https://www.nytimes.com/video/insider/100000004687429/farewe...
There are a lot of industries (at least historically) that have organized labor.
In the UK, there was the “Wapping Dispute” in 1986 when computer technology enabled journalists to type in their copy directly, doing away with the need for workers to set type using linotype printing.
Linotype was a big improvement on the older letter-by-letter typesetting and sped up composition of text 3 - 5 times compared to hand composition. Its introduction enabled a small number of machine operators to set type for multi-page newspapers, leading to an explosion of print editions in the 1900s.
But in 1986, 100 years after the invention of linotype machines, they were being replaced with computerized direct input typesetting. As a result of the new process, UK print unions held a year-long strike.
Result of the strike: failure. 6000 printers were fired, but there were jobs for 670 new workers who used word processing.
You probably can't force your job to remain (well, I guess some people have).
You can create laws to keep making work for a class of workers, but it ends up unpopular. Instead of a social safety net as it was intended, it turns into a corrupt drain on society at large, and a relative disadvantage to your economy versus those that are more ... agile, let's say. Check out e.g. the underpaid but overstaffed government bureaucracies and police forces in most Latin American countries. Giving a third of your society badge and a lousy paycheck often does more harm than good.
I don't consider this observation to be right wing (per the sibling post), it's just how things work. While there's nobility in work and psychologically it's better to keep people employed, I'd just as soon give all the gas station attendants a lifelong retirement UBI so they'd get out of the way and let me pump my gas.
But you don't give out UBI and let people become potatoes. You give out UBI to allow them to meet their basic needs and then have them work a job they kfhr genuinely be OK at, and, ideally, enjoy. Ideally.
So yeah, even if no one ever really enjoying being a gas station attendant, getting up and going to a job to earn money and pay rent gives people a sense of purpose. And UBI definitely risks robbing people of that purpose. The alternatives to UBI soon though might be creating fake jobs or letting people starve.
Not a joke.
All the folks talking about it, it sounds like some sort of fantasy cope to get people going along willingly into the void.
On the east coast I could understand not wanting to get out of your car in the winter. And an attendant standing out in the snow is a tough job. Not sure it should be mandated. But in Oregon there's really no time of year it's that great a hardship to pump your own gas.
The attendants weren't fired, btw. At most stations they're still there and they'll offer to pump your gas. You're just allowed to do it yourself now.
So today it would be mainly just busywork, I’m doing those like twice a year, but need to put gas in my car once a week (roughly).
I wonder what they’ll do next with EVs becoming more popular? Outlaw home charging?
That's because they're thinking that they're still going to get paid $200k/y for typing in "Duh, Claude, make me an app, here the specs from the client, doh!"
They aren't seeing that there is very little value to add when all they are, is an interface to a magic software-making machine.
I think the optimistic excited people are thinking more 'What a time to be alive' than 'All praise be, for they have come'
Which is not to say there won't be people deifying AI, I just don't think there are many of those yet.
The cynical side of me thinks it will happen, but right now I feel like most of those who seem susceptible to that kind of thinking are tending towards the Butlearian.
...is my read, but the wonderful thing about text communication is if I'm in a grumpy mood because I didn't sleep well, the other reading is also entirely possible.
I mean that's you agreeing with Elon Musk, I disagree, I think AI is just normal technology [1], there's a lot of us. Like tech revolutions before, it'll have huge effects on productivity alleviating major scarcities. That's boring to the algorithm, not enough conflict, but it's exciting to a lot of tech workers.
No messiah's and no Jihads, just excited about going to work to make sure we can do more with less tomorrow than we can do today.
[1]: https://knightcolumbia.org/content/ai-as-normal-technology
It's also not like I would do more work for less effort and be home by lunch. It will still be same 8 hours of doing something and be compensated to have the same general level of lifestyle with or without AI.
I'm certainly not excited to have a new office chair or a coffee machine.
Surely, on Hackernews, we know we can get excited about technology that maybe boring to most of the public. And in this case, I think the technology has wide-ranging productivity enhancing applications
Maybe your question is about why the tech billionaires are trying to get the public so excited about it? Totally different question.
>> It will still be same 8 hours of doing something
Yes but your 8 hours of work will serve more people. Will you see the fruits of that productivity gain? Very good question, but again, orthogonal to the usefulness of the technology.
I can imagine an alternate future where AI advances without all of the social, environmental and economic harm that it does, where there isn't a literal cult of neo-reactionaries using it to advance their authoritarian political agenda, where mass copyright theft isn't an issue, where the internet isn't consumed by slop and businesses aren't trying to put their workforce out on the streets as fast as possible. Where people don't literally believe it will evolve into some kind of techno-God whose judgement we should fear. Where we're not shoving it into every nook, cranny and orifice of our society, even when it doesn't work, because it's "inevitable" and we "just have to learn to live with it." A world where AI is just technology and not whatever this insanity is that it breeds in people.
I wish I lived in that world, because the hacker in me finds the technology fascinating, and I'd like to be able to use it without abandoning my morals or supporting the infrastructure of fascism.
Does this distinction matter practically? It's not the fall that kills you, it's the sudden stop. Do I care if I'm the one falling from 10 meters high?
"Normal"?
It will cause huge disruption on its way to increasing efficiency, and if we maintain our freedoms, increasing welfare.
But:
AI cannot do your job
Your boss bought AI to do your job
You're fired
This is true only in the headlines and the loud CEO pronouncements that we for some reason take at face value. In the numbers it's almost more boring than the industrial revolution. A "white collar reshuffling" [1] the industrial revolution was not.
[1]: https://www.hiringlab.org/2026/08/05/q2-labor-market-outlook...
Being almost more boring than the thing that caused Malthus to become wrong is quite an accomplishment.
I was expecting AI to put me, a software developer, out of a job after everyone else, because I thought coders would be needed to write the AI for everyone else, one job task at a time. Right now, it's looking like LLMs can translate not only English into Spanish, but business requirements into code. Sure, not perfectly, but well enough that I feel like I'm living that joke about a mechanic who charges $1 for a new bolt and $999 for knowing which bolt. #LeopardsEatingPeoplesFacesParty2026, but seriously, LLMs have been able to train new AI for a while now.
I hear similar from professional clothing photographers who find that even if they want to support the human models, they're forced by economics to use the GenAI models. I hear rumblings of problems from copyeditors, translators, and mathematicians. It's affecting a lot of people at the same time, even if they can all point to ways it kinda still sucks or "lacks taste" or "has no common sense" or whatever. I can point to the models doing bad code, but I know from experience that "bad code" can win awards at the product level.
Robots have been milking the cows and sorting the post for decades now. But even the first agricultural revolution had a lot of people moving out of the country and to the cities because they could no longer work on the land.
Ironic that I only hear praises of AI-driven cars from one place, which has been saying "just a few years" for the last 13. The economic impact if that actually ships without any caveats would also be huge (which is something I'd want people to keep in mind if they feel like responding with how good Tesla's current version is, I've heard that for the last three versions at least).
That, too, is a job that's gone. I used to know some actress/model/waitress types in LA. They'd sometimes do catalog modeling: "OK, the next one is the blue sweater, and hurry it up, we have thirty more to do before lunch".
I admittedly am not an expert, but I don’t think this is true? At least not in the “AI is building itself” sense, which is how I interpreted it.
Nobody bans them from paying those models some kind of aid. Oh, they mean they want to support them with other people's money. Yeah that's not so easy.
Stops being "other people's money" once they get paid.
He had classes set up for kids and grown-ups to learn printing and they had a ton of cool projects to show for it. We went through all his letter blocks and he told stories about a giant building in the U.S. Northeast that was just stacked with those blocks. He loved the idea of that place and saw threats to its existence as real problems, but not as existential. Faith never came up. It was just there and that's how I know it was real.
people could convene in secret, organize, and coordinate without leaving a digital trail
impossible task in the present. lot of gen z can't even read or concentrate for more than 5 minutes
so the old timers not even being able to open Settings of a Windows desktop /j
Which is an AI booster:
https://berggruen.org/projects/ai-visionaries
You cannot read these articles posing as human interest without following the money.
The about page says this:
> In the cultural realm, Studio B is networking frontier technologists with Hollywood auteurs and science fiction authors who will shape the next narrative.
The organization was founded in 2010. Asking filmmakers about AI seems pretty on brand for their goal of talking about frontier technologies intersecting with Hollywood, does it not?
Is there some definition of “AI booster” that I’m not aware of? Or does it really just mean anyone who talks about AI in a positive light? I don’t see any smoking gun financial incentive connection here where they’re getting paid to “boost AI”
> Aaron Horwath is the director of AI operations at a creative technology company where he is focused on implementing AI in a way that supports both humans and business.
Means they are invested in AI companies
> shape the next narrative
With pro AI narratives because they have an interest in pro-AI
Thank you for that, and look who one of their speakers is? Hardcore technocrat and transhumanist Mr. Harari! You can read his opinions about transhumanism and the Fourth Industrial Revolution in "Homo Deus" and on the WEF website.
Does this article seem like an AI boosting article? Perhaps exactly the opposite?
I dislike this article intensely, and disagree with it, but its lot because somehow the Berggruen Institute is shadow pushing AI here
This is why reputable journalistic outlets disclose financial ties to entities they report on, even if the connection is barely relevant. NPR will tell you about every ad buy that relates to their reporting.
This source could have and should have mentioned this connection in a disclosure, and it would not have detracted from the article. But the fact that it is effectively hidden is a detriment to the level of trust the reader can put into it.
Where is the financial tie between this organization and the AI companies?
The throwaway account's comment above implied some financial connection, but when I clicked the links all I saw was a couple videos where one of their other journalistic outlets had interviewed some filmmakers about AI.
I don't see anything to support this accusation that they failed to disclose reporting about some financial investment in AI companies.
He’s an advocate for universal basic capital, and this article is about how AI taking our jobs might free us from “workism.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicolas_Berggruen
In other words, this article is directly tied to the opinions of its financial backer and isn’t being presented in an independent journalistic way.
To be clear I’m not even saying that this is a bad dude or that the organization has bad opinions.
"The Power Mac G4 is so fast that it is classified as a supercomputer by the US government, and we are prohibited from exporting it to over 50 nations worldwide," Jobs said the Apple Expo, CNN reported in September 1999. (edit: added link)
https://www.businessinsider.com/apple-steve-jobs-us-export-c...
A bricklayer can be excellent at his job. He can work hard to become so (to paraphrase Inigo Mendoya). He should pride himself on this excellence, but it is unlikely he will think he was put on this earth to be a bricklayer. The despair of the the unemployed skilled laborer is that losing his livelihood imperils the things he does value, family and the ability to provide for them.
In a culture where the highest goods are production so you can feed the appropriate level of hedonic consumption, and without any transcendent meaning its a rough go.
Isn't that exactly a concern for those who find meaning in other things than their job? If you find meaning in your job then getting paid enough to support your family is obviously important, but it is ultimately a secondary concern.
University graduates are often considered min-bar for white-collar work hiring, so if it takes 4 years to train someone, how are people supposed to decide on a career path when it takes less time than that to completely alter the workplace?
My daughter is entering her first year of nursing, a career path that she is greatly looking towards. Who says in 3 years that robotics companies don't actually deliver on their promises and completely up-end the care industry? While I think that unlikely, it's not like people aren't trying to automate nurses away.
The irony is not lost on me on all those years where people were advised to "just learn to code, bro" in order to escape the personally threatening situation of obsolete jobs. Well, now people feel it's our turn so, "just learn to _something_ dudes"?
This is all, assuming of course, that the end is nigh and our profession really is close to extinction. I personally don't buy it, but if it is, so be it.
We literally did. There are dramatically fewer journalists now than just a few decades ago, and everyone is constantly complaining about how bad "journalism" is now. It was definitely bad a long time ago, in the era of yellow journalism, but now "Journalists" don't even ask basic questions, don't push back in interviews at all, don't do basic "Journalism" things, so it's just another arm of the PR industry.
Journalism is a great example of how bad this will go. It might look superficially like we still have some journalism right now, but we don't at all. We have a couple media orgs producing content, and they are all owned by the capitalist class explicitly, which is putting it's thumb on the scale every single day.
The death of the local newsroom is part of the reason local politics have gotten so corrupt. There used to be people who's job was to go sit in local town meetings, for your local town paper, so that everybody could see when the local town council did shitty things.
Another great example is how bad ESPN has become. They found that having a guy who's job it is to make wild statements to drive controversy is more profitable than just talking about basketball, so now the network is basically satire of its former self, and is made up of people who literally don't even watch sports, or care at all about it. The network spends millions of dollars on one big name who plays solitaire during games he is supposed to pay attention to. Basically all of their sports journalists are gone.
Youtube of all places had to pick up the sports journalism slack, but youtube is not a good platform for real journalism either.
But there is still journalism.
* Propublica
* The Economist
* The Guardian
* 404 Media
Life is much harder for journalist now, and joining g the "darkside" of PR is the best/lucrative career path, but it exists
If nobody actually needs your work's output and you are simply allowed to do it out of some kind of state benevolence because it's some quaint tradition, you're laughing stock. We should not put up with being that.
I sense the inverse: a demand that we make ourselves irrelevant to satisfy interest rate inspired demand for cost savings.
Executives have developed a religion around AI and it is inspiring an orgy of value destruction in software orgs as they try to slash costs and increase efficiency. But theyve done it rather stupidly with this new religion rather than with more prosaic and altogether more boring improvements.
Quality has plummeted everywhere and there aren't even any meaningful cost savings to show for it, just empty promises and more hype.
Yeah, I imagine that there won’t be much sympathy for the cognitive elite when the benefits of being smarter disappear. Even if we get AI-powered communism, they’ll get the same UBI check as everyone else.
Defiantly not something most countries have setup.
If instead we stick our head in the sand and ignore the human cost so that we can temporarily enjoy maximum technological progress AND maximum wealth accumulation for shareholders, as we have been doing for the better part of a century, things will slowly break down and eventually collapse when the pace of change accelerates to the point that enough people simply can’t keep up, have nothing to lose and decide to attack the source of their misery. Bread and circuses will only distract so much.
If you mean UBI that would allow anyone to stop working and live a modest life, that just doesn't work. UBI is essentially redistribution from those who work to those who don't work. That's not just a "safety net" because you could decide to stop working forever just because it's more comfortable than working.
I would possibly exploit such a system. Take 4% from my portfolio + UBI on top. Maybe work 3 days a week if I find a job that I enjoy.
It is NOT about enabling "a modest life" or stopping people from working! On any serious UBI proposal everyone is still incentivized to work.
This is, IMO, why UBI has to be timed almost perfectly for when the AI is ready to be the one who does the work.
That is what earned income tax, payroll taxes, and Medicare and Social Security taxes are.
If you believe this, then surely you also believe pension plans are the devil? If we can't have UBI then we can start by tearing away pension plans for all of the old people my tax money is being wasted on.
But yes National pensions can have the same problem, as is currently the case in France. The elderly vote themselves higher and benefits, waiting to back breaking taxes on the diminishing number of middle-aged workers
I think we've largely been able to avoid large scale disruption in society for the past several decades because the groups losing their careers were small enough, but we can see negative effects in things like health data. I think Deaths of Despair by Deaton and Case does a pretty good job at talking about this. However, AI now threatens a much more visible work segment, the upper middle class, so I do agree that now is a very interesting time to see what happens.
Have you seen who we elect to run our countries?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_basic_income_pilots
Skimming this list, there seems to be one really marked failure, in Finland, but that’s disputed I read also.
Can you list more failures?
> Among all the people, only two key groups were found to be discouraged from working by the Mincome project – new mothers and teenaged boys, who, instead of entering the workforce at an early age, decided to study until grade 12, increasing the proportion of students who graduate high school.
Remind us what the U stands for?
This would be great, in theory. The reality is that people would live on it and never work, have kids, and the same thing would happen with a new generation. As it expands, you run out of tax payers and the system collapses.
A 'robust' healthcare system that the government runs is a pipe dream.
"have nothing to lose and decide to attack the source of their misery. Bread and circuses will only distract so much."
"If instead we stick our head in the sand and ignore the human cost so that we can temporarily enjoy maximum technological progress AND maximum wealth accumulation for shareholders, as we have been doing for the better part of a century, things will slowly break down and eventually collapse when the pace of change accelerates to the point that enough people simply can’t keep up, have nothing to lose and decide to attack the source of their misery. Bread and circuses will only distract so much."
I suppose the people that are actually working will just need to get more guns.
Most of my friends are in some form of tech or creative work, so perhaps that is my bias, but with the threat of destitution removed the vast majority of people I know would turn into maelstroms of creation: art, crafts, coding, building, organizing, civic participation, scientific experimentation, and raising strong families.
Instead they are trapped spending the majority of their time navigating corporate politics to deliver a fraction of their value to society. Seems… dangerously inefficient and corrosive to the human spirit, no?
That "pipe dream" has already been achieved by most EU countries decades ago. Sure, you might argue it's worse in quality than American healthcare and that wait times are horrible, but I guarantee you most Americans would see it as an improvement over their current situation.
I live in Eastern Europe now where they also have free health care, and it's so bad that almost everyone pays for private medical insurance - essentially we pay twice because the first system is mostly not fit for purpose.
Are there historical or contemporary examples of this? I googled but couldn’t find any specifics.
The reason I ask is that I in the US, employer-provided health insurance is a large expense for businesses. And anecdotally, I’ve never spoken to any US small business owner that feels that choosing employee insurance plans is a real competitive advantage. But perhaps the historical/contemporary alternatives are worse?
Today, many of those activities are either toxic, like fossil fuel subsidies, or useless, like casino stock markets which force everyone to play PR con games that are divorced from bedrock physical fundamentals - like clean water, a safe food supply, and a stable climate.
Guns won't help anyone when farming dies.
Not for long, anyway.
Money and trade as we know it today was invented by the Romans because soldiers were raiding their own villages for supplies. Paying soldiers with coins then demanding them back from villagers got them to start trading. That’s where incentives started.
Oh yes, the usual argument of how what most industrializes nations (and many poor nations as well) have achieved, is somehow seen as impossible just because the US can't manage to do it (because it doesn't profit the oligarchs).
Smaller EU countries cannot even today introduce a fair revenue tax on big tech so that they pay any tax without being threatened about retaliatory steps by US administration.
Americans would largely languish if big tech wins, big tech is already profiting of our misery now they want to profit in other domains too?
80% of this country is not going to benefit at all from any American corporations because American corporations have open disdain for workers.
You say no plausible path to automating - I beg to differ.
It would get officers out of harms way.
Not imminent but not zero risk either.
Unless it's a criminal record holding you back, I really don't think this is the case. Since 2012, I know lots of people that changed careers.
The first step to solving the problem is acknowledging the problem, not throwing earnest observations of dysfunction into the, "I know a short guy who gets lots of sex, height doesn't matter," bin.
I know plenty of people who went into contracting (aka self-employment) and later found full-time jobs (frequently with clients) across multiple white collar industries, including programming. They were all in their 30s and 40s. In many cases, going the self-employment route actually made them more valuable to future employers. I also know plenty of people without a degree who went into programming.
Over the years I've built my own Linux distro from scratch, developed a heavily customized version of the Chromium web browser, and other interesting stuff.
If this were true you'd be gainfully employed by now. Coming out of COVID, companies were hiring people just because they knew what an IDE was.
Based on your comments though, it's easy to understand why you haven't been able to find a job. I wouldn't want to work with someone as negative as you and I can't imagine anyone would want to work with someone so emotionally draining.
Thanks for having a clue.
EDIT: I would say more, but what's the point? If any honest feelings are expressed that in any way reflect negatively (perish the thought) on anyone here or their crock-of-shit pet theories, it will be flagged and censored with no recourse. Because God is the moderator of this forum, and His judgment is all knowing and perfect.
It's not possible to criticize these raging assholes or any of the daily doings of their fucked up, selfish, corrupt society, as they have outlawed all criticism of themselves. Only they are allowed to criticize others.
This place is a toxic shithole, and I can't wait to watch it burn.
Go ahead and flag this one too, fucking losers.
You don't need to be an extrovert to be employed. I'm not, and neither are most of my coworkers. But you do need to not be a hyper-aggressive sack of negativity that emotionally drains everyone around you. So deal with that, and you might be able to land a job before you pass.
You're 40+, you have like potentially another 40+ years to live a life you want. If all it takes is a degree from a public university and some white knuckling for 4-6 years to then get the life you want to work in, is that such a burden to bare?
Wouldn't you want to at least try to achieve your dreams before giving up? You have the experience and smarts to know how to succeed if you want, so why give up 4 decades before the game is over?
Support that AI is now threatening.
Recording is too much work. ;-)
So what happens is that the capital class absorbs the capital of all those workers and then they all starve. How uplifting.
I increasingly believe that if we really do want to keep moving forward faster and faster, we will be forced to take one of two paths:
(1) Some kind of socialism with a much bigger social safety net, probably basic income, retraining, and universal health coverage.
(2) Absolute totalitarian surveillance state with drones and cameras everywhere and an iron-fist police force to suppress the constant threat of violent revolt as millions upon millions of people constantly lose their careers. This looks like dark cyberpunk, basically, and it's even kind of miserable for those at the very top. You can be rich and powerful, sure, but if you get on the wrong side of it you will be crushed. Look at what happens to oligarchs in Russia.
The path to (2) is unfortunately an idea that was just, even noble in the past: the puritan work ethic and its corollaries. It's a great idea when you have a society that doesn't change much where a person can pick a vocation and make a living. It doesn't work in a society that reinvents itself completely every 10-20 years, rendering entire employment verticals totally obsolete.
I think we've been able to ignore it until now. The change was still slow enough to tolerate.
AI is the end of that. It's going to be the end of stable careers.
Edit: I can think of a third option:
(3) Tax anything that is labor-replacing for a period of time equal to the time it usually takes people to retrain. e.g. AI would be taxed for the next 10-20 years in this scenario with the tax rate decreasing each year.
I greatly prefer (1) since the third option is likely to just freeze progress.
I find this comparison to printers arbitrary, precious, and specious. Aren’t the armies of software engineers in tech more akin to the line-level autoworkers than artisans? The numbers would certainly suggest so. But it’s also silly to pretend such a new profession is anything akin to a generations-old trade. But maybe those tradesmen aren’t such victims either in this context? How privileged to be able to pass your profession down to the next generation! No one in my family has had that since farming, when only the oldest benefited.