And if you make someone 3x faster at producing a report that 100 people has to read, but it now takes 10% longer to read and understand, you’ve lost overall value.

> The real gains from AI show up when it changes what work gets done, not just how fast existing work happens.

Sadly AI is only capable of doing work that has already been done, thousands of times.

Maybe the take is that those reports that people took a day to write were read by nobody in the first place and now those reports are being written faster and more of them are being produced but still nobody reads them. Thus productivity doesn't change. The solution is to get rid of all the people who write and process reports and empower the people who actually produce stuff to do it better.

What happens if (and I suspect this to be increasingly the case now) you make someone 3x faster at producing a report that nobody reads and those people now use LLMs to not read the report whereas they were not reading it in person before?

Then everyone saves time, which they can spend producing more things which other people will not read and/or not reading the things that other people produce (using llms)?

Productivity through the roof.

And the fact that you can make it 3x faster substantially increases the chances that nobody will read it in the first place.

What a load of nonsense, they won't be producing a report in a third of the time only to have no-one read it. They'll spend the same amount of time and produce a report three times the length, which will then go unread.

Not a phase, I’d argue that 90% of modern jobs are bullshit to keep cattle occupied and economy rolling.

Coding is a relatively verifiable and strict task: it has to pass the compiler, it has to pass the test suite, it has to meet the user's requests.

There are a lot of white-collar tasks that have far lower quality and correctness bars. "Researching" by plugging things into google. Writing reports summarizing how a trend that an exec saw a report on can be applied to the company. Generating new values to share at a company all-hands.

Tons of these that never touch the "real world." Your assistant story is like a coding task - maybe someone ran some tests, maybe they didn't, but it was verifiable. No shortage of "the tests passed, but they weren't the right test, this broke some customers and had to be fixed by hand" coding stories out there like it. There are pages and pages of unverifiable bullshit that people are sleepwalking through, too, though.

Nobody already knows if those things helped or hurt, so nobody will ever even notice a hallucination.

But everyone in all those fields is going to be trying really really hard to enumerate all the reasons it's special and AI won't work well for them. The "management says do more, workers figure out ways to be lazier" see-saw is ancient, but this could skew far towards "management demands more from fewer people" spectrum for a while.

Not all code generates economic value. See slacks, jiras, etc constant ui updates.

Code is much much harder to check for errors than an email.

Consider, for example, the following python code:

    x = (5)

    x = (5,)

Now imagine trying to spot that one missing comma among the 20kloc of code one so proudly claims AI helped them "write", especially if it's in a cold path. You won't see it.

LLMs might not save time but they certainly increase quality for at least some office work. I frequently use it to check my work before sending to colleagues or customers and it occasionally catches gaps or errors in my writing.

"They exist because the company gets more benefit out of the job existing than it costs to employ those people."

Sure, but there's no such thing as "the company." That's shorthand - a convenient metaphor for a particular bunch of people doing some things. So those jobs can exist if some people - even one person - gets more benefit out of the job existing than it costs that person to employ them. For example, a senior manager padding his department with non-jobs to increase headcount, because it gives him increased prestige and power, and the cost to him of employing that person is zero. Will those jobs get cut "eventually"? Maybe, but I've seen them go on for decades.

> 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?

I don't know if maybe he wasn't explaining it well enough, but that kind of reasoning makes some sense.

A lot of code is written because you want the output from Foo to be the input to Bar and then you need some glue to put them together. This is pretty common when Foo and Bar are made by different people. With open source, someone writes the glue code, publishes it, and then nobody else has to write it because they just use what's published.

In corporate bureaucracies, Company A writes the glue code but then doesn't publish it, so Company B which has the same problem has to write it again, but they don't publish it either. A hundred companies are then doing the work that only really needed to be done once, which makes for 100 times as much work, a 1% efficiency rate and 99 bullshit jobs.

Hmmm, I got something different. I thought that Bullshit Jobs was based on people who self reported that their jobs were pointless. He detailed these types of jobs, the negative psychological impact this can have on employees, and the kicker was that these jobs don't make sense economically, the bureaucratization of the health care and education sectors for example, in contrast so many other professions that actually are useful. Other examples were status-symbol employees, sycophants, duct-tapers, etc.

I thought he made a case for both societal and economic impact.

> They exist because the company gets more benefit out of the job existing than it costs to employ those people.

Not necessarily, I’ve seen a lot of jobs that were just flying under the radar. Sort of like a cockroach that skitters when light is on but roams freely in the dark.

> The "bullshit jobs" idea was more about feelings and notions of societal impact than economic value.

But he states that expressis verbis, so your discovery is not that spectacular.

Although he gives examples of jobs, or some aspects of jobs, that don't help to deliver what specific institutions aim to deliver. Example would be bureaucratization of academia.

> 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.

> Jobs that don't provide value for a company are cut, eventually.

Uhm, seems like Greaber is not the only one drawing conclusions from a hypothetical perfect world

Greaber’s best book is his ethnography “Lost People” and it’s one of his least read works. Bullshit Jobs was never intended to be read as seriously as it is criticized.

But you would see more houses, or housing build costs/bids fall.

This is where the whole "show me what you built with AI" meme comes from, and currently there's no substitute for SWEs. Maybe next year or next next year, but mostly the usage is generating boring stuff like internal tool frontends, tests, etc. That's not nothing, but because actually writing the code was at best 20% of the time cost anyway, the gains aren't huge, and won't be until AI gets into the other parts of the SDLC (or the SDLC changes).

CONEXPO, World of Concrete, and NAHB IBS is where vendors go to show off their new ladders and the attendees totally evaluate the value of those ladders vs their competitors.

Is there a productivity improvement resulting tangible economic results coming from that optimization?

It’s easy to convince yourself that it is, and anyone can massage some internal metric enough to prove their desired outcome.

> in the long run those businesses fall to leaner competitors

This is not true at all. You can find plenty of examples going either way but it’s far from truth from being a universal reality

> Companies are obviously not hesitant to lay off unproductive workers.

Companies are obviously not hesitant to lay off anyone, especially for cost saving. It is interesting how you think that people are laid off because they’re unproductive.

It's only after decades of experience and hindsight that you realize that a lot of the important work we spend our time on has extremely limited long-term value.

Maybe you're lucky enough to be doing cutting edge research or do something that really seriously impacts human beings, but I've done plenty of "mission critical right fucking now" work that a week from now (or even hours from now, when I worked for a content marketing business) is beyond irrelevant. It's an amazing thing watching marketing types set money on fire burning super expensive developer time (but salaried, so they discount the cost to zero) just to make their campaigns like 2-3% more efficient.

I've intentionally sat on plenty of projects that somebody was pushing really hard for because they thought it was the absolute right necessary thing at the time and the stakeholder realized was pointless/worthless after a good long shit and shower. This one move has saved literally man years of work to be done and IMO is the #1 most important skill people need to learn ("when to just do nothing").

What counts as “concretely”? And I don’t recall it calling sales bullshit.

It identified advertising as part of the category that it classed as heavily-bullshit-jobs for reason of being zero-sum—your competitor spends more, so you spent more to avoid falling behind, standard red queen’s race. (Another in this category was the military, which is kinda the classic case of this—see also, the Missile Gap, the dreadnought arms race, et c.) But not sales, IIRC.

As a layman, I have to say the collective credibility of economists does not inspire confidence.

Not surprising, because thesis is not about economy.

> There’s not much of value to obtain from the book.

Anthropological insight has much more value than anything economists may produce on economy.

Why should I believe "economists" over "David Grabber"?

Nobody questions that Anthropic makes revenue from a $20 subscription. The opposite would be very strange.

I always assumed that with inference being so cheap, my subscription fees were paying for training costs, not inference.

>make revenue from that $20 than the electricity and server costs needed to serve that customer

Seems like a pretty dumb take. It’s like saying it only takes $X in electricity and raw materials to produce a widget that I sell for $Y. Since $Y is bigger than $X, I’m making money! Just ignore that I have to pay people to work the lines. Ignore that I had to pay huge amounts to build the factory. Ignore every other cost.

They can’t just fire everyone and stop training new models.

Productivity is the ratio of real GDP to total hours worked.

The Amish are skilled at getting cash from the “English” as they call non-Amish. I imagine they also think that the money they receive is roughly tied to value they create. I wasn’t talking valuations, just revenue - money that CFOs and individuals spent so far, and are planning on spending.

I also didn’t talk profitable. Upshot, though, I don’t think it’s just a US thing to say that when money exchanges hands, generally both parties feel they are better off, and therefore there is value implied in a transaction.

As to what it will be used for: yes.