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That’s only true if companies give some of the productivity gains back to the employee, but most companies don’t do that. They keep the profits purely for themselves. There are some exceptions.

by mrweasel15 minutes ago|

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Of cause there are some who see boost in productivity and other advantages of AI, but I'm questioning the current AI models ability to produce code (and text). If all the promises were true, we'd see an increase in code quality, but we mostly don't. AI tools do help find interesting bugs code bases like Curl, but commercial vendors doesn't seem to be delivering any fast or better than before. In fact some, like Microsoft, seems to produce worse code now.

If there's this huge productivity boost what is it being spend on? I know, many have been laid off, but that's not universally true. So we have a productivity boost that doesn't really deliver anything and overall quality a lot of products/code/writing/communication is going down, yet we spend an ungodly amount of money on datacenters... for what, just spinning the wheels?

by coldtea1 hours ago|

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In general without unions and workers saying "that's enough", any productivity savings never go back to workers.

But of course AI is also making union/worker pressure matter even less, since it's function is to cheapen the cost/leverage of workers.

So the only solution is fighting that at the political/legal/social level. Which I ain't see happening anytime soon.

by ElevenLathe1 hours ago|

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There's only one way to eat an elephant: one bite at time. Putting some energy into organizing, even if only on the level of deliberately building solidarity with your coworkers and never mentioning the word "union", can and will pay dividends to somebody down the road -- possibly even you -- and also has immediate benefits in that it feels better than looking over your shoulder all the time.

by coldtea1 hours ago|

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>There's only one way to eat an elephant: one bite at time.

Maybe, but to eat it you need to kill it first or it will stomp you. And this can only happen all at once :)

by poszlem1 hours ago|

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Choosing speed today is going to cost you tomorrow. Leaning on these tools degrades your actual abilities. You are making yourself less valuable to future employers. So while it might be in the best interest of the company to force you to work faster it is in your own best interest to resist that.

by gib44447 minutes ago|

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What form can that resist realistically take if lots of companies are monitoring your LLM usage, demanding more usage, and fire bottom "performers"?

by regular_trash1 hours ago|

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I'm not convinced jobs will be axed in the long-term - All the big tech companies frequently staff teams on projects that basically go nowhere to spread bets on multiple projects in case one has legs. Once LLMs reach the point of commoditization and drop in price, it seems like the natural next step is more teams with smaller structures to spread bets even more. A 5 person team that is LLM-assisted is going to move faster and be more cohesive than an 10 person team that ends up stepping all over each other.

by coldtea1 hours ago|

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>Weren't these tools supposed to make our lives easier?

In a late stage capitalism market economy, their only actual requirements were to make profit for the shareholders and VCs.

If that means making our lives harder, firing most of us, making us stupider, being addictive, being used for surveillance to sell us shit or control us, or even being used to kill people, all of those are fine, if they fulfil that requirement.