alt Hacker News>> Harvard, MIT
> people are being paid too much to spend all day emailing each other
Hmm, this does not sound exactly right. Also, does anybody seriously think that communication is not work, or is not important? A number of really impactful things started from people emailing each other. (Hell, Linux kernel development is still much about people emailing patches each other.)
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The problem with human labor is that, as an organization scales, the amount of work any individual in the system can do shrinks due to the coordination problem.
Coordination consumes a larger and larger amount of employee time to the point that, in the absolute largest organizations, the vast majority of employee time is internal coordination vs. actual improvement/selling of the customer offering.
So if you go from 100 employees to 1,000 employees, they can MAYBE do 4X the work. Not 10X like you'd think. And this effect gets even worse as you scale further.
So if an AI can do 10X more labor in a human day, and can coordinate instantaneously via a central context ledger (say a git repo), it doesn't just create 10X gains in productivity for large orgs. It creates a multiple of that 10X due to also removing the human coordination overhead.
I have several friends at the big 4 who work ~2 hour weeks.
Completely agreed. The thought that "people emailing each other" is a problem that should be "automated" away is delusional.
Some type of emailing is important, what most people do, however, is not. Same with meetings, calls etc. Most of it is filling the day so they don't get fired.