[warent]

You’re right and validating the point.

A specific part of GP’s comment keeps getting overlooked:

  So the problem isn't robots, it's the structure of how we humans rely on jobs for income.

Humans being forced to trade time for survival, money, and the enrichment of the elite, is a bug. We are socially conditioned to believe it’s a feature and the purpose.

Nobody is saying robots should replace human connection and expression

Edit: tone

[mlyle]

> > Humans derive a lot of meaning from being useful and valued.

Sure, humans relying on jobs for income is a problem with transitions. But people finding purpose in jobs is a problem, too.

Right now how we get there is being "forced to' -- and indeed that's a bug. But if we transition to a future where it's pretty hard to find useful work, that's a problem, even if the basic needs for survival are still being met.

I haven't had to work for 25 years. But I've spent the vast majority of that time employed. Times when I've not had purposeful employment as an anchor in my life have been rough for me. (First 2-3 months feels great... then it stops feeling so great).

[warent]

Thanks for sharing. Absolutely right; people need to feel useful and valued—not to mention, jobs can help us get out of the house and connect with people.

Just to be clear, are you saying the only life work that you can find fulfillment in is work that can be perfectly automated and handled by AI? Do you have an example of what you mean?

[mlyle]

> Just to be clear, are you saying the only life work that you can find fulfillment in is work that can be perfectly automated and handled by AI?

No. I'm not saying that applies to me, but it may be getting dangerously close to many people. During my career, I've done CS, EE, controls, optics, and now I teach high school.

I do worry about CS in particular, though. If one's happy place is doing computer science, that's getting pretty hard.

LLMs feel to me like a 60th percentile new college grad now (but with some advantages: very cheap, very fast, no social cost to ask to try again or do possibly empty/speculative work). Sure, you can't turn them loose on a really big code base or fail to supervise it, but you can't do that with new graduates, either.

I worry about how 2026's graduates are going to climb the beginning of the skill ladder. And to the extent that tools get better, this problem gets worse.

I also worry about a lot of work that is "easy to automate" but the human in the loop is very valuable. Some faculty use LLMs to write recommendation letters. Many admissions committees now use LLMs to evaluate recommendation letters. There's this interchange that looks like human language replacing a process where a human would at least spend a few minutes thinking about another human's story. The true purpose of the mechanism has been lost, and it's been replaced with something harsh, unfeeling, and arbitrary.

[skeaker]

Not to sound harsh but this is a personal flaw. It's hard to find a better way to phrase it than "you need to get a life outside of work." Many, many people would kill to have not needed to work for the last 25 years because they have better things to use their time on outside of it.

[mlyle]

I've done plenty of those self-actualizing things. I've learned to fly airplanes. I've done hobby projects. I've gotten into astronomy. I've learned to make things in many kinds of ways (carpentry, sheetmetal, machining, welding, 3d printing, lithography) and have overkilled so many projects. I've gone to my kids' games. I've 100%-ed a lot of RPGs. I've travelled. I've read too many books.

But I want to be -useful-, too. I enjoy helping and working with kids in my current job more than I enjoy filling my time in empty ways (well, up to a point: summer sure feels nice, too :).

Money gave me the freedom to define the relationship with work in the way that works best for me; and it turned out that's more valuable to me than the ability to escape work entirely.

[beeflet]

It is not a bug, it is a law of nature. The world has limited resources, time and labor being one of them.

The technology proposes a source of labor for the elites so abundant that they will not need to trade their wealth with the eaters.

However much resources you consume, it will be too much to buy for your labor. You will be priced out of existence.

[ellenhp]

You're off base here for what may be a rather subtle reason. While I am not a marxist, I do think that the purchasing behavior of the wealthy makes much more sense when you think about things in terms of the labor theory of value.

The evidence for this is all around us. As automation of manufacturing has brought former luxuries into reach for middle-class families, those with means move on to consuming items that require more and more labor to produce. "Handmade" scented soaps. "Artisanal" cheeses. Nobody with money wants their wedding invitation to arrive at a destination with machine-canceled postage. It's tacky. Too automated, too efficient. In fact, I bet the ultra-wealthy don't even use postal mail for delivering their invitations, because it's not labor-intensive enough to be tasteful. Private couriers are probably the move. You can see this pattern over and over again once you know what to look for.

There will always be a demand for human labor, because value is a human construction. That said, the rate at which the economy will change because of AI (if the True Believers are to be believed) is probably too fast for most workers to adapt, so you may not be entirely wrong in your conclusion depending on how thing shake out, but the way you got there is bogus imo.

[warent]

Elites unilaterally claiming and reaping the benefits of automation (i.e. consolidation of wealth) is not a law of nature.

[beeflet]

It is. It's not something you can wave away with some new political system.

Automation results in centralization of power. It transforms labor-intensive work to capital-intensive work and reduces the leverage of the working class.

You could have a system that distributes wealth from automation to the newly-unemployed working class, but fundamentally the capital-owners are less dependent on the working class, so the working class will have no leverage to sustain the wealth distribution (you cannot strike if you don't have a job). You are proposing a fundamentally unstable political system.

It's like liebig's law of the minimum or any other natural law. You can try to make localized exceptions in politics, but you are futilely working against the underlying dynamics of the system which are inevitably realized in the long term.

[visarga]

I think you misread the situation. The move is towards open models, small efficient models, what makes you believe there will be a moat around AI for automation?

[GTP]

I think the point here is that a lot of automation still requires "real-world" components (read: hardware). E.g. robots, factories with said robots and so on. So you being able to run LLMs on your PC is still not going to put big factories owned by big companies out of business.

[SkyeCA]

> so the working class will have no leverage to sustain the wealth distribution

As has been seen time and time again throughout history the commoners will only put up with so much and when all else fails and they start suffering a bit too much leverage comes from the end of a barrel.

[mattgreenrocks]

Correct. If we don’t do anything, it effectively is about as immutable as a law of nature. But if enough people respond, the system will change in some way.

Note that the stench of inevitability likes to sneak into these discussions of systemic problems. Nothing is set in stone. Anyone telling you otherwise has given up themselves. The comment section attracts all kinds of life outlooks, after all. The utility of belief in some sort of agency (however small) shouldn’t be surrendered to someone else’s nihilistic disengagement.

[jimnotgym]

Yet the elite won't share that benefit until someone makes them. History makes me think that won't happen until hunger motivates the masses from their apathy.

[EchoReflection]

it's only for "the enrichment of the elite" if one looks at life with a perspective of entitlement, resentment and disregard for the nature of...nature (existence,randomness, realty itself).

just because humans can't "outdo" technology doesn't mean we should "blame" "the elite". that's literally how the great catastrophes of socialism, communism, Marxism, etc started

Humans aren't "forced" to do anything, (depending on how you look at it). You could just lay down, "live" in your own excrement until you starve to death. That seems reasonable! Liberate the proletariat! Why doesn't everyone else work for me?!

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/ressentiment