Humanity has a proven infinite capacity for 'make work'. What that will mean for you depends on whether you will be lounging, poisoning and backstabbing in Capital City, or breaking large rocks into little rocks in the Districts for your next cup of porridge.
What will be left for us to work on?
141–150 of 291 posts
Re: What will be left for us to work on?
#142You 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"...
But this assumes the ultimate "want" is "stuff" like houses, cars etc. But that's all just a means to an end or at least secondary to the real want, which is sex. For now at least, that requires people.
Re: What will be left for us to work on?
#143I have been writing software for over 40 years and have had a long time interest in and some work in AI over that time. I wouldn’t say this gives me any more prognosticating power about how all of this is ultimately going to go, but I believe we're soon nearing an area of plateauing; whether that's because the science itself is plateauing or the intervention of governments is going to force plateau it. So if things c…
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…
Yeah, I kinda feel like OP is missing the fact that it kinda already is the way they described. The majority of devs are mediocre at best and work on variations of mostly the same CRUD apps for different businesses. Only a relatively small number of people work on complicated stuff that requires CS knowledge.
There's a much bigger group of people building games with Unity than the number of people building complicated engines like Unity. Same for [insert Javascript framework here].
Re: What will be left for us to work on?
#144The answer to this question after a lot of reflection: games. AI can slop fork or clone existing software well, but a clone of an existing game is pointless, it's basically guaranteed to be derivative and worse than the original game, and games aren't so expensive that you can't just buy the original. AI can't know if new mechanics or angles to an existing genre will feel good to play, or if a new genre is fun, that…
all game stores are flooded with AI slop. good luck competing
Re: What will be left for us to work on?
#145I 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…
> phrases like “This is not a slogan. It’s a framework” which immediately devalued the work for me
Why? Because it resembles the typical "You're not just implementing a text editor, you're reshaping the text editing landscape"?
Re: What will be left for us to work on?
#146I have been writing software for over 40 years and have had a long time interest in and some work in AI over that time. I wouldn’t say this gives me any more prognosticating power about how all of this is ultimately going to go, but I believe we're soon nearing an area of plateauing; whether that's because the science itself is plateauing or the intervention of governments is going to force plateau it. So if things c…
That’s a good analogy, but I think the reason we currently need the "nurse" role is the need to interact with the physical world. Most software products don't require this step, so the demand for “nurses” or "doctors" will likely decrease. If robotics technology continues to advance, the number of nurses in real world will also decrease in the foreseeable future.
Nurses will likely be one of the last professions to be significantly impacted by robotics. Drivers, factory, warehouse, agriculture workers, cashiers etc will be automated away way before them.
It's just hard to design robots that can handle patients that may be simultaneously fragile, mentally handicapped and aggressive in a way that doesn't hurt them and respects their rights. It can take multiple human nurses to do a seemingly simple thing like changing a diaper.
Re: What will be left for us to work on?
#147You 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…
Exactly. And taking unpleasant work from humans has always been the ultimate goal of technology as a whole.
Re: What will be left for us to work on?
#148Earlier quoted context omitted.
Maybe? But it's at my day job, and it's because I was able to write a prompt which automates having Copilot review uploaded scanned PDFs of invoices with checks (and the bank line obscured with a pen, so no PII) and then write a batch file which renames the files per a file-naming convention, removing the need to open them in batches of 50, find the Invoice ID, re-save using that filename, then quit and re-launch Ado…
Extracting structured data from PDFs is something people have been doing forever, way before LLMs, there are state of the art OCR tools out there you can use as a lib, it’s hardly something that justify using a LLM
Yes it is. It's a poorly defined problem, and it needs to be correct, and existing OCR tools aren't perfect. Are the end of the day, it comes down to money and time, and throwing them at ChatGPT is cheap and fast enough to be used.
Re: What will be left for us to work on?
#149The 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…
The utility of AI is too high for the opposition to be real. It's like money or heroin. Someone who says money is the root of all evil will likely take a billion dollars if offered if for free. Everybody says they hate heroin but once you try it, you can't get enough of it.
You can simultaneously hate something and be addicted to it. Addiction and liking are not the same thing.
Re: What will be left for us to work on?
#150The 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…
Are they really opposed to AI or are they just opposed to anything that old people do/like, just like every generation? The moment they get their own AI that us dinosaurs don't understand they'll be all over it.