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> That creates fresh roles. We could see model shepherds who curate synthetic fraud datasets for insurers, prompt‑pack designers in Nairobi who fine‑tune Midjourney outputs, or historians in California labs who flag hallucinated citations. None of these roles are glamorous, but they are all essential, and what they mostly resemble are the proto‑IT departments of 1965: clunky and over‑specialized, but seeds of much larger sectors. If education systems and gig platforms can scale these complements quickly, gains can diffuse more broadly. Wow. And that's the best-case scenario in the article. Explain to me again how that is the glorious future in which everyone is better off. I think an important lens to view those developments with, apart from income and income security, would be alienation [1]. The industrial revolution brought alienation with respect to physical labor: Workers were not able to identify with (and learn the entire process of creating) a manufactured good like in preindustrial times. Instead, they were made to specialize on one specific production step inside the factory, which changed their role to the proverbial "cog in the machine". Suddenly, they weren't working to produce a good anymore, they were working "for the factory". If the article's vision plays out (the "Shared Upswing" one, I.e. the good scenario) then the same alienation process will play out for cognitive labor: You won't think (and gain the knowledge/experience) to come up with a solution for problems that other people have, you will think to do some nebulous and hard to quantify improvements for an AI, so that can think about how to solve the actual problems - as directed by its owners. I.e. you will work "for the AI". Even if (if!) those jobs stay economically viable enough to make a living, they sound extremely unfulfilling and much more psychologically draining than today's jobs. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marx%27s_theory_of_alienatio... |