>Why aren't we spending more time on the beach.

I think this comes down to getting paid per effort invested (measured in time) vs getting paid for the result.

If the average person were self-employed and received income proportional to their economic output, then they would be rewarded for working faster, instead of punished.

If they increased their productivity, by means of technology, they could then simply choose to work fewer hours.[0]

I noticed this before AI. If someone does the same job twice as fast, do they deserve half as much compensation?

What if they find a way to automate an entire process? What if they replace months of "manual labor" (tedious refactoring) with a perl script that produces the same result, deterministically?

A friend of mine once automated a woman's entire job away. He thought he was doing her a favour, freeing her from the drudgery, so she could focus on the other parts of the job. She wasn't so happy, when she revealed to him, that there weren't any.

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[0] But most people aren't in such a position, and have to stay the required number of hours regardless of how much has been achieved. And I'm increasingly hearing reports of some kind of burnout resulting from being expected to keep up with machines that work a thousand times faster than you.

And that's now... Just wait until the big providers switch to Cerebras in a week or two!

(Though at that token speed, the silver lining is the work becomes interactive again, so if you use it correctly, your mental model does not desynchronize from the codebase, i.e. you don't need to spend extra time later catching up. But that deserves its own thread, I think :)