The toilet.
What will be left for us to work on?
81–90 of 291 posts
Re: What will be left for us to work on?
#82Maybe the bottleneck will be the people who have to think of new tasks for AI? That is, markets do saturate; customer demand has limits. After it peaks, what will be left for AI to work on?
Re: What will be left for us to work on?
#83Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is a very short-sighted, and exceedingly common, take. Until the machines aren't owned by anyone (or owned by everyone, take your pick on the phrasing), the owners of the machine have no need to keep you alive. This take is basically "Don't worry, people like Sam Altman are looking out for us"...
It's quite a good metaphor. What used to happen to an old horse? How many horses do you see now that the world has moved to tractors[0]? I can't wait to be kept in agistment by my overlords, fed on treacle and oats, ridden in circles once a fortnight, and shot when I break a leg. [0] https://www.researchgate.net/figure/United-States-Farm-based...
> I can't wait to be kept in agistment by my overlords, fed on treacle and oats, ridden in circles once a fortnight, and shot when I break a leg.
Luxury horse living during the heyday of working horses and pit ponies, "horse power" wasn't left ideal for a fortnight.
> How many horses do you see now that the world
Personally, a surprising number perhaps, there's a pony club at the top of my street in town, and the area is still littered with horses and other livestock.
This isn't my area, but it's not dissimilar: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45623799
Full size image: https://live-production.wcms.abc-cdn.net.au/a26664f6500a7c74...
Re: What will be left for us to work on?
#84He's basically saying that even though AI capability is high and rapidly increasing, it is not reliable, creative or tasteful enough to replace humans. Further he implies that it will take decades before this is the case. But we already do have have some kind of measurement of most of these types of side factors, and they actually aren't at zero and are increasing rapidly. So the implication that they will not be hum…
It’s already the case that I’m no longer paid to type source code into a computer, but rather to control agents that do that. There’s still plenty of demand for human expertise and labor. It’s possible that this will change as well. What gives me hope that I won’t be completely useless in the future is Marx’s labor theory of value, which states that the value of a commodity is determined by the amount of human labor time invested in it. His reasoning as to why this is the case makes sense to me, even though other economists argue against it. Marx also argues that technological progress, which offers a market advantage here and there in the short term, tends to become widespread in the medium and long term due to competitive pressure, so that in the end, all that remains is human labor time. Seen this way, it doesn’t matter how much better AI becomes. In the end, human labor always floats on top of it like a layer of fat on soup. This does not rule out the possibility that the human labor that remains will be shit, but preventing that is a matter of political action.
Re: What will be left for us to work on?
#85The other issue is Gen Z and Gen A are now very much opposed to AI. I'm wondering with those two sets of generations who already have a very negative view of AI, how AI can survive that coming tsunami of change. According to WRITER’s 2026 Enterprise Adoption Survey, 44% of Gen Z employees admit to sabotaging their company's AI strategy in at least one way compared to 29% of employees overall. Sabotage behaviours incl…
Ironically, I think AI boosters are probably turning into AI's biggest obstacle right now. I see so much "adapt or die!" bullshit here (people literally saying that!), and yet when I talk to other professionals I know in real life everybody is just kind of sick of all this. It's utterly exhausting and the AI industry is looking and acting more and more desperate. They've basically put themselves in a stupid position where it has to replace everyone's job for the investment to even make sense, and it's just not happening. I'm longing for the day when the investment money runs out and the grifters go grift on something else.
Re: What will be left for us to work on?
#86You need to first address 1)What is work? 2)Why we need to work? Animals don't "work". Not atleast for their own sake. If there is enough green pasture and water around, they don't even migrate to other places. So if work is meant to provide food and shelter and if machines can ensure that, humans don't need to "work". Wealth is only a reserve capacity to help future generations so that they don't need to work for th…
This is a very short-sighted, and exceedingly common, take. Until the machines aren't owned by anyone (or owned by everyone, take your pick on the phrasing), the owners of the machine have no need to keep you alive. This take is basically "Don't worry, people like Sam Altman are looking out for us"...
Disparity in ownership of machines is not the main factor that is driving the need for work. It is the un-ending desire (or selling pressure) to have things that require money to buy. Most people work to be able to pay their loans and have things that are perceived to be common needs in their geography and culture.
These "needs" are sometimes enforced by the systems and government so that people don't stay away from the work and "economy" keeps churning. The housing prices could be a way to keep the people working for loan payments.
Instant foods, nursing homes for elderly, creches, roads, commuter trains - are all ways to have more workers and make them focused on work.
Re: What will be left for us to work on?
#87Earlier quoted context omitted.
Just FYI, if you know much about the medical field, nurses tend to do most of the actual work, with highly experienced nurses actually taking up the mantle for many duties often done by doctors. Nurses are in far higher demand, than doctors. Your analogy isn’t necessarily wrong, but it might ignore the extreme importance of nurses. Many medical facilities are only staffed with permanent nurses, with doctors helicopte…
> Many medical facilities are only staffed with permanent nurses, with doctors helicoptering in, from time to time, to take care of specific duties that may require certain licenses, or provide specific advice. Maybe for a very loose definition of medical facilities that includes assisted living facilities. But for example in an ER, nurses come and go with very rapid turnover and it’s common to staff with temporary t…
I think the only metric that matters is total medical care provided on a national / global scale.
It may take vastly more training but on average a full annual physical provides less benefit on average than a 30 second vaccination requiring minimal training. Value creation and skill are wildly different things in the medical profession.
Re: What will be left for us to work on?
#88I think this is an important article that provides a framework how to think and navigate what’s happening. What upset me a bit were phrases like “This is not a slogan. It’s a framework” which immediately devalued the work for me. I have read so much Ai generated text recently, that I developed some AI-fatigue or AI-burnout, and I’m wondering if that might hit more fields - making more humans reject Ai work. To be cle…
I've had this exact feeling about the article. I partly switched off after that paragraph
Re: What will be left for us to work on?
#89Earlier quoted context omitted.
If LLMs reach a point of sufficiently high competence to the point that they're capable of producing usable software from vague, and sometimes contradictory instructions - the same software engineers have to regularly deal with, then at that point software will simply be an expectation of ability in any job. So I think it would be more comparable to something like literacy. There was a time when that was a fairly unc…
> If LLMs reach a point of sufficiently high competence to the point that they're capable of producing usable software from vague, and sometimes contradictory instructions - the same software engineers have to regularly deal with, then at that point software will simply be an expectation of ability in any job. I don’t understand how people can say this and then continue talking about software. So we’re saying machine…
The only truly unprecedented thing is the white-collar part. Otherwise it happened many times over that entire regions where suddenly out of job and job prospects. Automation and offshoring have equivalent impacts on the affected job market.
Re: What will be left for us to work on?
#90Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is a very short-sighted, and exceedingly common, take. Until the machines aren't owned by anyone (or owned by everyone, take your pick on the phrasing), the owners of the machine have no need to keep you alive. This take is basically "Don't worry, people like Sam Altman are looking out for us"...
Disparity in ownership of machines is not the main factor that is driving the need for work. It is the un-ending desire (or selling pressure) to have things that require money to buy. Most people work to be able to pay their loans and have things that are perceived to be common needs in their geography and culture. These "needs" are sometimes enforced by the systems and government so that people don't stay away from…
You are missing my point; if you have no value other than unthinking manual labour to offer the world, why would the world keep you alive?
"Work" doesn't exist to keep people busy, it exists to keep them alive.