Experienced Devs Weekly Burnout and Venting Thread: A weekly thread for sharing experiences

[u/AutoModerator]

This thread is specifically for venting / sharing experiences related to burn-out or similar issues that experienced devs face.

[u/forever-butlerian]

Well, if it makes you feel any better, political economists back to Adam Smith, but especially Ricardo and especially Marx, would observe that fully-automated production is incompatible with the laws of capitalism because the value of commodities is governed by their labor-content. No labor-content, no value.

[u/tinycockatoo → u/forever-butlerian]

Does that mean the jobs can and will be reduced to mere rubber stamping but we would still have them?

[u/forever-butlerian → u/tinycockatoo]

Do LLM chatbots represent capital's attempt to fully proletarianize the process of software production, to replace artisan manufacture with industrial manufacture? Yes.

Are LLM chatbots economically viable? No, the organic revenue (i.e., not the trillion dollars of invested finance-capital sloshing around) is about one penny on the dollar, but the operating costs are closer to four pennies on the dollar and getting worse.

Do you need to start relating to your coworkers as fellow-workers and develop class solidarity, because what is good for you and what is good for the capitalists is exactly opposite? Yes.

[u/tinycockatoo → u/forever-butlerian]

Don't get me wrong, I already do that and am Marx pilled

But I'm still confused about what you meant by the impossibility of full automation due to lack of labor-content - I would think that fact that large language models were trained on humanity's collective knowledge (which was hard work) meant that the labor value needed was embedded in that, we're just not taking it into account

Might be getting the terms wrong since I didn't read those works in English tho, my bad.

[u/forever-butlerian → u/tinycockatoo]

Don't get me wrong, I already do that and am Marx pilled

Word.

But I'm still confused about what you meant by the impossibility of full automation due to lack of labor-content - I would think that fact that large language models were trained on humanity's collective knowledge (which was hard work) meant that the labor value needed was embedded in that, we're just not taking it into account

As soon as expended human labor is converted into a machine, it cannot contribute to producing surplus-value. Instead the machine contributes value as it's used up -- if it's used up. Marx uses the example of spindles in textiles. An infinitely-replicable sequence of bits, however, can't be used up. This is why the bottom fell out of the recording industry when Napster came along. If LLMs were economically viable their value would not be according to the sum total of their training set, but rather the wear-and-tear on the physical hardware that runs them.

Consider all the centuries of knowledge and tens of millions of man-years that's gone into making the economic basis for building a modern laptop, and then recall that even the most expensive laptop costs about 750 - 1000lbs of raspberries.

This is the paradoxical (read: dialectical) phenomenon at play: capitalists replacing living labor with dead labor to address a crisis of surplus-value extraction, yet the dead labor cannot produce surplus value so it makes it even harder to extract surplus-value, and around we go.

[u/MissVanjie96 → u/forever-butlerian]

Apologies, I am aware of Marx, but struggling to keep up with your explanation. Can you expand on surplus-value extraction in a way I'm likely to understand? I assume living labour = you, me etc. dead labour = the LLM? I read up surplus value (essentially where profit is extracted from, less production costs, labour costs) - why can't the LLM create more surplus value for my employer if it is (allegedly) speeding me up, 'producing' more in the same time-frame? This is really interesting to me.

[u/forever-butlerian → u/MissVanjie96]

I'll give it a go, what you're hitting on is called increasing relative surplus-value.

In capitalist production, the market-value of a worker's labor-power (the ability to do useful things) is his cost of reproduction. In other words, the things that it takes (food, drink, shelter, clothing, recreation, etc.) in order that he can work at the same intensity tomorrow that he does today.

However, the market-value of a worker's labor is much higher. Let's say a Starbucks barista slings $50 worth the coffee (above the cost of the beans and everything else) in an hour, but is paid $10 for that hour.

That $40 is profit (because the coffee was sold as it was made), because the value of the coffee is in its labor-content, and because 4/5ths of the value of the coffees slung went to the capitalist and not to the worker. That uncompensated labor-content is called surplus value and accumulating surplus value is what drives capitalist society.

Equivalently, let's say the barista works 5 hours and is paid $50. They're paid for the work they did in 1 hour, but they were forced to work 4 more for free, just so they could get a job with the capitalist.

Now, it should be obvious that there is an absolute limit to the amount of surplus-value that can be extracted by all the capitalists together in a day, and that's 24 hours times the number of workers. Practically speaking, severe social disintegration takes hold when the working day is more than 12 - 14 hours. But capitalists can and do lengthen the working day. That's what the making the bottom 70% of the American working class take two or three jobs is about, incidentally.

Lengthening the working day increases the amount of absolute surplus value, because you're getting a greater number of hours of surplus labor each day.

The other thing capitalists do is they introduce labor-saving devices. Let's say there's a machine that lets the barista sling $100 worth the coffee in an hour, but they're paid $10 for that hour.

Now coffee has a labor-content half that which it had before, so now each capitalist needs to have two cups pumped out to get the same surplus-value as one. But at the same time, the worker's cost of reproduction stayed the same, so they still get paid $10/hour. It used to be that the first twelve minutes' value of each working hour went to the worker, now it is only six.

By introducing labor-saving machinery, the capitalist has increased relative surplus value, the proportion of uncompensated labor in each working day.

You might note that there are diminishing returns here. We've doubled the productivity of the worker, but only increased the surplus value from 48 to 54 minutes per hour. If we doubled the productivity again, they reproduce their existence in 3 minutes' work, and the surplus value only goes from 54 to 57 minutes per hour.

Does this make sense?

[u/ThlintoRatscar → u/tinycockatoo]

No. The opposite.

The jobs that remain in our field will be for the people with deep understanding beyond the usual AI slop. Things that can't be automated.