[raychis]

This really captures the danger of turning every technological gain into a new expectation. AI may save us time, but if we simply reinvest that time into working harder and competing more, what have we actually gained?

Throughout history there have been predictions that the next technological breakthrough will lead to us working less and living more fulfilled lives, that has never happened. Same seems to be happening with AI, people are just working more rather than less.

[Aurornis]

> Same seems to be happening with AI, people are just working more rather than less.

In the last big AI productivity thread I read on Hacker News the most common anecdote was people saying they weren’t more producing more at work with AI, they were just getting the same work done faster. After that they’d relax or switch to working on side projects.

I don’t think that’s going to last for everyone, but I do think it is a common response to AI. I don’t agree when you say that people are working more. I think, at this moment in time, most people are using AI to compress the time spent doing their work. Some people pick up extra tasks with some of their new free time. Others don’t.

I don’t think AI is leading to increased working time other than in the LinkedIn and X hustle and grind bubbles where posters are bragging about having 10 agent loops running constantly to launch their startup.

[SauciestGNU]

I'm somewhere that does stack ranking so it's a prisoners' dilemma. As long as someone is running Claude constantly and producing PRs, we all get negative performance implications for simply allowing ai to help us be more effective at what we were already doing.

Honestly it's driving me mad and I'm thinking about looking for different work.

[pixl97]

Meeting your quota this month just means a bigger quota next month.

[ryandrake]

I don't know any knowledge-worker role that gives you a fixed X amount of work to do, and lets you chill if you get it done in Y amount of time. If the expectation is that with AI you should be doing your work in Y/2 amount of time, they all will just require you to do 2X the amount of work.

[theshrike79]

This is why you manage the expectations.

Say you were expected to complete a task in 10 hours. Now you can use AI with it and you do it in 5.

What incentive would you have to raise your hand at the 5 hour mark and go "Done, please give me more work!"? Maybe do it at the 9 hour mark or maybe 8 if you're feeling brave and use the extra 3-4 hours on something else.

[user43928]

I certainly work more, and I don't post on LinkedIn or X.

There is nothing wrong with trying to build a business and taking on large projects with AI.

It seems like the smart thing to do when our employment as software engineers is foreseeably threatened in the near future.

[TFYS]

This is how it will be until we figure out how to organize human life without competition. Too many of our systems are based on us competing against each other (markets, nation states), so we always have to maximize production or risk falling behind our competitors and getting devoured. We need to co-operate more instead of competing if we want to get out of this loop.

[Aurornis]

People in comfortable positions wish that other people would stop competing to take them away.

Organizing the whole world to stop competing only sounds nice when you imagine that it means you get to lock your position in life in place and stop feeling threatened.

It becomes much less attractive to most when you look at what it would actually mean to stop competing and have everyone revert to the average. Global average income is around $10K per person. If you make more than that, you’d have to give up a lot. That’s not even accounting for the sharp drop in production of things you need that would happen if the upsides of working hard were removed, leading to people working less.

[TFYS]

A transition away from competition could also be implemented by capping the standard of living to what it currently is in the richest countries and then waiting for others to catch up. After that production would slow down yes, and that's the point. People could spend more of their time on things that really matter to them instead of things they're forced to do by competition.

[abirch]

"one of history's few iron laws is that luxuries tend to become necessities and to spawn new obligations."

Yuval Noah Harari

Think about email. There is usually an expectation of a response within minutes/hours and not weeks/months like mail of the 1900s

[Aurornis]

On the other hand, my wife wouldn’t have survived to this age if not for technology that wasn’t available in the 1900s.

I can answer those emails from my air conditioned office or house.

I have time to answer them because we’re not spending all of our effort just trying to survive or working the farms.

Seems like a good trade to me.

[pixl97]

Until kill bots start blasting your neighbors, or we heat the climate to the point vast areas are not survivable.

Quite often the conveniences we take have a long horizon before they bear their true cost.

[oulipo]

Exactly. That's why the goal is to share the means of production among everyone

[bko]

> AI may save us time, but if we simply reinvest that time into working harder and competing more, what have we actually gained?

I think you may be in a bit of a bubble. Sure the Anthropic engineer is trying to token max. But "we" generally see AI as a step up from google search and go about our lives pretty much the same as we have.

The ones that are captured by AI, I think they're just truly excited about the technology. It's new and opening up possibilities. It's like when you first learned to program and you stayed up all night writing games or whatever your interests were.

I know without programming I would "work less" but that doesn't result in "more fulfilled lives". Quite the opposite. The most unfulfilled people I know in life work the least!

[inigyou]

"we" don't reinvest into working harder. Institutional shareholders, who control the large-scale structure of society, reinvest us into working harder.

[lotsofpulp]

If you keep your quality of life stagnant, then you don’t (generally) have to work harder.

If you want access to the cutting edge medicine, electronics, and other “new” stuff, then you do have to keep running on the treadmill.

Although, things like natural disasters and wars can shake things up.

[inigyou]

That is not true. Prices for necessities keep increasing faster than inflation.