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.

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.

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?

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.

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!

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.

  > There is no reason we aren’t working seven days a week beyond people fighting not to.

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 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.

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'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.

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.

History is not in the side of this argument

I agree, but I was commenting on things as I believe they currently are.

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.

----

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 don't get paid more when I work 9 or 10 hours, do I?

I am theoretically paid on deliverables, not hours.

Because that's what they observe the executive management performing for multiple employers simultaneously and the definitional difference between salary and hourly wage.

The problem is how 'hard work' is defined. Does staying after hours count? Not automatically, but managers everywhere use it as a proxy ( whether it is dumb position or not is an argument in itself ). Does carefully considering your options count? Does being anal when it comes to minute detail count? All of these are small dimensions of hard work, but we throw those vague terms willy nilly, because we hope the audience will accept our 'used key term values' within our message to them.

Good thing all employers are rational.

Yeah but if the AI is doing the work, why should I pay you?

Keep in mind that developers at Amazon were pressured this year to burn through as many tokens as possible because their “rational” employer assumed that productivity equals tokens consumed. I experienced similar situations on my last project.

The abstract concept of value you mention is part of the same vocabulary managers use, and I believe they often end up confusing even themselves with it.

They are just as rational as any other human being.

> an increase in efficiency

An increase in efficiency in and of itself, maybe, but there is no such thing. The increase in efficiency has largely come from deskilling the job. Deskilling the job makes the employees time less valuable, because they can be substituted for another more easily.

[edit: it's important to mention that this is compatible with programmer ego trips. I consider myself a reasonably good programmer and I've been doing it for a long time, but AI has made me far more eligible for jobs in languages that I have never used on platforms that I have never worked with.]

But another factor is that just because you can do work faster doesn't mean there's more work to do, so if you were hitting all your deadlines before with two employees, now you can fire one. Which one that will be is the result of a reverse wage auction.

Small business self-employment doesn’t care that much about saturation, I think, only the supply-demand relationship. See everything from Fiverr to coffee shops.

But yes, self-employment often is a lot of work.

I do recall, I’m more surprised anyone would believe it.

OP answered at the end, you would need to be

> employed by a compassionate human

I would add that companies are incentivised to chase profits, and paying employees more is not aligned with that, sadly.

I’m of two minds on this. Yes I get a lot more done. Yes I create a lot more bugs. Yes I have to spend a lot more energy understanding some things the AI does vs having written it myself.

It’s a mixed bag. I would say the worst part is that the increased level of output AND the increased level of tech debt is becoming accepted as the norm.

> I can now easily work every waking minute, and some sleeping minutes, at a level approximately comparable to my prior 8h workload from 10 years ago.

That is not something that should be celebrated.

It is a warning sign.

Marvelous AI psychosis. At last you are enjoying it.

It kind of was though? It was knowledge work that brought us fertilizers, tractors, trucks and large ships, which in turn made food as abundant as it is today.

Otherwise most of us would still toil on the fields just to harvest a tiny bit more food than our immediate family needs.

>you have to be ready to jump to different kinds of roles in different kinds of organizations.

How did that work out in 1933?

There are limits to how much an economy can shake up before structural problems appear that means when the music stops there is no chair anywhere for you to sit in.

>At any moment in time there are growth areas in the economy

For bread line server?

Worse with the modern world you're not just competing with your neighbor, you're competing with the entire world and if the other parts of the world have lower costs you can quickly find yourself in a trap.

That is how it has always been (not that I agree with it).

That didn't happen when we got computers to do more work for us, over the last 30 years, and it won't happen now unless people get violent.

Massive productivity gains over the last few years and the rewards have all gone to shareholders, not working class people.

If they had, and workers rights, minimum wage etc had kept pace with the economy, we'd be on a 3 day week by now.

No. You've seen no benefit from computers, domestic appliances, modern medicine?

You could argue that companies reap outsized benefits, and that the benefits are not shared fairly with workers.