Can we have the day off?
mlsu.io
mlsu.io
I know everybody is afraid of getting fired and replaced with AI or whatever right now. But we should be seriously asking in our next all hands meetings if 10x’ing our productivity can get us some days off. Or when our paycheck is going to be multiplied accordingly.
So far we’re all kind of being chumps about this, bragging on Linkedin about all of our new found AI productivity while accepting less job security and no increase in comp.
From the data I’ve seen the bottom decile Americans consume significantly more per capita compared to even 2006.
e.g. plane travel was completely absent amongst the bottom decile in 2006, like so close to zero mileage per capita per annum it was a rounding error.
Home ownership, high-quality food, working hours etc. seem far more relevant.
People will, intentionally, work longer hours to afford more frequent plane travel. And to upgrade classes, perks, lounge access, etc…
I’m pretty sure there are literally millions of people like that.
To your example it seems worth noting that the quality of the air travel experience appears to decline over time as well.
Real physical consumption is by far the hardest metric to game or play tricks with.
Yes technically, some probably are trading a bit of their future prospects for a nicer flight schedule, less red-eyes, etc… But I don’t see how that is relevant at all?
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2018/08/07/for-most-...
I hate to imagine what this graph looks like today, given the massive amount of inflation that's happened in the last 6 years.
Yes, lower classes have access to many more conveniences then they might have had in earlier decades, but they are working far more hours, and their expected lifespan has started decreasing.
Just because things may have been worse for specific individuals does *not* mean that current problems shouldn't be addressed.
Suggesting that things are better now than they were in 1986 for the overwhelming majority of people is not, in any way whatsoever, suggesting that "problems shouldn't be addressed". Come on. Y'all have got to start actually reading things before smashing that reply button.
In relative terms, they seem much worse, Americans standing isn’t what it was. In absolute terms, I don’t know. What’s the measure?
It's the highest, at the moment, that it's been since the 1800s. The nadir for the US was in the late 40s early 50s when we had a 92% top marginal tax rate and extremely high social cohesion despite massive WW2 debts. Needless to say the late 40s and early 50s was not exactly utopia, but substantially more stable.
So many claims about how it would lead to far better lives for everyone, but the working conditions and general affordability have basically gone down for 40 years. Imagine bringing back the white collar work in the 80s, with a private office with a door, and people whose jobs were to help coordinate and schedule things even if you weren't an exec, instead of you just having a phone to answer all hours of the day.
Then why have we not all been fired already? Sounds like an instant win.
(Has there actually been a lot of terminations in the US tech industry, or is that an odd biasing mechanism causing me to see such things as bigger than they are?)
Of course, until just recently, Big Tech workers were so proud to be on top of the world that they didn't think unions made sense for them.
Were you among them? Has that changed?
More flour more water. More water more flour.
Either way it doesn't change that being paid for your output is the realm of entrepreneurship and submitting bids for project work.
"Salaried" vs hourly is increasingly a scam anyway, but all that benefits stuff is something that would have to evolve. And it could, if people find the political will.
As such, you are still expected to work a minimum amount of time. That's what you're signing up for. Fixed deliverable contracts- completing certain objectives- tend to either specify those things as minimum performance expectations, or are for contractors rather than employees.
Productivity might get you a 5k raise more over your colleague on a 160k salary. Meanwhile the same engineer in Taiwan is more productive than you and getting paid 40k while working for the same company on the same product, and putting in more hours to boot.
Everyone pays as little for everything as they can get away with.
Companies aren't doing anything unusual or evil. This is literally just how a market works.
A lot of people forget that the job market is a market. Or they wish it wasn't a market and they could block out competition for themselves so companies had to pay them more (at the expense of those excluded)
Bullshit cop out. I regularly spend more than the “average” on technology because I’ve been burned by the bottom of the barrel too many times. Maybe you cheap out on all of your purchases, but it says nothing about “everyone”. The fact that you claim “everyone” has as few moral qualms as you is telling. But not in a way that reflects everyone. Just short sighted selfish assholes.
You missed the part about equal service. Please read my whole comment, not just snap responses to the first line.
Obviously nobody is hiring the person who has the lowest salary demands and ignoring their qualifications.
Just because this has been normalized doesn't mean it's not evil. If a healthcare company introduces processes that deny people life-saving interventions just to funnel more money to their shareholders, that company and its leadership are thoroughly evil.
I'd also like to add that I often pay more for things than I could get away with. I try to prefer locally owned businesses when possible, and if they have fair prices and give me good advice I often pay a bit extra (essentially a "tip" for the business) to support them.
What do you mean? Labor is a market. Companies can’t force anyone to work for them. If the pay gets too low, people leave for other companies or jobs.
> Companies can’t force anyone to work for them. If the pay gets too low, people leave for other companies or jobs.
In an ideal world, sure! But in the real world, there are many sources of friction that - when added together - keep people tied to a job, even if they feel the pay is too low.
You literally just described an evil behavior. It's obviously not evil when you're shopping for gadgets, but if you think that's morally comparable to the livelihoods of human beings, I'm sorry to inform you that you're a psychopath.
> This is literally just how a market works. A lot of people forget that the job market is a market.
You say that like you think it's a law of physics. Markets don't exist in nature. Markets are a conscious, deliberate creation by humans.
> Or they wish it wasn't a market
Correct! We've unambiguously determined that applying market logic to people's livelihoods is inhumane and immoral. There shouldn't be a market for being allowed to live. It should just be guaranteed to everybody.
Robots have pushed productivity well beyond the human capacity. But robots are not willing to work for free either, so...
But this belies the fact that the workers had to grow more skilled to operate and maintain those machines. They took on additional costs in education that are not being compensated. They're being asked to get more work done by being higher skilled, but the bosses are collecting all of the additional revenue generated.
What do you mean in a roundabout way? It says that quite explicitly.
> But this belies the fact that the workers had to grow more skilled to operate and maintain those machines.
No they didn't. What is a capital owner going to do if the labor didn't become more skilled? Just shut everything down and take the ball home? Ha ha. No. Not a chance in hell. This is the silliest thing I've read all day.
> They took on additional costs in education that are not being compensated.
One wonders why. When they said "go to college to make more money" they were clearly talking about using college research labs to develop capital. Exactly so that you become the one deploying robots, not selling your labor. That is where the "more money" comes from. How people — traditionally smart people, even — got it into their head that meant go to college to get a low paying job, the same job they would have gotten anyway, boggles the mind. I suppose smarts don't transcend into every subject.
it feels very disingenuous to pretend there aren’t expectations of a certain level of output.
Storypoints? Overestimate wildly. Stories done? Split stories like atoms! Impact of work done? Present your button color change stories as company saving divine intervention!
You can demand whatever you want. You could demand a million dollar salary if you wanted.
The challenge is that there are a lot of very qualified devs who would do it for less.
Labor is a market. Supply and demand determines your wages.
There are always hand-wavey arguments about unionization fixing this, but when other developers are hungry for those jobs and willing to go around the union to work them for pay then that doesn’t really work at scale.
There are several unionized software development groups in the US. They don’t have a good track record of getting significantly higher pay or even getting their demands met from their limited strikes.
Some rules I actually liked. Rehearsals started and ended _exactly_ on time to avoid overtime (showing up late was the only reason you could be fired, which was a useful compromise). But generally, the union was the yin to the producers yang, and an adversarial position as worker advocate was where they wanted to be, they didn't want more ownership.
If someone gave me the chance to join something more like a worker-owned coop, where the workers on the business and vote on how it works, I would actually be down. There's a grocery store down my street like this and it's a great place. I don't know how this would actually work in tech. If there's no startup capital, no one will have a salary or benefits for years until there's a profit (if at all). And capital comes in exchange for ownership of the future upside.
I run a co-op, and the most surprising thing I've learned is that it seems the only reason other people don't set up their businesses as co-ops is, frankly, greed.
In this startup ecosystem, why would you do a co-op when you could instead chase that multi million dollar exit that profits you? If we have any kind of event like that the earnings would be distributed basically equally among around 30 people. 20 mill payout suddenly becomes... Less...
Anyway though apparently statistics are on my side. Apparently co-ops are more sustainable and live for longer than traditional corporations. It seems to me that people are much happier here than at traditional corporations.
Clients are happy, engineers are happy and productive, I'm happy because I don't have the entire responsibility of the business on my shoulders - engineers are constantly contributing to the improvement of internal systems for example, because why wouldn't they? That saves them money too!
Downsides are increased ownership come with increased responsibility. Can't just clock in here, people need to manage the client relationship, issue invoices, participate in the accounting, and if they want more work when their gig is closing out, either try to sell the client on more work or help us find another one. Until we can find an alternative revenue stream to selling our labor to clients, we're all beholden to keeping the BD wheel turning in order to get paid. Upside is that we're keeping 85% of the margin for ourselves rather than at toptal where you keep, idk, 30%? And that 15% is still our money anyway it just gets used for overall co-op stuff, which members get to decide on.
Also I don't know if this kind of business lends itself to the silicon valley mythos of the huge work week for a few years followed by functional retirement. Instead it seems we'll all need to keep working for the foreseeable future, but at our own reasonable pace, fully remote, our own hours, at very high compensation but not "fuck you money" compensation. Well except for our people in Ethiopia and Taiwan, for the local market rates, their compensation is getting way up into that territory.
That said, I don't know about our ability to survive a full on capitalist attack in the form of lawfare or getting priced out or closed out of deals. Priced out in a labor market would be difficult since the only way to beat our labor margins is to hire directly, but we could be lawfared to death pretty easily considering our ARR might be 1 mil this year if we're lucky.
Co-op for consulting actually seems like it could work.
I made a comment about exactly this in the thread. This is where a lot of co-op ideas go, but they run into friction when they get to the part about sharing the money around. Consulting is one place where developers can see a direct relationship between their hours worked, hours billed, dollars coming into the business, and dollars going into their paycheck. There are some ideas like putting shared money into a group fund to cover vacations and similar expenses, but generally a consulting group is money-in money-out. Nobody really wants to join a co-op and see the hours they bill go to pay someone who works fewer hours, so the money relationship gets even more tightly coupled than at a traditional salaried company.
Down to explore this with me?
I often wonder if this is self fulfilling. I'm not saying you're selfish, I mean, has capitalism trained people that all people are inherently selfish, and then, within this system where selfishness is rewarded, incentivized further selfishness and continued to sell this myth?
How much maintenance does capitalism take? If human nature is inherently selfish, and capitalism is a force of nature, a ground truth, the answer should basically be no maintenance, right? Is that reality though? It seems to me it takes a lot of maintenance, the myths of capitalism. Look at the incredible amount of resources the USA dedicated to fighting Communism, both explicitly (crossing swords with the Soviet Union) and in the background (overthrowing socialist leaders in south America, meddling in southeast Asia).
Is the key difference for me that led to me making a co-op (rather than a traditional geographic arbitrage agency) that I don't buy into the capitalist notion that humans are inherently selfish? Maybe I just happened to have the experiences that indicated to me that this isn't true, that humans are inherently mostly selfless and social, which led to me researching this and learning that history supports this notion of humans as social-first organisms.
When I tell people about my business, a lot of questions I get confuse me: "You don't require timesheets tracking granular work? How do you know people are actually accurately recording the hours and not 'stealing time?'" the answers are always basically, "because I trust my co-op members," and "I really don't care if people are 'stealing' from me." Capitalism teaches us to always "get ours," but as soon as you let go of that, if people trust me as a genuine actor, they seem to abandon these unnatural principles and work with me honestly, as humans naturally want to.
For your VC example, I mean, nobody will invest in us. Maybe that's the double edged sword - you stop playing within the rules of the game, people won't throw the ball your way anymore. There's no massive value to extract here. That probably limits our ability to rapidly develop some products to generate revenue outside of selling engineering hours. Maybe that's ok though, the business might grow more slowly but sustainably? And maybe that cements our reputation as "no really, actually a co-op that genuinely doesn't put profit first?" I don't know. We'll find out.
But for you, what do you think would happen if you started putting yourself forward as a non-participant, non-self-interested? The prisoner's dilemma equivalent of saying "I will always cooperate no matter what you choose," and then following through on that? Is there a sort of aversion to that knowing that someone might exploit this aspect of you at some point, where you might end up in a situation where your personal profit wasn't maximized?
At the smaller scale, I’ve lived in coliving housing most of my adult life. Mostly positive, but problems that make people retreat away from cooperation. Once a week potluck but otherwise people cook their own food. Chronic mess/clutter/dishes/laundry headaches.
Should note that both the West & East included a lot of economic cooperation among countries within those competing Cold War economic models, even if there was coercion involved (and not just from the Soviets).
The developer co-op projects I've seen have targeted consulting for this reason. The idea is that developers get together and start doing projects that can bill clients immediately, and then they'll pool the money back into developing their own something later.
In practice there's no real difference between a group of people consulting together and a co-op of consultants when everyone is just billing hourly at the start. Nobody really wants to spread their earnings around the co-op because you can see the relationship between hours worked, hours billed, and dollars coming in so clearly.
> and then they wondered why there were only big producers that first developed the show out of town.
Most unions derive a lot of their negotiating power from location-based constraints. You can gather enough musicians in one place to form a union because there are a limited number of musicians within driving distance of the location. Musicians can't do their performance over zoom and the job can't be outsourced to another country.
Software jobs have no restrictions like this. Every time there are calls for unionizing software devs, nobody wants to answer the hard questions like what incentives multi-national corporations will have to cater to the unionized employees in a country like the US where we're already paid more than our international counterparts. It's just assumed that the union will form, then companies will have no choice but to accept their demands.
Recording is increasingly outsourced, unfortunately. There are great orchestras in Eastern Europe.
If your company is publicly traded, you can buy its stock.
That doesn't increase shareholder value, so it would be a violation of the c-suite's fiduciary responsibility. Sorry, the extra capital will instead be used on stock buybacks.
Given how start-up (and thus equity) heavy this board is, that should also directly multiply total comp, even though it was meant as a vapid snipe and isn't actually vaguely valid outside of a handful of very large companies.
1. Reduce working hours 2. Grow the economy
Guess which option was last picked in 1868 and never again despite massive gains in productivity?
One of the greatest tricks of the modern era in the US has been to convince everyone that making the slice of pie bigger for the richest people is necessary to grow the economy.
Where is that additional money going to come from? I think you’re missing some important factors in your analysis.
There have been numerous experiments with four-day work weeks or six-hour work days that have almost uniformly shown increases in overall productivity.
Not just productivity per hour at work. Overall productivity.
The resistance to this is clearly not based in financial concerns, but rather in control, and classism.
What it's telling you is that a company would rather have 4 people working 5 days a week than 5 people working 4 days a week. The reason for that is, productivity drops a lot when it's spread out over multiple people. The reason behind that is communication overhead - the more context an individual carries in their heads, the less likely their role will exist on an hourly basis in the industry.
So, if anyone wants AI to give us another day off, we need to think about how it can reduce the cost of "context switching" a whole person on and off a task, without simultaneously formalizing our roles so much that it gives us all five. ;-)
This ignores a lot of historical fighting (sometimes literally!) to get it down to 5 in the first place.
If everyone sufficiently "flips out" about it being 5 then the problem of "reduce the context switching problem" is something the owner can try to figure out.
Cause otherwise, you could find a perfect solution to that problem, and still not have leverage to make ownership actually change anything vs just raise expectations that much higher.
(Meanwhile, some companies are trying to import 996 and push it past 5 for white-collar work anyway, so any sort of non-political, non-disruptive action seems doomed to fail since the status quo is moving the wrong direction.)
How so? Without technology we wouldn't have a "work week" in the first place and work would be much more directly tied to survival of the community and generally less negotiable in the first place. The "flipping out" came about precisely because technology changed what work was and what the conditions around it were while people noticed that those new expectations and conditions didn't actually seem necessary for their survival (or even much to their personal direct benefit vs the benefit of business owners).
Any technology that lets more be done with less time is an opportunity for a population to make an attempt to claim some of those gains for themselves.
Are you saying you can't think of examples from the past of the introduction of technology changing labor dynamics or organization? Say, mechanical agriculture?
The changes are hardly going to always be good - there's no determinism of "new technology means society will get 'better'". But they've often been periods of change, and such periods are when it's easier to influence the direction if you happen to care about the direction of the change.
We think of productivity as linear to the number of employees, but it’s more of Log(N) for knowledge work because of the communication overhead. If your AI spend and employee productivity improvement ends up being proportional to headcount thats a linear gain that used to be Log(N).
Remember to thank your unions for the weekend.
The other thing is that if leadership is better—they have stronger vision and coordinate the silos (of people or teams) themselves—the communication overhead is less. The more each level needs to communicate, sync, and align with each other, the more it reflects the top not doing it. This is so thoroughly normalized today that it's hard to see otherwise. As you move down the hierarchy, the theory embedded in the chosen org structure that most tech companies have, is that less communicating should be necessary. This is what middle managers (and product managers) are supposed to be for—coordinating and communicating to take that off the plate of their subordinates. The lack of leadership above is why the managers below get hired. Those managers then do the same and eventually ICs need to coordinate amongst themselves.
Why make that assumption? The company has a lot of per-employee fixed costs, which means that it's much more expensive to have 5 employees than 4 employees under the assumption that total productivity is exactly equal in both cases. (And the further assumption that you pay more productive workers more than you pay less productive workers.)
If you want flexibility on the work week, get rid of the concept of "full-time employee" status and make everyone contractors.
Within software development, most contractors aren't freelancing.
You get to keep your job. You agreed to accept X pay for 40 hours, do it or we'll find someone else who will.
We're really failing to meet the moment before us by merely repeating the propaganda of elders that glaze over on live TV trying to act authoritative and useful to humanity.
Exploitation of youth is no less ageist than telling gramps look in the mirror.
I do agree though, give me AI tooling, and I will build you cities, but pay me to match it.
I have to ask myself why we think us white collar knowledge workers are so special? Even if I do dream of a time where automation leads all of us to a 3-4 day work week.
And if everyone else is, the productivity floor is raised but every other competitor has done the same so we don't have 10x the economic output, maybe only a marginal increase. If that is true, then there will be no days off because we have just reset the status quo.
edit: spelling
But they’re also paying hefty AI bills so there’s less money for salaries.
The AI companies just swoop in and take some of the money that was going to the working man
I think that's the key difference with AI, though. It's not like I'm losing my job, but at least I have a robot at home that cleans the house and does my laundry. People are having their livelihoods threatened while their utility bills go up because of datacenters, and the only substantive impact in their personal lives is that now they have to deal with chatbots and low effort automated customer service agents even more.
I'm OK with accepting a job that pays 10x less if the efficiencies from AI mean we're all living in abundance and life is >10x cheaper. But it's unclear if/when we'll move beyond marginal business impact, aside from in software development, I suppose.
Far, far more people and the same amount of land.
> Average families aren't buying prepared food and they have a washing machine from the 90s they bought on craigslist.
Well, that's just not true. The average person is absolutely terrible with their money. Not only are they buying prepared food, they're paying someone to drive it to their house.
The average person is doing this? Do you have sources/stats or are you just going on vibes, or are you looking at people in your (likely non-average) peer group?
Edit: A source I found cites 130 million US delivery app users in 2026, which is a little over 1/3 of Americans. Given that some non-users will call in orders (pizza, Chinese, etc) then it’s plausible that over 50% of people do order delivery from time to time. That said, it’s hard to find good statistics on how much the median person spends on delivery given the likely inflated numbers promoted by delivery app companies. One source said almost 50% preferred ordering delivery through third party apps like DoorDash; if so then how are only 1/3 of Americans actually users of those apps?
Given the numbers on consumer financial stress it’s likely that there is less food delivery happening right now.
The trouble with averages is they don't always say much that is accurate about most people .. it all rests on distributions.
Agree that no washing machines outright sucks.
I would never choose to raise a family in that period.
It's kinda funny that this is considered small, though. 110-120 sqm is perfectly normal for a family of 4 where I live, and in many cases they do it with 1 or 0 cars. But I live somewhere that isn't horribly designed (the Netherlands)
When I briefly lived in Paris, we had a laughably small refrigerator. But it was about a 5 minute walk to a neighborhood grocery store, so we effectively used their fridge instead. Which also provided human contact in a way driving to and shopping at a big box store really cannot.
Some of this is just the difference between living in a city vs the suburbs. But not all: even in the US cities, my impression is that you'll have a large fridge and shop at the big stores, even if you take public transit to get there, because the small stores can't compete on staple items.
We're in a path-dependent hell where losing a parking space is felt as a mortal insult, while losing the need for a parking space feels pie-in-the-sky, an unobtainable fantasy. There's an entire synergistic system of dependence on scale and cars and "self-sufficiency" (that masks the infrastructure dependency that it requires).
</rant>
I’m sure you will say something about housing costing more, which it does. But also many things cost less, such as food and clothing.
You just can't live an upper-middle class on a single income unless you have a good job, but you couldn't back then either.
Standards of living are going up regardless if we like it or not, and costs as well.
What brand of edibles do you have there 'bud? I'd like to fly into that realm of alternate reality for a bit.
Also when have any efficiencies gained by employers benefited workers? Being honest here because the only time workers have truly gained anything was due to solidarity between workers in the forms of strikes + workplace sabotage.
I’m pretty sure that doesn’t cost more than college today :).
Our standards have just risen massively.
Life was better then than it is now. But the 1990s were arguably the high point.
Mostly what I can think of is access to medical treatments developed in the last few decades. Comforts like A/C are more widespread now (but they were less necessary when we were under 400 ppm CO2).
> birth rates are down
“You can see the computer age everywhere but in the productivity statistics.” — Robert Solow
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Productivity_paradox
* https://www.brookings.edu/articles/the-solow-productivity-pa...
Connectivity/the Internet gave a bit of a boost during the 1990s, but the numbers pearked around 2004:
* https://www.milkenreview.org/articles/the-rise-and-fall-of-a...
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rise_and_Fall_of_American_...
But isn't the premise of "progress" a continuing improvement of things? At what point does it change to "stagnation"?
Nobody is operating businesses now without electronic cash registers, POS systems, accounting systems, etc. It's way more productive to use computers and the Internet than to try to accomplish the same stuff without them.
Well, yes. But once you make the switch and get your productivity boost, that's it: a one-time shot. How do you improve things after that?
Well, you won't be living in abundance. All productivity gains will go to the oligarchs. You will have slightly less than you had before. Instead of cleaning the floor yourself you'll work the extra hour for the oligarchs doing whatever the robots cant.
That's the path America is on at present.
Do you though? You might be hallucinating those robots. And no, a Roomba doesn't mop the floor, wipe the countertops or clean the toilets.
> I'm OK with accepting a job that pays 10x less if the efficiencies from AI mean we're all living in abundance and life is >10x cheaper. But it's unclear if/when we'll move beyond marginal business impact, aside from in software development, I suppose.
Will it though? Your biggest cost is lodging, either rent or own, and both have consistently increased over the past millenia.
My phrasing could have been better. The "not" applies to the rest of the sentence, not just the first clause. I'm saying it might be OK to lose my job for "progress" if I were personally getting big benefits from AI.
> Will it though? Your biggest cost is lodging, either rent or own, and both have consistently increased over the past millenia.
Lodging is typically <30% of income and housing costs are driven more by policy than market forces. That said, I see no reason why housing costs couldn't also decrease with the right applications of AI, at least in the eyes of its biggest cheerleaders.
> Computers and the Internet ushered in huge productivity gains. Despite many people losing their jobs as a result
The author might be being playful, but an increasing amount of folks at or past their breaking points definitely aren’t.
The message could be “we’ll all do more by working less.” Instead it’s, “some people will lose their jobs while everyone else works the same amount or more”
Any pay rises have been more of a side effect in the past of complexity and therefore needing more skilled labor to say operate a bulldozer or backhoe than it does for any individual with a shovel. Productivity may boost the economic ceiling of 'how much they can pay before they literally start losing money' but more assembly lines didn't mean big pay raises. A backhoe didn't mean that ditch diggers suddenly got paid 50 to 100 times what they were previously from other's expenditures because they could dig that much more. And that is before the back-and-forth of induced demand and supply vs demand causing the price of the labor to drop with more efficiency.
AI's whole thing is to provide for easier operation and trying to deskill the operations. (Key word: trying, currently knowing what the hell you are doing is essential for filtering good outputs from bad).
It remains to be seen if LLMs will be used in this way, but the messaging so far (including your post, the one I'm replying to) suggests that the elites' inclination is exactly that: more profit, more control, more power now for elites, temporary (possibly years, maybe as long a generation or three) but real suffering for many of the rest, and a steady state at the end of the transition where they are still in charge, much richer, and maybe also everyone else is better off (if they can't capture the gains completely for themselves).
How much money do you think the average developer would be making if we all were using punchcards instead of typing? Inputting machine code instead of using a compiler?
Every time we increase our productivity, we can build bigger and better things for the same amount of effort. This makes us more valuable than before. Our output grows and the world’s appetite for software grows with it.
This has been true for the entire history of the software industry and it’s the reason why developers are very well paid. You may not see it at the individual level, but we are reaping the rewards of increased productivity at the macro level.
The only way to get this outcome is to coordinate at a level higher than individual market participants.
In other words, get your government to implement UBI - tax all companies (or if AI really takes off, just compute) and redistribute to the people.
The only way to do this is to bypass the authorities.
Someone said the same before 1938, probably [1]
I think it's possible that AI will bring as much of a shift to our lives as the industrial revolution did, so it might be necessary to make some adjustments, just like we did back then.
[1] https://www.history.com/articles/five-day-work-week-labor-mo...
And you must be a high paid tech worker in a bubble if you think most people are just trying to "kill time". At least in the US the majority of people are living paycheck to paycheck.
I imply that the alternative to capitalism is starvation an gulags because that is roughly what happened the last 37 or so times humanity tried something else. That's just from the last century. Capitalism isn't perfect, but it's infinitely better than everything else.
> we also have high taxes
I don't think people mind paying taxes, but it's when your taxes don't clearly benefit you that people get upset.
Honestly it seems to me like one party just wants to shift all costs to the poor (rather than the government) and the other wants to be the king of Nottingham. It's no surprise our citizens are feeling defeated. The choices appear to constantly be the lesser of two (geriatric) evils. Not choices between reasonable leaders, but with different beliefs
I hope you guys find a better way forward. I have affinity for your people and culture and I think most of you have big hearts and mean well.
Is this true? There are a lot of low-productivity and zombie companies trudging through year after year.
Some companies are in highly competitive spaces while others have found a quiet, profitable niche.
And companies do have to compete for talent. If you want A-level players on your team, you're going to have to pay them more and/or provide benefits that surpass the competition.
From what I see in the market, it looks obviously true.
I’m sure there are lots of zombies too, they will die quickly IMO. Bad time to be a zombie, possibly the worst time ever.
> Whoever slows down will get eaten by some hungry upstart that is willing to work 996 to eat the incumbent’s lunch.
If you were right then there wouldn't be so much busy work, especially at big companies. They would have become more efficient, not less.
And when/if it doesn't, unionize. I know the HN crowd historically hasn't looked favorably on Unions, but times are changing. It's long past time for unions in tech. We've fared well individually for a long time, but that time is coming to an end.
But it's worth noting how leisure hours have been allocated after the invention of the 5 hour work week: we've reduced working hours at the end of life (longer retirements), start of life (longer education), and some amount of people simply do not work.
There hasn't been a reduction in hours during peak earning potential because many jobs are competitive, because firms are in competition with each other.
Maybe some companies will start doing 4 day work weeks because they find that productivity doesn't actually increase from 4 to 5 days and then start outcompeting other companies for talent. But unless 5 days is actually not more productive than 4 days, we're going to have the most competitive organizations continue to be 5 days a week.
This would have to happen again. But there is none of that worker unity so it's unlikely to happen. The productivity gains will go solely to the bussiness owners.
Nothing bad would happen, of course.
If AI is really about to automate away a lot of labor, I have yet to hear even a hint of a plan to deal with the fallout of that which doesn’t involve consigning much of humanity to the dustbin of history.
Normalizing this "10x" language (well before AI) is a factor in this problem.
It's been so loosely and casually thrown about in this industry. 10x engineer... 10x mindset... 10x growth... 10x this... 10x that...
All paraded around by people who fancied themselves to be their own version of 10x whatever.
Well, keep parroting this long enough, and it's just a matter of time before people not only believe it to be commonplace, but they start to expect and demand it.
So now we have AI as the next thing foisted upon us to force everyone to be 10x or die trying.
Should've just settled for being 3.14x engineers like reasonable people.
Days off might be a challenging ask as the AI needs feedback more often than that. Working sporadically throughout the day, able to do what you please between the AI asking questions, is realistic. We're already there, frankly.
You'd only get days off if it was only you who got a 10x increase. But it's everybody. So it's status quo: technology advances, and you have to keep up if you want to stay in the industry.
I don’t believe this is true. Or that more hours worked reliably translates to serious competitive advantage, in general.
But your point stands, because many (or most) employers think it does, and employees are usually incentivized to support that notion.
And we shouldn't. Workers should only get the wages they can command in the marketplace and not a penny more, and the smaller the better.
> I know everybody is afraid of getting fired and replaced with AI or whatever right now. But we should be seriously asking in our next all hands meetings if 10x’ing our productivity can get us some days off. Or when our paycheck is going to be multiplied accordingly.
Morally, all benefits of any technology or productivity gain must flow up to the owners, who deserve it all.
But this should be comforting to all of you. I'm sure everyone here owns at least a few thousand dollars in shares. You'll get some dividends and/or capital gains!
And I am grateful for not working on a farm, it’s hard work!
_Nothing_ I do that benefits my employer directly benefits me. AI or not. That was the whole idea of the relationship: I show up, perform some type of labor and am shielded from the bullshit of doing business (to some tolerable extend). The employer in turn forks over hard cash. The exact, same F amount every month and on time, no discussions about it.
If your actions directly or indirectly caused a loss to the business do you give up free days or pay? I don’t think you should. This works both ways.
However, that’s on the level of the individual. If you’re saying we should unionize, then, hell yes.
Pretty sure if you ask this that they'll give you all your days off.
Your livelihood has a price (duh, your wage). But making cynical remarks about how stupid it is to want things to improve? Priceless.
Kind of ironic, given the way unions came to be in US during the 1930's.
There have been movements toward this in the US, but particularly in the tech sector, far too many people are still stuffed full of decades of anti-union propaganda (like the idea that the union is a "third party" rather than being the workers themselves, or that it would bring down their salary because they're such a special awesome 10x developer and 10x negotiator).
The executive class has taken roughly all the productivity increases since 1980 and slid them straight into their bulging pockets, at our expense. The only way we get any of that back, or prevent them from taking this new increase from us too, is to stand together against them.
are you sure about that? i'm a software engineer and i feel like i'm on the wining side now, even more than before. I'm considering quitting my 500K a year job to go compete against the employers. they seem like dinosaurs to me.
Software engineers have more leverage than ever.
Open source is not to blame here. AI companies used the code, in some cases against the license, to train their models.
Nobody is actually getting replaced - it's just that layoffs are in vogue now. If there was productivity to gain here, it would be used to do more and capture more of the market.
Could you point to some factual basis for that claim, or is this a feeling disguised as an opinion disguised as a factual statement?
My sources? Easy.
Just try searching for news stories of companies directly stating AI is the reason for layoffs. I don’t need to do any statistical or mental gymnastics for my evidence of it happening when it is literally as easy as looking at the result and the stated causes.
You know companies lie and overstate things, right?
Are you missing the pattern here?
Which of these articles and which part specifically do you believe supports the statement “NO ONE” is losing their job due to AI? Zero. Not a single one?
Okay, if not that, are you trying to refute my statement that automation is increasing across sectors? Which one of your articles refutes this statement categorically? Is it that you’re refuting AI is used in or to implement automations? Are you refuting that people have lost jobs to automations? Are you refuting that an AI does not need to replace an ENTIRE job in order to cause someone to lose their job or for a job to be replaced with a lesser paying job?
I’m not clear on how you think what you have provided is actually contextually relevant to the words I actually wrote, much less how I must have a “problem” because of it.
If you don't get paid more for being more productive, someone else is getting richer. That means they buy the houses in your neighborhood, which means you can't buy it because they outbid you
Businesses, especially tech ones, are not altruistic. The idea that tech companies are out to make anyone's life better is a joke and a sentiment that should have died decades ago. The evidence is of predatory business practices and leveraging the worst aspects of our brain chemistry to keep us hooked on apps that make us less happy, keep us stupid and less informed, and buying more.
Even more confusing are the people who are welcoming AI with open arms as just another skill to learn, _surely_ they'll be the ones who come out on top, right? It has all the stink of the countless Americans believing they too will become billionaires and everyone else are just suckers as they are all one healthcare problem away from bankruptcy.
We don't learn.
You don't know that. And this same line could be said about any technology that results in accruing of capital, but actually does end up making life better for the average human.
What if AI at AlphaFold finds a cure for Alzheimer's disease? What if it finds a way to actually perfect fusion?
You can't tell me we don't live better lives than people 100 years ago right now, and that is because of technology.
What a cold perspective. Talk about throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
That's a fallacy. You're assuming we all agree that this is going to happen. I don't agree. And I think AI will drive a huge amount of innovation that is going to make almost everyones lives better.
"Concede everything" is way too vague to argue against, but I'd be more than happy if whoever is behind the tech to cure a horrible disease like Alzheimer's is made filthy rich for it.
I think here it's useful to separate "AI" as sold and marketed today from "AI" as a CS discipline, a field of study, and a category of tools and techniques.
The field of Artificial Intelligence has always been, at least for the majority of people in it, about improving things for real people.
The LLMs that have garnered huge valuations and an outsized share of everyone's attention in recent years started as part of that field, and grew out of its research and technological advances.
But once companies started seeing how they could monetise it, that's when it started being about wealth consolidation and control.
Mainly because in software development (at least for what I do), productivity does not translate into significant company gains. I work for an energy company, nothing is super revolutionary, and a new feature or capability takes a long time to translate into measurable revenue, if at all.
The energy crisis had a much bigger (positive) impact on the numbers than AI or anything I personally did. (although I have to add, they also did a major re-architecture of their back-end after the '22 energy crisis and did some smart buy-in, so as the other energy companies' websites struggled, ours churned along just fine and we got a lot of new customers/contracts)
I've lost my job in February... Still trying to find a new job... any job...
Remember the banner hanging over Initech offices with their internal motto: "Is this good for the COMPANY?"
Ultimately, that is the question that matters.
If a human element is required to get value from AI, but any human will do, then devs should get minimum wage. If different humans have a different multiplier when you apply them to AI, they should be compensated accordingly. So if the 1x dev can get 5x out of AI, and the 2x dev can get 2x out of AI, you can fire the 2x2 dev, double the salary of the 1x5 dev, and be more productive for less money[1]. Or you can keep both devs, but pay the 1x5 dev slightly better than the 2x2 dev.
This is all assuming you have some valid way of measuring 1x, 2x, 1x5, and 2x2.
[1] Double salary doesn't have to include double insurance, vacation, etc. But there is also the cost of the AI, so...
Edit: markup
This is not a tech problem.
This is a you problem.
*Yes salary is way way way way lower. BUT where in the USA could I take a 10min bus (normal people take the bus here not bums) or walk 30-40min to work feeling totally safe even at night? Nevermind I spent 0 on my education in terms of tuition. And live in a city centre, walking to a grocery store with a 60k studio condo? With high speed 5g and fibre. And I hear in the US you have to worry about water or power cuts? Not here lmao.
I mean that simply you make society what you make it.
Over and out, o7, waiting for [flagged]
He has this great quote about when computers came out:
"We were told 'computers will save you so much time on work tasks that you won't even know what to do with your free time'. I spent the next 30 years working the same number of hours. "
Weekends, sick days, vacation days, being paid in legal tender and not company scrip, maternity leave, safety regulations, disabled affordance, banning child labor, civil rights and womens' rights (while they lasted) and the minimum wage. All due to socialist activism and a non-zero amount of violence.
Child went away mostly on its own (as did labor by the disabled) because industrialization made all that non-competitive compared to a normal adult operating some machine. Then, once child labor was relegated to a few niches of limited overall economic importance the government showed up and banned it to win a few brownie points from some jerks.
Child labor isn't a success of some socialists 100yr ago. It's a success of some propagandists 100yr ago.
Medieval folks and hunter-gatherers had plenty of time off. It wasn't until the industrial revolution that we started extending our workweek.
Here's a nice summary of how the workweek looked like, from the AskHistorians subreddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1rf0lb/comme...
I'd love to work 3 days a week now and be paid a livable amount, rather than grind 5 days a week, getting paid more than I need so I can retire fast. But tech companies don't want you for 3 days a week, its 5 or nothing for most of them.
And from experience it seems that 80% people need to try damn hard to actually keep it at 80% and not get sucked into doing more to "keep up".
As you said, it can be a double edged sword to be the 80% worker in the otherwise 100% team.
I'm pretty sure most of white collar HN crowd isn't being ground into dust. It'd be cool to work less though!
Only if you count the hours worked for the local lord and forget about all other mandatory work like:
- growing your own food
- cooking/prepping said food (44 hours per week)
- maintenance
- spinning, weaving and sewing clothes
https://acoup.blog/2025/09/05/collections-life-work-death-an...
https://acoup.blog/2025/10/10/collections-life-work-death-an...
In one instance you keep the value you are creating, in the other it goes to your employer.
Given the choice between the two I would much prefer to work for myself, as a matter of dignity.
From about one hundred years ago:
> Now it is true that the needs of human beings may seem to be insatiable. But they fall into two classes --those needs which are absolute in the sense that we feel them whatever the situation of our fellow human beings may be, and those which are relative in the sense that we feel them only if their satisfaction lifts us above, makes us feel superior to, our fellows. Needs of the second class, those which satisfy the desire for superiority, may indeed be insatiable; for the higher the general level, the higher still are they. But this is not so true of the absolute needs-a point may soon be reached, much sooner perhaps than we are all of us aware of, when these needs are satisfied in the sense that we prefer to devote our further energies to non-economic purposes.
[…]
> For many ages to come the old Adam will be so strong in us that everybody will need to do some work if he is to be contented. We shall do more things for ourselves than is usual with the rich to-day, only too glad to have small duties and tasks and routines. But beyond this, we shall endeavour to spread the bread thin on the butter-to make what work there is still to be done to be as widely shared as possible. Three-hour shifts or a fifteen-hour week may put off the problem for a great while. For three hours a day is quite enough to satisfy the old Adam in most of us!
* John Maynard Keynes, "Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren" (1930)
* http://www.econ.yale.edu/smith/econ116a/keynes1.pdf
An essay putting forward / hypothesizing four reasons on why the above did not happen (We haven't spread the wealth around enough; People actually love working; There's no limit to human desires; Leisure is expensive):
* https://www.vox.com/2014/11/20/7254877/keynes-work-leisure
I don’t know how such people can live with themselves. But apparently, if you’re immune to the second factor, it is possible, nowadays, to work 15h or less, without any wealth, and lead a good life.
The only thing threatening this status quo is corporations and rich people pulling their wealth into other states; and related, being net importers. I don’t understand why the EU is allowing this to happen. They should grow some teeth finally.
Another example is privatisation in the UK: scrap all investment, load the company with debt, leave the consumer and govt to sort out the mess.
So the rich do it too, just on a much grander scale.
-- James Jeffrey Roche (1847 - 1908)
Jobseeker is a maximum of $26k per year, but for most people it's going to be around $21k [1]. What else are you using supplement that because that feels like it would be close to the poverty line.
1: https://www.servicesaustralia.gov.au/how-much-jobseeker-paym...
Decades ago there was what I have read was an extremely effective Government department called the ’Commonwealth Employment Services’ but that was disbanded and contracts handed to private firms for excuses like “efficiency” that (surprise) didn’t end up panning out.
This is possible even without welfare.
Some friends of mine choose to do this: live in a shared flat, no car, no kids, it's easily doable. They live a good live and are happy.
(Let me add that I'm forty)
In a communist society where the people own the means of production collectively the measure of wealth would not be money but disposable free time.
I suspect productivity will massively increase, the complexity and cognitive load of our work will similarly multiply, and yet we'll still being doing the now-more-complex work in some capacity for a similar number of hours.
"Too cheap to meter"
They used to charge you by the minute but now it's easier to just charge you a flat charge per month.
It's funny how underappreciated it is how the five day work week is powered by norms...at least in the US. People assume there are laws about it.
The only laws dictate compensation past certain thresholds, and in the case of well paid knowledge workers those don't even tend to apply. If you ever read HR material referring to your role as "exempt" now you know what you're exempt from.
And what's more, software engineers are exempt from these rules because of their pay grades. If you're a SWE making a salary the odds are your employer could require you work on Saturdays without running afowl of labor laws.
This is all powered by norms.
If you are a SWE, you don't get paid overtime for working that incident on the weekend or going over 40 hours in a week. The only reason you work five days a week is tradition.
Give the employees enough work such that they have to work on weekends... and... done.
France is a great place to be an employee.
Unless you're imagining congress do something. I want to shoot fireballs from my fingers, but unfortunately we don't live in a world of magic.
Acting like we are helpless and the future is determined is straight up loser talk while also not being historically accurate in the slightest.
You should go read about people starting wildcat strikes while working in literal company towns. There is tremendous power when we organize together, a power so great the elites have spent almost a 100 years trying to destroy the fruits of their success.
But we weren't talking about unions. We were talking about congress. I think you will find that tech workers are not the only job segment, and far from the most sympathetic due to their wages. Lobbying for an extra day off will not get you far in the face of many more pressing issues, and the party most likely to stand up for workers is more interested in stopping data centers at the moment. Unless you're talking about a time horizon past which I don't think I'll be around to notice.
Meanwhile I did some googling and I can buy a wrist-mounted flamethrower for $175, which is close enough to my fingers to make no difference.
That is an oxymoron. I think you probably meant coercion.
~90% of Iceland is on a 35-36 hours work week, seems to work fine.
Remote work was also skeptically thought of up until a global pandemic forced it, and while there has been some retreat, 20% of Americans work remotely in some capacity still. Just need a catalyst to challenge norms and rigid mental models.
https://autonomy.work/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/ICELAND_4DW...
https://www.cnn.com/2024/10/25/business/iceland-shorter-work...
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/nov/21/icelan...
That's a pretty abysmal number considering the number who do want remote work and its productivity improvements and its overall lower waste. I'm surprised it's so low.
“Our AI is so awesome and boosts productivity so much that no one has to work another 5 day week, ever again.”
Also, 996 is apparently a thing
Like...
You can actually work 4 x 8 if you want to. Or 5x5... No gun to your head
Yeah, agreed, you'll have a hard time finding a job with full benis and vacation yada yada, but like,.... Every CEO loves to negotiate
So stop being a bitch
If 4x8 is important to you:
Negotiate
***************
Reply to madrox:
"Demands" is a loaded term. In negotiations you enter with "must haves" and "like to haves"...
Through the course of negotiations you learn new information and reveal your own information....
At the end, whether you take the job or not: you end up with what you deserve. Not what you want.
By my assessment, a lot of people are learning that "deserve" is not a character trait, it's market driven.
Because to that CEO you're talking about, you have to convince them your demands are better than the next candidate who doesn't mind working more hours.
But ultimately the unsaid thing was: you either work 6/7 days a week, or you get marginalized or fired. And it's not like we weren't putting in the hours on the weekdays; most of us were working 12-hour days, or more. (And wow, we got to drop down to 8-10 on the weekends! So generous!)
Dumb. I'll never do something like that again. Not worth it, and certainly not for someone else's company.
I really think management still doesn't get it.
A four-day-a-week worker here.
I don't know what you exactly mean, but my personal experience is exactly the opposite. I worked for a startup as a founding engineer, just 4d/w (the CTO was crazily open-minded), and I was never so productive. Doesn't matter that the others were working 5 days, pushing more; it was my responsibility to keep up, and it worked pretty well.
Same now, working for a company with the same arrangement.
And no one is or was "losing."
Made up self-pressure is among the worst things smart folks can do in their lives.
If that is the case, then the same would apply to those who work overtime and on weekends.
If that is the case, wouldn't the same would apply to those who work overtime and on weekends?
This reminds me of the Luddite movement in England. Industrial machines were disrupting the textile industry. The Luddites were not anti technology they were against technology allowing employers to suppress wages and working conditions and for increasing the quality of life and more humane working conditions for the extra productivity.
As we know their movement was not successful giving rise to the bleak images of industrial factory life in England. I think all that will happen is workers will expect to be more productive than before but their skills will be less compensated because “the machine” did most of the work.
https://theconversation.com/im-a-luddite-you-should-be-one-t...
I’m seeing this talking point circulated a lot recently but it’s not really the whole story. Luddites weren’t on a selfless crusade to steal from the rich and give to the poor. They wanted to fight off competition for their specific jobs. They didn’t want anyone having access to cheaper fabrics and clothes and other things because that was their golden goose. They wanted to be in control and force you to go through the inefficient methods to get those things because it benefited themselves.
A closer modern day analog would be something like the dock workers striking to keep automation out of ports. They have a sweet gig and they don’t want machines doing anything to jeopardize their stranglehold on ports, even if it would benefit literally everyone else in the entire country if we could modernize our ports like the rest of the world.
>But the Luddites themselves “were totally fine with machines,” says Kevin Binfield, editor of the 2004 collection Writings of the Luddites. They confined their attacks to manufacturers who used machines in what they called “a fraudulent and deceitful manner” to get around standard labor practices.
>“They just wanted machines that made high-quality goods,” says Binfield, “and they wanted these machines to be run by workers who had gone through an apprenticeship and got paid decent wages. Those were their only concerns.”[1]
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/what-the-luddites-rea...
I've been trying to figure out how to bring the idea up to my boss of going back to it... at least the 4x10.
This is why 3x12 is not workable for average families. If you have kids and want to see them, 3x12 only works if you start really really early, then get to bed early when the kids do too.
I enjoyed 4x10 when I did it, but there were some real problems with some employees trying to adapt. Anecdotally we were seeing a lot of people who would barely work until the 8 hour mark and then just zone out or socialize while they waited the clock out at the end of the day.
Which is all too bad for those of us who work well with longer days.
You could try a data engineer’s life which is full of meetings, ad-hoc tasks and other BS —- everything that screams that this is not a real engineer job.
If you are excited about the technology, sure. But if you are excited about the increase in productivity, unless you are a manager, I don't really understand it. Like, why? You are not working one hour less than before. If anything, it's more likely you'll get laid off and have trouble finding your next job.
- Jim Morrison
You can and should choose your employers. Saying you have no alternatives is disingenious. It's possible (and often worth it) to trade a big salary for meaning.
My employer significantly underpays us compared to the market, we could be (and many had been) earning multiple times more elsewhere, and yet we're happy to work there: we get reimbursed by meaningful work in a relaxed atmosphere.
In theory yes, but lots and lots of people will tell you how hard it is to switch jobs in real life, especially with personal circumstances.
A very simple example -- depending on your location, there can be very few employers you can choose from. Relocatiob is a major life decision.
Just talk to a few people, and that should be obvious.
Regarding the point in GP -- you can bet that most Meta employees don't believe in the company's vision, and they are just there for the (very good) paycheck. They are likely employable but choose not to.
Source: direct contacts
> a natural desire for people to want to make things
... and all you can think of is "gains"?
But, work IS exciting now - not sure for how long - because AI allows me to work almost at the speed of thought.
Nothing more, nothing less. It's FUN to be able to _just_ think.
If your job was 80-90% shoveling and one day you were offered use of an excavator, wouldn’t you find that exciting even while realizing the shoveling part of your career is probably dead?
I'm not saying that's _why_ they're excited. But it's a great time to be a builder, and a terrible time to be a worker ant.
Dictating what to exist and what not to to the machine is a power fantasy that's not going to stick around for long, because we'll inevitably reach the point where no human is needed in the loop (or at least not as often as they needed today).
Most people finally feel how they would've felt like if they actually put deliberate practice for hours to work on something. That's why you see comments going "wow, I rewrote this in Rust, and I don't even know Rust". You get to feel like someone who outputs Rust.
I think it's mostly young graduates that have not been ground down by the wheel of labour just yet, and old/ex engineers that are able to build something after years of being out of practice.
Hard for me to be excited about being asked to do more for the same pay, to be measured on idiotic metrics, to compete with overconfident but inept people, when I'm reaching my 40s. I am at the peak of my engineering skills and the bottom of my patience.
The amount of code you produce in months of just typing must be enormous, no?
To me it seems no matter the plan there's many unplanned things that I need to handle, and that's where the time is spent. I never had a day in my career where I knew exactly what had to be done and just spent it typing...
1. Competitive market dynamics. If you only work four days a week, other employees and companies who are willing to work five days a week will do so and get ahead of you, and you are more likely to get fired or to go out of business. This force pushes us all to work longer (and harder) so we have more money to enjoy in our leisure time.
2. A society's willingness to sacrifice days of leisure for days of work. There are only seven days in a week. The tradeoff between work and leisure - production and consumption - is ultimately what determines how hard we all work. This force pushes us all to work less so we have more time to spend our money.
Economists think on the margin. It's easy to demonstrate these two principles to yourself by thinking through worked examples from different starting points.
Whether the equilibrium lands at 2 days of work to 5 days of leisure, or 5 days of work to 2 days of leisure, depends on our collective preferences, which vary between countries and cultures but have tended to be relatively durable over time.
No technology so far has shifted this balance much - not the steam engine, the industrial revolution, the invention of the personal computer, the internet - and there's no reason to believe "AI" will be any different.
The logical conclusion of this is that - assuming we're all 10x more productive - we'll still be working 5 days and enjoying 2 days a week, but we'll consume 10x more, or everything we consume will be 10x higher quality. Hardly a bad thing.
The point is: "a society's willingness" is doing a _huge_ amount of work in that framing. This willingness is precisely what is up for debate when we discuss work days.
The whole of humanity is one big system of self-feedbacks. Equilibria are only reached with respect to constraints (otherwise there is only one equilibrium, which is heat death!). The more you zoom out, the more "givens" come up for their own analysis.
Who is "we all"? To me, it sounds like the relative few who happen to have those jobs that have the 10x productivity boost but also receive the monetary upside (via ownership).
The rest of the hard-to-automate jobs will likely see their wages crater as the workers whose jobs got automated flood those labor markets - i.e. office worker turned skilled physical laborer.
This will further enrich the previous small group relative to the masses, as they will pay lower prices and receive higher quality goods and services due to competition between everyone else. Prices will fall not by miraculous AI robots but by squeezing labor.
This is the scenario - neofeudalism - that may await us absent strong mechanisms to replace the broad productivity redistribution the social technology known as "jobs" provided. Hardly a good thing.
Though this was a 100-year prediction so we still got three and half to go!
Yeah, if you switch to working as an independent contractor, you can work any amount of time you want. If you run your own business, you can work crazy hours or none at all. The world is truly your oyster
I'm not being facetious either. That's exactly what I did, and I got what I asked for
We can all talk about supply and demand here, whether companies should be forced to do X or Y, and how Keynes got his 15 hour work week prediction so wrong, ad nauseam. But if you truly want something beyond the talk, like a more flexible work schedule, there's real ways to get it right now
My girlfriend had a similar schedule when she worked at a hospital.
Good shoes like Brooks or Hoka and a good sleep schedule and it's doable. I only work 15 or 16 days a month. I work every other weekend, but the weekends I have off are 3 days.
Couples (in prime reproducing age) where both members WFH at least 1 day a week have 0.32 more live births per woman per lifetime than couples where neither does.
Time not spent working could be time working on spending.
https://rickwebb.medium.com/the-economics-of-star-trek-29bab...
There are people out there who would rather other people starve than they have one iota less prestige, power, influence or luxury. And, unfortunately, they are the people who wield most of the power in our society.
We have to solve that before we can solve the economics, which is the easy part.
I argue - there's nothing we can do to stop it; humanity, I mean. We will either achieve Star Trek or get wiped out as a species.
As a Kardashev Type 3, we will have achieved full automation. I'll leave the door open for Elysium problems, but hopefully Mr. Damon will save us then too.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Past_Tense_(Star_Trek:_Deep_Sp...
A couple of years ago, in fact. We're running late.
WWIII lasted 25 years and it took another 100 years to rebuild after that. WWIII in universe is also scheduled for 2026 I believe.
we definitely choose consumption over free time for the most part.
people generally choose nicer home, starbucks, vacay, neflix over work hours or retirement.
so this is a cultural issue
Post-scarcity is no longer technological problem, it's a political one. But it's still very much a problem, so no, we are not anywhere near post-scarcity.
I also don't understand the point you're making about people wanting to spend $15 on netflix or $12 on a coffee. Would everybody cutting netflix and lattes allow us to live in that utopia more quickly?
It's far more a cultural problem than political.
We starting hitting post-scarcity at the start of the 19th century, towards the end of the industrial revolution [1]
We were growing enough food, housing is actually not that expensive, we were 'starting to not need that much more'.
This is when we started marketing consumption to the population - it was the only way to grow the economy.
We have far, far more than we need for basic satiety.
It's not quite so simple though - many innovations that we 'truly want', like medicines and health tech - come out of the economy as a whole and would not be possible were that the only hugely important sector.
We work 5 days on 2 days off because that's the very strongly entrenched social contract, it's the 'labour equilibrium'.
No amount of tech or AI will change that - unless we collectively agree to change the rules.
The social contract is slightly different in different countries, and nobody seems to have figured out how to work on 2-3 days, I believe that we mostly prefer the way it is. Maybe 4 day weeks would be more amenable.
But the marginal income from the 4th day ... I think people would prefer to work it rather than not.
[1] https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/a-brief-history-of-consum...
Another problem is housing and living environment. Although it is very much possible to live in a smaller space, nice neighborhoods (quiet, clean, green) are expensive.
But basic necessities are almost free in rich societies, if you have time.
Roles that come with a 40hr work week were already decoupled from performance, if AI made those workers 10x more productive they will rarely see the fruits of their productivity
On an individual level it seems like the correct move is to either move to a role that rewards output or organize and get equity comp as part of everyone's package
And now with AI coming out in hot, and companies only hiring seniors, I found it very hard to move horizontally. It is not like I can't take a pay cut, but people simply won't hire someone who takes some time to learn the rope.
I might as well figure out how to increase my Charisma to 18 and sleep with someone at the top /s
I don't think the average person has even close to a 10x output increase due to AI.
It used to be that 80+% of the population worked in agriculture. In developed countries that number is now around 1-2%. Some of the freed labour was funneled into improving living standards, some of it was funneled into new jobs created by the increasingly complex society (the "intermediate economy").
With AI, the same is true: labour is freed by the productivity gains (which I doubt are 10x sustainably but whatever), more labour is needed for power generation, mineral extraction, maintaining this new extra layer of complexity in the intermediate economy, etc. In the end we might see, say, a net 3% increase in global productivity per year over the next 10 years, which will be funneled into increasing living standards and increasing economic inequalities, but not in reducing working hours.
If you accept living below average standards, you could easily work a single day of the week for the rest of your life. But why would an employer hire 5 people working one day a week, instead of one working 5 days a week? They won't, hence we don't see a reduction in working hours.
The alternative is to work full time but retire earlier, much earlier, than you would otherwise, which in the end is the equivalent of having worked one day a week for your whole life.
I highly recommend reading Lean Logic by David Fleming, it explores several of these concepts in a very interesting way.
Employers have two modes, waste peoples time, or sack them
The joke, of course, being that every increase in productivity has ALWAYS gone straight to ownership.
Economists have been predicting a boom in human leisure time since the dawn of economics. It has NEVER happened...
Which of course means that if you want to capture that upside for yourself, you need to be an owner.
The real problem with AI is that it breaks that for programmers. Before AI, you actually could be an owner. Of course big tech companies tried to get you to centralize, to depend on their tools, but you didn't have to. You could always run your own open source tooling on your own hardware, and freelance if you absolutely couldn't accept the loss of upside in being an employee.
But now AI has centralized a key tool, and that changes the game, at least if you think the game requires you to use AI to stay competitive.
AI Startup Founders Tout a Winning Formula–No Booze, No Sleep, No Fun
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45221423
996
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45149049
New trend: extreme hours at AI startups
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45156674
SV AI Startups Are Embracing China's Controversial '996' Work Schedule
The logical response should be to elect left-leaning politicians that recognize this; or educate your existing left-leaning politicians; or stand for office yourself with this as your platform.
If there are huge fines on any AI-related layoffs, substantially higher taxes on the top 1%, and an extra wealth tax then maybe we can fund some kind of UBI or stopgap support for the masses that will lose their jobs.
"Most of the things that we worry about under the mode of capitalism that the U.S practices, that is going to put people out of work, that is going to make people’s lives harder, because corporations will see it as a way to increase their profits and reduce their costs."
The problem is, it has always been that way - and not just in the US. The introduction of any kind of new technology or other way of disproportionately improving corporate bottom lines has always led to job losses, the key thing is what governments do in response to it.
The Industrial Revolution for example led to widespread devastation, the shift from agriculture being the dominant employer to industry and service sectors did not (as the ag workers were absorbed by the rapidly growing other sectors), the globalization / offshoring wave of neoliberalism once again led to widespread devastation, and AI will probably again lead to devastation.
And if Sam Altman isn't arrested for his blatant RAM market manipulation... I'm pretty sure there will be either people with pitchforks at the end or he will have ushered in, in retrospective, a new era of "stuff that uber rich people can get away with".
Yes, everyone has a modern smartphone now. Cool, thanks. But last time I checked, can't pay my rent with a smartphone when I'm out of a job.
> Nobody will suggest we ban cars and go back to horse and buggies so cowboys can have jobs.
Maybe not that, but have you looked at sustainable farming movements? In farming, there is a growing movement believing that the way we do farming - basically, ever larger and larger central operations running farms with tens if not hundreds of thousands of animals or acres upon acres of monoculture crops - is no longer sustainable, as the externalities get too serious to be able to ignore:
Biodiversity loss, land erosion (when everything is just the same crop from horizon to horizon and no bushes, wind and rain has an easy time carrying away soil after harvest), an increasing vulnerability to all kinds of pests...
But in order to get smaller, you need people again, because a tractor costing half a million dollars won't ever make the money back on a small farm.
Are you willing to part with your smartphone and computer? I would bet not.
That said, sustainable farming doesn't require very small farms, and it doesn't require more than 1% of the population to work on farms.
Highly disagree. If anything we'll see more variety because mass produced food has settled on a very limited set of breeds (both for plants and animals) to keep timing and yield consistent.
I want what you are smoking.
Yes, no-till farming has demonstrated excellent results
Also, a reference to population trends might be interesting. Nobody is wrong (I've spent my spring preparing fields) but could be close but actual data would be good. Meanwhile farms have been failing at increased rates.
I know most people don’t agree with that but it seems nice to me
I fear being targeted by an AI drone and mass surveillance. Neither of which are driven by capitalism (although being targeted by either of those by some billionaire because I refuse to RTO is related).
U.S. becomes more authoritarian -> you are more afraid of being targeted by an AI drone and mass surveillance -> companies that make those weapons of war for the government (prime contractors) make billions -> they use their money to influence politics and public opinion -> U.S. becomes more authoritarian -> etc.
You must be new here. No, that's not how this work. If you are able to produce the same amount of work by midday Monday we expect you to increase the amount of output in the current system by 14 x. And the owners pocket the financial gain from this productivity delta and you should be happy you even have a job.
This is why it’s prudent for more of us to figure out a way to be our own owners.
In the horrible, distant future known as 2023.
Appetite grows with eating.
It does when you own the tech. If you give the tech away then the people who you gave it to will continue to expect more of the same, naturally.
The reality is that if you were already a 10x coder, you can't be 10x more productive even if the LLMs made you so, because there's only so much work.
And even just using LLMs in my private projects, I feel my daily coding skills slipping. I want to ask Claude to do some dumb API integration instead of doing it myself. But I know if I don't do it myself, I'll be lost at sea and never able to debug it without more Claude.
This is a drunk state of mind post, feel free to ignore it.
There's no guarantee society needs 10x the productivity.
Yesterday I built a bespoke time keeping and billing tool in my browser for my boutique consulting gig. I got exactly what I needed and I paid about $1.
I think this piece of software could power my business for 2-3 years... If my business is very successful maybe I'll invest $2 to develop a GUI.
No SaaS needed. Software demand was actually surpressed by AI.
I don't need 10x more software. I need simple software at 1/100th the cost, on demand. And AI promises to give it to me. The most beautiful part is there's multiple market entrants competing for my bid.
Imagine OpenAI invented ICE engines and the world was dotted with lakes of crude oil, all we needed was refineries. That's the world we're in.
Now that should make you think.
In reality, higher productivity just means companies can do more with the same amount of time/effort, and so nothing will change. Wage-slaving will still be wage-slaving. We won't move the bar toward more leisure time; we'll move the bar toward more work completed in the same amount of time.
Then again, the labor movement gave us the 5-day work week, and the concept of weekends for resting from work. Maybe a new labor movement can give us more days a week off. Labor movements have been declining of late, of course, but perhaps that sort of thing can be reversed.
In today's parlance, this was excellent "work-life balance". If you can, talk to your boss and see whether you can adopt such a work schedule (with slight shifting of the time window as needed).
You wrote a lot of words, but none of them describe a slippery slope, or explain how a supposed 10x increase in productivity precludes a 20% reduction in hours worked.
Then, let's do a 3 day work week and multiply it by 0.6.
Pretty simple math
If it's just time, then why are we doing so much overtime?
This is just ripe for a response "leave California". Which Elon likes to bite on. But it's expensive everywhere and not just that, fundamentally time with your child is important and cannot be fixed by throwing money at it.
I know this isn't about Elon's hypocritical stance on fertility, sorry.
End the "software crisis" that's been with us since the 1960s. This would result in a quality-of-life improvement for every manager, stakeholder, user, etc.
Another idea: Alleviate some side effects of the crisis, such as vital functions being taken care of by "shadow IT" for decades.
Abolish Excel as the front end for business computation.
And it definitely doesn't help when everyone hires "Seniors" only, so it's virtually impossible to switch tracks unless I sleep with the CXOs I guess. I have been nudging towards system programming for the previous 8 years, starting as a data analyst, to BI developer, and to data engineer -- well, I guess data engineer is my last stop for life.
A lot of the paradox in productivity and labor may be attributable to a severe debt that needs to be paid down and now finally can be. Some of the 996 (or 007) working hour system stuff is coming from your peers feeling this new hope. The tone will continue to shift as backlogs get exhausted.
If you are pure software play I think you are on track to get more days off than you bargained for, one way or the other.
But the money was so good we (The royal we) didn't think we needed it, that would just get in the way. Did you see how much FB employees were getting paid in 2015! Insanity! Now, even the skutters have a better union than us.
A plumber, or an electrician has a better union, and hence rights and protection than us.
But if you're building a brand new field you can still build a guild.
Get a tractor, and spend less time farming.
The factory will save time making tractors, so everybody can have one.
Computers will make the factories more efficient.
AI will make the computers more efficient.
We've also ran out of freedom at that point. We used to simply walk away from bullies, but that was no longer possible, with the farm and all.
At some point bullies stopped charging for racket. They stole the land and told us we are now working under them, for them.
We could have abundance, but then people might not have to maximize their efforts to produce wealth for capital holders.
My wife and I work full time so we could outbid other people who wanted our house.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Right_to_Be_Lazy
But that has never stuck enough for masses to fight for it. It’s a shame.
Personally, the way I cracked it is by freelancing for an american company and living in France. I can totally take the day off.
Instead of asking for the day off, some startups should just implement the practice and popularize it
The expectation for him was to work 50-60 hours a week, not including commute, getting ready for work, and corporate social events. Time off was strictly 2 weeks until you hit a certain level and then you'd get 3 weeks. He didn't get sick often but if he was he still went to work.
Dad had it good. I used to jump on landscaping crews during the summer in SoCal and watch 60 year old guys break their backs for 12 hours to get ~$250 a day. I'd do it on the weekends for spending money.
I enjoyed the article but reading through all of the comments in this thread I'm genuinely surprised by the lack of appreciation for how good we have it. There's a "demographic" on HN and I'm pretty confident it aint the guys doing concrete work or running vampire hours at the local 7-11.
Moving around some 1s and 0s in between some coffee and meetings even at the bad companies isn't that rough in the grand scheme of things. I get what the article is trying to say - with all the productivity improvements when do the grunts get a little bit of those gains back?Unfortunately thats not how it works. It's "Red Queen Theory"... when something new changes the game you adapt or die - "It takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place."
... but appreciate what you have too
And I personally would like that something better for the people who have it worse, too.
>> If AI is going to 10x our productivity across the board, that means that I should be able to produce the same amount of output by midday on Monday that, in the before times, would have taken all week.
You are thinking of productivity as "code written". And certainly that part of your job will get more productive.
But that is just something you do when you're not in meetings. (or when you're in a meeting, but the camera is off, and you're not really listening). Your real job is to attend meetings. And unfortunately AI can't help with that (yet).
(I'm not even being sarcastic. Most programmers don't realize that they have been hired to have meetings.)
What it can do is free you up from the pesky code-writing part of your job, freeing you up to attend even more meetings. And this does indeed make management happy because (seriously now) their job is having meetings, and you being "unavailable" (because you know, you want to program) was hindering them in the first place.
So no, you can't have Friday off, but now that you mention it, let's set aside that time for "team building" exercises...
Many meetings have 0% content "that applies to you". But that doesn't stop you being "added to meetings".
Don't like your job? Fine leave, there are tens of millions of H1B's who will do your job for less money and they won't complain because they can't easily leave.
In short, people have been having the day off for decades now. It's called part-time work.
Joke's on you peasant. They're already playing golf on Fridays.
Political disengagement is often "too damn tired"
If I was smarter I’d have 200k in my 401k now. Assuming I live cheap in Vietnam and a good yield I’d just live off 10k usd per year
The overall code quality probably drops a bit, but as long as it still works the C level can call it a win.
So yes, take the day off but the models still need you to steer them when you’re back
the concern would be that this new ability will actually increase competition and give us less than we had before
this is not something that can just be blamed on the "CEOs/execs/shareholders" of the world. it is evolutionary competition - unless we can ALL join forces to draw the line somewhere, someone will choose to defect from the agreement to "just work less", because doing so will make them succeed at the expense of others. even if everyone from one country agrees, the other competing country that defects and works 996 with agents will "win" and conquer the lazy country.
I wish I knew what to do to fix it, doesn't seem sustainable but I don't know how to make all of humanity cooperate without doing something even worse
> We already did draw the line and we can redraw it. We drew the line very strongly at 40 hours, 4 days a week. That is the "official" expected hours for most salaried employees.
because doing so will make them succeed at the expense of others.
> This already happens. People making salary, 40 hours, that work 50, 60, etc. to get ahead of their coworkers in a career sense. Or people taking optional overtime to get ahead financially or people who work hourly working extra hours or people who have 2+ jobs or a side hustle.
even if everyone from one country agrees, the other competing country that defects and works 996 with agents will "win" and conquer the lazy country.
> Didn't realize Japan is imminently going to conquer the US because they work more hours.
Hours alone is not the only thing that matters, but all else being equal it does matter. Someone who works smarter for 20 hours will get ahead of someone who works stupid for 40, but if both people work smart the 40 hours person gets more done
I am definitely out of the loop. I assume it is used pejoratively only by self-labelled idiots?
Maybe we could afford for women to not leave their kids with strangers for most of their waking hours? Crazy talk I know.
Any gains in productivity are extracted by the rich. Any losses of productivity shall be covered by the poor. It is a one-way rachet.
What they haven't yet explained is how everyone is supposed to earn money to buy AI produced goods.
3 And they said: 'The God of the Hebrews hath met with us. Let us go, we pray thee, three days' journey into the wilderness, and sacrifice unto the LORD our God; lest He fall upon us with pestilence, or with the sword.'4 And the king of Egypt said unto them: 'Wherefore do ye, Moses and Aaron, cause the people to break loose from their work? get you unto your burdens.'5 And Pharaoh said: 'Behold, the people of the land are now many, and will ye make them rest from their burdens?'6 And the same day Pharaoh commanded the taskmasters of the people, and their officers, saying:7 'Ye shall no more give the people straw to make brick, as heretofore. Let them go and gather straw for themselves.8 And the tale of the bricks, which they did make heretofore, ye shall lay upon them; ye shall not diminish aught thereof; for they are idle; therefore they cry, saying: Let us go and sacrifice to our God.9 Let heavier work be laid upon the men, that they may labour therein; and let them not regard lying words.'
10 And the taskmasters of the people went out, and their officers, and they spoke to the people, saying: 'Thus saith Pharaoh: I will not give you straw.11 Go yourselves, get you straw where ye can find it; for nought of your work shall be diminished.'12 So the people were scattered abroad throughout all the land of Egypt to gather stubble for straw.13 And the taskmasters were urgent, saying: 'Fulfil your work, your daily task, as when there was straw.'14 And the officers of the children of Israel, whom Pharaoh's taskmasters had set over them, were beaten, saying: 'Wherefore have ye not fulfilled your appointed task in making brick both yesterday and today as heretofore?'
>This inadvertently led to an increase in the use of slaves. Whitney had hoped his invention would do the opposite by reducing the amount of labor needed to process cotton, but he never invented a machine to harvest cotton. That job still had to be done by hand. Cotton harvesting machines did not show up until the 1930s. So as cotton farmers expanded their plantations, they bought more slaves to pick the cotton.
In turn, your capacity to impose a day off is a question of either your personal power or of class struggle.
Of course when you arrive at the question of the class struggle, the discourse becomes funny
You are never going to get relief by asking politely.
Tractors didn't making farming more lucrative, it just meant less farmers. Automated loom technology didn't make textile workers wealthier, it made capitalists richer, and then still ultimately shipped the work to poorer countries. Powered drills and tools didn't make miners or construction workers wealthier or work less. Forklifts didn't make dock workers wealthier or work less. Women entering the workforce and nearly doubling the available labor didn't make us work any less.
I don't see AI doing anything to help the working class in any way, just funneling more money into capitalists hands while the productivity demands increase.
Even in programming, where AI is being shown to be the most useful, did any of you have your work demands decrease or wages go up? No, at best they just fired junior engineers and told them to go pound sand.
Choices are made by people who have power and imposed upon people who don't.
The people with power under current systems don't care about the people who do the work. They care about getting rich. So if there's an efficiency gain to be had, all of that new efficiency is going to be put towards increasing output or reallocating work. None of it - under current power structures - will ever go towards allowing workers to work less, because workers aren't the ones deciding where it will go.
There is a simple alternative. Vote; and educate your family and friends.
If you don't know what is on the ballot in the midterms, you are part of the problem. If you aren't starting a family conversation about how corporations are squeezing us, you are part of the problem.
Violent revolution has merit when peaceful means break down. The rise of the guillotine jokes are the first time that people are losing faith in the peaceful option. We should hope that our leaders don't make most of use disillusioned with the idea of a peaceful transfer of power.
It'll probably disabuse you of the idea that its a good way to get things done.
Democracies that arise by nonviolent revolution, do so in part due to the threat of what comes next if the nonviolent revolution is crushed. Because if you make sure placards and petitions don't work, it eventually won't be placards and petitions anymore.
'Those who make peaceful revolution impossible, will make violent revolution inevitable', and all that.
When I've gone to local government meetings, I've generally been one of only a few without gray hair. The vast majority of working-age people seemingly can't be bothered to learn the basics about who's running in a non-presidential election, let alone go argue for the boring but extremely impactful things that would actually help people out.
People need to put down the phones and put in some actual effort on fixing things before even jokingly advocating for something that would almost certainly be a mass casualty event. It's shameful.
Resistance doesn't work very well against highly militarized autocratic regimes.
Robespierre first entered the chat: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reign_of_Terror
Then Napoleon followed.
Make of it what you will.
[EDIT: for the downvoters - the folks who got guillotined in France were definitely bad, but the Terror was very real and very awful. It tends to be a trend with the noble overthrowers that after the initial wins they then get excited to go lop the heads off anyone else that might have ever bothered them. Be careful what you wish for.]
Don't get me wrong. I do vote, and I believe that voting and activism can work, and even still does for a variety of things. But as for fighting against forces of corruption and tyranny, I believe activism is about as useful as an ashtray on a motorcycle. Any grassroots efforts are in a horribly asymmetric battle against well-funded adversaries that will come back every year everywhere without fail to get their opening. And any hope we had of limiting corporate interests in politics has been decimated in the U.S. basically since Citizen's United — not that I really believe there wouldn't have been some other workaround had that not happened.
So yes, I believe grassroots activism largely doesn't work. The fact that the battle is so asymmetrical makes it even more asymmetrical by making people apathetic about and fatigued over activism, making it even less effective.
But people often turn their heads when there's violence.
Nobody wants violence, just like nobody wants to hit rock bottom. I believe truly that political violence is a very dark place that will be no fun for anyone involved that I personally do not want to be a part of in any way. But, it just is the case that things will get worse before they get ~~much worse~~ better.
I see it as a question of if and not when until structural changes occur that durably improve upon the asymmetry of political activism. And in that case, it's not a matter of whether or not, it's a matter of getting it the hell over with.
I don't know how the fuck these stupid Flock "safety" cameras got here, but I have a pretty good guess how they'll disappear.
Gee golly, I have no clue how the pole ended up being cut and the solar and cameras ended up smashed.
Must'a been an "accident".
What is voting for then?
You are also wrong. Contracts, ordinances, and everything related to governance get rolled back or changed all the time. Especially at the local level.
If you have lost the initial battle you can do the same thing as them: you keep attacking their presence and you only need to win once to undo it.
Normal activists don't stand a chance against well-funded adversaries.
If you don't believe in this system then start setting things on fire[0] I guess. Otherwise shut up, people are actually trying to fight it.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2026_Kimberly-Clark_distributi...
Feel free to spread naivity, but do not tell me to shut up, that is an endeavor less useful than any activism.
Cops love them, and look longingly at the UK panopticon and how easy it is to solve crimes.
Instead we’re being spied on but seemingly police can’t solve any of the crime affecting most people’s day to day lives.
Believe me, I know what's on the ballot for the midterm in the state but it's not going to stop me from making dark snarky jokes.
"The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure." - Jefferson
“People on twitter will really be like ‘you believe in voting? that pales in effectiveness to my strategy, firebombing a Walmart’ and then not firebomb a Walmart”
In a capitalist society, choices are made according to supply and demand.
In a world where there's a positive supply shock (in this case, there's a lot more programming available for purchase today than there was a year ago), supply goes up. We therefore expect the price for the good to decrease.
This has nothing to do with power or whether people care about xyz. It's a consequence of the economic system we live under.
You can desire to live under a different economic system! That's logically coherent. But if you want the laws of supply and demand not to apply to you, that's what you're asking for.
Honestly I'm getting tired of this narrative. People take the benefits of capitalism for granted (indeed most of us on this forum do very well for ourselves relative to the average person in our country and around the world), but we blame all of its downsides on "bad people".
And 2 days off was not a system dictated by God, which we are obligated to keep in perpetuity (in fact, most religions dictate 1 day off, not 2).
So, we could, as a society, just choose to make a 32 hour workweek “full time”, and mandate overtime pay after that.
There’s no reason, even under capitalism that we must allow all of the productivity gains to accrue to the benefit of solely those at the top of an enormous pile of wealth.
In fact, I think if we choose to do that as a society, it will end horrifically.
I would question the premise that all or even most of the productivity gains of any past technological improvement have accrued to the benefit of solely those at the top of an enormous pile of wealth.
200 years ago 90% of Americans lived on farms. In the early 1900s, it was 40%. Today that number is 2%.
The economic surplus from that increase in productivity accrued to everyone in society, not just the wealthy. (The evidence for this is that we are all living at a higher standard of living today than we were in the early 1800s or 1900s.)
But certainly the positive supply shock was not great news for farmers, many of whom lost their jobs. In the case of AI, I'm asking us -- programmers -- not to make the mistake of saying "this is not a benefit for me, therefore it's not a benefit for society".
Sure, a poor man with two dollars is richer than a poor man with one dollar.
And yet the man handing out the dollars had 100$ in surplus when he was handing out 1s and now that he's handing out 2's he's got 1,000,000,000.
Look at the wealth disparity. Even if quality of life has increased, it's not wrong for the people delivering that increased quality of life (workers) to also demand a requisite slice of the pie.
In fact, I see no reason why the pie should be shared with wealthy non workers at all. Were they necessary for the increased quality of life?
On top of that, it's a global economy. Expand beyond the USA and include in your analysis how life has changed in imperialized nations that now function as cheap labor sources for our factories that pollute the local environment while exploiting workers for absurdly low wages and bad working conditions.
Agreed, let's do that! Here is the economic history of the developing world over the past 70 years.
https://ourworldindata.org/history-of-poverty-has-just-begun
Pick any metric you care about: number of people living on less than $1/day, literacy, maternal mortality, access to birth control. It has dramatically improved in the developing world over the past 70 years or so.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0305750X2...
Putting the poverty line at 1$ a day, or saying people crossed from 2$/day to $3/day is "poverty decreasing," lets people get these self-serving numbers. Poverty declined, relative to what threshold? Do these people have secure housing, medical care, education, political power, in line with their contributions to the global market they've been shoved into?
People being moved from centuries old homes distributed across agrarian geographies into slums, that's improvement?
https://data.unhabitat.org/pages/housing-slums-and-informal-...
People living side by side to polluting factories that poison their water, that's improvement?
These people are foisted into a global supply chain, their economies changed into e.g. unsustainable cash crop or similar fragile-to-price-shock products, and themselves thrust into market dependence without any labor security since outside entities show up, exploit while it's profitable, then disappear without leaving any meaningful industrialization to the overall nation. Not to mention there's still a lot of people being straight up enslaved.
Sure, but the argument being made is that "productivity gains accrue to the benefit of solely those at the top of an enormous pile of wealth."
That is simply not true. Across the entire world, from rich countries to poor countries, economic development, driven in large part by technological development, has resulted in a dramatic improvement to everyone's quality of life.
https://ourworldindata.org/history-of-poverty-has-just-begun
The way some people talk about it, it's as though they wish they were middle class in the 1920s instead of in the 2020s. People are so. much. richer. today. In ways that really matter, like education, retirement, ability to travel the world. MEDICINE.
I get that it still sucks today. The only point I'm making is that it's false that the historical economic surplus has accrued "solely" (or even, mostly) to the wealthiest. It's not true.
However the story is much more dynamic and interesting than that, with income inequality shrinking until the late 70s and early 80s, then expanding drastically until now, half a century later. That period of lower income inequality is mostly why things got better for the working class (but science and technology have marched on regardless).
It is, though, if we talk scale. The rich went from having big houses in the 1920s to being sent into space, or building private libertarian colonies, or buying elections, or potentially increasing their lifespan a few decades, in the 2020s. The working class went from working 40hrs a week until age 64 when they retire in a house they own, to working 60hrs a week until they die, but hey, that death might be at an older age!
The improvement disparity between the two makes the improvement for the working class insignificant enough to be dismissible. I don't buy into the idea that the working class should be grateful that the scraps now have better seasoning.
I mean really, just look at the wealth gap. Imagine how much better the lives of everyone could be if that wealth was distributed better! Fuck a 20 hr workweek, what about 5?
The historical automation story seems to be that technology replaces workers, and those workers typically end up taking lower-paying jobs:
"replacing workers with technology “explains 50 to 70%” of the increase in inequality from 1980 to about 2016."
https://www.technologyreview.com/2023/02/21/1067563/automati...
They point out a disappointing aspect of some technologies (self-checkout), which seems to be that not only are workers displaced, but customers also experience degraded service (probably without a new benefit such as a discount for using self-checkout.)
As I said, when farming became more efficient, it wasn't great to be a farmer.
But when I say (and I assume everyone else here also says) "I don't want to go back to a world where 90% of people had to be farmers" (because farming was so inefficient), that's another way of saying, the world that farming efficiencies gave us is richer / more preferable overall than the previous world. In other words, the economic surplus did not go exclusively or primarily to the richest.
I expect the same will be true for AI. I think our society should do more to help the displaced. But I do not want my grandchildren to live in a world where, 100 years from now, 90% of people are still doing jobs that could be done by a computer, but we choose for the computer not to do them. Just like I wouldn't want to have to be a farmer.
What you seem to be saying is that consolidation of the farming industry into fewer producers with higher productivity was good for food buyers and society at large, which might be true but doesn't contradict GP's point that when their company earns $100 more due to improved employee productivity, approximately $0 of that will be paid to the employees, so they find little reason to celebrate.
The link I posted makes somewhat different yet important points: first, the arc of automation seems to tend toward increased inequality (and a hollowing-out of the middle class); second, automation may provide a markedly worse (but cheaper) replacement for the thing it replaces. Even in the case of farming, many fruits and vegetables are less nutritious than they were 100 years ago - perhaps effects of selective breeding (such as for size, shelf-life/durability, resistance to pests/pesticides/herbicides/etc.), soil depletion, environmental changes, etc.
That was in large part due of strong leftist movements and states that forced the capitalists to share the increasing wealth. WW2 and the resulting labor shortage and other special circumstances contributed as well. Currently no such movements and circumstances exist. Globalization and the resulting free movent of capital has put capitalists in a better position to direct the extra wealth for themselves than ever before. A global movement is required to get a meaningful share of the increased surplus to the workers now, and that is very hard to do. The market will not do it on its own, as the demand for human labor eventually decreases due to automation.
I'm not sure about that - farming kind of sucks. I think what the transition away from farming generally looked like was people who had some kind of small family farm, where multiple generations had worked hard all their lives to make a living growing crops, having kids who left the farm to work in some other industry, and making more money that way and having better working conditions (at the price of living a more urban lifestyle foreign to their family back on the farm). When their parents' generation got old and was ready to pass the family farm along, the urban worker generation decided they'd rather not quit their jobs and go back to the family farm; so (perhaps with some feeling of guilt), they sold the land to a large farming conglomerate; and then the next generations who grew up in an urban area doing white-collar jobs simply forgot that their ancestors had ever been farmers.
Something like this happened in my own family - about one hundred years ago, my great-grandfather owned a farm on what was then the outskirts of the bay area. He sold the land when he retired, no one else in my family ever did agricultural work, I only know the story, and the land that farm was once on is now incredibly valuable bay area real estate that is not being used for any agricultural purpose. I have no desire to work in agriculture.
That would be relevant if I stood for that premise, but I don't and I wasn't putting it forward.
I was responding to your earlier claim:
> But if you want the laws of supply and demand not to apply to you, that's what you're asking for.
I was disagreeing that this was what was being asked in the present moment. What was being asked in the present moment ("can we have a day off") is very similar to what was being demanded in the past.
In the past, workers demanded to share in the wealth and productivity that was being created through technological gains. And so, I agree with you, workers in the modern era have benefited massively from past technological gains. But that wasn't an accident. Those gains were earned through the blood and sweat of workers demanding to be included in those gains.
And so, to ensure that these present gains continue to be distributed more equally, we need to continue applying the pressure that was applied in the past.
But that's not a rejection of the the laws of supply and demand, it's at a social layer before the economics of supply and demand apply. It's at the political and social layer of how much work we expect an individual worker to put forward into society, which is a major factor in determining the amount of supply of work available.
It's a political decision—totally separate from a rejection of capitalism—of how many hours a "full week of work" is. It is not a rejection of capitalism to set the "full work week" to 48 hours, or to 40 hours, or to 32 hours.
I have less sympathy for decision-makers who are stressed than the people who’ll be fired first, and have less mobility. Or safety net.
You could have a straight up communist for a boss that completely shares all profits, but if the business doesn't extract labor value and expand as aggressively as other businesses do, it'll eventually get eaten or lawfared to death, or priced out, or closed out of deals (e.g. small player in chips related business).
So the only way to prevent industry wide redundancy at everywhere except the 1% largest companies that survive (which will also be laying off people but not completely closing down), is through organized labor. Or, I suppose, completely restructuring the economic system, which I'm very down to chat about as well, but the labor organizing feels more achievable for now.
I care less about the motivation rather than the action.
And what exactly does it mean to "compete"?
When have you ever saved the company money and been given a bonus that was even 1/10th of that money?
But let's be clear - we all probably own a decent part of our companies (collectively). Productivity gains mean winning the race to market, profits, glory. And that means ownership is valuable.
At the _very least_, you can push your company stock higher and buy it with your 10% IRA contributions or through a similar investment program and make 16x your investment over your 40 year career.
It's easy to look tactically at productivity gains being "captured" by high CEO bonuses, and that's legitimate, but we have so sufficiently seized the means of wealth production if we have stock options and market access that I'm not sure it's really valid to say we get, paraphrasing, "nothing if not a day off work".
It’s simply being looted now by the idiots this moron worshiped.
Maybe he meant this somewhat disparagingly, but ultimately not enough. For a greek.
I quote it here because the best way to get a day off is not to continue being weak, but to find strength, just as miners and railroad workers found strength in the 1870s.
When the AI bubble pops, large companies will be extremely relieved to stop throwing money into the wind playing this game. For most companies, the AI arms race is a huge hassle. They are fine with losing money in the short term and even in the long term as long as they can find a stable path forward.
This is the exact same trajectory as when the internet came out and every insurance company and toothpick manufacturer spent gobs of money to have a brochure website built because everyone else had one. This will play out differently, but recognize most companies are acting entirely from a place of fear right now.
Over the past 150 years, the work week dropped from 70+ to 35h in France.
Granted that’s a long time horizon but still.
Now imagine if only 10% of companies were allowed to use AI. Those companies would easily be willing to give 2-3 days off per week to their workers. Makes sense since those companies would easily outcompete the others and so they would have enough economic surplus to provide lavish benefits to their workers.
However, because 100% of companies and 100% of workers have access to AI, the competitive pressure on the deployment of capital means that no days off can be given.
New perks are only given to you if you, your company or your country has some sustainable systemic advantage over other employees, companies or countries.
In the absence of those sustainable systemic advantage, any perk given would put you, your company or your country at a competitive disadvantage against some other employee, company or country who are willing to work without such perk.
The only way to sustain such a perk in those situations is with anti-competitive practices: Labor Unions, protectionism, corruption, etc.
Yeah, like when the steam engine was invented?
Can we have a day off? Yes and no, or yes, but at your expense.
The problem is system design. If a company earned money for its contributors/workers, then each gain would be shared across the company, from the board to its employees. But a company earns money for its shareholders, and you, as an employee, are in the expense column.
Therefore, a day off is either a mandatory legal right meant to help you rest so you can be more productive, or it is just additional unproductive time that does not create more value or maximize profit.
Therefore, this is where the argument for a 4-day working week collapses. To get a 4-day working week would mean yes, but with less "expense", or a lower salary.
For the same reason, taxing the rich would not help "the people" much, as it goes to the wrong pocket.
Is there are fix, yes.
You want to create jobs? Find ways to get people legitimately out of the workforce. By that I mean out of the workforce but still spending money and improving their skills for when they come back in.
If capital is doing the work, why on earth are they getting paid?
Speaking of AI, it’s been what, 3 years since it became mainstream? Did the employees wellbeing’s become better? Are the codes better? Do we have a breakthrough innovations that changed fundamentally in how we use/deal with xyz? All I hear is more work, more anxiety, more cost for some tokens, so I am not entirely sure about the “productivity increase” claim.
And then this phenomenon is being called 10x productivity and celebrated.
This is why we cannot have nice things.
/me is off to rewatch They Live
ALL technological progress under capitalism goes through this same conflict. It's why workers are sometimes pressed into reactionary positions like opposing self-checkout lanes. Capitalists decide to deploy the technology in a way that is worse for the workers. Technological progress could be liberatory. Technology could be used to make workers' lives better, like working less, if workers were in charge of the organizations in which they worked.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/
basically, we can blame greedy corporate overlords, and that's cathartic, and somewhat correct, but we can (and have) ended up in a hell of our own making even with every individual wanting to do better. the boss that wants to let workers have the day off can't afford to, because the competition makes workers do 8x5. the competition lays off workers to pay for more tokens, because their competitors are. it's a bad game equilibrium.
labor laws are the reason we have the five day work week. we needed overtime to dissuade employers from defecting from the policy. we need coordination to keep AI from turning out like children working the bobbins in old-timey textile factories.
* - not while any of us reading this are under 65.
I've mentioned a few times, that I actually appreciate an aspect of Claude's 5 hr API window... I generally watch, stop, re-prompt and review what comes out. I'm not running a bunch of separate prompts and instances all at once. I'm using AI to plan and do a lot of work... I am getting a lot more output and a lot more value for that time than I could without it. It takes a toll... and the few times I've hit the window on API usage actually aligns with that toll in when I need a break.
I also assume I'm not going to be productive all day... I'll review mail, checkout articles on HN, comment, etc. I'm generally actively in a productive flow about 5 hours a day... with AI, I can be a lot more productive. That said, my current job is pretty locked down and I'm unable to leverage AI for most things... I've been able to use my own computer to write a few libraries/utils that I can then leverage in-job... but that's about it.
Mental work can be more tiresome than physical work, depending on the individual jobs. You aren't "on" all the time. This isn't a statement against or for a 4 day work week, only countering part of the narrative.
Right now the job market is a mess... developer wages are severely suppressed and almost everything is "contract" based and lacking basic benefits like good medical insurance, vacation time, etc. It pretty much sucks. AI is not a panacea, and it's not a replacement for skilled developers. Not only that, but a junior developer + AI can literally be several steps backward compared to a skilled developer without AI or with.
I'm seeing a lot of cool things happen on GitHub projects I follow, a lot of it allowed by leveraging AI... most of the best stuff not left to AI alone. It's a tool. On the flip side, I do think a lot of major employers need to return to actual employees with actual, meaningful benefits and even start implementing profit sharing... There are a lot of people pushing for outright Communism, and they're winning elections in some places. Just from a CYA point of view, it's time to treat the workforce a little better. I'd rather not have communism become prominent in the US... it won't be pretty.
Marx called it exploitation for a reason.
What inspires me to work harder is getting to work on things that I enjoy.
That would be true if you and only you are 10x more productive than anyone else. Since everyone is now 10x more productive it just means you have to work just as much as before since you're competition can outwork you. I don't get why people don't understand this.
Why? I don't need 10x more stuff. I'd far rather spend 10x less time working. If we're talking about an actual productivity increase, let's just produce the same amount of stuff in 10x less time.
And let's say that work is correlated with quality. Company A wants to spend 10x less time working, while Company B works 10x more. Company B therefore has a better product than Company A, so eventually Company A goes away. The consumer still consumed the same amount, but they switched to the better product.
Either the product was 10x better, which I don't think I need, or it wasn't really a 10x increase in productivity.
If everyone had said this 100 years ago we wouldn't have the Polio vaccine, air conditioning etc.
There are lots of problems in the world and there are still a ton of incentives to fix those problems. Yes there is also greed, scams, and exploitation - but that's never going to go away
If we got a 4-hour work week that might be a worthwhile trade.
It's a free market - if you can find someone willing to hire you to work 0.5 days a week, and are happy receiving the same income you do today, you can do so.
But your living standards won't improve, while everyone else's will, and by 10x.
And the people you are competing with to buy housing, a car, consumer goods, healthcare, food, and everything else - people who want to work 5 days a week - will have 10x more money than you. Resources like housing, which are supply constrained, will seem to go up dramatically in price relative to your income, and you'll be living in a slum.
Does that still sound like a good idea?
That sounds like a problem with that system. If we're 10x more productive why can't we make 10x as much nice housing?
Because the supply of land is relatively inelastic (and to some extent building materials and construction labor). There isn't suddenly 10x more land on the planet because we all start using AI. Maybe we can make more land or build taller buildings, but it gets progressively more difficult and expensive. And because of NIMBY of course.
In the world where someone can take your cake by working 25% more hours, it's always going to happen.
Almost this entire thread is people discussing a labour issue with no reference to the fundamental antagonism between labour and capital.