[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.