Work

Impact of heatwaves on labor productivity

This article reviews recent economic studies on the causal effects of temperature on labor productivity. The negative effects of extreme temperatures are widespread, and the magnitudes of the impact differ across social and economic factors. In addition to physical outputs, extreme temperatures also impair mental productivity, including cognition and learning. In utero exposure to extreme temperatures has profound effects on…

This time is NOT different

Some will argue that “this time is different” because AI is replacing knowledge work, not just physical work. And, if this comes to pass, what will there be left for people to do? It’s a compelling argument, but people made similar arguments about the automation of physical work. There was literally a group of people in England in the early 1800s called the Luddites who destroyed weaving machines due to their adverse impact…

Jeremy Siegel on an AI Apocalypse

Before the industrial revolution, humankind had to work 12 hours a day, seven days a week to produce the goods for bare-bones survival: food and basic shelter. Today, in the modern world, survival can be achieved by working less than a day. In 1800, 80% of American workers toiled in the farming industry. Today that is less than 2% and the US exports food to the rest of the world. Pessimists maintain that the speed of the AI…

AI as an excuse to fire people

“I don’t know what the exact percentage is, but there’s some AI washing where people are blaming AI for layoffs that they would otherwise do, and then there’s some real displacement by AI of different kinds of jobs,” Altman said

Normie AGI is here

Artificial general intelligence (AGI) for normal people is here.

Age of anxiety

THERE is still time for the cheerful and the gloomy to disagree, sincerely, about the net impact on employment from automation and artificial intelligence. Perhaps AI will unleash a job-creating economic boom for the ages, as boosters maintain. Maybe on balance the doom-mongers are right, and grim legions of algorithm-guided bots and robots will conquer one industry (and profession) after another. One outcome is not up for…

The defining question of our times: "Who are you without your job?"

as a software engineer, i feel a real loss of identity right now. for a long time i defined myself in part by the act of writing code. the pride in a hard-earned solution was part of who i was. now i watch AI accomplish in seconds what took me hours. i find myself caught between relief and mourning, awe and anxiety. the craft that shaped me is suddenly eclipsed by a machine. who am i now?

Orchestrating is the new doing

Every engineer needs to learn how to design systems. Every researcher needs to learn how to run a lab. Agents push the humans up the org chart. I feel like I have an advantage by being early to this wave, but no longer feel like just working hard will be an lasting edge. When I can have multiple agents working productively in parallel on my projects, my role is shifting more to pointing the army rather than using the…

The virtual co-workers are here?

My guess: the virtual coworker coming next year is going to be something like a nice UI sitting on top of an agent operating your computer using mostly a command line, occasionally GUI use, with obscure bash commands translated to natural language by a tiny intermediary LLM. The agent will be able to designate subagents, probably, to do specific things behind the scenes. It'll be able to access many of the software and cloud…

The Bullshit job apocalypse

That’s because humans didn’t just sit on their hands; rather, entirely new kinds of work were created, which were valued dramatically higher. Much of this was in factories, and then, over the last century, there was the rise of office work. All of that could very well be replaced by AI, but the point is that the history of humans is the continual creation of new jobs to be done — jobs that couldn’t have been conceived of…

Automation is a moral imperative

Anything that can be automated should be. There’s no good reason humans should be making excel models or powerpoints in 10 years, any more than they should be hand-washing clothes. It’s toil and drudgery. What will remain? Anything we want to do because it’s fun or interesting. May be weird but I view automation as a moral imperative so that everybody can spend their time gardening or making art or playing chess or making…

Best of times and worst of times for cognitive peasants

the timeline is full of people using Claude Code to generate ads, recover corrupted video, make landing pages, manage business texts… the narrow view of coding agents is that they primarily decrease the cost of software development the ambitious view is that almost any problem/solution can be expressed in software and this capability is upstream of all knowledge work

If you can describe it, you can solve it

The timeline is full of people using Claude Code to generate ads, recover corrupted video, make landing pages, manage business texts… The narrow view of coding agents is that they primarily decrease the cost of software development. The ambitious view is that almost any problem/solution can be expressed in software and this capability is upstream of all knowledge work.

Some non-advice advice

Post type: Loose reflection. Certainty: Reasonably sure. I get a lot of messages on LinkedIn from young students and graduates. They'll share a templated note, attach a resume, and ask for a job. When I tell them we're not hiring, they pivot: "Can you give me some advice then?" And every time, I freeze up. Because I…

Here come the robots

Amazon’s U.S. work force has more than tripled since 2018 to almost 1.2 million. But Amazon’s automation team expects the company can avoid hiring more than 160,000 people in the United States it would otherwise need by 2027. That would save about 30 cents on each item that Amazon picks, packs and delivers to customers. Executives told Amazon’s board last year that they hoped robotic automation would allow the company to…