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0 pointslukev10mo ago0 comments

Whenever I think about AI and labor, I can't help thinking about David Graeber's [Bullshit Jobs](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit_Jobs).

And there's multiple confounding factors at play.

Yes, lots of jobs are bullshit, so maybe AI is a plausible excuse to downside and gain efficiency.

But also the dynamic that causes the existence of bullshit jobs hasn't gone away. In fact, assuming AI does actually provide meaningful automation or productivity improvemenet, it might well be the case that the ratio of bullshit jobs increases.

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throw2342342349mo ago

Its hard to automate something that is hard to define, so I see the productive jobs/workers being punished by AI moreso than those jobs. Generally I see anecdotally:

- Value creators (i.e. the ones historically carrying companies with the 80%/20% rule) generally are the ones cautious and/or fearful of AI. The ones that carried most of the company. Their output is measurable and definable so able to be automated.

- The people in the jobs you mention in your post conversely are usually the ones most excited about AI. The ones in meetings all day, in the corporate machine. By definition their job is already not well defined anyway - IMV this is harder to automate. They are often there for other reasons other than "productive output" - e.g. compliance, nepotism, stakeholder management, etc.

alvah9mo ago

Exactly. For as long as I can remember, in any organisation of any reasonable size I have worked in, you could get rid of the ~50% of the headcount who aren't doing anything productive without any noticeable adverse effects (on the business at least, obviously the effects on the individuals would be somewhat adverse). This being the case, there are obviously many other factors other than pure efficiency keeping people employed, so why would an AI revolution on it's own create some kind of massive Schumpeterian shockwave?

ryandrake9mo ago

People keep tossing around this 50% figure like it's a fact, but do you really think these companies just have half their staff just not doing anything? It just seems absurd, and I honestly don't believe it.

Everywhere I've ever worked, we had 3-4X more work to do than staff to do it. It was always a brutal prioritization problem, and a lot of good projects just didn't get done because they ended up below the cut line, and we just didn't have enough people to do them.

I don't know where all these companies are that have half their staff "not doing anything productive" but I've never worked at one.

What's more likely? 1. Companies are (for reasons unknown) hiring all these people and not having them do anything useful, or 2. These people actually do useful things, but HN commenters don't understand those jobs and simply conclude they're doing nothing?

trade2play9mo ago

All of the big software companies are like the parent describes, in most of their divisions.

Managers always want more headcount. Bigger teams. Bigger scope. Promotions. Executives have similar incentives or don’t care. That’s the reason why they’re bloated.

alvah9mo ago

Have you heard of Twitter? 80-90% reduction in numbers, visible effects to the user (resulting from the headcount cuts, not the politics of the owner)? Pretty much zero.

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throw2342342349mo ago

Its hard to automate something that is hard to define, so I see the productive jobs/workers being punished by AI moreso than those jobs. Generally I see anecdotally:

alvah9mo ago

ryandrake9mo ago

I don't know where all these companies are that have half their staff "not doing anything productive" but I've never worked at one.

trade2play9mo ago

All of the big software companies are like the parent describes, in most of their divisions.

Managers always want more headcount. Bigger teams. Bigger scope. Promotions. Executives have similar incentives or don’t care. That’s the reason why they’re bloated.

alvah9mo ago

Have you heard of Twitter? 80-90% reduction in numbers, visible effects to the user (resulting from the headcount cuts, not the politics of the owner)? Pretty much zero.

1 more reply

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse