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I really wish that machines could just take over at some point and we could be free of the pointless jobs we have.
There are two problems with this: machines can’t do that right now, despite everyone trying to make them, and somehow we humans are amazingly capable of inventing new and new jobs to do, because we somehow hate leisure.
Already almost a century ago Bertrand Russel observed in the Praise of Idleness that we have the capacity to greatly relieve ourselves from the burden of jobs, if not fully then enough to create the space to do excellent, intrinsically motivated things.
Alas, this never happens. We always have to invent some other job. And what’s the point of super AI (please forgive me for using this vague and misleading term, I’m doing so sarcastically) if it can’t even give us a minute more of time with our kids, or tinkering on our personal projects?
Because at its core a “job” is just doing something useful for other people, validated by the incurrence of a large societal cost (your salary).
Humans like to feel useful AND validated. If you remove either we generally become more unhappy. If you remove both it becomes a real problem.
Hence why unemployed people (both of the working class and “too rich to work due my trust fund” variety) have much higher rates of depression. This even extends to people who have jobs, but that feel their jobs are not actually useful (re: big tech workers arbitraging the inefficiency of large organizations to get paid doing very little). They have the validation of the societal cost (the salary) but deep down they know it’s an inefficient mistake.
Intrinsic motivation beyond our base instincts is a myth. Everything you do as a human is in pursuit of external validation, hence why we are social creatures. It’s why you’ve bothered to take the time out of your day to type these words into a box.
Humans finding new useful things to do for other people (jobs) is the engine behind everything good in modern society. So no, it’s not a bad thing.
> a “job” is just doing something useful for other people
So all you need is someone who considers a task useful, and boom, you have another job.
What it that person is out of their mind?
> What it that person is out of their mind?
Then, I believe, the job is called "psychiatric nurse".
we somehow hate leisure
We don't hate leisure. Everyone loves their leisure. What we hate is each other. Unless people are able to accept someone else getting a free ride (even when they're not getting one themselves), some form of ever-increasingly pointless work will be required, because that's how we define whether or not someone has 'earned' their leisure.
I think what bothers people is the idea of having to work to pay for somebody else's leisure. Obviously lots of arguments to be had about the specifics of that, but I think it's more about this than a moralistic concern about "unearned" leisure. Nobody minds much if somebody wins the lottery and lives a frugal and leisurely life on the proceeds.
But that’s the current system. We all work so that 0.001% of the population can hoard wealth, influence our laws and control the media.
That's not remotely true. You forget the default state of humanity is fighting off starvation running naked in the dirt.
The average net profit rate of all business in the US is 7%. To think you’re not a primary beneficiary in such a system is just silly.
I see your point, but it feels like you're engaging in a broader defense of the system rather than directly adressing apercu's concern about wealth concentration and elite influence.
My first draft had examples of what "working to pay for somebody else's leisure" means for different people, but I thought it better to omit specifics in favour of the general point.
> Alas, this never happens.
it never happens because the amount of energy we can collect and consume is still insufficient. We have not reached post-scarcity, not even close in fact.
And i don't see a superior AI being capable of giving us post-scarcity, at least, not within this life time, nor the next. Perhaps in 100 years, that would be possible, if you'd want to be optimistic.
We haven't reached post scarcity, I grant you that, but we have reached a point where we could get away with much more leisure time than in the past. Either that, or all technology is useless.
If AI can outrun hedonic treadmill that would be vast achievement. Even more so if nature isn't destroyed in the process.
>it never happens because the amount of energy we can collect and consume is still insufficient.
Pretty much every developed country is overflowing with stuff, we just don't know how much is enough.
Why 100 years if there's exponential growth? I think it could be more like 50 years.
> we humans are amazingly capable of inventing new and new jobs to do, because we somehow hate leisure.
We don’t. We do generally crave meaning, the only people who hate leisure are the owner class, and they hate leisure for other people. Employees are not out there clamouring for 80h weeks or having to piss in bottles on your 12h shift. Some do like that (sometimes to an unhealthy extent) but that’s a very different consideration.
I really don't want that. The rich will find a way to force us into jobs we dont want. I'd rather develop software than cleaning toilets to be honest...
figuring out how to balance this, could be the intrisincially rewarding role you are looking for in life. So that way we have people who are rewarded with ensuring that there is no outsized bargaining power on the political stage.
Marx figured this out a long time ago. The problem is implementing it.
> I really wish that machines could just take over at some point and we could be free of the pointless jobs we have.
I would take it a step further and question why is everyone assuming that people have to work, whatever the work might be.
Of course the genetic answer is to pay the bills, but what if you didn't had to worry about paying them? How would your life change if you didn't had a mortgage or rent to pay? Would you still spend hours commiting to and back from the office? Would you stick with your current job? What would change in your life?
Once I came across a group of construction workers that were working on a construction site. Half a dozen of them were spending their days wearing fluorescent vests and holding hand-held stop signs on a crosswalk of a low-traffic road. There were more construction workers on that crosswalk than people actually crossing the road. They were there five days per week, from early morning to evening. What a colossal waste of time. I wondered how soul-crushing that would be. Is that how people expect to spend the bulk of their days? Does society benefit anything from those roles?
> I really wish that machines could just take over at some point and we could be free of the pointless jobs we have.
This is already the case for shareholders, and will still be the case in the future as long as automation remains privatized.
The rest of us will need to find a way to eat without working pointless jobs. We aren't getting a slice of the automation pie.
It did happen and continues to happen!!! The average time worked per week has halved over th past 70 years (more so in Europe than the US, but that is also why the US is richer)
It's not just jobs but also chores used to take up significantly more time!
> I really wish that machines could just take over at some point and we could be free of the pointless jobs we have.
Who will own the machines that feed you?
If you aren't contributing anything, why would they care to give you more than the absolute bare minimum to survive?
I don't know, a benevolent, humanity loving oligarch? Or you know, common ownership.
Even with common ownership, why would you be given any more than subsistence? What actual power and influence will you have if your economic value is zero?
I see a future where someone who has the skill and talent to be a surgeon earning millions of dollars is now living in a basic pod, eating rations of slop, exactly the same as everyone else, with no meaningful role or contribution to society.
I'd work for the little more than subsistence that I need to be happy.
The premise is a future where the economic value of your work is zero. Machines do everything better and faster than you.
That was never my premise.
It's also absurd. Machines can't make a person feel powerful because they're controlling another human being.
"I really wish that machines could just take over at some point and we could be free of the pointless jobs we have."
Your words.
No it is not absurd. That is the goal for AGI/ASI sytems and it is an existential threat to human civilization, currently being debated at a very high level.
David Graeber's Bullshit Jobs argues semis convincingly that 40% or so of jobs in the USA don't really have to be done - by the workers own admission.
Certainly if we wanted to, so much of the advertising, scamming, copying other companies, etc. could be done away with without affecting life very much.
We don't even need to wait for AI.
Conversely, even with AI I suspect we will still be expected to work, if anything harder because our labor is relatively less useful
> 40% or so of jobs in the USA don't really have to be done
Many would question that, but if you think it through it probably even higher. Somehow we manage to automate and industrialize pretty much everything, yet everyone still have a job. Previously women stayed at home, removing half of the workforce, and that still worked out fine.
I had a client, they sell cheap furniture. They really didn't need me, because they really didn't need all the IT infrastructure they've built up. Rather than attempting to sell me new cheap ass plastic garden furniture every spring, how about they just sell me really high quality stuff once? Then I don't need to shop with them for the next 25 years. That would save a lot of work right there.
Russell was an aristocrat and enjoyed excellent schooling, and thus knew how freedom and idleness could produce excellence. He was a socialist because he realized that non-aristocrats generally had no shot at his kind of life without it.
Well, yeah, that's rare among aristocracy though. Look at today's billionaires, they'll tell you that you should work until you drop dead.
The problem with this idea is that in a capitalist system, the machines taking over all the jobs means wealth fully concentrating in the capitalist class while taking away all power from labor. In other words, misery for the 99%.
We need a systemic change before we can allow this to happen.
So the problem is capitalism?
In my eyes, yes.
If we had some sort of post-money utopia where the machines would do the work and we could all just do whatever we wanted, AI would be great. But as-is, we'll have a dystopia where AI will allow the rich to hoard ever more while the rest of us loses all leverage.
> could all just do whatever we wanted
Anything except do work that meaningfully contributes to society and makes the best use of your abilities, or that requires significant material resources beyond the bare subsistence level that the system has allocated to you.
What if you want to be a neurosurgeon or radiologist? Forget it. That will be done by machines better than you.
What if you want to travel the world? Why would you be entitled to any significant amount of international air travel, or any at all?
You could hang out and be friends with a lot of people. That's a meaningful contribution that's impossible right now.
Also why should a person be entitled to being a neurosurgeon who has a worse success rate than the magical theoretical machine you're assuming? That's plain selfish.
Exactly. That's the point.
Hanging out with friends? That's what we will be reduced to. Everyone living in a Trailer Park Boys episode.
> could all just do whatever we wanted
No we cannot, because that would be "selfish and entitled".
People ceasing to think because AI can "reason" sounds a lot like people ceasing to go outside and move because now jobs can be done from a computer screen, and so can tasks like grocery shopping, prescription filling, bill paying, services, clothing shopping, take-out food, and more. We lost something when we moved everything online - much of our physical health. I wonder if we won't lose much of our mental health if we outsource physical, on-the-spot thinking to the virtual world, too.
Though of course, there is the argument that using calculators didn't make us more mentally inept, so why would AI? But I'm not sure, this seems different.
> using calculators didn't make us more mentally inept
We (collectively) did lose some skills, that we no longer value as much because we (individually) grew up after the loss happened.
Just like losing a large part of our orientation skills in the GPS era.
Or how happily-single urban people in their 40s don't feel like they've lost anything compared to eg. their grandparents living a married life with three generations living under the same roof, but if you'd taken that person from the past and showed them the option to switch, they would feel the loss.
It is totally possible that the average "2045 human" could be significantly mentally/emotionally atrophied in several ways, while not feeling like anything is missing.
That's a pretty narrow view, I think it depends more on culture.
I live somewhere where (not in North America) where grocery delivery is the norm, food delivery is the norm... online shopping is easy. This all frees up time that we spend outside, in parks, in lessons and study... because these are communal values.
We don't spend our free time in front of screens (though nothing wrong with that if you want it), again, because of culture.
Unfortunately, physical health is not beholden to culture. The sedentary lifestyle in the US and other countries has significantly impacted health outcomes for the population. There is much research on it, enough to not discuss it over and over.
After the Spanish blackout people said there was a silver lining in that it was so nice that people were forced to simultaneously disconnect.
For some of these things there's insidious network effects. If everyone else is doing it being an outlier of resistance is not rewarding. We need ways to collective decide to do things differently.
It’s always a responsibility of an individual. You can look at it the other way around: instead of going outside to do chores you can do them more efficiently online and use the saved time to enjoy higher quality time outside, e.g. in a park instead of a shopping centre.
AI is a powerful tool and it’s already changing the world but it’s still just a tool - the smarter you’re, the more efficiently you can use it. It might change our intelligence but I don’t think it will decrease it.
> It’s always a responsibility of an individual. You can look at it the other way around: instead of going outside to do chores you can do them more efficiently online and use the saved time to enjoy higher quality time outside, e.g. in a park instead of a shopping centre.
But we know this ideal version of events does not happen often, and large populations of people did in fact become a lot more sedentary as a result of not having to do physical activity in day-to-day life.
Technology shapes humanity. Cars preclude roads, roads shape cities, the shape of car-first cities has fundamentally changed how humans interact. The same is true for any technology to an extent.
Whether for better or worse that depends on one's own interpretation and the technology itself. On one extreme you have people who reject all technology after a certain point in time, with rare exceptions thoroughly considered (the Amish). On the other you have people who see technology as the goal, even if it comes at the expense of the genocide of the human race.
The author opens with a story of building ramps and repeating endless combinations until they excel at ramp-building, expanding their possibilities through experimentation until they can say they’ve acquired quite some skill at ramp building.
Consider though, how many ramps would be built if each time they had to first design and injection-mould the ramps? This would slow iteration. Fortunately there are already ramps to play with. The ramps are a tool used to build ramp courses.
AI is also a tool, but it’s a tool for thinking at a certain level of abstraction. The author misses that infinite levels of abstraction exist in thought; in this way having tools of thought to lift you to higher levels lets you play in even more abstract thought-space.
Having AI for the basic bits of thought is like already having ramps ready to go.
I find that the concept of shifted "worth" was nicely done in the series The Orville[1]. This is a surprisingly deep series under a layer of comedy.
The idea is that a device that gives you whatever you want was discovered, and this completely changed the priorities for people. The one that became the most important was "trust". You earn it, you lose it, you are defined by it. I like the concept.
I would be happy to not do a lot of things that are "socially accepted" - job, clean environment etc. and more focus on people relationships as a determinant.
For the inevitable comparison to the advent of the automobile.
You still have to think about how that introduction changed how humans lived. What are the changes that will happen here?
PS: I must add - we talk about LLMs as reasoning machines, but they are narrative machines. They do not reason because they do not have a model making mind. If the content generated is similar enough to expert output, it doesnt matter if it came from a parrot or from a person. Its "good enough" provided it passes inspection.
Any prognotication on our future work habits and mental resilience will have to recognize how verification is the crux of our physical and information economies.
After twenty years building out products in Silicon Valley I have come to the point where I have lost the plot. None of the projects at my last company seemed interesting, none of the projects I see other companies seem interesting. All AI, no substance.
So I’ll just sit at home and build robots till something interesting does pop up or my robots gain sentience and decide I’m the problem.
In my current job hunt, 80% of startups I talked to were AI for X and I fully agree - nalmost all of them were uninteresting or could even articulate why AI would make a difference.
The fear of AI reminds me of the fear of automation, that it will replace us. Part of me understands, part of me doesn't understand. Humanity has been dreaming of the future and writing about it for hundreds of years. It's closer than ever, and a lot of people are terrified that we're not going to have anything left to do.
That's why I think it's a matter of mindset. This is going to sound dumb, but I keep thinking about the interactions between Robert Downey Jr. as Tony Stark and Jarvis in Iron Man. That's the AI I always wanted: something that could do deterministic (here's the weather, here's your schedule) and non-deterministic (research) things.
Jarvis wasn't the inventor. Jarvis was a tool Tony used to invent things.
This might be an unpopular opinion, but generative AI truly is the miracle solution to a lot of my problems. As a solo entrepreneur with a huge, multi-year project that was bordering on impossible to achieve alone, it has done wonders for my ability to follow through on my opportunities and ambitions.
Call me when AI will be able to shortlist 2 job offers ready to be accepted by me and then 2 affordable real estates nearby every job location. Until then don't bother me with it.
> Now that machines can think for us
They don't
But people treat them as if they could. You can already see them using LLM output as "proof" in discussions...
They can simulate thinking or reasoning well enough, better than some humans.
What an overly verbose article.
AI does feel like it sucks the joy out of any human creative endavour by replacing it with effortless, good enough slop.
Why try to engage in the arts when you won't be able to make a living as illustrator or musician because AI slop is good enough to feed the capital machine?
Why try to engage in engineering quality software when the power structure has decided that you better be using AI for it?
Why do anything that makes us think or exhibit any human qualities when it's not the most cost effective way in our lovely capitalist AI dystopia?
All that's going to be left for humans is going to be shitty manual labor that nobody wants to do - sweatshops coming back to the US again soon thanks to the Trump tarrifs! All the intellectually or creatively stimulating work is going away, sacrificed to the machine at the altar of mammon.
If anyone has been going in to art for the commercial opportunities then someone needs to sit them down and explain how bad a strategy that is. Art is a recreational activity that happens to involve money sometimes. Besides, I don't care how good the AI is it can't make a $100 million equivalent to Blue Poles. People are clearly paying for the connection with the human artist rather than the quality of the art.
> Why try to engage in engineering quality software when the power structure has decided that you better be using AI for it?
Why engage in engineering quality software? The reasons haven't changed because AI exists. AI just adds new ways of achieving high quality software outcomes.
I don't mind admitting that I spent a lot of my childhood really annoyed at all the people who seemed to just be smarter than me and there was no clear way to catch up. It is a lot less fair than physical fitness where I could at least train more. Levelling that playing field somewhat is long overdue and - for most people - going to be quite a welcome change.
The reasons have changed. https://x.com/eugeneyan/status/1917034784355979479/photo/1
Our capitalist overlords don't want us to write quality software anymore. They want cheap, disposable AI slop.
Chess has been mastered by computers long ago, and yet people still play it.
But a computer still can't predict all moves, because the number of possible moves exceeds the number of atoms in the visible universe. This fact still blows my mind.
Work is not the same as leisure.
horse riding has been obsolete as a primary mode of transportation, yet still people ride horses for fun.
Well I can only speak for myself, but my interest in poetry (which was non-existent) has spiked thanks to AI responding to random questions on poetry. To the point now, I spend sometime everyday thinking about poems, writing little notes to people and experiencing some real connection over it.
The dream of many (if not most) people here on Hacker News has always seemed to eventually leave tech and work with their hands. AI will just get us there sooner for many professions.
True, it's a cliche but it's my dream also.
Except the dream includes first using a tech salary to pay off a mortgage or at least most of it, and then being able to comfortably work with my hands in some romantic artisanal manner.
AI probably gets me closer to spending 60 hours a week doing back breaking groundwork and struggling to pay the bills.
> good-enough slop
It isn't nearly good enough, as far as I can tell.
Systems that nobody understands because nobody wrote them are unsafe, unmaintainable, and brittle.
Art generated by AI can't be copyrighted so its use can't be controlled.
> Why do anything that makes us think or exhibit any human qualities when it's not the most cost effective way in our lovely capitalist AI dystopia?
If the most optimistic reasonable projections of the AI optimists are true, the decay of human capability by itself among people who rely on AI will be so damaging that those who don't rely on it will become more valuable on the labor market.
If the most optimistic projections aren't correct, then in all likelihood these will continue to be simple tools that nobody should use for anything serious.
And apart from market/labor dynamics, I have seen no evidence that those who shun the use of AI tools are worse off for it (quite the contrary), so the spread of these tools should, if the current tend continues, actually become a rallying cry for and proof of the value of human work and the intrinsicness and necessity of our participation in the worlds we make for ourselves.
The longer the hype continues, the surer I am that it won't replace humans.
> Why try to engage in the arts ... Why try to engage in engineering quality software
Try applying your questions to other areas. Why engage in the study of philosophy, or history, or ancient languages, when barely anything of use ever comes out of it? For that matter, why engage in the study of the sciences, when you are statistically very unlikely to make a significant contribution. Why engage in the sports, if you almost certainly won't become an Olympic champion, and quite likely not even a professional sportsman? Why work in geriatrics or palliative care when your patients will keep dying?..
There are things that we do for fun, or for personal fulfilment, or just because...
> Why do anything that makes us think or exhibit any human qualities when it's not the most cost effective way in our lovely capitalist AI dystopia? ... All that's going to be left for humans is going to be shitty manual labor that nobody wants to do
Well, there you go then. The reason for doing something that 'makes us think' etc. is because this is much more desirable for the doer than 'shitty manual labor that nobody wants to do'.
That's all fine and dandy, but in our capitalist system, we have to do something monetizable to be able to survive, unless we were lucky enough to be born into wealth. AI is taking away all enjoyable avenues to do so.
So how do historians, or philosophers, or classical linguists currently survive in our capitalist system?
Mostly through family wealth.
"Why try to engage in the arts if you won't make money" is perhaps the most capitalist dystopian statement I've read the whole year.
I sing with my friends regularly. I'm not expecting to ever get paid a dime.
I don’t think they mean “getting rich,” they mean “enough to get by”.
Many art forms can and should require more time and investment than simply getting together with friends a couple of times a month.
Even then, for some people getting enough free time to do that is a struggle. They need to monetise their spare time by working second jobs, and so on, instead of pursuing art.
"Enough to get by" is still a variant of "make money"
Have people forgotten how enjoyable dancing, painting, making music or any of the other arts are, even if you don't get paid a penny
But if you don't get paid a penny, unless you're born into wealth, you will need to do some other endavour for most of your day if you don't want to starve. The point is that all that's going to be left to do to prevent starvation is the crappiest jobs - all the enjoyable ones are being automated away.
> all the enjoyable ones are being automated away.
You keep asserting this but I have to say that I don’t know that to be true.
Can you explain a little more concretely why you draw this conclusion?
Precisely. The percentage of people making a living from their creative pursuit is vanishingly small.
We should be looking to move that number up, not down.
That is the capitalist dystopia we live in. I don't like it either. If we lived in a post-capitalist society, AI wouldn't be the threat it is.
> Why try to engage in the arts when you won't be able to make a living as illustrator or musician because AI slop is good enough to feed the capital machine?
Maybe this is an uncommon view on HN, but personally I engage in the arts to scratch that itch of creative expression and emotional release, not with the goal to eventually monetize it. Even without AI, my poetry would never realistically be "good enough" to make it into a career, but that doesn't make it any less fulfilling for me.
In our capitalist system, we have to do something monetizable to be able to survive, unless we were lucky enough to be born into wealth. AI is taking away all enjoyable avenues to do so.
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