AI and leisure time

Yesterday I offered, as one of nine reasons why AI wouldn't be leading to noticably more and better software for everyone, that efficiency gains might instead be captured by people making the software: Software teams are capturing a lot of the speedup in the form of more leisure or quasi-leisure time. (To greatly simplify: software teams are offering 2x speedups to their companies. They're then using tools that allow them to work 10x as efficiently, and taking nice long coffee breaks.) It turns out a lot of people really dislike this idea. Understandably so! Here are some further notes: As I tried to make clear, this is one explanation among many. I do think this happens more than never (see below), but I definitely do not think that a lot of the AI productivity gains are going to programmer leisure time. But! What exactly is supposed to happen if a programmer or team (i) has access to AI tools, (ii) is structurally blocked from increasing output by more than (say) 2x, and (iii)…