Comment by ehnto
5 days ago
I often turn to the saying "Rich people don't talk to robots". Time poor people want things done for them not by them. The agency of action needs to be delegated.
Just because Flight Centre can automatically line up your flights for you, doesn't mean they want to. Time poor people still don't have time to go through that nor do they want to. They ask their assistant to do it, their assistant knows them well and fills in all the knowledge gaps.
Even in the age of AI chat assistants, I don't see a time poor person bothering to go through the process of building a website with a chat interface. There's too much knowledge asymmetry that needs to be closed and that's time cost again. Still much easier to ask a team member to do it.
Their assistant might have reached out to a digital agency in the past, maybe now they don't thanks to AI.
If you're time-poor maybe you're not as rich as you think.
The richest person I know talks to robots all the time.
> The richest person I know talks to robots all the time.
I've noticed this too, but I always thought of it as mostly people fooling themselves.
If you're rich (let's say anywhere above 10mil), it's practically guaranteed that you can allocate resources in such a way that more effective engineering, or science, or whatever, is done in less time than if you tried to do it yourself (rather than spending your time allocating capital). I've actually thought of this as a bit of a curse: the value of a rich person's labor output is inverse to their net worth. No matter how smart, you're not smarter than a crack team of Ukrainian/vietnamese/taiwanese/Indian scientists/engineers/whatever, and the more rich you get the more you can stack your crack teams, either paying higher salaries for higher skilled people or building bigger teams.
I think there's maybe 100 outliers to this rule in the world, people like John Carmack. I mean I assume he's rich.
I don’t think John Carmack likes to tell people what to do, regardless of wealth.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26170052
1 reply →
So what, the richest person I know talks to DMT jesters, it doesn't make it good.
The richest people I know talk to a range of people like personal assistants, but really the PA is valued for getting things done reliably and in the real world with any needed resources. Even calling in experts as needed - of course they may indeed talk to an AI too
Nah, they're right. In fact, "self-service" is one of the biggest value transfers from people to capital owners, a society-wide "fast one" the computing industry pulled over everyone.
It's cool that you can do something yourself with a computer, whether it's ordering food or picking clothes or booking a trip. But, market doing market things, that can quickly became a have to, which is much less cool.
It's a problem that's hard to see until you're certain age (and therefore easily dismissed as whining of old people yelling at cloud(s)) - it's because most people in the west start with no money and lots of free time to burn, and gradually become extremely time-poor as their start working and accrue responsibilities (and $deity forbid, start a family).
Correct.
The smartest people in academia get promoted to positions that used to come with administrative staff.
Now they’re expected to do all of that with a computer, which is easy right?
So now they spend 30% or more of their time administrationating their position, rather than delegating those duties to their admin staff.
That’s less time teaching and innovating.
Meanwhile, the increase in administration costs of learning institutions has massively outpaced all other costs as a fraction of total.
4 replies →
All of the demos of booking travel using AI are hilarious to me. This used to be a job a travel agent did, and planning a trip was either a fun conversation or you could be like "send me somewhere warm" and let them do it.
Is it cheaper now that you can swear at flight booking software yourself, and scream at the hotel when they cancel your rooms that you got from a third party site that went through some other intermediary that bought the rooms at a group rate they shouldn't have been allowed to buy it at? Sure, it's cheaper. Is it better? Well, they want you to believe that. You have unlimited choice now. Oh sure, all the web searches and ads are targeted in a way that you're going to end up at the same place a travel agent would have put you, but you can perceive the freedom of choice along the way!
16 replies →
By choice. Your friend is presumably wealthy enough that they could talk to a human instead, or completely delegate whatever they’re talking to AI about and never talk of it further.
Oh I am not speaking from experience here, I'll clear that up.
Also the original saying used rich people but I think it better pertains to busy people in general.
"Time-poor" rather than "time poor" would make this a lot more readable. I struggled a bit on the first go of reading.
Otherwise, totally agree.
Referring to a person rich enough to buy human labor as “time poor” is interesting because poorer people working 12+ hour shifts who don’t get paid time off or holidays would consider themselves “time poor”.
Sure, poorer people are also very busy, but i think the GP poster is using "time poor" to refer to people for whom time is their most scarce resource.
When i was a kid, i couldn't afford to buy all of the toys and games i wanted to, but i had plenty of time with the toys and games i did have. Now as an adult i can afford to buy whatever i want (within reason), but life gets in the way of me enjoying those things. I think "time poor" is just the latter part of that transition.
Also, "rich enough to buy human labor" is a silly phrase as well. If you've ever stopped at a coffee shop instead of brewing coffee yourself, or if you've purchased bread instead of farming your own wheat, you've "bought human labor". Don't try to paint willful employment as some evil.
2 replies →
Both rich and poor people can be time-poor. Depends a lot on priority and values. I value spending time with my family and I will often trade money for time to enable that.
Half my comment was on readability. "Time-poor" reads better than "time poor" when no quotation marks are used. When using quotations like you did, either approach is fine.
Agreed to be fair, the saying better pertains to time-poor people but I didn't want to misrepresent the original idiom.
I can see that when reading it back, I'll keep it in mind.
Why can’t people just ask for simpler, less custom, prebuilt websites? If you want a custom app then you can always create spaghetti logic, but does a restaurant or small accounting firm really need that?
From what I've observed in different parts of the world, small restaurants, hair salons, beauty salons, boutiques, etc. all go straight to Facebook/Instagram. Opening hours and driving directions are already there, menus/offers are in the gallery - together with pictures of the meals or whatever they are selling. Contact forms are replaced with a WhatsApp number. Testimonials are the customers comments. If there are negative ones, either respond for bonus points or just outright delete them.
Restaurants don't even need a dedicated take-out ordering section since delivery apps cover that too.
I rarely see Squarespace or Wix.
> Why can’t people just ask for simpler, less custom, prebuilt websites?
They already do.
e.g. our landscaper's website is something like:
bobslandscaping.landscaper.com
It handles the invoices and hosts his basic contact information etc. Sounds like a great business to be in to be the hosting company for this.
>but does a restaurant or small accounting firm really need that?
Where I live in my part of Europe, most small restaurants, cafes, bakeries etc. only use a Facebook page and their Google maps entry to share their menu, phone number and interact with the customer base. They have no use to spend time and money owning and maintain a website, plus the advantage of even grandmas knowing how to update a Facebook page versus stuff like shopify or squarespace.
With a website that has a table reservation system you don't have to get interrupted by the phone all the fucking time by people when you're trying to chop onions or set tables.
10 replies →
Instructions unclear: my website is now advertising the logic of spaghetti for an Italian restaurant.