This is an underrated take. If you make someone 3x faster at producing a report nobody reads, you've improved nothing. The real gains from AI show up when it changes what work gets done, not just how fast existing work happens. Most companies are still in the "do the same stuff but with AI" phase.

I find that highly unlikely, coding is the AIs best value use case by far. Right now office workers see marginal benefits but it's not like it's an order of magnitude difference. AI drafts an email, you have to check and edit it, then send it. In many cases it's a toss up if that actually saved time, and then if it did, it's not like the pace of work is break neck anyway, so the benefit is some office workers have a bit more idle time at the desk because you always tap some wall that's out of your control. Maybe AI saves you a Google search or a doc lookup here and there. You still need to check everything and it can cause mistakes that take longer too. Here's an example from today.

Assistant is dispatching a courier to get medical records. AI auto completes to include the address. Normally they wouldn't put the address, the courier knows who we work with, but AI added it so why not. Except it's the wrong address because it's for a different doctor with the same name. At least they knew to verify it, but still mistakes like this happening at scale is making the other time savings pretty close to a wash.

At least in my experience, there's another mechanism at play: people aren't making it visible if AI is speeding them up. If AI means a bugfix card that would have taken a day takes 15 minutes, well, that's the work day sorted. Why pull another card instead of doing... something that isn't work?

This is what I have been saying for sometime. Working inside different Goverment department you see this happening every day. Email and report bouncing back and forth with no actual added value while feeling extremely productive. That is why private sector and public sector generally don't mix well. It is also one reason why I said in some of my previous post LLM could replace up to 70% of Goverment's job.

Edit: If anyone haven't watched Yes Minster, you should go and watch it, it is a documentary on UK Government that is still true today as it was 40-50 years ago.

> but the work itself simply has no discernable economic value? This is argued at length in Grebber's Bullshit Jobs essay and book.

That book was very different than what I expected from all of the internet comment takes about it. The premise was really thin and did't actually support the idea that the jobs don't generate value. It was comparing to a hypothetical world where everything is perfectly organized, everyone is perfectly behaved, everything is perfectly ordered, and therefore we don't have to have certain jobs that only exist to counter other imperfect things in society.

He couldn't even keep that straight, though. There's a part where he argues that open source work is valuable but corporate programmers are doing bullshit work that isn't socially productive because they're connecting disparate things together with glue code? It didn't make sense and you could see that he didn't really understand software, other than how he imagined it fitting into his idealized world where everything anarchist and open source is good and everything corporate and capitalist is bad. Once you see how little he understands about a topic you're familiar with, it's hard to unsee it in his discussions of everything else.

That said, he still wasn't arguing that the work didn't generate economic value. Jobs that don't provide value for a company are cut, eventually. They exist because the company gets more benefit out of the job existing than it costs to employ those people. The "bullshit jobs" idea was more about feelings and notions of societal impact than economic value.

And in the type of work where AI arguably yields productivity gains the workers have high agency and may pay for their own tooling without telling their employers. Case in point, me, I have access to CoPilot via my employer but don't use it because I prefer my self-paid ChatGPT subscription. If Ai-lift in productivity is measured on the condition that I use Copilot then the resulting metric misses my AI usage entirely and my productivity improvement are not attributed to their real cause.

> the work itself simply has no discernable economic value

i'm going to need you to go ahead and come in on sunday

That would be a way to get "the right answer."

i.e. it's not the LLM, it's that they're not being used properly.

I get accused of the no true Scotsman argument because I think agile can be done right, for example. Is work bullshit because an LLM doesn't help it?

> What if LLMs are optimizing the average office worker's productivity but the work itself simply has no discernable economic value?

I think broadly that's a paradoxical statement; improving office productivity should translate to higher gdp; whatever it is you're doing in some office - even if you're selling paper or making bombs, if you're more productive it means you're selling more (or using less resources to sell the same amount); that should translate to higher gdp (at least higher gdp per worker, there's the issue of what happens to gdp when many workers get fired).

David Graeber is the correct spelling.https://davidgraeber.org/books/

I think it’s more likely that the same amount of work is getting done, just it’s far less taxing. And that averages are funny things, for developers it’s undeniably a huge boost, but for others it’s creating friction.

I think this is extremely common and nobody wants to admit to it!

Have had job. Can confirm.

We made an under-the-radar optimization in a data flow in my company. A given task is now much more freshData-assisted that it used to.

Was a LLM used during that optimization? Yes.

Who will correlate the sudden productivity improvement with our optimization of the data flow with the availability of a LLM to do such optimizations fast enough that no project+consultants+management is needed ?

No one.

Just like no one is evaluating the value of a hammer or a ladder when you build a house.

Bullshit Jobs is one of those "just so" stories that seems truthy but doesn't stand up to any critical evaluation. Companies are obviously not hesitant to lay off unproductive workers. While in large enterprises there is some level of empire building where managers hire more workers than necessary just to inflate their own importance, in the long run those businesses fall to leaner competitors.

Would hardly drag Graeber into this, theres a laundry list of issues with his research.

Most "Bullshit Jobs" can already be automated, but can isnt always should or will. Graeber is a capex thinker in an opex world.

And that book sort of vaguely hints around at all these jobs that are surely bullshit but won’t identify them concretely.

Not recognizing the essential role of sales seemed to be a common mistake.

The thesis of Bullshit Jobs is almost universally rejected by economists, FYI. There’s not much of value to obtain from the book.

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