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ehnto 4 hours ago

I often turn to the saying "Rich people don't talk to robots". Time poor people want things done for them not by them. The agency of action needs to be delegated.

Just because Flight Centre can automatically line up your flights for you, doesn't mean they want to. Time poor people still don't have time to go through that nor do they want to. They ask their assistant to do it, their assistant knows them well and fills in all the knowledge gaps.

Even in the age of AI chat assistants, I don't see a time poor person bothering to go through the process of building a website with a chat interface. There's too much knowledge asymmetry that needs to be closed and that's time cost again. Still much easier to ask a team member to do it.

Their assistant might have reached out to a digital agency in the past, maybe now they don't thanks to AI.

jstanley 3 hours ago | parent [-]

If you're time-poor maybe you're not as rich as you think.

The richest person I know talks to robots all the time.

type0 5 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

So what, the richest person I know talks to DMT jesters, it doesn't make it good.

dv_dt 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

The richest people I know talk to a range of people like personal assistants, but really the PA is valued for getting things done reliably and in the real world with any needed resources. Even calling in experts as needed - of course they may indeed talk to an AI too

TeMPOraL 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Nah, they're right. In fact, "self-service" is one of the biggest value transfers from people to capital owners, a society-wide "fast one" the computing industry pulled over everyone.

It's cool that you can do something yourself with a computer, whether it's ordering food or picking clothes or booking a trip. But, market doing market things, that can quickly became a have to, which is much less cool.

It's a problem that's hard to see until you're certain age (and therefore easily dismissed as whining of old people yelling at cloud(s)) - it's because most people in the west start with no money and lots of free time to burn, and gradually become extremely time-poor as their start working and accrue responsibilities (and $deity forbid, start a family).

nandomrumber an hour ago | parent [-]

Correct.

The smartest people in academia get promoted to positions that used to come with administrative staff.

Now they’re expected to do all of that with a computer, which is easy right?

So now they spend 30% or more of their time administrationating their position, rather than delegating those duties to their admin staff.

That’s less time teaching and innovating.

Meanwhile, the increase in administration costs of learning institutions has massively outpaced all other costs as a fraction of total.

komali2 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> The richest person I know talks to robots all the time.

I've noticed this too, but I always thought of it as mostly people fooling themselves.

If you're rich (let's say anywhere above 10mil), it's practically guaranteed that you can allocate resources in such a way that more effective engineering, or science, or whatever, is done in less time than if you tried to do it yourself (rather than spending your time allocating capital). I've actually thought of this as a bit of a curse: the value of a rich person's labor output is inverse to their net worth. No matter how smart, you're not smarter than a crack team of Ukrainian/vietnamese/taiwanese/Indian scientists/engineers/whatever, and the more rich you get the more you can stack your crack teams, either paying higher salaries for higher skilled people or building bigger teams.

I think there's maybe 100 outliers to this rule in the world, people like John Carmack. I mean I assume he's rich.

argee an hour ago | parent [-]

I don’t think John Carmack likes to tell people what to do, regardless of wealth.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26170052