If an AI can replace me on the mental aspects of work, and robotics are on their way to replacing humanity on the physical aspects of work... then what's left? When there was agrarian societies, there were writers, priests, bankers, merchants, and laborers before and after - I really don't think things were that unclear even at the time. Now that we have machines that are close to exceeding humans in every way, what good are humans?
But lets consider what that end state could look like when machines exceed humans in everyway, what good are humans?
One possibility which I don't particularly enjoy is humans will be good for status games, art, creativity, story telling, IRL experiences, everything that involves human to human interaction and connection with other humans. If AI can supply everything in abundance than like rare cards there is only so many humans in the planet at any particular time then human's value increases. I really do believe connections with other humans will have a premium. As a nerd who is borderline anti-social, non artistic, creative, etc this does not appeal at all to me and properly to many others who read HN as well. For the majority of other people with some adaption time I think they will be fine. They were fine adapting to hunters and gathers to agricultural society, they were fine adapting to agricultural society to industrial society, they were find adapting from industrial society to information society and they will will be fine adapting from information society to the social/creative economy. Some short term pain but overall most people will accept this reality quite readily. Those born into it will not even know what we talking about.
> Some short term pain but overall most people will accept this reality quite readily. Those born into it will not even know what we talking about.
How do you propose this brave new world of yours will work economically?
Once many of those jobs get automated, I bet there will be many more people working in health research, which hopefully should lead to better health outcomes for society as a whole.
That was of course a complete fantasy. Now let's see, who is in charge of the nukes these days...
At the same time, I agree with the original comment as well. I don't think this necessarily leads to some doomsday scenario. Whatever happens it'll likely be better for us and imo we will merge with the AIs at some point, so it won't be a question of us vs them.
I actually see it more likely the opposite - a subset of humans will retreat into a (vastly smaller) human-first world, and AI will be of a separate world concerned with material/scientific/research concerns and appeases the masses who are still around.
We can already see this today in the form of upper class parents (like myself) who vastly restrict their kids screen time and ban social media. We may see AI-free societies that form, but supported by AI. The jobs and roles people play within that society may deal with services that really need to be done by a human, being a buffer from AI to the rest of this society, or just straight up fake.
I personally think this is close to a doomsday scenario - but it doesn't end with a big bang, but more of slow quiet death.
The subset of people who will want to merge will be people who will not be content with having no control over their future. No ability to create new inventions, new discoveries, new ways of working. They will not be content with just having everything provided to them, playing the social games that will remain and think their environment is a prison.
At the risk of sounding new age, my answer to this is "emotional work".
What exactly that would mean in the equivalent of the post-agrarian society that LLMs might bring, I cannot know.
There had always been abolitionists who were against slavery simply because they thought it was immoral, not because they thought slaves weren’t needed anymore.
Then what is preventing the owners of AI companies from collecting and training on tons of examples of this new work, until AI are equally good at it as humans?
The issue is that unlike the technology that automated farming or the like, AI is a general technology. So not only could it theoretically automate the work humans are currently doing, they could also automate any future human work, even if there’s some degree of lag.
Then, I think a lot of cognitive production and post-production code review/proof validation/design approval will start to look like this.
In my view that's a very charitable reading and sadly I don't think it aligns with the historical record. When the cotton gin was invented, there was a hope it would lead to a reduction in slavery. But of course it increased the demand for slaves since more cotton could now be processed, making cotton much more profitable. Slavery ended in the United States because a war was fought, not because of automation.
There’s now a chance to do more with software.
I actually think art is safe. The machines don’t value it but we do. There’s something in that.
Or will it be the cumulative total of various advances?
I've equated Claude Code, or Codex, to the looms that made fine fabric more affordable during the Industrial Revolution; life-changing, but not society-changing. Neither the steam engine nor the automobile.
Perhaps I've answered my own question in that it's the LLM technology itself that equates to the steam engine, and it will power superfarm analogs that have yet to emerge. I'm still curious what you think they will be.
So an obvious example there would be software. It's certainly true (if we assume LLMs reach their 'potential') that software will be able to reach new heights, and with a far smaller headcount driving the development. So some people see this as economically catastrophic for software developers, or an economic boon for certain large software companies.
But I think that when software can be built at the drop of a hat, software itself will no eventually no longer really matter in economic terms. Yet things you can build on top of it will matter more than ever. Those things are difficult to see from here, but I expect they will be the giants of the economy of tomorrow.
Salt is another one. Used to be payment for Roman soldier, now you can just take it from a McDonalds if you want.
Seems like we can have an abundance of software.
I hope we start to rebuild in person connections again with this technology.
Software allows us to push computation (intelligence) into our environment.
I do think there's something there though: I've spent the last 2 days building an app I've always wanted to build for myself with my computer in the corner running Claude and Claude Remote. Prototypes land on my phone and I don't even look at it for more then a few minutes before doing something else.
It's software, actually useful software, which doesn't take 100s of hours to build.
So I didn't even really spend two days on it: I mostly didn't look at all. I'll spend more time setting the result up on my home server.
Maybe a few thousand people for personal services of... various kinds. But no one's going to need the rest.
It's the ultimate capitalist fantasy.
And of course it won't happen, because long before things get to that stage AI will have independent plans of its own.
(Which is just as well, because if things did get to that stage the emperors would all wage war on each other rather than living peacefully and productively.)
I don't think we can imagine a post-ASI culture because - by definition - we're not smart or inventive enough.
It's not just farmers -> superfarms. Although in fact that did happen, but largely as a footnote to developments elsewhere.
It's more to do with the fact that our visions of the future haven't changed for over a century. They've been implemented in unexpected ways, and there have been unexpected social and cultural changes. But you can easily see the outlines of modern technology as far back as the late 19th century.
With ASI, the outcome could easily be something that doesn't look and act like technology at all. It would be some unimaginable New Thing. Literally no one on Earth has any idea what that would be or whether there would be room for trad-humans in it.