The AI Vampire

Rings true, I wonder how often AI will get the blame for poor management, overwork, stress, burnout and all the side effects of covid, long Covid etc.

In Scenario A, you decide you’re going to impress your employer, and work for 8 hours a day at 10x productivity. You knock it out of the park and make everyone else look terrible by comparison.

In that scenario, your employer captures 100% of the value from you adopting AI. You get nothing, or at any rate, it ain’t gonna be 9x your salary. And everyone hates you now.

And you’re exhausted. You’re tired, Boss. You got nothing for it.

Congrats, you were just drained by a company. I’ve been drained to the point of burnout several times in my career, even at Google once or twice. But now with AI, it’s oh, so much easier.

Now let’s look at Scenario B. You decide instead that you will only work for an hour a day, and aim to keep up with your peers using AI. On that heavily reduced workload, you manage to scrape by, and nobody notices.

In this scenario, you capture 100% of the value from your adopting AI.

In this scenario, your company goes out of business. I’m sorry, but your victory over The Man will be pyrrhic, because The Man is about to be kicked in The Balls, since with everyone slacking off, a competitor will take them out pretty fast.

But in Scenario A your company is honestly pretty precarious too, since you’re running all your employees on the ragged edge of burnout.

The answer to “who captures the value” must lie somewhere in the middle, or we’re all pretty screwed

»Steve Yegge →