The most famous study is on Javanese farming: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agricultural_Involution

In terms of software development, here's a blogpost from 2025, by a professor at Sussex Uni: https://stunlaw.blogspot.com/2025/07/involution-and-artifici...

There are also some studies in China on the concept but I'm less familiar with that literature.

> The most famous study is on Javanese farming:

I had thought that 'involution' was just a literal translation of the Chinese term, since I've never heard of the English word in this sense. To me it would just mean "turning inside out".

But things appear to be the other way around; that paper was apparently titled Agricultural involution in 1963.

It's very striking that the blog post mentions the paper, names the phenomenon "involution", and then comments that it's similar to "what Chinese social theory calls 内卷", while completely ignoring the fact that 内卷 is transparently a calque of "involution".

内 "inside", 卷 "roll".

I have been thinking of measuring it along these lines perhaps... https://www.gitclear.com/the_ai_code_quality_maintainability...

But they have a closed sourced software so I would have to find or create an open one in that case.

Happy to hear if you have any ideas on study design!

It's atomic, and one can't usually add value beyond a low threshold. If we're seeing more words–or tokens–used over time for a task which one cannot reasonably argue has gotten more complicated in that time, it would be direct evidence of involution. If you can relate that to competition for VC dollars or customers, that takes you over to Neijuan.

Read "Amusing ourselves to death" for exemple; written as a criticism of TV-media in the 80s but even more applicable on the short-form content of today.

Put Toqueville in a time-machine. Would he really regard the current state of society as something that should be aspired to?

Watch a televised primary or presidential debate from mid 20th century and you will be astounded at the quality of argument and focus of the discussion.

I think most people severely underestimate how far public discourse has fallen.

If you’re eating vegan cheeses and whatnot you’re probably not doing so hot. Or impossible burgers. Or any other manner of “invented” food that is not essentially basic agrarian or hunter-gatherer.

Conversely, wildlife play important ecological purposes and can be hunted sustainably.

Wild life can also be useful in processing things we cannot eat and grows in abundance (grass) into things we can eat (cows).

Everything in moderation…

The economies of scale work differently for billions of mouths vs one mouth.

Wildlife hunting has zero emmisions! Even lower emmisions than agricultural products! If you are serious about lowering emmisions, lets push that!!!

This is like claiming seafood is very expensive to produce, and then give imported caviar as an example.

I recommend you check any healthy eating table for vegans and vegetarians. Bread, beans, rice, legumes aren't exactly billionaire luxuries.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vegetarian_Diet_Pyramid

However, even though I think Sennett is right saying that the drive to constantly release new features go against core ideas of craftsmanship, I think he underestimates the productive forces that cause this behaviour. For example, he argues that the reduced craft-aspect of programming today isn't necessarily because craftsmanship is less productive. While I agree in that the quality of production would be higher in a more craftsmanlike paradigm, but that the release of "more stuff", more features, new programs etc, would be lower. I don't think it comes down to 18th century ideas that we've ingerited. As long as the productive forces reward high quantities of new and shiny features then we will continue to receive software like Windows 10.

Not sure it’s good riddance that they’re turning away their own citizens over such a small, likely unnecessary(?), tax.

The Ayn Rand philosophy holds that the people at the top are working hundreds or thousands of times harder than the rest of us.

The modern socialist view is completely contradictory, where most of the people at the top are supposed to be doing even less than a construction worker, but they're rich because of the return on capital or the right to extract some sort of rent.

Everyone knows people at the top get paid more, even in socialist/communist societies this is the case. Now whether this is because of birth privilege, good social connections, politicking, actual hard work. It's pretty well a constant that's held across time & differently structured societies. I guess what I'm trying to say here: there's always people jockeying for position. Pretending we're in some sort of utopia won't give the average person a good experience.

Second. While the hard work is most definitely over exaggerated, it's not uncommon that hard working people usually end up better off then not hard working people. There's also the saying/belief that people make their own luck. And I am firmly in the camp that luck, whether it's made on their own accord or blindly stumbled into, is a probably the biggest unspoken factor because it takes away from narratives of self-made etc.

Perhaps the difference between a good CEO and a bad CEO is 100-1000000x the average worker's productivity, or even more. I suspect the real disagreement is: does that justify paying a CEO 10-100000x more than the average worker, even if they only work 1.5x as hard? From the perspective of a company it may be worthwhile, but I can see how some people might feel that's a little unfair.

1. Already strained government services need to bear increasing input, affecting waiting times and employee workloads, which is bad.

2. LLMs are empowering citizens to appeal in a social security landscape which often require expert-level knowledge to navigate, which is good.

3.This phenomenon says more about the complexity of our social security systems than it does about LLMs, hopefully prompting our governments to review and start thinking about social security reform.

Including Voter Roll Purge requests? That’s in the paper as well.

Child protective services has a tip line.

2b. LLMs are empowering bad actors to exploit loopholes and collect benefits they're not entitled to.

The assumption from a lot of commenters seems to be that these are all legitimate claims and appeals, not a gold rush to get money from the government while the getting's good. In the end it will be the good faith actors that suffer - both those relying on these benefits to survive who will have to jump through more hoops to prove it and those funding the system with their taxes.

The political zeitgeist is to always blame the "bad people", the "welfare queens" and the "undeserving" as the problem with the system. But never the complex system that's seemingly designed to benefit things like corporations extracting as much wealth from the system as they can. Or politicians ear marking the money for things they want to do, rather than the people that put the money in the system.

So, yea, your reasoning just really doesn't hit me in the heartstrings at all.

You should worry more about your parents whose benefits are jeopardized by stress to the benefits system.

Don’t audits usually find that vast majority of benefits are valid and correctly applied?

So I dug a little deeper: roughly 94% of Medicare/Medicaid dollars and 89% of SNAP dollars passed audit reviews in 2025, but I can't find any national percentages for beneficiary fraud rates overall (which is sort of what we are talking about).

Provider fraud does appear to be the main driver of healthcare losses if we look at the enforcement evidence, but that does not mean every improper payment is abuse. It does seem the programs are audited quite extensively (unlike what some other comments in this thread are claiming).

Stressing the benefits system includes improper payments, fraud, and even the perception of fraud or anything else that decreases political support. It also includes the effective denial of service that this paper documents.

It should not be controversial to expect high integrity for a system that pays out money. “Its OK, its just a minimum of $186B in improper payments in 2025, not fraud” shows that it doesn’t have high integrity and that you don’t expect it to.

This paper makes a distinction between direct operational strain and harm created by governments' responses (like adding fees, procedural barriers, and other types of friction in the system). The second part is where my concern is, when bureaucracy is meant to suppress questionable claims it can also delay or deter legitimate benefits.

The paper says it doesn't/can't make definitive claims about AI's impact, but says the strain is moderate. The conclusion does not seem to suggest any severe operational risk to these agencies/systems. Only 9 of 84 potential cases involved benefits or social protection, and it says most cases are good-faith users.

So, I do question what in the paper would show that the burden is large enough to jeopardize benefits? The main finding seems to be that friction in the system may itself effectively deny legitimate access.

Response to your edit: the $186 billion is GAO's government-wide estimate across 64 different programs and not a fraud figure or addressing individual benefits. It contains administrative and document errors, indeterminate payments, and underpayments. And expecting integrity in a system doesn't prevent criticism in the form of asking whether added enforcement bureaucracies cause more harm to legitimate beneficiaries than it prevents in that system.

What “system”? Are you talking about? Social security? How is social security designed to maximize corporate wealth extraction?

If you mean the more nebulous “system” (“the system, man”), or capitalism, etc. then you’re equivocating.

I see the opposite, where LLMs and purchased datasets will make it easier for governments to create additional barriers for taxpayers seeking welfare.