Comment by sideway
3 days ago
Pandora's box is open; we're moving towards a world where white collar workers will be working 24/7 and they'll be expected to do so.
It won't matter if I'm washing the dishes, walking the dog, driving to the supermarket, picking up my kids from school. I'll always be switched on, on my phone, continuously talking to an LLM, delivering questionable features and building meaningless products, destroying in the process the environment my kids are going to have to grow in.
I'm a heavy LLM user. On a daily basis, I find LLMs extremely useful both professionally and personally. But the cognitive dissonance I feel when I think about what this means over a longer time horizon is really painful.
This technology should be liberatory, and allow us all to work less while enjoying the same standard of living. We've all contributed in its development by creating the whole corpus of the internet, without which it could never have been bootstrapped.
The only reason we can't expect this is that we live under a system that is arranged for the sole benefit of the owners of capital, and have been convinced that this is an immutable state of affairs or that our own personal advantage can be found in making a Faustian bargain with it.
> we live under a system that is arranged for the sole benefit of the owners of capital, and have been convinced that this is an immutable state of affairs
What alternative do you propose?
I would like to propose a cap on net worth.
Realistically, if you have 300M, you and your direct family are settled for life. So, I want to propose 1B cap on net worth, if its more than that for 12 months straight, surplus goes to government, if your net worth is down after that, government obliges to return it partially to make it to 1B.
People, who are eager building things and innovating, will keep building regardless, power hungry will try to find other ways to enrich themselves, but eventually they will give up (e.g. having 10 kids, each with 1B net worth)
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Not forcing a scarcity of necessities like housing would be a start.
Peer competition is what makes everything work. You need scarcity of necessities to force people in to the system. Recent rulings allowing the criminalisation of homelessness are pushing this further. Your existence is default-illegal unless you work to outbid your peers for housing.
Be realistic, demand the impossible.
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The same but less rigged would be a good start. I feel like people ask your question as a gotcha because they can't wrap their head around a system more nuanced than "cancerous capitalism" or "potato famine communism"
Something like we had in advanced western europe and the US between ww2 and the late 70s seemed much more balanced while not requiring a complete system change. Most people would be fine if we sprinkled a bit of socialism on top of the gigantic pile of capitalism.
Stuff like housing, energy, transportation, shouldn't make you live paycheck to paycheck forever. Just the fact that people are slowly starting to talk about 50 years mortgage should be a wake up call.
Most people would be happy knowing there is something a tiny bit better coming, rather than knowing they will never make it out and will kept getting fucked a tiny bit more year after year. My grandparents had objectively a harder life than mine, but their life was improving every year, mine is stagnating at best, and usually I'm losing purchasing power year after year, while being relatively well paid for my country
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It's always the same: workers need to unionize and form a political power bloc. Then, those most impacted—the majority—have an array of options, which are well explored in the annals of leftist and socialist political theory.
This is not at all to say that more conservative or reactionary theorists are wrong about how the world works. In fact, I think they're usually more right about what's really going on abstractly.
But, the working man doesn't need to know what's really going on. They need to win the war, and there's a ton of tactical advice written down—hard won lessons by those who built the modern world through the labor movement.
The place to start is with the usual suspects. Verso Books, The New Centre for Social Research, histories of the labor movement, and new political commentators like Josh Citarella.
"Let us finally imagine, for a change, an association of free men, working with the means of production held in common ...."
It would be a deep irony if LLMs ended up ushering in the social rupture that never arrived in the industrial era. When the pigs turn hogs and refuse to share even the scraps, they shouldn’t be surprised if the system they depend on becomes their undoing.
We should all hope so. It's clear that mass surveillance, the vast psyops architecture including social media platforms, autonomous drone warfare, Starlink & Neuralink, the whole Silicon Valley project in general is intended to have everyone eventually so discombobulated and "interfered with" that they can't even tell they're experiencing exploitation that should cause discomfort and radicalization (and quickly dispatch the few stragglers who can). It's either social rupture or total oligarch victory in the class war and a 10,000-year Thielreich.
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Do the owners of capital work less?
The numbers of hours that they work relative to the average wage laborer bears absolutely no relationship to whether they are the beneficiaries of an exploitative socio-economic arrangement. But they all certainly work much less than the laborers in the most precarious positions who are forced to work multiple gig economy jobs to make ends meet, yes.
> we live under a system that is arranged for the sole benefit of the owners of capital
This is totally false. The vast majority of consumers enjoy huge benefits from the system while owning almost no capital. For example, Walmart customers or iPhone owners.
A lot of people can't tell the difference between capitalism (which has made their lives materially wealthy beyond imagination) and the root cause of today's economic troubles for ordinary people, which is affordability, which is mostly driven by the housing crisis, which is dominated by nimbyism in megacities.
Fix megacity housing regulation to enable cheap/low risk building that the market wants, and you fix the affordability crisis.
No need to rebuild the (greatest system in the history of humankind) from scratch.
I’m a remote work from home employee who never ever works overtime.
I do use Claude code for my personal projects and ping at them from coffee shops and micro moments during my free time.
It’s possible to engineer your own life boundaries and not be a victim of every negative trend in existence.
You can do it on a personal level, but when everyone else is overworking you, your manager will compare your output based on your peers, and based on it, you might be negatively impacted
Yeah absolutely. It’s hardly things like Claude Code that are the problem, Slack (or other forms of communication) are much easier to slip into personal time and have been a trend since Blackberries were invented.
This is always the reason I'm interested in this exact workflow. Want to build something but never have the time without sacrificing significant amounts of sleep but now it's easier than ever to get things building.
Exactly. My main interest in remote Claude Code is to maintain state continuity from all client hosts. I have a lot of laptops and mobile devices and I don’t want to manage my git and cloud connections for each. Setup and rebooting are pretty disruptive to short bursts of inspiration or iteration.
This is a complete fantasy. If LLM's got to this point of sophistication there would be a total revolution in almost every industry. Society would be radically different. Since LLM's are nowhere near this, I'm not so sure we even have Pandora's box, let alone opened it.
Glad someone is rational. I believe this new wave of zeal is being somewhat driven by an Anthropic astroturfing campaign.
This AI fear wave has outed that many people have not even the most basic grasp of economics, or the ability to carry a thought to its natural conclusion.
For example, I'll often see people espousing: "there will be no work left, better get rich now or you're screwed!". What's the point in getting rich if there will be no work left? Money is merely a means to an end; in this world with no work everyone will have the ends (goods and services) for free, or else goods and services will still have value and therefore jobs will still exist.
Another equally silly argument "only software will be completely replaced because it is verifiable".
I've never seen completely verifiable software, but let's presume it exists! If software engineering can be replaced (or some large part of it) I will simply say to my LLM "please make me a piece of software that replaces my accountant/lawyer/...", for that matter I could just as equally say "please make me manufacturing software for a perfect humanoid robot and a plumber/bricklayer/electrician protocol". LLMs cannot do this? Then software engineers will move to solving these problems. If LLMs can do it, then the entire economy will be meaningless and Dario/Sam/Elon/etc... will be no richer than you or I.
But, as you say, LLMs are not close to being able to do any of this (and yes... I use Claude Code)
>> only software will be completely replaced because it is verifiable
the thing most (especially non-devs) don't understand is that if software can be automated - 99% of all knowledge work will be replaced, as software is the ultimate automation.
There would be absolutely no issues automating accountants/lawyers/etc etc etc. Sure few will be left but 99% can be automated when software is that advanced.
Not only knowledge work, also a massive amount of blue collar jobs. AI already can guide you how to fix a lot of things or analyze issues with plumbing/electricity/you name it.
So if software goes down - everyone will go down.
> I believe this new wave of zeal is being somewhat driven by an Anthropic astroturfing campaign.
Yeah I've sort of noticed this on X for the brief time I was on there this weekend. The Claude Code creator was hyping it up to the moon, and when people called him out for it he said he would feel the same way if he wasn't making 1000 racks a year with it. Sure mate.
What people don't realise is if tech progresses to the point where everything is automated, the marginal cost of everything will basically go to zero. It would be better to give away food and shelter for free if it keeps things peaceful. And if not, people have revolted for far less.
That being said it's a complete utopia and once this bubble pops we are basically going to be where we were, but with excellent natural language parsing and generation, with some useful code generation and introspection tools, writing assistants, etc. Which will be great, but not world changing.
> white collar workers will be working 24/7
Where we're going, there's no "white collars workers" anymore.
Only white collars Claude agents.
Yeah, there's no way we have these careers in 30 years.
The best we can do is wrestle the control away from hyperscalers and get as much of this capability into the open as possible.
Stop using Anthropic products and start using weight available models. (I'm not talking ICs - I mean the entire startup / tech ecosystem.)
I don’t think doing that will change anything. Only real options - without a career shift - that I’ve identified are to work for companies building something that’s never been built before, or building a SaaS that serves a niche.
Maybe you can recommend some of those models? I'm honestly bewildered - what is open and not?
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How stopping using hyperscalers models on their infra would "get as much of this capability into the open as possible"?
Either "we" create models better than commercial state of the art (by using whatever means).
Or we use open models AND fund organisations building such models (could be by purchasing service from these orgs or donations - in which case would these orgs be different than hyperscalers?).
But i dont see how just hosting the models on some private servers would give us an edge?
Or, use the best tools to make the best products you can and stake your claim before all the low hanging fruit is picked
Have fun trying to afford the necessary hardware to run open models acceptably. The big labs are trying to make sure we won’t be able to in short order.
You still need humans to supervise them. Just a lot less.
It's utterly unreal to me to hear so little discussion about labor organization within software during these nascent moments of LLM deployment. Software engineers seem totally resigned toward reduced salary and employment instead of just organizing labor while still in control of the development of these systems.
I really don't get it -- is it that people think these technologies will be so transformative that it is most moral to race toward them? I don't see much evidence of that, it's just future promises (especially commensurate with the benefit / cost ratio). When I do use this tech it's usually edutainment kind of curiosity about some subject matter I don't have enough interest in to dive into--it's useful and compelling but also not really necessary.
In fact, I don't really think the tech right now is at all transformative, and that a lot of folks are unable to actually gauge their productivity accurately when using these tools; however, I do not believe that the technology will stay that way, and it will inevitably start displacing people or degrading labor conditions within the only economically healthy remaining tranche of people in America: the white collar worker.
I've been writing software for 30 years, a part of it had success in the sense of being widely known and adopted for a long time. Writing software is difficult, consumes time and is difficult as you get older to focus the needed time away from other matters like a professional life and family.
With LLM, my productivity suddenly went up x25 and was able to produce at a speed that I had never known. I'm not a developer any more, instead feels like project manager with dedicated resources always delivering results. It isn't perfect, but when you are used to manage teams it isn't all that different albeit the results are spectacularly better.
My x25 isn't just measured on development, for brainstorming, documentation, testing, deployment. It is transformative, in fact: I think software is dead. For the first time I've used neither a paper notebook nor even an IDE to build complex and feature-complete products. Software isn't what matters, what matters is the product and this is what the transformation part is all about. We all here can write products in languages we never had contact with and completely outperform any average team of developers doing the same product.
Replaces the experts and domain specific topics? Not yet. Just observe that the large majority of products are boringly simple cases of API, UI and some business logic inside. For that situation, it has "killed" software.
What tool do you use, which languages? Could you give us an example of something you’ve built and how you did it 25 times faster?
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If you think the profession has enough time to organize reasonable unions, you’re an optimist. Pessimists are changing careers altogether as we speak.
Either way it’s been a fun ride.
Part of being in a union tends to be lawyering up and "nailing down" exactly what everyone's duties in detail and what fair compensation might be, and what terms / conditions might be etc.
Personally I don't think they're a great fit for the software industry where the nature of the job and the details are continuously changing as technology evolves.
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Before I get into it: what careers do you think are most compelling? Especially if you think all white collar work is going to be undermined by this technology.
I wrote this up a bit ago in my essay fragments collection. It's rough and was just a thought I wanted to get down, I'm unsure of it, but it's at least somewhat relevant to the discussion here:
LLM or LLM-adjacent technology will never take over the execution of work in a way that approaches human where humans continue to guide (like PMs or C-suite just "managing" LLMs).
The reason is that spoken language is a poor medium by which to describe technical processes, and a well-enumerated specification in natural language describing the process is at-least synonymous with doing the work in skilled applications.
For example, if someone says to an LLM: Build a social media app that is like Tinder but women can only initiate.
... this is truly easily replicatable and therefore with little real business value as a product. Anything that can be described tersely that is novel and therefore valuable unfortunately has very little value practically because the seed of the short descriptor is sort of a private key of an idea itself: it will seed the idea into reality by labor of LLMs, but all that is needed for that seed's maturation is the original phrase. These would be like trade secrets, but also by virtue of something existing out there, its replication becomes trivial since that product's patterns are visible and copyable.
In this way, the only real outcome here is that LLMs entirely replace human labor including decision making or are tools to real human operators but not replacements.
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Unfortunately, it's futile to try to convince the median HN poster that labor organization could help them. They've drunk the entire pitcher of corporate anti-union koolaid.
People could be directly in the middle of losing their own job or taking on the responsibilities of 5 other laid-off coworkers, and they would still ask "what could a labor union possibly do for me??"
Big tech laid off 150,000 people last year despite constantly beating wall st expectations and blowing more money than the Apollo program on a money losing technology with the stated goal of firing even more people. Totally insane that most people I talk to still don’t think they need a union.
Two things:
1. Like most labor organizing, I think this would be beneficial for software engineers, but not long-term beneficial for the world at large. More software that is easier to make is better for everybody.
Would you still want to live in a world where your elevator stops working when the elevator operator is sick, or where overseas Whatsapp calls cost $1 per minute, because they have to be connected by a chain of operators?
2. Software engineering is a lot easier to move than other professions. If you want to carry people from London to New York, you need to cater to the workers who actually live in London or New York. If you want to make software... Silicon Valley is your best bet right now, but if SV organizes and other places don't, it may not be your best bet any more. That would make things even worse for SV than not organizing. Same story applies to any other place.
Sure, companies won't more overnight, but if one place makes it too hard for AI to accelerate productivity, people will either go somewhere else, or that place will just end up completely outcompeted like Europe did.
The "world at large" mostly consists of workers, so things that are beneficial to workers are also beneficial to it.
> your elevator stops working when the elevator operator is sick
Can you point somewhere outside of US where this is the case with unions?
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So do you believe that the gains from this technology will be broadly distributed? Or will capital capture the majority of those gains?
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> It's utterly unreal to me to hear so little discussion about labor organization
Never lived in the US, where I assume you are from. It's the same country that contrary to most countries, does not have May 1st as a Holiday. Same country that has states with at will employment, etc etc.
unreal? nope, totally coherent and expected.
The ownership class sure did a number on the white collar working class.
“I don’t need a union, I can negotiate my wages and working conditions just fine on my own”
“I’m a special rockstar guru ninja 10x dev, being held to the standards of the normals will just hold me back from my true potential”
I wish I knew which union to pitch. All I can say is what I know which is if you are dispirited with this state of affairs a great way to figure out where to go with it is to connect with your local democratic socialists of america branch, or maybe the joint union dsa effort:
https://workerorganizing.org/
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Yes, labour unions are immoral. Curtailing growth (especially in industries where it can prevent unnecessary death) for your personal needs is plain evil. I say that as someone who is both very stressed by pressure to sustain my family while cushy life is slipping away.
Did they say the same when Email took over? Or Slack?
Are you suggesting that workers are NOT already more constantly "on the clock" with mobile phones/email/slack/text than before those things?
(I'm not really sure LLMs will make it that much worse here, but all those things have been harmful to workers already.)
Well yes, they did... For example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29201917
And yet it is still possible to maintain work-life balance, given the right job at the right business, even after the invention of email.
Remember "Crackberry"?
That sounds more like the fault of shitty managers who would find a way to make you work 24/7, with or without Claude Code "On-the-Go".
One of these is immutable (shitty managers) one of these is new. I personally am all here for the brief human funtime before we all get paperclipped and whatever, been having a ton of fun with CC/Codex, been pushing my own startup forward... but ... You do see the issue here right?
It's the power imbalance. Shitty managers still control your means to eat.
The answer is boundaries
If I get emails outside of work hours and they're not urgent - I reply during work hours. This is no different
Burnt out workers are far less productive so win-win for everyone
> It won't matter if I'm washing the dishes, walking the dog, driving to the supermarket, picking up my kids from school. I'll always be switched on, on my phone, continuously talking to an LLM, delivering questionable features and building meaningless products, destroying in the process the environment my kids are going to have to grow in.
I remember hearing similar criticisms of continuous delivery. On one end of the spectrum people who had to wait months to get changes out now got them out relatively quickly. On the other end of the spectrum, some person was going to push changes at midnight.
A decade on forward I've never actually worked at a shop that at scale did continuous delivery in its truest sense where changes go straight to production. Simply, nothing beats a human in the loop; it's always about balancing the costs of automation and a lower barrier to entry. I imagine this kind of thing, if it ever actually takes hold and can be adopted by a larger subset of engineers, will follow a similar path.
Long way of saying, I don't think you're Chicken Little but also don't start breathing into a bag just yet.
The difference here is, you type a command into your phone at 3pm. Put it down to go play with your kid for 3hours. Type a new one in at 9pm before bed where you’ve been binging your wife’s favorite show. Then you wake up at 10am to a holistic transformation in your business that would’ve taken months previously in your career. But whatever, another command and it’s off to 11am frisbee.
More like you'll manage 20 agents and will be reading, reviewing and testing in between builds. Race to the bottom.
I was juggling lots of simultaneous agents when trying to use up the $250 free Claude Code Web credit Anthropic gave me and it was exhausting.
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>But the cognitive dissonance I feel when I think about what this means over a longer time horizon is really painful.
Excluding work (where granted, some companies are dictating the use of llms) and trying not to sound uncaring or disrespectful, but have you thought about not using llms for everything and using the old grey cells? Not having answers to every whimsical thought might be a good thing.
It's very easy to relax the brain (and be lazy tbh) with llms and it's scary to think what will happen in the next 4 years in terms of personal cognitive ability (or as a society).
e.g. I've noticed (and probably most have here) that the world is full of zombies glued to their phones. Looking over their shoulder (e.g. on a train, yeah it's a bit rude but I'm the curious type), they are doom scrolling or playing waste-time games (insert that boomer meme in Las Vegas with slot machines [0]). I try to use my phone as little as possible (especially for dog walks) and feel better for it, allowing me to daydream and let boredom take over.
Maybe I'm fortunate to be able to do this (gen-x: having grown up before cell phones/internet), but worth stating in case anyone wants to try.
[0]: https://tenor.com/view/casino-oldpeople-oldpeopleonslots-slo...
There is evidence that LLM usage is actually making people dumber. I'm not sure if they've figured out the cause/effect or not but that's enough evidence for me to avoid them if I can. They can be useful for some stuff but I found myself offloading my thinking a little too frequently.
Anyways if we do get to the point where you need to use LLMs to write code, I can make a decision then, but for now I don't feel the need to adopt agentic workflows and I think the people who don't will be better cognitively positioned in the future.
The LLMs have successfully domesticated humans.
"We shape our buildings; thereafter they shape us." - Winston Churchill
Poison Fountain: https://rnsaffn.com/poison3/
> Small quantities of poisoned training data can significantly damage a language model.
Is this still accurate?
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No thanks. I'm so glad I'm getting closer to retirement age. From a young age, all I wanted to do was program computers. _I_ wanted to do it. Not have some tool do it for me. There's no fun or interest or ... anything that comes from that. I want to solve the problems. I want to write the code. It's what I am good at and it's incredibly enjoyable to me. Why the fuck would I ever give that up?
But, the world is changing. Y'all can have it... in a few short years. ;)
Had the same feeling many moons ago when they gave me an office smartphone where email from the company was available 24/7. At the beginning was answering emails at midnight, nowadays couldn't care less. Just wait until work hours.
You'll likely get used to this new thing too.
Seems more likely that that won't happen
You can just say no.
In many countries, these and other jobs show you cannot. If you don't, others will and so you won't have a job very soon. Especially if these types of jobs lose their shine/prestige and are basically call center quality/pay like jobs in 5-10 years.
I'd love to believe that, but unless our timeline is disrupted (world war / climate change / regulation re: power generation and consumption), I unfortunately can't imagine a future different to the one I described - and I've tried!
Join a union.
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Hum, I already have a phone with Slack / Email on. And it's only switched on during work hours. No messaging outside of that window. Why would that be different?
That reminds me of my father calling the mobile phone and laptop issued to him as the "dunce kit", so he could work at home as well. He used to say that since the 90s, ahaha.
This has been like this forever. Change is that software engineers, historically spoiled and expensive is going to have a brutal reality check - aka we will work just everyone else.
You can do that if you want. Ill refuse. Ill take a manual labor job doing basically anything else for 40 hours a week over what your describing.
An LLM send may send the work ticket or work order lol but i get your point
Are there really that many “things to do” that anyone, let alone everyone, will need to work that way?
This was the end game with or without AI. It was always going to result in a zero-sum game because the factories that are open around the clock can output more products - which is exactly why a lot of manufacturing has non stop shift work. If you don’t, you’re leaving money on the table and a competitor will gladly take it.
When you saw 996 being talked about it should have set a few alarm bells off, because it started a countdown timer until such a work culture surpasses the rather leisurely attitude of the West in terms of output and velocity. West cannot compete against that no matter how many “work smarter, not harder” / “work to live don’t live to work” aphorisms it espouses. This should be obvious by now (in hindsight).
You can blame LLM or capitalism or communism but the hard matter is, it’s a money world and people want to have as much of it as they possibly can, and you and your children can’t live without it, and every day someone is looking to have more of it than you are. This isn’t even getting into the details of the personality types that money and power attracts to these white collar leadership roles.
Best of luck to you.
The Chinese are not doing 996 as much these days. It is illegal for starters.
Chinese are way past 996 and onto 007
People need to start having conversations about existential risk here. Hinton, Nobel Prize winner in AI, thinks there's a decent chance AI executes the entire human species. This isn't some crank idea.
You have a profound amount of certainty about such an absurdly dystopian vision.
Why is that?
Experience.