AI is not cutting my hair anytime soon. AI is not making my meals anytime soon. It's not organizing events, or doing anything in the real world. It's not doing my open heart surgery. Robots are still doing this in 2026
We might have to get off the computer, and we might have to rethink how we organize the world economically, but there is still work to be done everywhere.
This is an absolutely bizarre pitch for labour replacement for the very obvious reason that the rate at which the world's hair grows is not going to increase and nor are we going to suddenly discover a great need for new high maintenance hair styles to increase the work available.
There are clearly at a first approximation enough barbers and hairdressers already to cut the world's hair at the rate it is growing.
Do you think the average dirt farmer in the 1800 is going to be assuaged by the prospect of almost all farm work being mechanized, because he can be a "medical and health services manager" or "data scientist" instead?
Nobody has mentioned AGI in this thread until this comment. And either way, there's no evidence that AGI as you're defining it is going to be solved anytime soon. Sam Altman and Dario may claim it will to pump their incoming IPOs, but outside of la la land, OpenAI and Anthropic aren't making any big robotics plays, which leaves a huge chunk of the "G" in AGI completely unattended to.
"By definition"? If you define that to be the future, yes. But that's the problem with vitorfblima's statement upthread. Are we talking about all labor? That's still a very big, unproven assumption. It's an assumption that I question. And given that I don't buy the premise, I don't buy the conclusions, either.
And the farm analogy is somewhat on point. We went from 67% of people working on farms to... I think it's more like 3% than 1%, but a very small amount. That's two thirds of labor being replaced.
Where does this agricultural labour point come from?
It's so common here and so obviously wobbly. That labour was displaced (and in most cases into way more gruelling and dangerous factory work).
The AI pitch is that the giant superbrain will do all the knowledge work and rapidly self-improve faster than humans (and therefore, do more future jobs we could do). That is a pitch for replacing human labour.
You can't simultaneously have a machine that is said to be likely to wipe out entire categories — not market sectors, categories of work — and then say that all those people will get jobs elsewhere. Because, where? The timescales they are talking about are short. Where's the work going to come from in time?
As far as I can tell many people, especially tech practitioners, are as a whole desperate to believe that there is an iron law of the universe that “technological progress” is always a net good. Maybe there are some bumps along the way, but you can’t make an omelette…
The next couple of years will see these people contorting themselves into increasingly complex knots to try and argue that AI is making the world a better place. The arguments will get far weirder, and far more detached from reality, than bad comparisons to agricultural labor.
> The next couple of years will see these people contorting themselves into increasingly complex knots to try and argue that AI is making the world a better place.
I mean, if it delivers. So far we're only really f**ing ourselves in the face; outside the tech industry everyone else is figuring out how to push back on AI.
If you're never seen Man of Aran, you're in for a treat! Far more thought provoking than the fluff Lucas made, but by which I always assumed his fictional homestead on Tatooine was inspired.
What I do think is that your comparison have squat zero with history, society or tech of 1800. People like to make historical comparisons based on pure fantasies and this is one of them.
Why are we believing in marketing lies? For instance, crypto is useful (in a narrow context) even if it's 99.99% scams, and has positively impacted at least some people (the unbanked), even if it fell short of replacing the world's banking system. It's good tech.
Similarly with LLMs, it's good tech, but I do not believe for a single second that these things will ever replace anyone who is remotely skilled. People will be augmented by them. They won't be fully replaced. Well, I hope not anyway.
Surgery is a regulated field with high barriers to entry. Even if surgeons did not get replaced, displaced humans in other fields would not find employment in surgery.
https://www.news.com.au/sport/carnage-at-start-of-robot-mara...
We might have to get off the computer, and we might have to rethink how we organize the world economically, but there is still work to be done everywhere.