it's funny, people constantly criticize LTSE because it hasn't made "enough" progress (you can see one such example already on HN below). But since nobody has ever done anything remotely like this before, I am not sure how we are supposed to judge how much progress it "should" have made by now.
and since everyone widely agrees that what we are attempting is "impossible" I am pretty impressed that we've managed to make any progress at all :)
I do think it's more subtle. AI can replace very few jobs end to end with the same quality, maybe none. But AI can be put to work on high ROI problems. Now when the new marginal job is not obviously as high ROI as putting another 100k of tokens to work, no human gets hired.
Next, comes natural attrition in a company where a certain percentage will leave every year. Will they get replaced with a human or their budget goes into tokens?
Only when these 2 angles are exhausted, a typical company will start thinking about layoffs.
Now, some companies are already stressed: customer buy AI products instead of theirs, AI makes it easier to build what they offer, customers believe they can vibe code things. These companies will layoff first, because of AI. Not because AI will do the persons job but because the money gets spend differently.
Naive question but if it works best wouldn't companies that have a four day work week outperform theirs peers and because of that grow faster, and become more common?
I see the opposite in most startups that have a 6 day work week to get ahead of the "slowly moving" 5 day work week competition.
In what metric do they get ahead? I think this is the key. What many visualise as getting ahead primarily seems to be fund raising or having a higher monetary value. Especially in startups where the largest mouth, the biggest blagger, or the quickest to mention a buzz word gets you more funding. Being closer to your end goal, with an adoptable product that improves society, is really the only metric that matters.
In a perfect free market, like a spherical chicken in a vacuum. Maybe.
Problem is there's no such thing, monopoly powers, government subsidies, inter-company issues, contracts.
All these things can mean that a less functional, more wasteful and less productive organisation performs (in the sense of the metric that companies care about , line go up) better than a 4 day week startup.
> Naive question but if it works best wouldn't companies that have a four day work week outperform theirs peers and because of that grow faster, and become more common?
Eventually, but what's the typical lifecycle of a company? And if e.g. Treehouse succeeds or fails, was that because of their 4 day work week or because of any of the hundreds of other reasons a company might succeed or fail?
Think of it like a sprint versus a marathon. If you run at full speed you can get farther than someone keeping a steady pace in the same amount of time, but you’re going to tire yourself out and become slower. You’ll lose in the long run despite looking very “productive” at the start.
Similarly, have you ever been “in the zone” and worked non-stop on a fun project, being super-productive for a full week or even multiple weeks, but then “crashed” (or even burned out) and your output got worse?
New companies are on a race against the clock. At the beginning everything is a cost, you’re constantly losing money. So you plough through to survive until you become stable. Then you need to scale back and take it slower to allow yourself to recuperate and keep going.
Also, keep in mind that small companies can often be very productive simply by having fewer employees and “red tape”. You can have an idea, send a message to someone else, get an immediate OK and get going. When a company gets too big and has lots of processes to keep things running, a lot of effort is wasted on even getting started.
Techno optimist here who expects the following to make a big contribution to reducing human made future climate change: better batteries+solar/wind, nuclear fusion, self driving cars (we'll need to manufacture less cars for the same amount of miles humanity drives), AI helping with better resource allocation in general (hopefully).
The answer can't be, let's just consume 10x less. We have to engineer our way out of it.
I’d be embarrassed to call myself a techno optimist and associate with someone who thinks empathy is bad.
I love technology but optimism about it is incompatible with the current capitalist system. Tech is exploited to make capital not to further our optimism.
Edit: if you’re gonna downvote at least offer a counter. lol pathetic.
To make energy requires not only a lot of time to be produced, but also a lot of energy to get it done. Industrial society is based on these "oil reserves" from the Mesozoic Era. All the stuff made in factories from the 19th century all the way to iPhones 17s relies on these diminishing EROI — which, instead of being underground, is now in our atmosphere. It's not like a jar on a shelf we can just take off because by the time the energy transfers through the ecosystem all the way it hits where the ecosystem the most fragile, melting the taiga and lowering the albedo.
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