Time saved by AI offset by new work created, study suggests

I worked in automated customer support, and I agree with you. By default, we automated 40% of all requests. It becomes harder after that, but not because the problems the next 40% face are any different, but because they are unnecessarily complex.

A customer who wants to track the status of their order will tell you a story about how their niece is visiting from Vermont and they wanted to surprise her for her 16th birthday. It's hard because her parents don't get along as they used to after the divorce, but they are hoping that this will at the very least put a smile on her face.

The AI will classify the message as order tracking correctly, and provide all the tracking info and timeline. But because of the quick response, the customer will write back to say they'd rather talk to a human and ask for a phone number they can call.

The remaining 20% can't be resolved by neither human nor robot.

Zuck is just bullshitting here, like most of what he says.

There is zero chance he wants to pay even a single person to sit and take calls from users.

He would eliminate every employee at Facebook it it were technically possible to automate what they do.

> Most of the calls are going to be 'I forgot my password' and 'it's broken' anyways. So having a robot guide people along the FAQs in the 50+ languages is perfectly fine for ~90% (Zuck's number here) of the calls.

No it isn't. Attempts to do this are why I mash 0 repeatedly and chant "talk to an agent" after being in a phone tree for longer than a minute.

Sorry for the acidity, just training my patience while waiting for the mythical FB/AI call center.

Read the article. The book is just a long boring elongation without new content.

> It's got me wondering: do any of my hard work actually matter?

I recently retired from 40 years in software-based R&D and have been wondering the same thing. Wasn't it true that 95% of my life's work was thrown away after a single demo or a disappointingly short period of use?

And I think the answer is yes, but this is just the cost of working in an information economy. Ideas are explored and adopted only until the next idea replaces it or the surrounding business landscape shifts yet again. Unless your job is in building products like houses or hammers (which evolve very slowly or are too expensive to replace), the cost of doing of business today is a short lifetime for any product; they're replaced in increasingly fast cycles, useful only until they're no longer competitive. And this evanescent lifetime is especially the case for virtual products like software.

The essence of software is to prototype an idea for info processing that has utility only until the needs of business change. Prototypes famously don't last, and increasingly today, they no longer live long enough even to work out the bugs before they're replaced with yet another idea and its prototype that serves a new or evolved mission.

Will AI help with this? Only if it speeds up the cycle time or reduces development cost, and both of those have a theoretical minimum, given the time needed to design and review any software product has an irreducible minimum cost. If a human must use the software to implement a business idea then humans must be used to validate the app's utility, and that takes time that can't be diminished beyond some point (just as there's an inescapable need to test new drugs on animals since biology is a black box too complex to be simulated even by AI). Until AI can simulate the user, feedback from the user of new/revised software will remain the choke point on the rate at which new business ideas can be prototyped by software.

I've been thinking similarly. Bertrand Russell once said: "there are two types of work. One, moving objects on or close to the surface of the Earth. Two, telling other people to do so". Most of us work in buildings that don't actually manufacture, process or anything. Instead, we process information that describes manufacturing and transport. Or we create information for people to consume when they are not working (entertainment). Only a small faction of human beings are actually producing things that are necessary for physiological survival. Rest of us are at best, helping them optimize that process, or at worst, leeching off of them in the name of "management" of their work.

>do any of my hard work actually matter?

Yes... basically in life, you have to find the definition of "to matter" that you can strongly believe in. Otherwise everything feels aimless, the very life itself.

The rest of what you ponder in your comment is the same. And I'd like to add that baselines shifted a lot over the years of civilization. I like to think about one specific example: painkillers. Painkillers were not used during medical procedures in a widespread manner until some 150 years ago, maybe even later. Now, it's much less horrible to participate in those procedures, for everyone involved really, and also the outcomes are better just for this factor - because the patients moves around less while anesthetized.

But even this is up for debate. All in all, it really boils down to what the individual feels like it's a worthy life. Philosophy is not done yet.

> Don't think we'd have as many videogames, but then again, we would have time to play, which I would argue is more valuable than games.

Would we have fewer video games? If all our basic needs were met and we had a lot of free time, more people might come together to create games together for free.

I mean, look at how much free content (games, stories, videos, etc) is created now, when people have to spend more than half their waking hours working for a living. If people had more free time, some of them would want to make video games, and if they weren’t constrained by having to make money, they would be open source, which would make it even easier for someone else to make their own game based on the work.

Mine doesn't, and I am fine with that, never needed such validation. I derive fulfillment from my personal life and achievements and passions there, more than enough. With that optics, office politics and promotion rat race and what people do in them just makes me smile. Seeing how otherwise smart folks ruin (or miss out) their actual lives and families in pursuit of excellence in a very narrow direction, often hard underappreciated by employers and not rewarded adequately. I mean, at certain point you either grok the game and optimize, or you don't.

The work brings over time modest wealth, allows me and my family to live in long term safe place (Switzerland) and builds a small reserve for bad times (or inheritance, early retirement etc. this is Europe, no need to save up for kids education or potentially massive healthcare bills). Don't need more from life.

>It's got me wondering: do any of my hard work actually matter?

It mattered enough for someone to pay you money to do it, and that money put food on the table and clothes on your body and a roof over your head and allowed you to contribute to larger society through paying taxes.

Is it the same as discovering that E = MC2 or Jonas Salk's contributions? No, but it's not nothing either.

You're on the right path, don't fall back into the global gaslight. Go deeper.

http://youtube.com/watch?v=9lDTdLQnSQo

Most work is redundant and unnecessary. Take for example the classic gas station on every corner situation that often emerges. This turf war between gas providers (or their franchisees by proxy they granted a license to this location for) is not because three or four gas stations are operating at maximum capacity. No, this is 3 or 4 fisherman with a line in the river, made possible solely because inputs (real estate, gas, labor, merchandise) are cheap enough where the gas station need not ever run even close to capacity and still return a profit for the fisherman.

Who benefits from the situation? You or I who don’t have to make a u turn to get gas at this intersection, perhaps, but that is not much benefit in comparison for the opportunity cost of not having 3 prime corner lots squandered on the same single use. The clerk at the gas station for having a job available? Perhaps although maybe their labor in aggregate would have been employed in other less redundant uses that could benefit out society otherwise than selling smokes and putting $20 on 4 at 3am. The real beneficiary of this entire arrangement is the fisherman, the owner or shareholder who ultimately skims from all the pots thanks to having what is effectively a modern version of a plantation sharecropper, spending all their money in the company store and on company housing with a fig leaf of being able to choose from any number of minimum wage jobs, spend their wages in any number of national chain stores, and rent any number of increasingly investor owned property. Quite literally all owned by the same shareholders when you consider how people diversify their investments into these multiple sectors.

Indeed. And AI does its work without those productivity-hindering things like need for recreation and sleep, ethical treatment, and a myriad of others. It's a new resource to exploit, and that makes everyone excited who is building on some resource.

They will never be creative, and creativity is a pretty big deal.

Oh for sure, I should have included that. I was thinking of people being idle by choice rather than circumstance.

> there aren’t a ton of good options for workers seeking shorter hours.

But you do have that option, right? Work 20 hours a week instead of 40. You just aren't paid for the hours that you don't work. In a world where workers are exchanging their labor for wages, that's how it's supposed to work.

For there to be a "better option" (as in, you're paid money for not working more hours) what are you actually being paid to do?

For all the thoughts that come to mind when I say "work 20 hours a week instead of 40" -- that's where the individual's preference comes in. I work more hours because I want the money. Nobody pays me to not work.

We are seeing an interesting limit in the food case though.

We increased production and needed fewer farmers, but we now have so few farmers that most people have very little idea of what food really is, where it comes from, or what it takes to run our food system.

Higher productivity is good to a point, but eventually it risks becoming too fragile.

> Food production is a class case where once productivity is high enough you simply get fewer farmers.

Yes, but.

There are more jobs in other fields that are adjacent to food production, particularly in distribution. Middle class does not existed and retail workers are now a large percentage of workers in most parts of the world.

Did you type in an additional zero there?

I don't think we can so easily pin it on capitalism. Capitalism brings incentives that drive work hours and expectations up for sure, but that's not the only thing in play.

Workers are often looking to make more money, take more responsibility, or build some kind of name or reputation for themselves. There's absolutely nothing wrong with that, but that goal also incentivizes to work harder and longer.

There's no one size fits all description for workers, everyone's different. The same is true for the whole system though, it doesn't roll up to any one cause.

For ios/swift the results reflect the quality of the information available to the LLM.

There is a lack of training data; Apple docs arent great or really thorough, much documentation is buried in WWDC videos and requires an understanding of how the APIs evolved over time to avoid confusion when following stackoverflow posts, which confused newcomers as well as code generators. Stackoverflow is also littered with incorrect or outdated solutions to iOS/Swift coding questions.

Cannot comment on swift but I presume training data for it might be less avaialble online. Whereas Python, what I use and in my anecdotal experience, it can produce quite decent code, and some sparks of brilliance here and there. But I use it for boilerplate code I find boring, not the core stuff. I would say as time progresses and these models get more data it may help with Swift too (though this issue may take a while cause I remember a convo with another person online who said the swift code GPT3.5 produced was bad, referencing libraries that did not exist.)

Which LLMs have you used? Everything from o3-mini has been very useful to me. Currently I use o3 and gemini-2.5 pro.

I do full stack projects, mostly Python, HTML, CSS, Javascript.

I have two decades of experience. Not just my work time during these two decades but also much of my free time. As coding is not just my work but also my passion.

So seeing my productivity double over the course of a few months is quite something.

My feeling is that it will continue to double every few months from now on. In a few years we can probably tell the AI to code full projects from scratch, no matter how complex they are.

I’ve found it to be really helpful with golang.

With swift it was somewhat helpful but not nearly as much. Eventually stopped using it for swift.

Sometimes it’s PEBCAK. You have to push back on bad code and it will do better. Also not specifying the model used is a red flag.

Agree! I love this aspect, coding feels so smooth and fun now

Is the code audit included in that 2 hours?

I'm surprised there are developers who seem to not get twice as much done with AI than they did without.

I see it happening right in front of my eyes. I tell the AI to implement a feature that would take me an hour or more to implement and after one or two tries with different prompts, I get a solution that is almost perfect. All I need to do is fine-tune some lines to my liking, as I am very picky when it comes to code. So the implementation time goes down from an hour to 10 minutes. That is something I see happening on a daily basis.

Have you actually tried? Spend some time to write good prompts, use state of the art models (o3 or gemini-2.5 pro) and let AI implement features for you?

It's not different from code I write myself.

I read each line of the commit diff and change it, if it is not how I would have done it myself.

Obviously not because AI is available to everyone and salary isn't only a function of work completed.

> Cinema created jobs though, it didn't reduce them.

Is it that straightforward? What about theater jobs? Vaudeville?

> AI automating software production could hugely increase demand for software

Let's think this through

1: AI automates software production

2: Demand for software goes through the roof

3: AI has lowered the skill ceiling required to make software, so many more can do it with a 'good-enough' degree of success

4: People are making software for cheap because the supply of 'good enough' AI prompters still dwarfs the rising demand for software

5: The value of being a skilled software engineer plummets

6: The rich get richer, the middle class shrinks even further, and the poor continue to get poorer

This isn't just some kind of wild speculation. Look at any industry over the history of mankind. Look at Textiles

People used to make a good living crafting clothing, because it was a skill that took time to learn and master. Automation makes it so anyone can do it. Nowadays, automation has made it so people who make clothes are really just operating machines. Throughout my life, clothes have always been made by the cheapest overseas labour that capital could find. Sometimes it has even turned out that companies were using literal slaves or child labour.

Meanwhile the rich who own the factories have gotten insanely wealthy, the middle class has shrunk substantially, and the poor have gotten poorer

Do people really not see that this will probably be the outcome of "AI automates literally everything"?

Yes, there will be "more work" for people. Yes, overall society will produce more software than ever

McDonalds also produces more hamburgers than ever. The company makes tons of money from that. The people making the burgers usually earn the least they can legally be paid

Let's achieve AGI first before making predictions.

Is there any evidence that AGI is a meaningful concept? I don't want to call it "obviously" a fantasy, but it's difficult to paint the path towards AGI without also employing "fantasize".

There is no point in these ill-formed hypothetical untestable assumptions.

- Assuming god comes to earth tomorrow, earth will be heaven

- Assuming an asteroid strikes earth in the future we need settlements on mars

etc, pointless discussion, gossip, and bs required for human bonding like on this forum or in a bierhauz

Id we do it will be able to grow food, build houses etc using humanoids or other robots.

We won’t need jobs so we would be just fine.

That's not really why (at least in the U.S.) - it was due to strong labor laws otherwise post industrial revolution you'd still have people working 12 hours a day 7 days a week - though with minimum wage stagnation one could argue that many people have to do this anyway just to make ends meet.

https://firmspace.com/theproworker/from-strikes-to-labor-law...

The agricultural revolution has been very beneficial for feeding more people with less labor inputs, but I'm kind of skeptical of the claim that it led to weekends (and the 40hr workweek). Those seem to have come from the efforts of the labor movement on the manufacturing side of things (late 19th, early 20th century). Business interests would have continued to work people 12hrs a day 7 days a week (plus child labor) to maximize profits regardless of increasing agricultural efficiency.

Medical is our fastest growing employer and you could make the case that modern agriculture produced most of that demand:

Obesity, mineral depletion, pesticides, etc.

So in a way automation did make more work.

Only if that’s cheaper than security guards. “Just” hiring security guards may be more cost-effective than “just” making trucks more robbery-resistant.