[Avicebron]

> What does it mean? Does clicking on a link counts as labor.

I think we might be seeing what happens when people are being paid too much to spend all day emailing each other and jockeying excel/gantt charts/org charts. Yeah for some definition of "work" I guarantee that a LLM could perform 3.25 years worth in four weeks.

[jfengel]

For many tasks, being able to turn it over to an LLM means nobody really wanted the task done in the first place.

We should definitely seek ways to turn things over to AI. Then turn the AI off, and figure out what actually needed to be done.

[nine_k]

>> Harvard, MIT

> people are being paid too much to spend all day emailing each other

Hmm, this does not sound exactly right. Also, does anybody seriously think that communication is not work, or is not important? A number of really impactful things started from people emailing each other. (Hell, Linux kernel development is still much about people emailing patches each other.)

[pembrook]

The problem with human labor is that, as an organization scales, the amount of work any individual in the system can do shrinks due to the coordination problem.

Coordination consumes a larger and larger amount of employee time to the point that, in the absolute largest organizations, the vast majority of employee time is internal coordination vs. actual improvement/selling of the customer offering.

So if you go from 100 employees to 1,000 employees, they can MAYBE do 4X the work. Not 10X like you'd think. And this effect gets even worse as you scale further.

So if an AI can do 10X more labor in a human day, and can coordinate instantaneously via a central context ledger (say a git repo), it doesn't just create 10X gains in productivity for large orgs. It creates a multiple of that 10X due to also removing the human coordination overhead.

[_pdp_]

Don't you think AI itself is something that adds coordination overhead? A 1000 strong team with AI agents will feel like 5000-person company where more than 30% are not even at exception level - i.e. they need to be pulled along.

This is why having less people and more agents actually makes sense but the coordination problem remains either way.

And you cannot escape it because it is simply mathematical.

[pembrook]

The coordination problem absolutely can be escaped with technology, hence why productivity gains exist and why the economy grows and isn't a fixed pie over time.

Here's an easy non-AI example:

In the past, a 'computer' was literally a person [1]. If you needed to synthesize large amounts of data, you needed to split the task among a team of people writing things down and then a team of people to check their work after the fact and then a team of people to combine all the work and then a team to double-check the combined work.

Tasks that in the past would have taken a room full of people coordinating with pencils are absolutely done by 1 machine today (what we know as computers) that no longer needs to split that task and coordinate, which is exactly what will happen with 'agents' who can take on vastly more work per unit of time.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_(occupation)

[_pdp_]

Look up Amdahl's Law and Universal Scalability Law.

The math doesn't care whether the nodes are people, CPUs or language models. If agent A's next action depends on what agent B decided, you've introduced a sequential dependency.

[pembrook]

The point is that we don't need an equivalent number of nodes (agents) as we needed people.

The computer flattened the coordination dependencies of that room full of people by doing all the calculations by itself. As they get smarter, you can theoretically assume 1 agent could eventually run the entire US federal government.

In the historical [human] computer example; if 15,000 calculations needed to be done, a CPU doesn't need to wait on Bob to come back from lunch to do the next 20 calculations...and doesn't need to wait on Alice to combine his work with the 20 calculations done by Jane...and doesn't need Bill to wait for everybody to be done to double check Jane's work.

The CPU does all 15,000 calculations instantly, by itself. This will be similar with AI agents.

[Nevermark]

Note that Amdahl's rule doesn't capture the practical situation.

1) The purpose of algorithms is ultimately to create value, not compute some fixed value X. This is important as it gives flexibility to choose different value producing tasks where parallelism dominates over serial tasks, whenever the the latter becomes a bottleneck.

2) In terms of producing value, perfect accuracy or the best possible solutions are not always necessary. Many serial tasks can become very parallel tasks when accuracy or certainty do not have to be complete.

3) Solutions that are reusable changes the math further. No matter how serial a calculation is, if something is calculated that can be reused, that serial part becomes effectively order O(1), after calculation if reused exactly, but as neural network demonstrate, many serial tasks become very parallelized after training a model that can be reused for now a wide class of specific problems. Resulting in very amortized serial computing costs.

It doesn't matter how many steps something takes, if those steps are now in the past and the value is "forever" reusable.

4) The economics of serial and parallel computation are not static, but improve relative to economic value achieved. Meaning that demand for cheaper serial time and currency costs result in improved scaled up hardware that delivers cheaper serial costs. This may have less impact than the previous points, but over years makes a tremendous difference on top of all those points.

This can go on.

The point being Amdahl's law certainly applies to specific algorithms, but is not the dominant determinant of computing in general, and not useful application of computing to a significant degree, where problems can be strategically chosen, strategically weakened or altered, and can be strategically fashioned to create O(V) of value - to balance any O(S) cost of serial computing, via direct reuse and generalization.

[MITSardine]

In an organization, the number of sequential steps doesn't really scale with number of participants, does it? Rather with dependent steps of the tackled process; say, devise building permit request, await approval, purchase materials, move materials to site, hire workforce, etc.

Theoretically, each of those steps is parallelizable to some extent. Amdahl's law equivalent here would be that some delays are outside the reach of an organization to improve. For instance, a building permit will take the time it takes to be examined based on an external public administration.

[amirhirsch]

Critically, Amdahl’s Law remains a conjecture until we have the maths to disjoin complexity class P from NC.

[keeda]

Yep, I call this the "Conway Overhead": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47270142

[wolvoleo]

This is so true. I can see the same in our organisation. So much time wasted on bullshit busywork and red tape.

[reverius42]

Does anybody seriously think that communication is something an LLM can do for you?

(Hint: if you have to prompt it to write an email -- you could have saved everyone some time and emailed the prompt instead.)

[jazzpush2]

I have several friends at the big 4 who work ~2 hour weeks.

[ornornor]

While it might sound like the ultimate hack, it’s not.

I’ve been in that situation and died a little inside everyday. It’s not like being a rentier, because you still have to lose most of your day at the office and pretend to work, and be available in case some higher up needs something so you don’t get caught.

It might sound sweet but it’s hell.

[psjs]

Looks like Graebers bullshit jobs, right?

  1. https://davidgraeber.org/articles/on-the-phenomenon-of-bullshit-jobs-a-work-rant/
  2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit_Jobs
  3. https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/david-graeber-bullshit-jobs

[resonious]

Completely agreed. The thought that "people emailing each other" is a problem that should be "automated" away is delusional.

[anonzzzies]

Some type of emailing is important, what most people do, however, is not. Same with meetings, calls etc. Most of it is filling the day so they don't get fired.

[Esophagus4]

This is such a broad generalization it is easy to dismiss.

[uoaei]

Yours is such an unspecific criticism it's impossible to take seriously.

[Esophagus4]

I guess we’re at a stalemate, then.

[sally_glance]

The amazing thing is that soon (actually already) we will be seeing people being paid way too much to prompt a LLM to email other people or respond to other peoples emails. And then turn these emails into presentations which will be turned into meeting transcripts again followed by emails.

The lingering question is if the intermediate LLM translation steps will actually make our communication more efficient - or just amplify the already inefficient parts.

[pdfernhout]

Inefficiency all too often is celebrated by our society, as I wrote in 2010: https://pdfernhout.net/beyond-a-jobless-recovery-knol.html "Also, many current industries that employ large numbers of people (ranging from the health insurance industry, the compulsory schooling industry, the defense industry, the fossil fuel industry, conventional agriculture industry, the software industry, the newspaper and media industries, and some consumer products industries) are coming under pressure from various movements from both the left and the right of the political spectrum in ways that might reduce the need for much paid work in various ways. Such changes might either directly eliminate jobs or, by increasing jobs temporarily eliminate subsequent problems in other areas and the jobs that go with them (as reflected in projections of overall cost savings by such transitions); for example building new wind farms instead of new coal plants might reduce medical expenses from asthma or from mercury poisoning. A single-payer health care movement, a homeschooling and alternative education movement, a global peace movement, a renewable energy movement, an organic agriculture movement, a free software movement, a peer-to-peer movement, a small government movement, an environmental movement, and a voluntary simplicity movement, taken together as a global mindshift of the collective imagination, have the potential to eliminate the need for many millions of paid jobs in the USA while providing enormous direct and indirect cost savings. This would make the unemployment situation much worse than it currently is, while paradoxically possibly improving our society and lowering taxes. Many of the current justifications for continuing social policies that may have problematical effects on the health of society, pose global security risks, or may waste prosperity in various ways is that they create vast numbers of paid jobs as a form of make-work."

[sally_glance]

Philosophy territory now... you wrote about technology making labor unnecessary 15 years ago - Aristotele did ~2000 years ago too (same text where he tried to justify slavery but nvm that): "For if every instrument could accomplish its own work, obeying or anticipating the will of others, [...] if, in like manner, the shuttle would weave and the plectrum touch the lyre without a hand to guide them, chief workmen would not want servants, nor masters slaves."

I bet in 2000 years they will still be writing about it - yeah, technology changes our lives (for better or worse).

[wongarsu]

It's pretty fascinating to look at the impacts this has had in the last 2000 years, or even just the last 200.

Take construction work. Incredible improvements through power tools, gasoline-powered mobile cranes, etc. The productivity per worker has exploded. A lot of this has been captured by induced demand: we build bigger, taller, grander. But the improvements aren't distributed equally. Which means that crafts that haven't seen much improvement are now more expensive in comparison to everything else. Which has contributed to our buildings having less elaborate facades and becoming more "bland"

The same in clothing. Clothing has become dirt cheap. Even the poorest people can afford new clothing multiple times a year. But in the same transition we have gone from everything being custom tailored to most things only kind of fitting, being made for variations of the most common body shapes. Not necessarily because tailored clothing has become much more expensive (though higher labor costs from higher average productivity haven't helped), but because every other step has become cheaper and tailoring hasn't.

I wonder what we will say about the trajectory of software in a couple decades

[sally_glance]

That's a great angle - will handcrafted software of the future become the equivalent of a tailored suit today? One might argue it already is, most companies and individuals do just fine using cloud/SaaS offerings and COTS apps. So on first glance it seems like automating software engineering would mainly benefit exactly those providers. The other side of the coin is that it also allows for cheaper/faster in-house DIY solutions and competition.

[wongarsu]

Yeah, I could see a world where it swings exactly the opposite way for software. Writing software for yourself is becoming cheap, but gathering requirements, getting alignment between stakeholders or marketing your software isn't getting much cheaper. Maybe everyone will end up with their own in-house solution? Or maybe we end up with configurable SAP-like behemoths, but instead of an army of expensive consultants configuring the software for your use case you have AI agents taking that part

I'm sure whatever path this takes will seems obvious in hindsight

[figassis]

I see how this can boost productivity...for those that today already produce value voluntarily. These will move one level higher. The rest with 100x the amount of performative work. Everyone will be busier created presentations and charts that no one needs and no one will read. Managers will ask for new presentations and reports every sync, and hours will be spent discussing things that don't actually matter.