alt Hacker NewsYou are missing a critical third - people organize and via unions or the polls push back and require less work. There is no reason we aren’t working seven days a week beyond people fighting not to.
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This is a historical misconception.
The "cushiness" of jobs such as fewer work hours, more benefits, etc. preceded the formation of unions and then slowed down (overall) once unions became popular.
It has little to do with union pressure and a LOT to do with economics, in particular the demand for labor. Jobs get nice when employers are competing over the same pool of employees.
Unions are nice for those in them and bad for everyone else. They are (quite literally) cartels, in an economic sense.
> There is no reason we aren’t working seven days a week beyond people fighting not to.
That's what German unions did in the 90s. In the end it only undermines productivity of the national economy while competitor countries eat your lunch.
I think you’re not seeing the whole picture about pushing back: It doesn’t happen in a vacuum. People have options to organize and push back but it doesn’t automagically make their demands possible. Companies also have options to push back, move the work to other locations, withdraw from markets that aren’t conducive to work, and now, look at automations.
Much of this unionization conversation has lot the plot about how unionization is about collective bargaining, but you still have to bargain. Both sides have options and you can’t come to the bargaining table with a belief that you can get whatever you want by threatening to strike or quit. There are limits to this and they’re decided by markets and technology.
I'm pro unions and come from a social county. I'm self employed though, if I start relaxing, my "competitors" outrun me instantly. Bye bye assignments. This seems like primary school level reasoning to me, I also don't understand the premise of the article.
What stops me from working more than others is being smarter than my competitors right now. Not being smarter in any objective, fixed way. To keep it that way I must constantly evolved, learn.
Yes, micromanaging AIs is more intense for me than coding, and feels more tiring, I hope that (or I) will change, somehow.
I think even apart from unionizing, if all/ the employees at company aren't AI jockeying, more work isn't necessarily demanded. I realize you have to have relatively decent management too. I consider myself extremely lucky to work for a company that hasn't been beating the drum of AI maximalism and our work load in general has stabalized.
Obviously things can change but in general I feel AI jockeying is the exact opposite of showing solidarity with the people you work with.
Somebody should do a economic analysis of how technology affects unions. I bet the availability of automation has a lot more to do with the downfall of the unions than the political changes that are commonly described to that phenomenon. Similarly, I bet the availability of AI will have a devastating effect on any white collar unions.
I work in a unioned environment. I use AI.
My boss would never dream asking I crank more because I now have AI help.
That guy saying there were only two possible outcomes doesn’t know about the beauty of unions.
I agree, but I was commenting on things as I believe they currently are.
The 4th is UBI
Unions worked in the pre-globalized world.
Once companies can just outsource anything from manufacturing to services the only categories that can really unionize with success are those that can de facto block everything at once (port workers are an example).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Em96NVxO9Q — So This is Progress (Terry Jones, BBC, 1991)
Apparently, minute hands were added to clocks so factory owners could extract more work from their employees.
Medieval people used to own more property (though not technologically equivalent of course) and "owned" more of their time than the average person today.
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As for the title of this post, I can testify to that: As a solo coder, AI has actually increased the amount of work I do - but in a good way!
Even on non vibe-coded stuff, AI reviews keep helping me finding bugs and inconsistencies to fix that would have taken ages to even notice on my own
but more than that, whenever I have the faintest idea about anything, I can immediately put it to practice and explore it further or move on to other ideas.
Even when I'm outdoors away from my computer doing some normal life stuff in meatspace, I often think of stuff and pull out my phone and open the ChatGPT app to remote into my computer's Codex.
This is actually fun.
Unions do not exist in a vacuum. They have to operate in the same fundamental power structures as everyone else.
If union A is like "work less let AI take the slack" and union B is like "work the same, use AI to achieve more, let AI help us win" I'm joining union B every time.
I'm very pro-union but I feel like at this point attempting to organize will just speed up the process of replacing as many people as possible with machines, not slow it down. It's too little, too late.
I don't understand what kind of society we're building right now. Anthropic and other AI labs at $20T valuations, the 1% monopolizing all the wealth and the rest of us out of a job and fighting for the scraps?
There seems to be some sort of magical thinking within the AI crowd at the moment, that it'll all work itself out in the end.
- Build the God Machine
- ??????
- POST-SCARCITY UTOPIA!