Would you say the same about any other tool, like where is the revenue caused by Susan in accounting having a computer, shouldn't we take away her computer if she can't prove a benefit?
The benefits of having a computer that we can now interact with in plain natural language, that can extract intent from vague questions/statements, and that can piece together answers is obvious.
The link talks directly about the disconnect between the supposed productivity benefits of a technology and the measured productivity benefits of it in practice. And provides historical context about why the “obvious” benefits of a computer did not materialize when it was introduced; business and their processes had to be rebuilt around the computer before real gains were seen.
not sure one would expect huge revenue increases from these internal tools, but maybe dramatic cost savings? Surely a lot of corporate processes could be automated?
That's been the dream for the 40 years I've been paying attention. And in that time, I've seen plenty of incremental changes but never the kind of sudden sea change that the hype machine anticipates.
The perennial reality is that automation is inherently inflexible, so there's only so much of it that you can do before you've committed a huge strategic blunder by making your business resistant to change and severely curtailing its ability to cope with situations that don't cleanly fit the mold. So then we need to hack in ways to deal with the exceptions, but, since they're hacked in, they're often painful and time consuming. Sometimes so much so that after the new process stabilizes it turns out to be even more cumbersome and require more manual effort than the system it replaced.
When anyone other than a technologist suggests doing that kind of thing, we call it "bureaucracy", and we hate it. I think maybe what we have trouble seeing is that there's actually a pretty fundamental difference between automating purely technical processes like server deployment, and automating processes that are fundamentally about mediating human interactions.
I worked for the state and had to participate in procurement. Not only did they do this, but when we were purchasing commonly available things, we purchased them from weird insider vendors whose catalogs were literally photocopies of other catalogs with the prices blacked out.
When I left, people were advising me to become a vendor, which was what a lot of people did as a retirement plan. You'd go to the secret portal and fill out the inscrutable forms, then give them to someone who you probably knew at the special time. Then the state would order things from you, and you would simply order them from Amazon or Uline or whatever. There was also a trade in minority and female figureheads (to white male businesses) to get you prioritized.
Money is how you test whether someone is currently in privileged circumstances (be it their own doing or not), not whether they are good at argumentation or decision-making.
The vast majority of people do not work jobs that they enjoy, that is a middle-class indulgence and ideal that they don't even live up to; almost all their literature is about why they should be enjoying things that they don't or how to discover the things that they might enjoy, and they stuff themselves with drugs to make themselves pay attention and not want to die.
And that's the top 15% of the population. The rest are not romanticizing digging ditches, scraping the dead skin off people's feet, or putting catheters up senior citizens.
Your "realistic" scenario is how 95% of the world lives already.
Getting meaning, community, culture, and "growth" from your job is middle-class religion, and they're constantly having crises of faith. The default state is to find these things in something other than serving people in order to eat.
Did any of that signal come from people who hadn't spent the last 40 or 50 years working, in a society constructed around working?
If I had a study that showed increased mortality in people who had owned a parrot for 50 years in the year after that parrot died, you wouldn't cite it as evidence of the basic human need for a parrot.
Humans are socialized to want purpose and meaning in life. Modern humans are socialized to put a lot of that meaning into their employment. Many humans have a lot of trouble with unemployment and even retirement, because they feel a lack of purpose.
I think imagining a world where people are universally able to find purpose outside their employment counts as "changing the definition of people". Perhaps less difficult of a change than making us not dependent on oxygen, but still a big enough change not to clear the bar.
> Plenty of people live without working.
A minority of people live without working. And many people who do not work are profoundly unhappy with that state of affairs.
> We're ruled by people who don't work.
That's a cute thing to say, but isn't a serious rebuttal of anything.
You’re right that my reasoning was off. I don’t think it helps the point OP was trying to make. The argument being made in favor of labor isn’t “The only way for someone to be happy is to have a job” but instead “The majority of people will be unhappy without an occupation,” which is testable. The existence of people who are happy without any sort of structured, purposeful activity would not invalidate that the majority of people may well need structured, purposeful activity in order to feel fulfilled.
If you tested the claim it wouldn’t tell you about human nature, because it’s possible (and I think likely) that most people are simply conditioned to believe they need purposeful work to be fulfilled, so you could just as well argue that if society were to be radically re-engineered, it would be worthwhile to re-engineer it at the psychological level (such that no one felt the need to work), rather than the economic level (such that work was made available to everyone).
> We're ruled by people who don't work.
I don’t have any data to support this but I suspect the majority of those people that we would characterize as happy are still engaged in an occupation (not a “job” as such, but purposeful work that goes beyond mere leisure). I’ve seen dozens of well-to-do retired boomers who waste away on Twitter or YouTube and don’t seem to do much of anything anymore, which is what I’m guessing is the behavior you’re imagining when you talk about oligarchs not working, but I don’t see much evidence that the oligarchs are like that; most that I can think of have made no indication that they will ever retire. Now, granted, work looks a lot different if you’re Warren Buffett, but what we’re looking at is not the social benefit of work as such but the impact of structured, purposeful activity on an individual’s psychological sense of wellbeing. In that sense, I think it’s unlikely that these people would disprove the premise.
People I know who grew up in working class families consistently believe that they have to work to have meaning.
People I know who grew up upper middle class or professors' kids seem to split down the middle. Some of them are very high achievers, the other half don't do anything. The latter often have a blackpill or Marxish explanation of why "work is for suckers" or a label that they can have a meaningful (to them) struggle with indefinitely and often a bit of paranoid ideation to boot.
Children of the working class would resist a workless future and the older ones would probably just... die. Some of my wastrel friends might be happy in that word with endless bread and circuses, others will find meaning in explaining their experiences in terms of the conflict theories of the last century.
When you talk about the "work is for suckers" class, I think you're talking about (at most) 15% of the population. So sure, people like this exist, but not enough to matter when it comes to the overall argument.
I am actually one of those people who thinks traditional employment is mostly a raw deal (I wouldn't go so far as to say "for suckers"), but the need for a purpose in life is a very real one. A friend of mine recently said that having kids is like easy mode for finding purpose. Pursuing a career feels pretty similar in that regard. It's not impossible to find purpose without those things, of course, but it can take a lot more effort, and many people will tire of that effort.
(Not have I found the missing link..but. your comment looks like it should be helpful in the future)
Plus I know some working class who made life-changing money (whether they felt like they earned it or not) _and then_ struggle to "self-actualize"
These tend to usually either.. admire/emulate professors becoming somewhat crackpottish in the process (if they felt like they earned it) or just dissipate in costly vices (if they don't). Note the strategy is kind of flipped if they come from upper-middle. Then there are the Wolframs,geohots,Carmacks etc that we can't put in a box but you "conveniently" left out the lower middle
Which means... _You_ better make life changing money soon. Just kidding. These paths can't be the only options can they ? If we don't assume men are islands the options improve?
Me glad you are friends with wastrels, which for some reason I conflate with skunks the animals :)
There's a comic (not Furballs) about dumpster diving skunks and foxes which I can't get out of Gemini . Korean-American artist iirc
I LOVE density. I still live in the same place I grew up and they are "trashing" our location. I know this because that's what all the people age 50+ who live here are saying (it's actually just a subset of the 50+ people, but mostly in that demographic). Takes forever to take a left turn now and they HATE it. They hate sitting there waiting for 4 lanes (2 lanes in both directions) of traffic to clear so they can speed off to work out of the Bojangles parking lot.
Growing up here, I hated how walking places took a whole hour to go anywhere fun, had to walk on medians on a highway to get to the movie theater.
We finally have enough demand due to increased density that they're building out a bus stop within walking distance. I already can walk or bike to get groceries and the pedestrian infrastructure is good enough that I can walk to a few different places, adding the bus route gets me to the train station and even the airport. I experienced the tyranny of the car, first in my childhood, without a car, now in my adulthood, with a car, but soon a closer step free of that tyranny with increases in these kinds of transit services.
Not that I don't think the urbanization is perfect. One of the bigger ones I've noticed is everyone has sterile landscaping, dead grass lawns (even when not in a drought) and other stuff that provides little wildlife value. At least we have serviceberry trees in our neighborhood...
Thing is, even in rural areas, the landscaping will be messed up or sterile too. I even saw someone with a HUGE thicket of bamboo, easily a quarter acre, maybe more, I could only see it from the road. Now that trashes a location!! Not moving anywhere close to that! Yet, the rural life affords more space for less money, which allows, in the correct non-trashed location, the ability to create a valuable space for wildlife.
I find it a really hard choice to make. I'd have to live in a smaller house in a rural area accounting for the fact that I would absolutely go the cheapest I could get, down to a single wide. And giving up the nice infrastructure! I mean, I don't think density is perfect, there are tradeoffs, but I do find the version that I'm experiencing to be enjoyable. I think the only thing that would make it unbearable is if they started rolling back the transit/pedestrian/bike infrastructure progress we've made.
I do think there's an argument against over development, but that's still a "building up" problem. Build up tall, but with bigger green space - like 2-3 acres at least.
Really? Cities like Cleveland, Memphis, or Wichita aren't particularly dense but they're affordable in terms of median price-to-income ratio. The unemployment rate in Cleveland is only 4% so there would seem to be job opportunities.
I have no idea how this was published or why it has generated discussion. The "surprising" discovery that the author made is that you don't just write something all the way through without stopping, you go back and edit it.
I always thought that even very small children knew that. If someone wasn't aware of this for years even after many attempts, I wouldn't trust them to do any sort of research.
Somebody should have put a red line through every word of this.
disclosure: I used the science of editing this comment after writing it.
Especially when the chance they'll get that bailout is around 99.9999999%. That bag has already been got. Doesn't matter if AI ultimately turns out to be useless for anything but children's toys because the productivity it adds to IT work is exactly offset by the amount of bugs it both adds and has to find.
The psychopaths that are pushing it will be arguing over who gets to be president of the world in 2044. This arguing will not be done in any public forum, but over a grouptext.
> The psychopaths that are pushing it will be arguing over who gets to be president of the world in 2044. This arguing will not be done in any public forum, but over a grouptext.
I don't think arguing will be the method that decides it.
There's at least one of them who is openly talking about how important it is for him to have control over a large robot army (and I'm sure several more are thinking similar thoughts, just not blurting them out on social media).
> The psychopaths that are pushing it will be arguing over who gets to be president of the world in 2044.
I’m suddenly reminded of Metal Gear Solid 2’s plot …
In 2044, “the Patriots” AI will monitor the internet and the media, and “guide” humanity via manufactured consent with an unprecedented level of effectiveness.
2. Who cares if somebody gets fired for PR purposes? Especially with a severance that will make sure that their great-grandchildren will never have to work and your great-grandchildren will be paying them rent?
Everybody doing tens of billions of $ of business shrugs off a $200M fine. They might even get a bonus and a plaque for coming up with a scam that lasted so long before it blew up.
reply