alt Hacker NewsThis article is scratching the surface of the concept of desynchronization from the theory of social acceleration and the sociology of speed. Any technology that is supposed to create idle time, once it reaches mass adoptions has the opposite effect of speeding up everything else.
We have been on this track for a long time: cars were supposed to save time in transit, but people started living farther from city centres (c.f. Marchetti's constant). E-Mail and instant messaging were supposed to eliminate wait time from postal services, but we now send orders of magnitude more messages and social norms have shifted such that faster replies are expected.
"AI" backed productivity increases are only impressive relative to non-AI users. The idilliac dream of working one or two days a week with agents in the background "doing the rest" is delusional. Like all previous technologies once it reaches mass adoption everyone will be working at a faster pace, because our society is obsessed with speed.
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You are wrong. Cars have made it possible for people to commute way more easily than the alternative where cars don’t exist.
Cars allowed people to live far away which allows for lower housing cost therefore decreased overall cost of living.
If anyone is saying "yeah, but this time will be different", just look at our society now.
Arguably the only jobs which are necessary in society are related to food, heating, shelter and maybe some healthcare. Everything else - what most people are doing - is just feeding the never ending treadmill of consumer desire and bureaucratic expansion. If everyone adjusted their desired living standards and possessions to those of just a few centuries ago, almost all of us wouldn't need to work.
Yet here we are, still on the treadmill! It's pretty clear that making certain types of work no longer needed will just create new demands and wants, and new types of work for us to do. That appears to be human nature.