alt Hacker NewsThis 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.
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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.
"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
> 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!
Exactly. That's why the goal is to share the means of production among everyone
"we" don't reinvest into working harder. Institutional shareholders, who control the large-scale structure of society, reinvest us into working harder.
> 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.