[HN Gopher] Will AIs take all our jobs and end human history, or...
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Will AIs take all our jobs and end human history, or not? (2023)
Author : lukakopajtic
Score : 57 points
Date : 2026-01-28 16:48 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (writings.stephenwolfram.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (writings.stephenwolfram.com)
| reactordev wrote:
| (2023)
| saberience wrote:
| ChatGPT, please summarise this long essay by Stephen Wolfram into
| a couple of pithy sentences:
|
| TLDR: AI won't "end work" so much as endlessly move the
| goalposts, because the universe itself is too computationally
| messy to automate completely. The real risk isn't mass
| unemployment--it's that we'll have infinite machine intelligence
| and still argue about what's worth doing.
| ori_b wrote:
| Why would we argue if the machine is better at knowing what's
| worth doing? Why wouldn't we ask the machine to decide, and
| then do it?
| evilantnie wrote:
| There are infinite things worth doing, a machines ability to
| actually know what's worth doing in any given scenario is
| likely on par with a human's. What's "Worth doing" is
| subjective, everything comes down to situational context.
| Machines cannot escape the same ambiguity as humans. If
| context is constant, then I would assume overlapping
| performance on a pretty standard distribution between humans
| and machines.
|
| Machines lower the marginal cost of performing a cognitive
| task for humans, it can be extremely useful and high leverage
| to off load certain decisions to machines. I think it's
| reasonable to ask a machine to decide when machine context is
| higher and outcome is de-risked.
|
| Human leverage of AGI comes down to good judgement, but that
| too is not uniformly applied.
| ori_b wrote:
| For what human leverage of AGI may look like, look at the
| relationship between a mother and a toddler.
|
| As you said: There's an infinite number of things a toddler
| may find worth doing, and they offload most of the
| execution to the mother. The mother doesn't escape the
| ambiguity, but has more experience and context.
|
| Of course, this all assumes AGI is coming and super
| intelligent.
| c22 wrote:
| Why would we let a machine decide what's worth doing? In what
| way could its decisions be better? Better for who?
| ori_b wrote:
| Well, because people are lazy. They already ask it for
| advice and it gives answers that they like. I already see
| teams using AI to put together development plans.
|
| If you assume super intelligence, Why wouldn't that expand?
| Especially when it comes to competitive decisions that have
| a real cost when they're suboptimal?
|
| The end state is that agents will do almost all of the real
| decision making, assuming things work out as the AI
| proponents say.
| autokad wrote:
| back in 2023 when this article was written, you'd get downvoted
| into oblivion on hacker news for using AI to summarize a very
| long article/post.
| dzdt wrote:
| (2023)
| eloisant wrote:
| AI is evolving so fast, and you post an article from 2023?
| AlexandrB wrote:
| What a weird complaint given that the post is trying to address
| the general question, not whether ChatGPT 3.5.0.1 or whatever
| replaces humans today.
| tony_cannistra wrote:
| Not much of a historian, I see.
| alexjray wrote:
| Even if they automate all our current jobs uniquely human
| experiences will always be valuable to us and will always have
| demand.
| wincy wrote:
| Sounds like it's time to become a Michelin Star chef. Or a
| plumber.
| scottyah wrote:
| Seems like entertainers/influencers are doing the best.
| akoboldfrying wrote:
| No doubt the top influencer is doing better than the top
| plumber, but I'd say the median plumber is streets ahead of
| the median influencer.
| sramam wrote:
| What fraction of the remaining population would be able to
| pay for these services?
| b112 wrote:
| For AI, yes.
|
| For AGI? Do you care about uniquely ant experience? Bacteria?
|
| Why would AGI care? Which now runs the planet?
| IncreasePosts wrote:
| Considering the lengths many people go to help preserve
| nature and natural areas, yes, I would sayany people care
| about the uniquely ant experience.
| AlexandrB wrote:
| I think it's academic because I suspect we're much further
| from AGI than anyone thinks. We're especially far from AGI
| that can act in physical space without human "robots" to
| carry out its commands.
| falcor84 wrote:
| That's an interesting formulation. I'd actually be quite
| worried about a Manna-like world, where we have AGI and
| most humans don't have any economic value except as its
| "remote hands".
| lifetimerubyist wrote:
| > Do you care about uniquely ant experience? Bacteria?
|
| Ethology? Biology? We have entire fields of science to these
| things so obviously we care to some extent.
| Mordisquitos wrote:
| Why would AGI choose to run the planet?
| ar_lan wrote:
| This is honestly a fantastic question. AGI has no emotions,
| no drive, anything. Maybe, just maybe, it would want to:
|
| * Conserve power as much as possible, to "stay alive".
|
| * Optimize for power retention
|
| Why would it be further interested in generating capital or
| governing others, though?
| b112 wrote:
| I think you have it, with the governing of power and
| such.
|
| We don't want to rule ants, but we don't want them eating
| all the food, or infesting our homes.
|
| Bad outcomes for humans, don't imply or mean malice.
|
| (food can be any resource here)
| adrianN wrote:
| Why would it care to stay alive? The discussion is pretty
| pointless as we have no knowledge about alien
| intelligence and there can be no arguments based on hard
| facts.
| myrmidon wrote:
| Any form of AI unconcerned about its own continued
| survival would be just be selected against.
|
| Evolutionary principles/selection pressure applies just
| the same to artificial life, and it seems pretty
| reasonable to assume that drive/selfpreservation would at
| least be somewhat comparable.
| stackbutterflow wrote:
| Tech billionaires is probably the first thing an AGI is
| gonna get rid of.
|
| Minimize threats, dont rock the boat. We'll finally have
| our UBI utopia.
| bigbadfeline wrote:
| > AGI has no emotions, no drive, anything. > * Conserve
| power as much as possible, to "stay alive"
|
| Having no drive means there's no drive to "stay alive"
|
| > * Optimize for power retention
|
| Another drive that magically appeared where there are "no
| drives".
|
| You're consistently failing to stay consistent, you
| anthropomorphize AI although you seem to understand that
| you shouldn't do so.
| simianwords wrote:
| > AGI has no emotions, no drive, anything
|
| why do you say that? ever asked chatgpt about anything?
| badsectoracula wrote:
| ChatGPT is instructed to roleplay a cheesy cheery bot and
| so it responds accordingly, but it (and almost any LLM)
| can be instructed to roleplay any sort of character, none
| of which mean anything about the system itself.
|
| Of course an AGI system could also be instructed to
| roleplay such a character, but that doesn't mean it'd be
| an inherent attribute of the system itself.
| simianwords wrote:
| so it has emotions but "it is not an inherent attribute
| of the system itself" but does it matter? its all the
| same if one can't tell the difference
| reducesuffering wrote:
| Instrumental convergence
|
| https://www.lesswrong.com/w/instrumental-convergence
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instrumental_convergence
| Mordisquitos wrote:
| > _Instrumental convergence is the hypothetical tendency
| of most sufficiently intelligent, goal-directed beings
| (human and nonhuman) to pursue similar sub-goals (such as
| survival or resource acquisition), even if their ultimate
| goals are quite different. More precisely, beings with
| agency may pursue similar instrumental goals--goals which
| are made in pursuit of some particular end, but are not
| the end goals themselves--because it helps accomplish end
| goals._
|
| 'Running the planet' does not derive from instrumental
| convergence as defined here. Very few humans would wish
| to 'run the planet' as an instrumental goal in the
| pursuit of their own ultimate goals. Why would it be
| different for AGIs?
| mwigdahl wrote:
| Despite the false advertising in the Tears for Fears
| song, everybody does _not_ want to rule the world.
| Omohundro drives are a great philosophical thought
| experiment and it is certainly plausible to consider that
| they might apply to AI, but claiming as is common on
| LessWrong that unlimited power seeking is an inevitable
| consequence of a sufficiently intelligent system seems to
| be missing a few proof steps, and is opposed by the
| example of 99% of human beings.
| danaris wrote:
| ...Well, why would aliens care, when they take over the
| planet? Or the Tuatha De Danan come back and decide we've all
| been very wicked? Because right now, those are just about as
| likely as AGI taking over.
| otabdeveloper4 wrote:
| Probably more likely. There's at least _some_ evidence that
| aliens and Tuatha De Danann actually exist.
| sodapopcan wrote:
| For those not living terminally online, yes.
| falcor84 wrote:
| There's a bit of a circular argument here - even if we human
| always assign intrinsic value to ourselves and our kin, I don't
| see a clear argument that human capabilities will have external
| value to the economy at large.
| AlexandrB wrote:
| "The economy" is humans spending money on stuff and services.
| So if humands always assign intrinsic value to ourselves and
| our kin...
| ben_w wrote:
| For economic purposes, "the economy" also includes
| corporations and governments.
|
| Corporations and governments have counted amongst their
| property entities that they did not grant equal rights to,
| sometimes whom they did not even consider to be people.
| Humans have been treated in the past much as livestock and
| guide dogs still are.
| kadushka wrote:
| This will break down when >30% of people are unemployed
| BurningFrog wrote:
| "The economy" is entirely driven by human needs.
|
| If you "unwind" all the complexities in modern supply chains,
| there are always human people paying for something they want
| at the leaf nodes.
|
| Take the food and clothing industries as obvious examples. In
| some AI singularity scenario where all humans are unemployed
| and dirt poor, does all the food and clothing produced by the
| automated factories just end up in big piles because we naked
| and starving people can't afford to buy them?
| falcor84 wrote:
| There's nothing definitional about the economy being driven
| by human need. In a future scenario where there are
| superintelligent AIs, there's no reason why they wouldn't
| run their own economy for their own needs, collecting and
| processing materials to service each other's goals, for
| example of space exploration.
| gdilla wrote:
| sex with humans - still hard to replicate. for now. sex workers
| should charge by the second since techbros are so used to that
| model now.
| ramesh31 wrote:
| >Even if they automate all our current jobs uniquely human
| experiences will always be valuable to us and will always have
| demand.
|
| I call this the Quark principle. On DS9, there are matter
| replicators that can perfectly recreate any possible drink
| imaginable instantly. And yet, the people of the station still
| gather at Quark's and pay him money to pour and mix their
| drinks from physical bottles. As long as we are human, some
| things will never go away no matter how advanced the technology
| becomes.
| TheOtherHobbes wrote:
| In Star Trek lore replicated food/drink is always one down on
| taste/texture from the real thing.
| guluarte wrote:
| More food chains keep opening up even when there is plenty of
| food available. The pie just gets bigger. Every tech shift was
| supposed to "end work" and yet here we are, busy with jobs that
| didn't exist 20 years ago.
|
| The real issue isn't jobs dying. It's who gets the money from all
| this and whether new needs show up fast enough to give people
| something to do. With software we don't really know the limit
| yet, unlike food where your stomach tells you when to stop.
| nemomarx wrote:
| In the long run transitions like this work out and new jobs
| show up, but the people who had the old jobs don't always make
| the jump or keep equivalent pay.
|
| Could be it shakes out in a generation or two, of course.
| mips_avatar wrote:
| Outside of America people aren't really stressed about AI. Like
| you go to Vietnam or Vienna they mostly just think that they will
| have a good life with AI. It's uniquely American to believe that
| your life will end when AI takes your job.
|
| The problem isn't the AI it's that your access to basic rights is
| intermediated by a corporate job. American's need to decenter
| their self worth from their jobs. Like when I quit Microsoft I
| literally thought I was dying, but that's all an illusion from
| the corporations.
| testfrequency wrote:
| I would argue this says more about how Americans view and treat
| life as their work instead of treating the world as their life.
| briantakita wrote:
| It's part of the messianic end-times fervor that has been with
| America since the beginning...which is useful for imperial
| management...As it provides a constant source of existential
| judgement and dread...that religious/quasi-religious
| administrators can exploit.
| pelasaco wrote:
| Vienna? lol
| tomjakubowski wrote:
| An art school in Vienna recently admitted an "AI student" as
| a publicity stunt.
|
| https://www.euronews.com/next/2025/04/02/this-ai-
| successfull...
| shevy-java wrote:
| I think you do have a point here, but I should like to point
| out that, since you mentioned Vienna, barely anyone here sees
| AI being tightly integrated into anything. Sure, smartphone
| users may use it; and exams at universities may say "don't use
| AI", so people use it - but for most everyday stuff it is
| really barely noticeable here. This is why I also disagree with
| "they will have a good life with AI", because it assumes that
| AI plays a huge role here, which it really does not.
|
| The AI hype is definitely much bigger in the USA - on that part
| we concur.
| mips_avatar wrote:
| Yeah but even if you believe the hype, if you're in a
| functioning country you don't think that your ability to
| house your family wrests on AI being worse at excel than you.
| ewuhic wrote:
| I am from Vienna, and this is completely false. Likewise, my
| friends from many countries, incl. Vietnam, also share the
| sentiment you describe as "American". Your point has no
| standing.
| mips_avatar wrote:
| Ok well I didn't meet everyone in Vienna or Vietnam, but
| those I did meet hadn't been laid off in the name of AI
| (yesterday three of my friends were laid off from Amazon).
| And if you're laid off in Vienna you still have access to
| healthcare, and there's a functioning safety net, and just
| generally a sense that you're not alone in this. In the
| united states my apartment has a homeless man living beneath
| it and every night you hear him either screaming because he
| doesn't have access to drugs or laughing because he does.
| There's a not so subtle attitude that maybe people like that
| deserve to die. So yes maybe people in Vienna don't like AI,
| but you are wrong that they fear it in the way Americans do.
| ewuhic wrote:
| You have a very rosy picture of non-Pax-Americana.
| mips_avatar wrote:
| Well I also visited Ethiopia this year and I got to hear
| first hand about the genocide in Tigray, I'm very aware
| of the horrifying atrocities that happen when social
| order and human rights break down.
| ewuhic wrote:
| weird flex but ok
| Avicebron wrote:
| It's because most people are already teetering on the edge. The
| difference between working in software vs anywhere else in the
| US is that the average atlassianer or similar is spending 3
| months 4 times a year writing js from beach resorts up and down
| Europe while keeping a condo in new york. The rest can't afford
| to own a home or dental insurance. So when people are
| threatening those people who barely have anything as it is they
| get heated.
| alexjplant wrote:
| For a while my job was part of my identity in the way you
| describe not because "lol hypercapitalist American" but because
| I like computers and computers also pay the bills. I was
| writing software and doing technical stuff from a young age
| because I enjoyed it. I fell into doing it professionally
| because it was an obvious path. It didn't help that when you do
| this older people like it because they can use you as
| free/cheap labor which an impressionable kid might mistake for
| actual praise. It turns out I like other stuff too but it's
| hard to talk to people socially about obscure New Wave bands
| and continental philosophy and 90s neo-noir films whereas
| computers and gizmos and apps are a common frame of reference.
|
| I guarantee you that these people exist in other countries too.
| Not everybody is a tech bro strawman.
| advael wrote:
| To "decenter [one's] self worth from [one's] job" would
| presumably require the fact that one's "access to basic rights
| is intermediated by a corporate job", no? This is a policy
| problem that needs to be solved by collective action, not a
| mindset problem that can be solved by personal growth
| mips_avatar wrote:
| No you have to decenter yourself from your pay to achieve it.
| People accept things like cutting of medicaid because they
| see their job success as a moral success. There's a lot you
| can do to start being the good in the world that doesn't
| require Washington's permission.
| advael wrote:
| I can't parse what distinction you're trying to draw here.
| When I say "collective action" I mean exactly things like
| exerting political pressure toward objectives like
| expanding rather than reducing healthcare coverage provided
| by governments, such as medicaid. The notion that solutions
| that involve changing the policy of governments "require[s]
| Washington's permission" seems to reject the notion that we
| exert power collectively via democracy, but your proposed
| example of what someone shouldn't accept suggests that this
| is an issue of how people fail to see the value in exerting
| said power, for which the prescription would presumably be
| doing so? I don't understand what you're driving at or even
| why you think we're in disagreement
| mips_avatar wrote:
| Sorry I think you're completely right, I'm frustrated
| that collective action here is so hard to come by. I
| think that we feel really isolated because we don't see
| ourselves as part of a larger whole and becoming less
| isolated involves leaving behind this identity tied to
| our economic output.
| onlyrealcuzzo wrote:
| > It's uniquely American to believe that your life will end
| when AI takes your job.
|
| It's probably because it's uniquely American for a sizable
| chunk of the workforce to have cushy jobs that _appear_ ripe
| for the picking.
|
| AI is not going to immediately replace food service work,
| manual labor, farming, hospitality, etc.
|
| But it _might_ replace quite high-paid software jobs, finance
| jobs, legal jobs, etc. One, if AI is good at _anything_ it 's
| things _at least tangential_ to this. Two, these have costs
| high enough that off-setting is _at least worth trying_.
|
| My suspicion is that _ultimately_ it will lead to more of these
| types of jobs, though it could easily come with a huge
| reduction - and the jobs aren 't guaranteed to be in the same
| countries.
|
| You could create 3x as many of these jobs, and still end up
| with -25% of them in the US. Who knows.
| mips_avatar wrote:
| The tech jobs were cushy because the tech companies bribed
| ambitious people to keep them from starting their own
| companies. Like it wasn't about hiring them because you
| needed them it was to keep them from competing against you.
| Like this was always a deal with the devil, but the idea that
| Microsoft has more of a right to the monopoly it has over OS
| operating systems than their employees have access to their
| healthcare is wrong. Like I think a lot of people are waking
| up to the idea that the promises their companies made to them
| were like the promises the devil made in that theirs fine
| print and they sold the company more than they realized.
|
| Additionally all the startups offering to automate
| whitecollar work are going to run into a problem when they
| realize the jobs never needed to be done.
| danaris wrote:
| > It's probably because it's uniquely American for a sizable
| chunk of the workforce to have cushy jobs that appear ripe
| for the picking.
|
| What an arrogant statement.
|
| Lots of people outside America have cushy jobs.
|
| What's much more likely to be uniquely American is that if
| you lose your job there's nothing there to help you.
| jsight wrote:
| A big part of it is insurance. Family coverage can easily cost
| $15-20k per year in the US. Avoiding the need to pay for this
| out of pocket drives a lot of people into less than optimal job
| dependence.
| mips_avatar wrote:
| That and housing, and inflation during covid. Like there's
| this idea that you don't really deserve anything in the
| United States.
| raincole wrote:
| > your access to basic rights is intermediated by a corporate
| job
|
| Lmao. America has worse social welfare than most developed
| countries, but it's still a heaven compared to most of the
| world. What you can find in food bank is a feast for billions
| of people on this planet.
|
| American people are stressed about AI because American people
| are _expensive_. Like hella expensive. So the incentive to
| replace American workers is very strong.
| BirAdam wrote:
| If all jobs were taken by AI in a short time span, the companies
| owning and operating those AIs would go out of business as no one
| would be able to afford the products made by the AIs. This is an
| unlikely scenario. Not all things will be made/run by AIs in a
| short time. It is far more likely that specific jobs in specific
| industries will be taken by AI, and AI will slowly take the labor
| market. This will drive down prices on products, services, and
| labor. Once human labor's price is low, and once many product
| prices are low, the overall employment level of humans will rise.
| The effect of AI then is actually just deflationary pressure on
| all prices over time.
|
| The really scary part is what happens to all of the newly
| unemployed people between the falling prices part and the rising
| employment part. My guess is, governments and markets won't move
| quickly enough and unrest is what happens.
| kelseyfrog wrote:
| Except the services that are intractably human: educators,
| judges, lawyers, social workers, personal trainers, childcare
| workers.
|
| Those will suffer the Baumol effect and their prices will rise
| to extraordinary levels.
| p1esk wrote:
| The best educator I've ever had is ChatGPT.
| kelseyfrog wrote:
| How scalable is that in the sense that teachers have been
| obsoleted and we can run zero-staff schools?
| onlyrealcuzzo wrote:
| One would assume - if this were to happen - that supply and
| demand would bring prices back down, as everyone would rush
| to those fields.
| kelseyfrog wrote:
| Our increased efficiency producing manufactured goods,
| technology, food, and clothing has already produced this
| effect in healthcare, education, childcare, and more.
| That's how the effect works.
|
| The only question is, are we prepared to deal with the
| social ramifications of the consequences? Are we ok with
| new crises? Imagine the current problems dialed up 10x. Are
| we prepared to say, "the market is in a new equilibrium,
| and that's ok"?
| oops wrote:
| Healthcare, education and childcare are either free or
| affordable in almost all developed countries.
|
| Even in places where these services are expensive, it
| does not seem to be because the workers are highly paid.
| oops wrote:
| I imagine personal trainers and childcare workers would see a
| drop in demand and perhaps also an increase in supply if a
| bunch of people suddenly lost their jobs to AI.
| ben_w wrote:
| There's already examples of lawyers offloading work to
| ChatGPT even though they weren't allowed to. Also educators
| (and students), though if all other work is automated, what's
| there to educate for, and how would the prospective students
| pay?
|
| Social work, childcare, for now I agree:
|
| My expectation is that general purpose humanoid robots, being
| smaller than cars and needing to do a strict superset of what
| is needed to drive a car, happen at least a decade after self
| driving cars lose all of the steering wheels, and the
| geofences, and any remote safety drivers. And that's even
| with expected algorithmic improvements, if we don't get
| algorithmic improvements then hardware improvements alone
| will force this to be at least 18 years' between that level
| of FSD and androids.
| danaris wrote:
| The big tech AI barons absolutely claim that their LLMs can
| replace educators, judges, lawyers, and personal trainers.
| I've seen some vague claims about childcare robots, but for
| whatever reasons anything that's not pure software appears to
| be currently outside their field of vision. They're unlikely
| to make any claims about social workers because there's not
| enough money in it.
|
| No; the services that seem most _intractably_ human, at least
| given the current state of things, are very much those in
| personal care roles--nurses, elder care workers, similar
| sorts of on-the-ground, in-person medical /emotional care--
| and trades, like plumbing, construction, electrical work,
| handcrafts, etc.
|
| Until we start seeing high-quality general-purpose robots
| (whether they're humanoid or not), those seem likely to be
| the jobs safest from direct attempts to replace them with
| LLMs. That doesn't mean they'll be safe from the overall
| economic fallout, of course, nor that the attempts to replace
| knowledge work of all types will actually succeed in a
| meaningful way.
| raincole wrote:
| There are millions of jobs that can be fully automated with
| 20th century technology but are still done by humans today
| because 1) third world labor is just too cheap 2) unions and
| other job protection policies.
|
| Therefore the scenario where 'all jobs being replaced in a
| short time span' is simply impossible.
| ben_w wrote:
| Sometimes that delays it.
|
| But when the tech is good enough and cheap enough then the
| picketing unions find their only barganing chip, that of
| witholding their labor, has become a toothless threat: no
| matter how long and hard a person of the profession
| "computer"* refuses to work for me for daring to have an
| unauthorised "electronic brain"**, the absense of that labour
| will not cause me any loss.
|
| * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_(occupation)
|
| **
| https://archive.org/details/electronicbrainh00cook/mode/1up
| brewdad wrote:
| We are already at a point where the richest 10% of Americans
| represent half of total consumer spending. A lot of companies
| would fail but plenty of them would survive just fine if we
| assume AI won't take literally ALL of the jobs.
|
| As for the civil unrest, I see Minneapolis as a bit of a dry
| run of what it would take to remove large numbers of presumably
| poor minorities along with anyone else who objects. The job is
| clearly more than the leadership expected but it still seems
| within the realm of possibility given the fact the minority
| party leaders are barely saying no to those in power.
| AnotherGoodName wrote:
| Also just to be clear on the outcome of what you said: Humans
| will be cheaper than AI in order to compete.
|
| AI uses 10litres of water and 10kwh of power per day to digg a
| hole? You'd better do it for less human!
|
| I'm not sure on the human needs costs vs the AI costs and what
| lifestyle it would allow me. I'm sure as shit not having kids
| in such a world. I suspect it's ghetto like meager living while
| competing against machines optimised to do a job.
| ASalazarMX wrote:
| If machines did all the repetitive, labor intensive, productive
| work, including building more machines, the natural consequence
| would be a very disruptive rethinking of economics. Post-
| scarcity is only a disaster if money exists. People would still
| work, but as a hobby, not as a way of survival.
|
| Think of it as if in a few generations, everyone had the
| motivations of a rich junior, for better or worse.
|
| IMO, this is a natural consequence of the industrial
| revolution, and the information revolution. We started to
| automate physical labor, then we started to automate mental
| labor. We're still very far form it, but we're going to
| automate whole humans (or better) eventually.
|
| Edit: I think I replied to the wrong comment, feel free to
| ignore this.
| myrmidon wrote:
| "Disruptive rethinking of economics" is a very optimistic way
| to put this IMO.
|
| The big problem I see is that there is little incentive for
| "owners" (of datacenters/factories/etc) to share _anything_
| with such hobbyist laborers, because hobbyist labor has
| little to no value to them.
|
| All the past waves of automation provided a _lot_ of entirely
| new job opportunities AND increased overall demand (by
| factory workers siphoning off some of the gained wealth and
| spending it themselves). AI does neither.
| ef2efe wrote:
| Who cares who owns the data center? The govt can send in
| the army and nationalise it... Lol as if you really believe
| that a bunch of people will actually control everything and
| the govt wont?
|
| Think harder.
| funkyfiddler369 wrote:
| of course they can, but that's a process, and a reactive
| one at that.
|
| the government won't control uptime, ever.
| pelasaco wrote:
| those are just "wishful thinking" or "Noble lies" that we are
| used to in the post-truth world. Until now, only creative
| jobs are going away. Music, Arts, Software development..
| Construction Work, Garbage Collector etc, are much safer than
| expected after the "Robot Revolution"
| Veedrac wrote:
| > the companies owning and operating those AIs would go out of
| business as no one would be able to afford the products made by
| the AIs
|
| What do you think money is...?
|
| Money is a way to indirectly trade labour and goods. If a job
| is automated, that labour doesn't disappear into the aether,
| it's still in the tradable pot of total goods and services. You
| cannot empty a pot by filling it. A world where a company
| though automation has made there nobody else to productively
| sell to is a world where _by definition_ they own all the
| output that they could otherwise have traded for.
| mannanj wrote:
| > If all jobs were taken by AI in a short time span, the
| companies owning and operating those AIs would go out of
| business as no one would be able to afford the products made by
| the AIs
|
| I think The companies would go out of business if the
| government did not subsidize them as a matter of public or
| national security interest. Do you think that would not be the
| case? It doesn't take much for a company with money to lobby
| for this and for the power of marketing and mainstream media to
| make the public perceive this as the right decision - in fact a
| study of our history would reveal this as the more likely
| scenario so as a company racing to render the labor market
| obsolete its in their interest to disrupt it to capture any
| amount of it.
| ef2efe wrote:
| The end game is nationalisation lmao. How people cant see
| this is mad...
|
| It wouldnt be the first time in history a govt has taken into
| their hands an organisation that is deemed too powerful.
| funkyfiddler369 wrote:
| if the government is owned by corporations via the stock
| markets than governments taking over organisations is
| privatization via a majority shareholdership and not
| nationalization.
| ef2efe wrote:
| Are you seriously this delusional? THe leaders of tech
| firms operate at the behest of Trump. Not the other way
| round.
| mannanj wrote:
| Who funds those tech firms? It's not Trump. His power is
| mostly theater to his constituents and those who funded
| Trump: spoiler: he's not entirely self funded, and some
| of his funding is at least from others so he's conflicted
| in his self interests to others. We call this a classic
| conflict of interest.
| ericmcer wrote:
| We might just keep making more jobs and coming up with more
| busy work to keep people grinding away for 40 hours a week.
|
| If you look at 1940, women were ~24% of the workforce. Now in
| 2025 they are ~48%. The numbers are probably similar with
| immigrant workers having increased greatly in the last 80
| years.
|
| If you view AI workers as just more labor flooding the
| workforce it might have a similar affect. If we flooded the
| 1940s economy with 10s of millions of qualified women and
| immigrant laborers people would have viewed it as devastating
| to the economy, but introduced gradually over time we arrive at
| a point now where we fear what would happen if they went away.
| shevy-java wrote:
| This was written in 2023 though.
| recrush wrote:
| We should enjoy using up our quota instead of working ourselves
| to the bone.
| empath75 wrote:
| > "Computers can never show creativity or originality". But--
| perhaps disappointingly--that's surprisingly easy to get, and
| indeed just a bit of randomness "seeding" a computation can often
| do a pretty good job,
|
| ---
|
| This is, I think, not what people mean when they say "creative"
| or "original".
|
| Creativity is not simply writing something nobody has written
| before, as he said, that would be trivial and doesn't even
| require a computer, you could just shuffle a deck of cards and
| write out the full sequence and chances are no other person in
| history has written down that sequence before.
|
| And I think Borges made a reasonable argument that simply writing
| down the text of Don Quixote verbatim could be a creative act.
|
| Creativity is about _intentionally_ expressing a _point of view_
| under some constraints.
|
| When people say LLMs can't be creative, what I think mostly they
| are getting at is that they lack intentionality and/or a distinct
| point of view. (i do not have a strong opinion about whether they
| do or if it's impossible for them to have them)
| myrmidon wrote:
| A big short-term risk that I see is that AI is going to cripple
| wealth redistribution mechanisms that we currently rely on.
|
| Most willing persons have access to income by providing labor
| right now. If the value of that labor diminishes because AI can
| do most of it for cheaper/free, that is a big problem because
| wealth/class barriers become insurmountable and the american
| dream basically dies completely.
|
| Automation in the past suffered much less from this because only
| a subset of jobs was affected by it, and it still relied on human
| labor to build, maintain and operate the machines, unlike AI.
|
| I'm curious if AI is gonna spawn comparable "workers rights"
| movements like in the past, but I would expect inequality to
| increase a lot until some solution is found.
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| (2023)
|
| Some discussion then:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35177257
| pelasaco wrote:
| A country automates everything and builds paradise on Earth --
| and the next day, a neighboring country invades it. People are
| still people. Even with all the AI in the world, two rockets
| hitting the power plants and we're back to the Stone Age. I hope
| the people making decisions for us have thought through all these
| scenarios and risks.
| yodon wrote:
| I read it. He used many words. Did he say anything?
| dang wrote:
| Discussed at the time (of the article):
|
| _Will AIs take all our jobs and end human history? It's
| complicated_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35177257 -
| March 2023 (172 comments)
| gizajob wrote:
| Not.
| HPsquared wrote:
| AI will Jevons Paradox human labour.
|
| Tasks that aren't currently feasible, will become feasible.
|
| That's if AI ends up being as productive as they say it will be
| CrzyLngPwd wrote:
| Take all jobs? Yes.
|
| End human history? No.
| tsoukase wrote:
| If an LLM hallucinates in 1% of occasions and gives subpar output
| in 5%, this kills his effectiveness to replace anyone. Imagine a
| support guy on the other side of the phone to speak gibberish 10
| times a day. Now, imagine a doctor. These will never lose their
| jobs.
| Bratmon wrote:
| > Imagine a support guy on the other side of the phone to speak
| gibberish 10 times a day.
|
| A massive improvement?
| simianwords wrote:
| but llm's dont speak gibberish 10 times a day even now. from my
| usage, chatgpt has not said one obviously strange thing since
| o3 came out.
| HEmanZ wrote:
| What are you working on that they are so knowledgeable?Even
| the best models absolutely make stuff up, even to this day. I
| literally spend all day every day working with them (all
| latest ChatGPT models) and it's still 10-15% BS.
|
| I had ChatGPT 5.2 thinking straight up make up an api after I
| pasted the full api spec to it earlier today. And built its
| whole response around a public api that did not exist. And
| Claude cli with sonnet 4.5 made up the craziest reason why my
| curl command wasn't working (that curl itself was bugged, not
| the obvious it can't resolve the dn it tried to use) and
| almost went down a path of installing a bunch of garbage
| tools.
|
| These are not ready to be unsupervised. Yet.
| HEmanZ wrote:
| But maybe your point is that it isn't gibberish, it's
| "seems correct but isn't" which is honestly more dangerous
| simianwords wrote:
| you are incorrect. "seems correct but isn't" is fine as
| long as the other times it is accurate at high enough
| levels.
|
| "seems correct but isn't" is like the most common mode of
| humans getting things wrong.
| simianwords wrote:
| for coding, if you have not hooked up your workflow to a
| test -> code feedback loop, then you are doing it
| incorrectly. i agree it doesn't get things right all the
| time but this loop is important to correct it.
|
| for other things like normal question answering in the
| chatgpt window, it hasn't really said anything incorrect..
| very very few instances.
| einrealist wrote:
| Unless the economy crashes and I die to the consequences, there
| are so many pre-AI hard-cover books to read.....
| HNisCIS wrote:
| Lets assume auto-complete does continue to progress at a rate
| that threatens most knowledge worker jobs and then we manage to
| automate the rest by using it.
|
| There is a particular mental disorder where people will horde
| wealth at absolutely all costs, personal or societal, until
| everyone else is dead (see NZ bunkers). We commonly see this as
| "the billionaire class".
|
| _IF_ things go in that direction we need to be ready to depose
| all of these billionaires. I mean that quite seriously.
|
| _IF_ this future comes, there is a very quickly closing window
| where preventing them from killing all of us for their own gain
| is possible. After a point, surveillance and their control over
| state violence will be so complete that it 's impossible to do
| anything about it.
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