alt Hacker News> I’m more and more convinced that all of AI engineering is Neijuan (内卷, meaning curl inwards). In China it describes a system that demands ever more effort and competition without improving output. The way in which it sometimes shows up in the West is the 996 nonsense. The English term for Neijuan is “Involution” from the book Agricultural Involution. Agricultural involution describes the intensification of farming that raises productivity per square meter while leaving productivity per head unchanged.
This resonates
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This sounds like all engineering, rather than just AI. The greatest effort given to the last small difficult details, often for results that seem trifling but which matter at scale.
But it's a poor argument. The code improvements with these things is hardly marginal - Opus 4 was only 16 months ago. How many of the grumblers would want to ditch their modern stalwarts and return to it? What is marginal is the nitpicking - and like anything in tighter bounds, it's more intense with a narrower scope.
These threads always have many dissatisfied voices with repeating complaints - about overwrought thinking and disappointing output - alongside others who are amazed at the sudden real extra capabilities. Both are true at once - capabilities are rapidly increasing, but nowhere near ideal, which is why this attempt to tag it as Neijuan, though interesting, is ultimately a load of bollocks.
But doesn't this reduce the required amount of farmland?
It surely resonates if your reason for working is to extract wealth from others (ie. be a parasite) but if it's to improve things for everyone, then it's wonderful. You might still work just as much and get paid just as much but produce a lot more because of technology.
Also known has the Red Queen's Race
it reminds me of a thread I read on PTT, Taiwan's Reddit. AI finally achieved what humans could not. Managers must give exact context for what they want, must pay exact wages (tokens), and can't delay salary payments (which seems to be a problem in China).