People totally do want to offload the drudgery. That's why there is such a thing as dishwashers, and why OpenAI has 90 million users. But they also want the drudgery to be done reliably and not require as much work checking as it would have doing it in the first place.
Labor-saving devices don't save labor at work. They increase productivity rather than reducing hours, and the extra value is captured by the employer.
That's the difference between your home dishwasher and the means of production.
It's also probably a big part of what worries Gen Z about when it comes to AI. They're thinking about their own employment and employment prospects, where most people probably understand they have little to gain from it long-term.
You missed the part in TFA where Amodei talks about gazillions of jobs going away, or literally any AI CEO saying the same thing over and over again, or mass layoffs all blaming AI.
I disagree. In college, I worked at a bagel shop, and one of my favorite parts of the job was washing the dishes and cleaning the equipment. It was incredibly therapeutic to have my headphones on, listening to music, and think about whatever, while also getting paid to clean.
I do use my dishwasher at home, and I love that dishwasher. However, I also cook and I want to get to bed at a reasonable hour.
Funny enough, I have come across many people in my life who usually only use their dishwashers as drying racks. It's a bit odd whenever I see it, but I get it.
So, people DO like drudgery. People even seek out drudgery. There is no one-size-fits-all of what it means to live a life, and as the article states, the biggest problem for adoption is that AI is so flattening as product.
I mean look at some games like farming simulators. I have only played Slime Rancher. Sure the Slimes are cute and fun and there is a background story, but it also gets quite repetitive...
My job is to improve workflows with automation and analysis, I preach progress, but in my daily life I enjoy shifting gears in my ice car, taking time to make a coffee, developing photos from an analogue camera, listening to music on physical media, all things that could be automated away...if we read stories for the ending we could flip to the last page and get it.
There are a lot of managers out there (my own included) that would automate every aspect of their own life just so they can sit around and wait for death, and assume that is what everyone else wants.
Drudgery is not as much drudgery when there is variety. I think a lot of people who see their work as "drudgery" actually just are forced to do one thing and never even think about doing a second thing during their day.
The purpose/results of the work matter just as much. Take restaurant work. Making meals people enjoy is less drudgery. Making meals you know are good versus making low quality slop. Working at a basic but locally appreciated breakfast place versus making breakfasts at Denny's even though you are making basically the same thing.
Take making software I felt was making the world better versus software that was not. When I knew my work dramatically improved the lives of tens/hundreds of thousands of people and by extensions their families touched hundreds of thousands more versus just a software job in a kind of bad industry. The positive job it was easy to put in ridiculous hours. For the other straight 9-5 felt like too long.
A million percent. I would love to offload the shit parts of SWE to a model. But models are wildly unreliable (hallucination rates are sky high, insignificant differences in prompts create hugely different output, etc) so I can't trust them to do it.
It's amazing to me that people believe a company is easier to run than a robot. Several people try to start business every year, most of them fail. The lesson is right there.
Before the Mayflower Compact and the Magna Carta, there was the Casual Shirt Manifesto.
Irish monks kept it safe during the dark ages, along with the rest of written histories deemed critical to continued evolution of mankind.
It was there, in Dublin, in The Stag’s Head at 3 a.m. that I traded my treasured duster for the only remaining copy (still in Latin so please allow me some paraphrasing)…
“Find Henley and wear it. It won’t make you look crisp. Nobody looks crisp in Temple of Dendur. So, look good. When you wear something unstructured, relaxed, something that makes you feel good – you look good.”
Vintage Henley (No. 7129). Classic European military henley style in heavyweight rugby slub jersey. Created with siro yarns for high character and texture. Unique woven bib facing with button closure behind placket (keeps the chill out, looks more interesting than the neckline of your other henleys). Woven cotton twill bib facing and placket. Shell buttons. Flatlock stitching. Reinforced box stitch at placket end. Imported.
It's the kind of job you can do on autopilot and then work on your novel later.
So much of advancement has gotten rid of jobs you can sort of half-ass, while you put most of your energy into something that advances culture in the off hours. Think of like, photographers and school photos or weddings, poets and copy editing, etc.
This is what happens when one thinks "tech=good" no matter what. I'm not saying we need something like a huge investigation to see if something will disrupt the fragile ecosystem of artists, but I'm not not saying it.
