America Is Headed Toward the Infinite Workweek
theatlantic.com
theatlantic.com
Software engineers are probably already familiar with the feeling of burnout from thinking too hard. The reality is very few people can work on the hardest problems they’re capable of for 8 hours a day.
Writing routine Python code for some system you know well is not that mentally taxing. Managing an agent that rapidly finishes tasks but needs careful review and big-picture planning is much more exhausting, and has higher returns on intelligence and deep careful thought.
I think this points towards the opposite conclusion of the OP. It’s not realistic to expect 8 hours of hard work out of a knowledge worker. Remote work naturally allows this transition, as employees can work a bit less but still overachieve with AI.
(I hate AI. Just observing the world we live in)
It wasn’t really realistic to expect hard physical labor for 70 hours a week, and yet in the 1800s before unions were established to negotiate workers rights, that’s exactly what we had.
What on earth makes you think non unionized IT workers aren’t going to be pushed to their breaking point and then pushed further? If AI truly starts eating all the knowledge work, there will be an endless supply of people lining up to work themselves to death.
That makes no sense at all. If it was common, it was obviously realistic.
Rinse, repeat.
But only for bullshit criteria. If your work needs to be actually good to reach the goal posts, AI can have a supporting role in the background at best.
1. Understanding the world is the bottleneck to thinking.
2. The world is an unbounded system with unpredictable behavior. Chaos.
3. An outcome is a possible state of a system.
4. Formulating an outcome means choosing a future state of the system.
5. That future state may be desired or undesired.
6. Therefore an outcome is not purely objective. It is a consensus problem.
7. Consensus is concentration around a shared outcome.
8. Consensus around an undesirable outcome is maladaptive consensus.
9. Intent is a decision that constrains future system states.
10. One outcome may relate to another. It may also relate to intents.
11. Related outcomes and intents form a problem domain. Or simply: a semantic graph.
12. A graph gives structure to otherwise ambiguous future states.
13. Structure reduces the number of possible interpretations. Or simply: reduces uncertainty.
14. High uncertainty prevents action. Low uncertainty makes action obvious.
15. A problem without structure requires thinking.
16. A structured problem can be acted upon.
17. A sufficiently structured problem becomes the solution to itself.
18. An insufficiently structured problem keeps producing chaos.
19. Problem solving is creating structure from chaos.
20. Therefore thinking is problem solving before the structure exists.
We can automate action. Not understanding.
Therefore we should optimize for it.
[1] https://www.refolk.ai/blog/coinbase-ai-native-engineering-ma...
It’s just entirely grift, speculation, and rug pulls. My friends who used to use it to buy drugs don’t even do that anymore as it’s completely lost any sense of being a currency like the original, somewhat defensible arguments of it suggested it could act as.