Given sane working arrangements or at minimum presence of remote work, it would be a bit shortsighted not to want to get done with your work in a tenth amount of time. In the very least, you're competing for a promotion against less effective people, all while having more time for yourself. If not, you're building labor market skillset in an efficient way so you can hop to a better employer.

> I mean, who the hell wants to be 10X more productive without a commensurate 10X compensation increase?

The person who realizes that everybody around them is bow at 10X and if they don't follow suit then they will soon be out of a job.

> I think most people are going to say they dont want it. I mean, why would anyone want a tool that can screw up their bank account? What benefit does it gain them?

I'm not so sure. Matter of marketing and social pressure, big time.

Consider this: "Always-on pervasive google/fb/... login? I think most people are going to say they dont want it. I mean, why would anyone want a tool that would track their every move on the internet?" That could easily have been a statement 20 years ago. And look where we are.

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