alt Hacker News> The opening premise baffles me. What kind of illusion must one be under to believe that employers would ever pay you the same amount of money to do less work?
It seems like a pretty common misunderstanding in rank-and-file AI-boosterism. I'm guessing that reflects their initial experience, before their employer adjusts their expectations, extrapolated out to infinity. Your correct understanding makes AI sound like a bad deal for workers (and it is), so my theory AI-enthusiastic boosters have to engage in a degree of reality distortion to keep up their enthusiasm.
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Right. People don't understand the difference between labor and value. The job of a corporation is to extract as much surplus value from its workers as possible while making it as opaque as possible to individual workers the actual revenue they bring in.
It's very normal to think that the extra revenue growth you bring in should mean you have either 1) a larger share of the pie for every efficiency increase that grows revenue or 2) less expectation from you, as a worker, to labor as intensively since you are continuing to bring in surplus value that is being actively skimmed from.
At this point I wonder if those aren't simply marketing shills or the usual kind of "pro-business" press articles that always push ridiculously optimistic takes on new technologies.
Reminds me of the old press pieces along "with the new machines, the workers won't have to do this tedious and dangerous work anymore and will have so much more free time!"
And free time they had...
Pretty large distortion, in the case of this blogger.
He produces much more shareholder value.
He works much more harder.
He is much more tired.
Exactly why does he think this is a good deal for him? Because he's VP of blah?
The whole AI-boosterism is from people convinced that if only they can maximise shareholder value, their lot in life would improve.
It speaks to a lack of understanding of the economy as a complex adaptive system.
Same idea with all these agents that are going to negotiate our insurance down, haggle with our cell phone providers, and find the best hotel deals.
Your counterparty will have its own agent, a larger budget for that agent, and a lot more skin in the game to ensure they retain their advantage (cell phone bills are 100% of the cell companies income but is only 0.5% of your spending). Good luck.
Honest question: Where does the “AI booster” phrase come from? I only ever see it in online comment sections where certain people use it as a pejorative like this and everyone who uses it puts forth very similar ideas. Is this catchphrase something that comes out of a certain online community, political circle, or influencer?
On the plus side for us worker bees, this is why I never really bought in to the narrative that our jobs were inevitably doomed. A question I've posed a few times: Consider two reasonably similar competitors with 100 engineers two years ago. Suppose AI really does accelerate development 10x times. It doesn't (at least not yet) but the larger number helps bring the question into focus. One company fires 90 engineers and does the same work with the remaining 10. The other company keeps all its engineers and does 10 times the work.
Who wins in the market?
It's not a uniform answer. There are times and places where the first one wins, as well as a mixed strategy. But I think broadly speaking the majority answer is the second.