My team can crank out high quality work in a few hours and AI could do the same medium to high quality work in a minute or two, but the review, feedback, and sign off takes days of back and forth. AI just slows this part of the process down because editing AI work is often a challenge because, no one is quite as familiar with how it was put together and sometimes it creates things that are not editable at all. And telling AI to make very specific changes is often a mixed bag at best.
Solo devs and small teams with minimal oversight can probably move a lot faster, but corporations are going to see minimal uplift except in areas where no one is looking.
There's a couple types of companies where the reverse is true: young companies trying to grow, and dying ones that need a turnaround.
Out of those two, young companies are less likely to be set in their ways. So the first place you really see the result of development moving faster with AI is probably going to be in future months and years when suddenly-big companies start getting widely known with products and business strategies that wouldn't have made sense a decade ago because writing code to try different things to even get the ball rolling was a bottleneck, and you could only do things that wouldn't scale for so long.
It's roughly the same pitch that the ruby on rails crowd had 15 years ago, and the no code crowd 5 years ago.
Very few companies need to rebuild their product every week, or actually care what tech stack it runs on. They are trying to build new things, or reduce how often those things break, or figuring out what if anything is worth building next.
Spot on!
Usually, most work in corps is slowed down by executive decisions. It takes 3 - 9 months to get a yes/no on something and for most things that are obvious that need to be done need to go up the chain of command. The decision takes forever, but when the decision is made, they want things to be done quickly, which creates unreasonable stress on the ICs.
The first step to see real productivity gains is for AI to eliminate the executive and middle-management layer, this starts a virtuous cycle, destroys both empire building and massively accelerates true productivity, not just meaningless metrics like LOC.
So the first signs of productivity gains will be shrinking head count, but it's going go from the bottom up, as usual.
I have no idea how it’s sustainable but I dont see AI CEOs coming until a new company becomes successful from the bottom using that model.
> most work in corps is slowed down by executive decisions
I work in a startup and I find it to be the opposite. Management wants us to go really fast and engineering is like "well wait we should slow down because just because LLMs can write a bunch of code doesn't mean it can build a maintainable app"
That said, I know that our small engineering team can't build an entire business by ourselves. So some management is required. But as you said, getting stuff done quickly is stressful. And with LLMs we're expected to get a LOT of stuff done very quickly. Some colleagues have decided to go on quiet strike by submitting AI slop and citing "no time to review" to prove a point. I don't fault them, but I also know that me and someone else will have to clean up their messes at some point.
However, if a PM tries it they will more often than not get a wrong answer because they do not know what to look for or how to ask the right questions.
Prompts still matter a lot especially when you are working in an established enterprise.
[1] https://communitysupport.group/t/what-is-the-purpose-of-the-...
The doorman was called a doorman because its essential task was the door. Everything else was additional and replaceable or unnecessary in the first place.
Same with AI. Once it has replaced the main task, the rest will adapt around it.
Look at how beautiful old buildings were. However, now everything is a box, because it is more efficient.
The people setting the prices are not some omniscient backroom of guys smoking cigars. They are thousands and thousands of people much like you can me, competing with each other.
Deluded.
hahahah pls stop posting about economics. For people who have gone much deeper on this branches of knowledge and have a far greater understanding of how it fits in reality - your posts are insulting to read. Stop.
Modern buildings draw the line somewhere else. I too wish there would be more beautiful buildings, but not at the old price.
Honestly, rising house prices have fucked everything up.
I don't see why it doesn't count. It shows we still value the service but it is out of reach for anyone who can't afford it. It lost in the same way much better food outings went out if business while McDonald's thrives. By making society arguably worse and punishing quality.
There are many other little examples like this, where beneficial side-effects go lost from automation. I suppose LLMs serve as a prime example of how this can affect people quite negatively (e.g. skill atrophy), if not careful. I think adaptation only goes so far, and we are being arrogant in thinking that we can adapt to everything, because a large part of how we function as humans is not as adaptable as we think, e.g. our emotional and instinctual needs, or how we maintain skills that are essential in the long-term.
It also has been an incredibly short period with incredibly large changes, to be able to say that things will just adapt; perhaps they will, but at what cost, and who wins from it?
We stopped going to one favorite place because the wait for a table became interminable. You’d spend forever standing there watching people waiting 15-20 minutes to get a busser’s attention so they could ask a question about the food, and then another 5-10 minutes for someone who actually knows the answer to come out and talk to them. Or, after the meal was over, people would just camp out indefinitely.
Loss on every side, still happened.
Okay, but were you coming to the restaurant for social interaction with the waiters? Have you stopped going to those restaurants that serve you good food at a reasonable price and which are otherwise desirable places to eat because of the lack of social interaction with waiters?
People dislike places that charge too much for mediocre service, and those places disproportionately use the QR codes for ordering and don't pass on the savings from labor reduction to the consumer. Very few people actually miss their waiter interrupting their conversation to tell them the specials.
I agree with your last point though, and you can turn it into a more general statement: some people or companies use automation to do more, and others use it to do less. There's probably a reason for it, among others most likely deprivation. People and companies are getting pushed to 11, and take shortcuts.
Maybe, you'd say there are more automatic doors than doormen. I'm confident that is true, but those automatic doors haven't supplanted doormen; they're automatic doors where there would have been manual doors before.
So everything hasn't adapted around automatic doors. We've just got a lot more automatic doors now. And a lot more doormen.
1) What proportion of doors had doormen before compared to now?
2) What proportion of the population was employed as doormen then and now?
3) What proportion of the population benefited from doormen then and now?
That said, to your actual points, as an intellectual exercise: while the population of New York has increased since 1930 (from around 7m to around 9m), the number of doormen has gone up much much faster (from "a few thousand" according to NPR to 25,000). So on the criteria you listed there, the number of doormen has increased as well.
The doorman example remains true.
Sometimes I feel like peter theil smokes a bunch of crack and posts antichrist takes on here under hundreds of alts. There is a lot more to life then instaspending money on Amazon, running on social media instead of talking to the kids, calling your dad for advice instead of chatgpt. These takes are exactly why most brands suck and why people will fight in the streets to defend Costco or valve.
Life will always have the intangibles and believe it or not it's still a good idea to hire someone who is only okay at a job but has an awesome personality and work ethic. Or lose a couple bucks on some hot dogs... 99% of purchases above survival are done for emotional needs and desires.
It's sad how the stupidest forms of short term cost saving and efficiency have driven ghouls to think they belong in business long term.
the one with a doorman & porter vs the one with just an automatic door and elevator.
people really need to read alchemy by roy Sutherland.
Doorman and porter means more awkward social interactions with strangers, and “premium” just makes me feel like I don’t belong there. I prefer my hotels to be simple and automatic. Airbnbs with self-service check-ins are ideal.
The wal-mart greeter is essentially a doorman for automatic doors.
In an ideal world (yeah, I know), it should result in them being paid for what they actually do.
One of the most troubling aspects of human's poor planning ability is they're absolutely sure something is valuable until they have to make a skin-in-the-game commitment to how much value it provides them personally. Then it turns out they weren't serious.
How? How do you set a price based on what someone does?
the classic revealed preference vs stated preference.
People have no problem paying something for nothing, if it gives them a chance at a disproportionally great return when they actually need it. It's called insurance, and perhaps we should start framing some of the intangibles in this way.
I.e. paying the premium for possibility of human interaction isn't paying for niceness-as-a-service, it's an insurance policy that pays out in kindness whenever you need it, wherever you are. But like every insurance policy, it only works if there's critical mass of people pooling resources, and stops working if they evaluate it as investment.
Is it more efficient in America? Yeah. Is part of that scene her being bored while waiting? Yeah. Are gas prices there probably a bit higher? Yeah.
But there really was something appetizing about it. I’m not sure I could put my finger on exactly what.
Why would he be watching the Bruins and not the Devils?
The tipping.
It's fucked because it distorts the relationship between staff and customers, not to mention it lets businesses get away with underpaying their staff.
Fortunately Japan doesn't do this.
<edit> Ah, my Oregonian neighbors inform me that in the last few years, this mandated institution is no longer in force.
It's the fact you were not there.
Low end labor costs tend to track cost of living costs. In high cost-of-living places, you have high labor costs and vice versa. Most places are much cheaper than America, which means you can afford to hire more people to do tasks that would otherwise be uneconomical.
Do you happen to know where one could find statistics on this? This doesn't mesh with my experience at all, and a quick search did not turn up reliable data in either direction. Not-logged-in ChatGPT gave me an estimate of 40-60% worldwide, but that obviously has very low certainty.
That's just bullshit. And barbaric.
Making someone stand in place all day primarily to open a frickin door (or other menial tasks) for others is a degrading job.
What "vital functions" exactly?
Whenever I see someone in a job where they're not even provided a chair, I feel ashamed. Like doormen, guards, "traffic police" that act as meat-based traffic lights, standing right smack dab in the middle of exhaust fumes all day without even a face mask.. it all seems such a ridiculous and archaic ceremony
Should we also bring lamplighters [0] and phone operators [1] back?
I thought bellhops do that, that's not just a "doorman"
You're confusing the word "doorman" to include other random unrelated jobs, like expecting the postman to also deliver your milk and then complaining that email doesn't solve that problem.
(I guess if you ordered milk online, he could, but that's not the meaning regular people assume when saying "postman")
No. Coporate fired a bunch and now doorman is doing their work, too.
- Identifying suspicious people and situations.
- Helping people carry things through the lobby.
- Passing messages before cellphones.
- Receiving packages.
- Making sure people in the lobby behaved.
And probably more that I never realized as a child. Doorman doesn't necessarily mean "suited guy standing attention outside the building next to a door". The locks were also electronic, so they didn't even have to stand up to answer intercom buzzes.
Maybe there’s a connection.
Which is to say, it is sometimes a fallacy, but often, it is not. We have far more intercoms and automatic door openers than doormen.
First they provide real security an intercom does not. They know everyone and won't let an unknown go through the door without checking in.
The courier leave their wares to them, and can hand over packages for the courier.
There's no extra cost, really, to having them do dry cleaning since all they do is hand over all the dry cleaning to a service that comes by.
We have to know how long it took.
I’m sure it’s similarly true for travel agents, real estate agents, probably lawyers, etc. Just because there are circumstances when someone values them doesn’t automatically justify them everywhere or refute that many of them basically don’t do anything.
Real estate agents are a good example. They might be the only people involved aware of the processes everyone's engaged in and moving things forward. Having helped build tools for a local shop I can tell you that their checklists and flowcharts can't and won't be built with AI because hoarding and sharing information has always been part of their competitive advantage.
A corollary might be that the value of human involvement is unknowable because human beings aren't rational. The Doorman is a buffer against chaos.
The value of the doorman isn't the intercom functionality.
People like doorman buildings because the building has a real person with eyes on the premises at all times.
An intercom or automatic door opening system can't deal with delivery people who can't figure out the intercom system, don't follow delivery instructions, leave your package/food somewhere random, etc. And that's only a fraction of the value a doorman provides.
An intercom system won't deter trespassers, petty crime, etc.
As long as the building is large enough, the cost is negligible.
I randomly picked a listing in NYC, 219 East 69th Street. 145 apartments on 13 floors.
Let's say you're paying a doorman 24/7 at $30/hour, that's $150/month/resident.
Was this supposed to be negligible?
The building I randomly picked out wasn’t particularly large, either. The larger the building, the smaller this cost becomes.
I know someone living in a 900 unit tower. A doorman is an obvious benefit in that building.
But if you never bother talking to the person at the door then you won’t see much value and thus an intercom seems just fine.
I’d choose the building with rather than without.
Hell the smoother interface and interaction model with the apartment admin alone is worth it.
I live in an apartment without one and I would not pay $150/month for a dedicated doorman so that delivery people have an easier time with the intercom.
And honestly, you are undercounting the cost, you can't get away with 3 doormen for 24/7 coverage and the salary is not the all in cost. It's probably closer the $300/month for 145 apartments.
If you're already paying $10k/month for an apartment, sure, you don't care about the cost and are happy with the fringe benefits. This doesn't change the fact that the vast majority of people have an intercom because the main function is solved.
The Doorman Fallacy is exactly this—thinking that one function of a job is the whole job. The doorman doesn't just open doors nor relay messages. They're eyes and ears, security, friendliness, an extra hand with bags, local knowledge, emergency response... The list goes on and on. Almost none of their functions can be replaced with an intercom.
Much of the US has buildings that are too small to justify a doorman regardless, but something is lost for it.
"Individuals aren't naturally paid-up members of the human race, except biologically. They need to be bounced around by the Brownian motion of society, which is a mechanism by which human beings constantly remind one another that they are...well...human beings." - Terry Pratchett
There will be cases where they stick around (luxury hotels, etc) where the ancillary benefits are the point, but there are many cases where the primary task is the economically valuable thing.
Respectfully, it is not.