You can't shift productivity by 10X and expect the rest of the supply/demand equilibrium to stay the same, with you working 10% of the time and sipping drinks on the beach while retaining the same job opportunities and expected salaries.
There will be increased competition for job openings, reductions in real wages, or increased expectations of productivity. Probably some combination of all three.
No, but you could cut everybody to 30 hour workweeks and hire more people.
Once it becomes the norm even for a small section of the economy it will spread.
People are more productive in an absolute sense working fewer hours anyway.
It just takes a union, an ambitious company, or a state to force that 30 hour workweek to show some success with better talent attraction and retention and better corporate results to start a trend.
It is possible for everybody to get a piece of the pie.
Yes, in theory but if working more confers an advantage then work expectations will stay the same and will show up as higher productivity. So the real question is how will that productivity be distributed. Right now it's being concentrated into shareholders value rather than wages.
Strongly agree. Reduce the work week today to 4 days 32 hours, the US already generates $5T in profits per year. That is time taken from workers from the one life they get. If corporations want to be more productive, take your best shot with LLMs. If it works, great, we keep reducing the work week. If it doesn't work, well, take it up with who sold you the magic beans.
We are already productive enough to have a shorter work week and more leisure, anyone saying no has specific incentives to not support it (either via financial gain from the capital accumulation funnel or work bound to their identity).
So tax them as much as needed, or require state ownership of some amount. Startups, and company entities in general, exist because a jurisdiction allows them to, or allows them to accept payments, control accounts with financial resources, pay vendors and workers, and operate within a commercial framework. That is a privilege, not a right. The rules are a shared agreement and delusion, the rules can change at any time.
It would be one thing if those increases in productivity were improving my QOL as a consumer of produced goods, through cost reductions or increases in quality, but I'm not seeing any of that.
All that seems to be happening is that these productivity gains roll up as profits for the owner class.
It's easier to enter the owner class. It's easier for you to do a startup where you're not the expert in everything. It's easier for you to rely less on buying things when you can make them yourself.
The moat of the owner class is lower because now information is everywhere and it's less possible to hide behind trade secrets and implementation effort.
Based on what? The macroeconomics don't work out that way. IF productivity goes up, but consumption does not, that means that it's harder to enter the owner class, because fewer productive enterprises (owned by non-working people) are supplying a larger share of customer demand.
This may make a difference on the margins for people in the software bubble. But for the other 8 billion people on the planet, they aren't all going to become owners in your brave new world, unless consumer demand goes to the moon to soak up all that productivity. It's not doing that. Prices aren't dropping. Quality isn't increasing.
If you think I'm wrong - is there a cross-economy explosion of small one-person businesses that I'm somehow not seeing? Are gigacorps across the board all losing market share? Because on the macro scale I see nothing but further consolidation.
Which is only relevant if one of the following two things happens:
1. Consumption goes up. (It's not going up. 40 hours at your job buys you less shit today than it did 3 years ago.)
2. Mega-corps start losing marketshare and revenue to this avalanche of new one-to-two-person businesses. (They aren't. Their revenues are climbing, which implies that consolidation is what's happening, not diversification.)
New markets are created all the time, as new products and services become viable. So one-to-two-person businesses don't necessarily compete with larger businesses for the same customers. And that's why both can have rising revenue.
None of that matters, if the populace lacks the purchasing power to sustain these “new markets”. It also assumes, that incumbents won’t enter the new markets, and acquire/squeeze/kill the new players.
A new market is made when a product or service which previously was too expensive becomes affordable to more people due to innovation. There's thousands of example, many of them in your own life.
But you are decided. Being negative is what you have chosen and there's plenty of people who will back you up because they are also afraid.
That has always been the question since Elon started making self-driving claims back in 2016. If you believed him any time up until now you'd have been wrong and potentially own a car that will never drive without a responsible human in the driver's seat.
Another question is how many resources each "self-driving" car needs to complete its task. All of the major self-driving taxi providers do have monitoring staff who need to intervene occasionally to get the car unstuck from some situations.
If you need to pay one monitor per 10 cars you can run a taxi service in specific markets but it's pretty hard to roll that out to a fleet of millions of personally-owned cars.
We have already reached the point where solar and wind produce new MW of power cheaper than any other power source you can build.
Of course that energy generation comes with the caveat of being variable with sun and wind. It can still be a net benefit to the grid but the variability means alternative energy sources are still needed.
The cost trend of installing solar/wind plus enough storage capacity to provide steady grid power will eventually cross over to also being cheaper than other sources of energy. At which point the only reason to be against it is if you prefer artificially subsidizing another energy source.
A big question about this push for AI/LLM features in products, and I think very related to public sentiment on AI, is that if these features were so desirable and useful why do they need to be so forcefully promoted?
If these features were so useful, the internet would be full of articles and viral videos about how to turn them on and use them.
Instead, every single software service you sign in to now has to stop you with popups, chat windows, and sparkle animations to show you all of the shiny new AI features they have added, like they're all Microsoft trying to convince you to switch your browser to Edge.
Google announced at their annual blah blah last month that they want to be the center of your digital life. Gmail is probably their most popular/stickiest product after search, so there's a lot of pressure to make sure it is the loss leader in making your life "less complicated" or easier or whatever the thought leadership is this week.
If they can't make gmail effortless and easy with AI then the whole concept quickly collapses under its own weight. Unfortunately everyone has been doing email (gmail in particular) for literal decades now so adding AI feels especially forced. The "swipe to help you type" prompt actually blocks me pasting text into a new email in the android app which absolutely boggles the mind. I'm about to switch back to K-9 email client which I haven't used in probably a decade just so my email will work again.
ARM Windows laptops are a pretty different scenario now than when the Surface came out. They have pretty seamless x86/64 emulation built in similar to when Apple started their Mac transition to ARM. In contrast the OG ARM Surface didn't run any existing Windows software.
Most people could pick up a modern Windows ARM laptop and everything they do would work just fine, just potentially with less heat and longer battery life than their older Windows laptop.
The primary annoyances would be Windows itself and its ad and engagement driven UI reminding you about Copilot and Edge every chance it gets.
I wouldn't call it "seamless"; a lot of Windows applications don't work. An example is some software packages common in the construction industry which want to install all kinds of ancient x86-only thing likes old ODBC drivers. So that wipes out one of the compelling reasons to have a Windows laptop. Quickbooks (Enterprise Desktop) is another example of one; not supported on ARM, although with some hacking you can get it to sort of work.
They've discovered that it's more efficient if the money flows directly from the private enterprise to the politicians without going through tax revenue.
There will be no single moment when that happens. It will be a stack of years and years of innovations and improvements each of which take time to roll out into mass production, start expensive, and get cheaper.
Then, write your "breakthrough" article when they get to mass production. (Ok, you can write the article when they demo it as the consumer show six months before availability, if you really can't help. They won't ship it in six months, they will ship in a year, maybe that's fine.
I'm a software engineer, I'm not going to lecture anyone about optimistic release dates.)
Write another one when they find a way to make it affordable to the average consumer.
I m asking : don't write it when it's a proof of concept in the lab, or when you just started the workforce that's going to contemplate thinking about thinking of a plan to build a pilot plant for the alpha version of the prototype. I'm sick and tired of those.
Same thing if your "breakthrough" is in curing cancer or making fusion. Please stop using this word. It does not mean what you think it does.
Well except that there were incidents of cars getting stuck in floods with passengers before they paused the service.
A closer analogy would be ""Chicago O'Hare pauses flight departures due to a winter storm after 3 planes slide off the runway due to ice"
Absolutely I think there will be a disconnect between when people think they should be able to drive somewhere (ie to work in a no-visibility blizzard) and when ideal self-driving cars would allow themselves to operate. Maybe society will adjust to be more flexible to natural conditions, or maybe people will get frustrated and drive themselves into the poor conditions as always.
There will be increased competition for job openings, reductions in real wages, or increased expectations of productivity. Probably some combination of all three.
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