This is not a technology problem. AI intensifies work because management turns every efficiency gain into higher output quotas. The solution is labor organization, not better software.
Labor organization yes! I don't quite know how to achieve it. I also worry that my desire to become a manager is in direct conflict with my desire to contribute to labor organization.
On a separate note, I have the intensification problem in my personal work as well. I sit down to study, but, first, let me just ask Claude to do some research in the background... Oh, and how is my Cursor doing on the dashboard? Ah, right, studying... Oh, Claude is done...
> I also worry that my desire to become a manager is in direct conflict with my desire to contribute to labor organization.
Nah. You can definitely do both. A labor organization of any meaningful size needs management. A labor union is effectively a business in its own right, after all. Some unions even opt to register as corporations, and some unions even see unions rise up to protect workers from the larger union!
And certainly a tech union, to be effective, would have to be humongous given how easy it is to move the work around.
Why does management turn efficiency gains into higher output quotas? Because competition forced them to. This is a feature of free market capitalism. A single participant can't decide to keep output as is when efficiency improves, because it will lose the competition to those that increase output. Labor organization could be the solution if it was global. Labor organizations that are based in a single country will just lead to work moving to countries without labor organization.
This problem of efficiency gains never translating to more free time is a problem deep in our economic system. If we want a fix, we need to change the whole system.
The driving force is not management or even developers, it's always the end users. They get to do more with less, thanks to the growing output. This is something to the celebrated, not a problem to be "solved" with artificial quotas.
No, absolutely not. I would even be for labor organization if it had no impact on this matter primarily because I don't see why it would be a negative.
Nah. Rich people don't exist, or at least cannot last long, without a moat, which is an idea from the left. In fact, taken to the extreme, the left outlaws property ownership so that a few rich people gain control of everything.
You can be libertarian and a capitalist and still be pro-union. At the end of the day, a Collective Bargaining Agreement is just a private contract between two parties. It can be a way to raise wages without government setting a minimum price for labor.
While I'd agree most of its proponents (like myself) also favor other left-wing policies, I'm just saying it doesn't need to be.
Unions are labour cartels for the purpose of extracting above-market wages from the commons, a sort of mafia. They are incompatible with capitalism and libertarianism, especially with libertarianism.
What is rich people collaborating called? You might claim that it is incompatible with capitalism but it’s just a fact of it. It’s easier for a small number of resourceful people (and capital gives them resources) to collaborate than for many people with not much more resources than their house/mortgage. This is what Adam Smith told us anyway.
Simply assuming that "every employer does it because theoretically it is easier for then to do so" to help your argument is rather self-serving, considering that labour unions are explicitly legal and exist.
Cartels are not at odds with libertarianism. In fact, freedom of association is the fundamental underpinning of libertarianism. Unions are the libertarian solution to labour woes. Other groups normally favour regulation instead.
Libertarians don't have a theoretical problem with cartels because if a cartel tries to push for above-market prices, someone else will swoop in and start doing it for less, taking all the cartel customers with them.
By this logic, every corporation is a cartel to extract below-market wages from the commons. Both sides are bargaining collectively. And so you'd be saying both are incompatible with libertarianism.
There are strands of libertarian thought, I suppose, where government shouldn't be incorporating businesses at all. But it's still legit to say libertarianism is compatible with corporations and with labor unions.
This argument has been used against every new technology since forever.
And the initial gut reaction is to resist by organizing labor.
Companies that succumb to organized labor get locked into that speed of operating. New companies get created that adopt 'the new thing' and blow old companies away.
> And the initial gut reaction is to resist by organizing labor.
Yeah like tech workers have similar rights to union workers. We literally have 0 power compared to any previous group of workers. Organizing of labour cant even happen in tech as tech has large percentage of immigrant labour who have even less rights than citizens.
Also there is no shared pain like union workers had, we all have been given different incentives, working under different corporations so without shared pain its impossible to organize. AI is the first shared pain we had, and even this caused no resistance from tech workers. Resistance has come from the users, which is the first good sign. Consumers have shown more ethics than workers and we have to applaud that. Any resistance to buying chatbot subscriptions has to be celebrated.
Just a regular senior SDE at one of the Mag7. I can tell you everyone at these companies is replaceable within a day. Even within an hour. Even the head of depts have no power above them, they can be fired on short notice.
This website is literally a place for capitalists (mostly temporarily embarrassed) to brag about how they're going to cheat and scam their way to the top.
Labor organizing is (obviously) banned on HackerNews.
This isn't the place to kvetch about this; you will literally never see a unionization effort on this website because the accounts of the people posting about it will be [flagged] and shadowbanned.
So race to the bottom where you work more and make less per unit of work? Great deal, splendid idea.
The only winners here are CEOs/founders who make obscene money, liquidate/retire early while suckers are on the infinite treadmill justifying their existence.
