The Weeking #4
Two insightful essays, and a fun place to play...
Horses
An interesting analogy - written by an employee at AI powerhouse Anthropic - comparing the improvement in the automobile at the start of the 20th century, versus the number of horses, then mapping this onto human labor versus AI, in the mid-21st century.
I was one of the first researchers hired at Anthropic.
This pink line, back in 2024, was a large part of my job. Answer technical questions for new hires.
Back then, me and other old-timers were answering about 4,000 new-hire questions a month.
Then in December, Claude finally got good enough to answer some of those questions for us.
In December, it was some of those questions. Six months later, 80% of the questions I'd been being asked had disappeared...
On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs: A Work Rant - David Graeber
A short, crisp and profoundly influential essay by the late David Graeber about the high percentage of jobs that basically involve servicing the internal bureaucratic needs of the business. Do these jobs add value? Why do we generally value them more than other, more essential work? AI is coming for these roles first, so Graeber's observations are more current than ever before.
...rather than allowing a massive reduction of working hours to free the world’s population to pursue their own projects, pleasures, visions, and ideas, we have seen the ballooning of not even so much of the ‘service’ sector as of the administrative sector, up to and including the creation of whole new industries like financial services or telemarketing, or the unprecedented expansion of sectors like corporate law, academic and health administration, human resources, and public relations. And these numbers do not even reflect on all those people whose job is to provide administrative, technical, or security support for these industries, or for that matter the whole host of ancillary industries (dog-washers, all-night pizza delivery) that only exist because everyone else is spending so much of their time working in all the other ones.
These are what I propose to call ‘bullshit jobs’...
The Wonderful 3D Portfolio of Bruno Simon
A playful, interactive 3D portfolio created by digital artist Bruno Simon - his scientific visualisations are award-winning - and amazing!
Hope you're having a great week,
Mark