The next great American novels.
Never. At this point I think the only way out is a Sea Peoples[1] level of collapse. Maybe they'll call it the Late Chip Age collapse. People will not put with with being obsoleted. Americans at least have the means to resist. The rest of us will probably need 3D printers.
I was listening to a podcast a couple days ago and Brad Gerstner was on and mentioned that with how AI is boosting productivity that perhaps one member of a household would be able to start staying home from work if they wanted. I shut off the podcast after that (to be fair, the podcast just seemed to be one massive SpaceX IPO pump).
It’s just so divorced from reality and every new advancement is just making *higher expectations for doing more work*.
The unfortunate reality is: Companies that are selling ai will sell that ai will make life easier. Companies that are buying ai will demand more from employees using ai (why else would they buy it?).
So when exactly is this productivity going to hit that doubles my income?
Still a win but not as big as many are selling it.
Compared to 50 years ago, the middle class is getting poorer.
Honestly I could "retire" to a senior level role and have AI do 90% of my work and nobody would know the difference.
The benefits COULD hit by employers reducing everybody's hours.
The blocker to this is the middle management disease where there's a class of people who spend 40+ hours a week in some kind of update meeting or another and that much talking can't be replaced by AI. (much of it could be replaced by just not doing it any more but that's a different story)
Are you getting paid more or are you just doing more for fun.
There will be increased competition for job openings, reductions in real wages, or increased expectations of productivity. Probably some combination of all three.
Once it becomes the norm even for a small section of the economy it will spread.
People are more productive in an absolute sense working fewer hours anyway.
It just takes a union, an ambitious company, or a state to force that 30 hour workweek to show some success with better talent attraction and retention and better corporate results to start a trend.
It is possible for everybody to get a piece of the pie.
We are already productive enough to have a shorter work week and more leisure, anyone saying no has specific incentives to not support it (either via financial gain from the capital accumulation funnel or work bound to their identity).
Eventually a new startup will replace your large inefficient employer with people working 10% of their time.
All that seems to be happening is that these productivity gains roll up as profits for the owner class.
What's the point of all that, to me?
The moat of the owner class is lower because now information is everywhere and it's less possible to hide behind trade secrets and implementation effort.
Based on what? The macroeconomics don't work out that way. IF productivity goes up, but consumption does not, that means that it's harder to enter the owner class, because fewer productive enterprises (owned by non-working people) are supplying a larger share of customer demand.
This may make a difference on the margins for people in the software bubble. But for the other 8 billion people on the planet, they aren't all going to become owners in your brave new world, unless consumer demand goes to the moon to soak up all that productivity. It's not doing that. Prices aren't dropping. Quality isn't increasing.
If you think I'm wrong - is there a cross-economy explosion of small one-person businesses that I'm somehow not seeing? Are gigacorps across the board all losing market share? Because on the macro scale I see nothing but further consolidation.
Based on the far lower bar to get a product out the door.
Concretely: if you can do 90% of your work with AI, someone else can also do that same work, making you interchangeable unless that 10% is really important.
I think this is partly why it's so hard for people to find jobs right now. Everyone is interchangeable thanks to AI, so skill gives you less of an edge than it did in the past.
That's the part that is not true. Prompting and guard-rails and generally harness engineering do matter a lot lately. Seen it first-hand multiple times, especially after I used Fable 5 for a week.
Jobs were hard to find in the drawback after the COVID hiring boom in uncertain times as the result of Trump, inflation, tariffs, war, and the constantly impending but pushed off market crash we've been expecting since before COVID started. I'm not saying AI isn't contributing, but it's hardly the only factor.
AI is far cheaper to fire than a person.
"Everyone is interchangable" isn't quite right, a tremendous amount of people don't actually add all that much value and a lot of work is just running on a hamster wheel and now instead of taking time we've got a machine for running on hamster wheels for us.
And then you’re fired.
They would notice, and then they would fire 9/10 of the people in your role. If you are unlucky, you get laid off. If you are lucky, you get to botsit full time for the workload of 10 engineers for less pay and no career advancement.
This would last until they figure out how to remove the human from the loop entirely.
Key factors for me:
- Company is full of old school engineers who seem to hate AI and will scrutinize every command it runs. Means that even though we're both 'using' AI, I'm still way more productive.
- Said engineers have too much inside knowledge of the horrific system they made that management can't possibly get rid of them. Helps that they're workers-rights minded too.
- Company has enough revenue to keep up payroll indefinitely.
Now, does the AI write good code? Often not. But the codebase is already terrible, so it's no big difference.
Not that I disagree otherwise though.