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0 pointsdmarchand902y ago0 comments

If I understand it would be something like. You used to get a dedicated secretary. But now most of those roles are now handled by computer. So in a sense everyone has had their workload mildly increased. But worse than that the workload is typically of a different nature so, for example, excessive meetings are now easy to generate.

I would also add that it may be of a net benefit that fewer roles are needed. But that net benefit overwhelming goes to the owners of the company. And that's what we've been seeing the last 30+ years the very wealthy have become much more wealthy while everyone else is worse off. ()

() growing wealth inequality is very complex and I'm sure would be happening anyway. I'm not saying computers cause wealthy inequality but they don't seem to be doing much good in fixing it either

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TeMPOraL2y ago

> But worse than that the workload is typically of a different nature so, for example, excessive meetings are now easy to generate.

That, but also:

- Secretaries were better at this work because that was their specialization, and they enjoyed efficiencies coming from focusing on doing a single specific kind of work.

- Those increments of extra work add up.

- Moving that work to everyone else means you now have highly paid specialists doing less and less of the specialized work they're paid for. In many cases (programming among them), context switching is costly, so the extra work disproportionately reduces their capacity at doing the thing they're good at.

This all adds up to rather significant loss of productivity.

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