alt Hacker NewsTime saved by AI offset by new work created, study suggests
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I feel like people in the comments are misunderstanding the findings in the article. It’s not that people save time with AI and then turn that time to novel tasks; it’s that perceived savings from using AI are nullified by new work which is created by the usage of AI: verification of outputs, prompt crafting, cheat detection, debugging, whatever.
This seems observationally true in the tech industry, where the world’s best programmers and technologists are tied up fiddling with transformers and datasets and evals so that the world’s worst programmers can slap together temperature converters and insecure twitter clones, and meanwhile the quality of the consumer software that people actually use is in a nosedive.
Modern AI tools are amazing, but they’re amazing like spell check was amazing when it came out. Does it help with menial tasks? Yes, but it creates a new baseline that everyone has and just moves the bar. Theres scant evidence that we’re all going to just sit on a beach while AI runs your company anytime soon.
There’s little sign of any AI company managing to build something that doesn’t just turn into a new baseline commodity. Most of these AI products are also horribly unprofitable, which is another reality that will need to be faced sooner rather than later.
This is effectively Jevans paradox[1] in action.
The cost, in money or time, for getting certain types of work done decreases. People ramp up demand to fill the gap, "full utilization" of the workers.
Its a very old claim that the next technology will lead to a utopia where we don't have to work, or we work drastically less often. Time and again we prove that we don't actually want that.
My hypothesis (I'm sure its not novel or unique) is that very few people know what to do with idle hands. We tend to keep stress levels high as a distraction, and tend to freak out in various ways if we find ourselves with low stress and nothing that "needs" to be done.
Others have already said so, but the same is true for automation and anything else. We've had the technology to do less work for a long time, but it doesn't seem to be in our psychology. Not necessarily that we're intentionally choosing to work 40 hours for no reason. But, it feels like we're a bit stuck, and individuals who would try to work less just set themselves back compared to others, and so no one can move.
My dad has a great quote on computers and automation:
"In the 1970s when office computers started to come out we were told:
'Computers will save you SO much effort you won't know what to do with all of your free time'.
We just ended up doing more things per day thanks to computers."
When it comes to programming, I would say AI has about doubled my productivity so far.
Yes, I spend time on writing prompts. Like "Never do this. Never do that. Always do this. Make sure to check that.". To tell the AI my coding preferences. Bot those prompts are forever. And I have written most of them months ago, so that now I just capitalize on them.
The real problem is with lower skilled positions. Either people in easier roles or more junior people. We will end up with a significant percent of the population who are unemployable because we lack positions commensurate with their skills.
AI has certainly created new work for the GCC project. They had to implement a scraper protection from the bots run by corporations who benefit for free from GCC but want to milk it even further:
That's the story of all technology and the argument AI won't take jobs pmarca etc has been predicting for a while now. Our focus will be able to shift into ever narrower areas. Cinema was barely a thing 100 years ago. A hundred years from now we'll get some totally new industry thanks to freeing up labor.
This reminds me of a thought I had about driver-less trucks. The truck drivers who get laid off will be re-employed as security guards to protect the automated trucks from getting robbed.
Work will expand to fill the time available.
(I know this is not the commonly accepted meaning of Parkinson's law.)
I feel that I spend a lot more time Looking out for hidden Easter eggs in code reviews. Easter eggs being small errors that look right but hard to catch, but obvious to the one who wrote it. The problem is that the LLM wrote it so we have no benefit of the code author during review or testing.
2023-24 models couldn’t be relied on at smaller levels thanks to hallucinations and poor instruction following; newer models are much better and that trend will keep going. That low level reliability allows models to be a building block for bigger systems. Check out this personal assistant done by Nate Herk, a youtuber who builds automations with n8n:
https://youtube.com/watch?v=ZP4fjVWKt2w
It’s early. There are new skills everyone is just getting the hang of. If the evolution of AI was mapped to the evolution of computing we would be in the era of “check out this room-sized bunch of vacuum tubes that can do one long division at a time”.
But it’s already exciting, so just imagine how good things will get with better models and everyone skilled in the art of work automation!
""The adoption of these chatbots has been remarkably fast," Humlum told The Register about the study. "Most workers in the exposed occupations have now adopted these chatbots... But then when we look at the economic outcomes, it really has not moved the needle."
How does that comply with the GDPR? OpenAI now has all sensitive data?
The article markets the study as Danish. However, the working paper is from the Becker Friedman Institute of the University of Chicago:
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=5219933
It is no wonder that the Chicago School of Economics will not find any impact of AI on employment. Calling it Danish to imply some European "socialist" values is deceptive.
This is what the "AI will be a normal technology" camp is telling the "AI is going to put us all out of work!" camp all along. It's always been like this.
Wasn't this covered a few days ago? One point here is that the data is from late 2023, before LLMs were any good. Another point is that the data was collected from remaining workers after any layoffs.
Previous discussion https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43830613
Seems obvious: If AI lets you produce more of your product then there would be more work added as well. Sales, maintenance, etc.
All of our communications at my organization that have clearly been run through Copilot (as we seem to keep championing in some kind of bizarre wankfest) lead me to have to waste a significant sum of time to read and decipher the slop.
What could have been a single paragraph turns into five separate bulleted lists and explanations and fluff.
Thats called a productivity increase. Finally. We were due for one.
Yes. Companies aren’t going to allow you to relax with said new time
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As long as they can capture some of the productivity gains, this is good news for workers.
No surprise here, same can be true of IT. I remember a time before PCs and most work was done on Mainframes and paper w/file cabinets.
Compared to now, the amount of work is about the same, or maybe a bit more than back then. But the big difference is the amount of data being processed and kept, that increased exponentially since then and is still increasing.
So I expect the same with AI, maybe the work is a bit different, but work will be the same or more as data increases.
It's like when they widen a highway yet the traffic jam persists.
It’s just math, we tend to like to add and add, more and more. To think AI will take out all work for humans is likely false. Humans always find a problem. You solved your money problem? You are gonna have another problem like and existential crisis problem and that creates more stuff. Just an extreme example
So this study says people are producing more profit. The important question is whether they get it or someone else does.
This has probably been true of all invention / automation: when we went from handwashing to using washing machines, did we start doing more leisurely things for the hours that were saved by that 'labour saving' device?
> Now it is true that the needs of human beings may seem to be insatiable. But they fall into two classes --those needs which are absolute in the sense that we feel them whatever the situation of our fellow human beings may be, and those which are relative in the sense that we feel them only if their satisfaction lifts us above, makes us feel superior to, our fellows. Needs of the second class, those which satisfy the desire for superiority, may indeed be insatiable; for the higher the general level, the higher still are they. But this is not so true of the absolute needs-a point may soon be reached, much sooner perhaps than we are all of us aware of, when these needs are satisfied in the sense that we prefer to devote our further energies to non-economic purposes.
[…]
> For many ages to come the old Adam will be so strong in us that everybody will need to do some work if he is to be contented. We shall do more things for ourselves than is usual with the rich to-day, only too glad to have small duties and tasks and routines. But beyond this, we shall endeavour to spread the bread thin on the butter-to make what work there is still to be done to be as widely shared as possible. Three-hour shifts or a fifteen-hour week may put off the problem for a great while. For three hours a day is quite enough to satisfy the old Adam in most of us!
* John Maynard Keynes, "Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren" (1930)
* http://www.econ.yale.edu/smith/econ116a/keynes1.pdf
An essay putting forward / hypothesizing four reasons on why the above did not happen (We haven't spread the wealth around enough; People actually love working; There's no limit to human desires; Leisure is expensive):
* https://www.vox.com/2014/11/20/7254877/keynes-work-leisure
We probably have more leisure time (and fewer hours worked: five versus six days) in general, but it's still being filled (probably especially in the US where being "productive" is an unofficial religion).
Always has been
This is an insane clickbait, and none of the comments seem to have read further than the title.
There are two metrics in the study:
> AI chatbots save time across all exposed occupations (for 64%–90% of users)
and
> AI chatbots have created new job tasks for 8.4% of workers
There's absolutely no indication anywhere in the study that the time saved is offset by the new work created. The percentages for the two metrics are so vastly different that it's fairly safe to assume it's not the case.
there's always more work to do. the workforce is always tied up in a few areas of work. once they're freed, they're able to work in new areas. the unemployment due to technological development isn't due to a reduction in work (as in quantity of work available and/or necessary). the more efficient we become, the more work areas we open up.
That's why they say never give 110 percent, because they'll come to expect that all the time. Workload abhors a vacuum.
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I think we may be reaching a point where tech is better at almost everything. When I look at my workplace , there are only a few people who do stuff that’s truly creative. Everybody else does work that’s maybe difficult but fundamentally still very mechanical and in principle automatable.
Add to that progress in robotics and we may reach a point where humans are not needed anymore for most tasks. Then the capitalists will have fully automated factories but nobody who can buy their products.
Maybe capitalism had a good run for the last 200 years and a new economic system needs to arise. Whatever that will be.
Based on the history of technology, this is overwhelmingly the expected result of technology-enabled automation - despite every time pundits claiming "but this time it'll be different."
I can't find the article anymore but I remember reading almost 10 years ago an article on the economist saying that the result of automation was not removal of jobs but more work + less junior employment positions.
The example they gave was search engine + digital documents removed the junior lawyer headcount by a lot. Prior to digital documents, a fairly common junior lawyer task was: "we have a upcoming court case. Go to the (physical) archive and find past cases relevant to current case. Here's things to check for:" and this task would be assigned to a team of junior (3-10 people). But now one junior with a laptop suffice. As a result the firm can also manage more cases.
Seems like a pretty general pattern.