Comment by rahimnathwani
3 days ago
The more efficient I made the technical part of the job, the more time they had to spend doing the manual labor part of the job to keep up.
Imagine you like writing code, and someone automates that part of the job so you have to spend more of your time reviewing PRs and writing specs...
What a great comparison; I've never thought of it this way. It's obviously not perfect since the automation is so temperamental shall we say, but this does give me more empathy for the countless workers whose jobs have been re-natured by technology.
From their prospective, the efficiency increases and more gets done, but the hours and wage stay the same and the number of co-workers may decrease.
I don’t even have to imagine it, you just described my job now that we have LLMs.
I believe that was the point
Reading it back now it does seem pretty obvious. That’s what I get for commenting right after waking up!
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efficiency is the enemy of employment, no?
The amount of work expands to fill the available labour. All other things being equal, at least. Which they aren't, but it's a usefully wrong model.
There’s many praises to sing about efficiency, (and I don’t take your 1 liner as a position against it). That said, efficiency, job creation, and underemployment overlap quite a bit.
There’s far more scientists, programmers, and doctors today than farmers and stablehands.
At the same time, people who lost manufacturing jobs to automation and outsourcing, did not get jobs with equivalent pay and growth.
Human brains do not get retrained very easily, and so every technological revolution is a boon to those who grasp it, and a challenge for those who invested their time in skills no longer in demand.
Nursing massively expanded but they didn't want to take it.
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