Any other software developers out there remember the mythical man hour? It comes from Fred Brooks’ classic book The Mythical Man–Month which argues that adding more people to a late software project often makes it even later. This is also known as Brooks’s Law.
The man‑hour is “mythical” when tasks are not perfectly partitionable and require significant communication, shared context, and integration.
I think in the age of artificial intelligence we need to be revisiting this classic complexity insight as it applies across a world where we understand even less about how the time of input drives its notional value.
Measuring productivity in hours is a relic of a past labor era. And most workers have little incentive to improve output when they aren’t paid for it.
If we had quiet quitting during the pandemic where jobs could be done in minimal ways we see another type of value capture mismatch between labor and firm. We are seeing what Fabian Steltzer calls Dark leisure. Others call it shadow user innovation. This is innovation happening through employee adoption of new technologies that is opaque to management.
the reason ppl hide their AI use isn’t that they’re being shamed, it’s that the time-based labor compensation model does not provide economic incentives to pass on productivity gains to the wider org
so productivity gains instead get transformed to “dark leisure”
Anthropic released a study on the supposed stigma attached to using artificial intelligence at work. Humans are already reacting to artificial intelligence as if it were an existential threat. Except it’s mostly existentially freeing at this point. Anyone who has used commercial language models on healthcare can attest to that. So why are hiding its use?
Even coders are doing it. And who can blame them. It’s a lot less fun for some folks to coordinate a swarm of agent than it is to write code for a living. If you wanted to be a product manager, well you’d already be one.
The boss makes a dollar and I make a dime so that’s why I prompt on the company dime!
We are seeing the early artificial intelligence era take off collide with industrial-era systems of management that are no longer relevant in age of increasing complexity.
We’re putting intelligence into systems designed to measure hours and surprised when there is a misalignment. A Twitter mutual who has a theory of consciousness systems believes this is a form of time violence.
Human beings can tolerate NP hard moments of complexity, but cannot survive continuous low-grade complexity
The gap between human adaptability and systemic inertia is now wide enough to generate an entirely new form of harm: time violence
We just cannot keep up with the varieties and types of complexities that are arising so any advantage that can be used is being used. And you’d want to hide that advantage. Sharing it has no rational basis. I find that disappointing.
I’d rather we not vice signal artificial intelligence as it only harms us. The value capture won’t always match up but the gains to be made are worth having so keep using it where it works for you.