I first heard about this in Marshall Brain's short story _Manna_ [1]. In the story, the robot takeover started with AI management software running fast food restaurants, where workers would execute tasks the AI would narrate to them over headsets.
I bet we're pretty close to being able to implement this.
1. https://web.archive.org/web/20260725174355/https://marshallb...
This year alone, a lot of people have been complaining of how unsatisfying their job has become. I imagine this will keep getting worse, not better.
If the claimed productivity gains turn out to be correct, we really should have UBI/UHI in the future, and that will permit a lot of people who hate their jobs to quit. Of course we won't do that until things become dire.
Is there some kind of breaking point? There is for everyone, but I don't think satisfaction is the red line. For most people it has historically been things like pay and health and safety. If everyone were to suddenly have their pay cut in half, I could see that resulting in general unrest.
It will sometimes get things wrong because it made non-viable assumptions, but that's on me and prompt accuracy.
What I see is: it makes tests against desired features or bugs or mistakes, and iterates until it gets it correct. I steer as it goes.
(I hate this, by the way, zero job enjoyment anymore, but I don't know what else to do.)
An algorithm isn’t. I still dunno how they’re gonna square that circle.
The state of the art doesn't matter. Only the first couple of time derivatives matter.
in the imagined system above it requires physical acts that an llm can not do, if we go further than the above imagined system and make robots to perform these task for the llm a human still is needed for maintenance for these robots and their assembly, once there are robots for maintaining the llm assistant robots, humans are still needed to maintain the maintenance robots and so on and so forth. I dont see an end point where a robot machine system is fully self healing without atleast a few humans in the mix to correct when there is a breakage in the chain
It's also worth noting that it's far easier at present to press a human into doing something highly illegal than it is to get Claude or GPT to do so.
Someone has to type in "create the next billboard top 1 single" ?
So whether that's a CEO at the top instructing a human manager that then instructs AI systems, which then put into motion plans that include the harnessed humans getting prompted, or however it's decided to best configure the top operational tiers - that's all fairly irrelevant ultimately. All human labor, and all AI labor, will be in harnesses. Realistically all human labor has always been in a harness.
The people in charge will be the people that control the capital. They will instruct the AI to their bidding, they will control the data centers the AI lives in, they will own the robots doing the labor in factories, they will own the factories, they will control the grid, they will control the electricity generation, et al.
It's true now, it'll be true tomorrow. Nothing fundamental will shift at that tier: don't be labor, own.
If you're a software developer, you're increasingly depreciating labor. Every unit of improvement the AI systems see, the average human software developer's labor value diminishes. It's diminishing extraordinarily fast, kind of like a confrontation between increasingly productive machines and physical human labor during the industrial revolution. You might as well picture a human with a hand plow taking on a modern industrial tractor.