AI could break the pattern of tech making work worse for employees
Most tech revolutions made work worse for employees
Past tech revolutions—PCs, email, smartphones—sped up work but added more of it, benefiting companies more than workers. AI, however, can do some of the work itself, potentially freeing up time. The productivity J-curve suggests initial turmoil before gains. If we reclaim the time saved, we could focus on quality, creativity, and collaboration, as desktop publishing did for graphic design. The question is whether we'll use the extra 2.5 hours a day for more of the same or for better thinking.
The promise of AI is different: it speeds things up, but it also does some of the work, including the net-new work that comes from everything moving faster.
- briga
The central premise of this post is basically not true: working conditions and wages have pretty consistently improved over the past 200 years. The cases where it didn't were generally offset by the rest of society benefiting from increased automation and productivity. Where the current revolution will lead remains unclear, but if the past is any indication things will probably continue to improve for most people.
- taeric
This feels wrong. Did the vacuum make cleaning worse for employees? What about sewing machines? Modern looms?
It is probably a safe case that most tech revolutions reduced the number of needed employees for most things. But even then, it would be great if this would provide evidence of that!
Notably, it isn't like people strongly missed this work! Yes, there are fewer secretaries. But there aren't none, and the ones that were responsible for being a scribe to bad bosses almost certainly don't miss that work.
- aeternum
This seems obviously wrong as there are many counter examples. Employees in Ford's plants for instance saw huge wage increases and an additional day off. Mining mechanization made mines far less deadly and greatly reduced the human exertion required. I'd much rather harvest corn in an air conditioned combine vs. with an ox.
Even during the early industrial revolution, notorious for poor working conditions, people overlook why there was such high demand for those shitty jobs. The reason is because people were literally starving in the countryside. A family's survival was dependent on a good harvest.
- janalsncm
Corey Doctorow talks about the role of technology in society as not pre-determined, and I think this is mostly right. Trends are not inevitable.
At the same time, technology makes it easier to do one thing or another. And I think that’s the right framing for new technologies like AI: what does it make it easier to do? (It might be easier to answer that question by teasing apart the different technologies lumped together as “AI”.)
- Havoc
idk I'm pretty glad to not be in the coal mines
- paulfharrison
A comment by Norbert Wiener on translation machines (published 1993 but written somewhat earlier in "Invention: The Care and Feeding of Ideas"):
"Thus the effect of the machine of this sort in intellectual work may be to decrease the number of first class brains needed but to increase, and greatly increase, the demands made on these brains."
- DaedalusII
There was a time when life was much simpler. We would all walk a few miles down to the 'station then have breakfast and read the 'paper while the steam smoke hung thick in the air
Then we all had to move to cars. The fire man, stations, engineers, and conductors all lost their jobs, and the commute got 10 times more intense. Now we had to drive our own cars, follow road rules, maintain our cars, and find parking
- gulugawa
This reminds me of watching JIRA go downhill over 10 years as it incorporated new technnology.
I used to be a scrum master who helped manage the team JIRA ticket board. When running into the inevitable problem during a meeting, I would sarcastically make a comment about "JIRA's monthly downgrade". By the time I stopped using JIRA in early 2025, it had become noticeably slower and had a bunch of UI clutter that made it difficult to do basic tasks.
I checked the homepage for Atlassian, which owns JIRA, and it has a headline saying: "Unleash your teams and their agents"