Reading Yegge’s rant and the much shorter and more polished https://siddhantkhare.com/writing/ai-fatigue-is-real (“AI fatigue is real and nobody talks about it”), I keep coming back to this, which I published in 2020 and is sort of at the center of my thinking about everything: https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/202x/2020/07/05/Too-Efficient (“Just too efficient”)
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@timbray Great shares.
Khare's essay ... wow ... so much going on in my world that relates, including a theme of "reducing cognitive load" in this AI-for-learning workshop I got myself into. Its ... not going so well.
Pretty clear we lack the neuro-physiological capacity for this acceleration. Organizationally and individually, we also have a very, very poor grasp of what cognitive and metabolic activities are the real contributors to "productivity" as well.
@timbray at our office, we are noticing a huge drop in Comp Sci co-op applications. The next generation is convinced there’s no future in programming thanks to AI hype. Feels like tech is painting itself into a corner.
@timbray I personally believe that something like a 20 hour work week is ideal for humans to flourish, with the condition that anything a person makes outside those hours belong entirely to them. It gives people enough structure to do “organized work” for society to function on some sort of schedule, but leaves more time for them to do unstructured, or communal work, or leisure.
@timbray Fantastic blog. And prescient. One thing someone explained to me about efficiency has stuck with me:
Efficiency is making sure that when some capacity is available, there is work waiting for it. Effectiveness is making sure that when there's some work to be done, there's capacity waiting for it.
In the business world, "work to be done" is some kind of customer activity: checking out at the grocery store, serving food, whatever. Better to have the customer waiting and the people fully utilized than to have people not fully utilized and have customers never wait.
@paco @timbray My brain pulls so many things into patterns. Your efficiency vs. effectiveness makes me think about the Region of Waterloo's current panic over not having the water supply to support development goals.
Nothing has worsened about the water supply. The 'problem" is that someone realized we could not have a water distribution system aiming to operate at 100% capacity 24/7/365 and not risk catastrophe, and called it out. "Efficient is not Effective" encapsulates that perfectly.
@timbray I was very disappointed when I learned that Yegge had overdosed on AI koolaid: https://bird.makeup/users/steve_yegge/statuses/1965991591367295403