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Comment by techfoodie123 | Hacker News Reader

honestly i think the majority of my concern stems from how great my life is now as a tech worker. i am paid a large sum every year, my job is relatively low-stress/risk, and i have a great lifestyle. i am afraid of losing all of that if my jobs becomes something most anyone could do -- like plant new trees, remove trash from oceans, etc.

it's not clear to me we'd have a need for humans to "conduct research" outside of maybe physical labor tasks associated with research -- like moving bottles, autoclaving media, etc

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Yup. Spent years studying, working late at night, building softwares and what not and in the end I get replaced by a bot. What a tragic end to the story.

I have no real life skill, all my skill set can be easily replicated by a bot in few minutes.

If an AI can create copies of itself and scale, it can definitely build a software end to end, write e2e tests and unit test cases with 100% coverage and deploy. It has enough capabilities as of now to understand requirements.

I have never felt to unenthusiastic about my job like I have been feeling from last few days.

I agree. I've been hit be a total existential crisis.

Also i definitely don't believe in any benevolence of the elite, UBI or other romantic ideas that seems to ignore the rising Gini Coefficients and the toil 95+% of the world engages in daily. Tech workers were lucky mercenaries to the elite for a short amount of time blinded by ideologies manufactured to keep them from asking questions.

The startup i'm involved in, and my side projects are all pretty easily done by AI's in few years, and i seriously doubt most people here are doing anything that won't be easily replaced sooner than we think.

It seems my friends doing carpenting, nursing, therapy or hell even theater are all going to be better off soon - it's a total inversion of the worth of labour.

> Tech workers were lucky mercenaries to the elite for a short amount of time

Exactly, and I don't think we can all claim blindness.

Live by the sword, die by the sword.

I share the same thoughts. I think AI has reduced the value of human effort in a terrifying pace. Human identities are being stripped out, digitized and commercialized. There's no point in this struggle which gave life its temporary meaning.

A few weeks ago I thought to myself that maybe if I'm to be worthless, I'd probably pick up a few new hobbies. But which hobby do I take? Even the best of artists who spent decades mastering their skills can have it stolen in minutes by a bot. I'd learn a language, but it seemed obvious to me that translation and voice technologies are at a level that we should be seeing excellent real time translation apps within the next year. Why do anything at all?

The past few months I've been mulling over some dark thoughts. It's cliched to speak out loud like this, but really, what can we do? We are worthless.

I can always recommend Sports and other physical activity.

“Enjoy your body, use it every way you can. Don’t be afraid of it, or what other people think of it, it’s the greatest instrument you’ll ever own.”

― Kurt Vonnegut

I am already lifting weights regularly thank you. But it will not quell the disquietness of the mind. I suppose I can approach learning other hobbies with the same mentality: focusing more on self improvement than the practicality of it. But alas I am no such saint. There's just so much time needed and time is exactly what we don't have right now.

I have this feeling that humanity as we know it will die out within the next few decades. It's bleak thinking I'll have to distract myself with sports and other hobbies while observing the end of mankind.

Lifting is great but in my opinion (!) is not really a sport. It's more conditioning for sport. Sports like soccer, football, skating, skiing, mountain-biking, surfing etc. are much more complex and interesting IMO.

Of course, there are plenty of intellectually rewarding hobbies that are not sports. How about writing? You seem to have a talent for that!

I currently share your pessimism with regards to the future of humanity. AI will take over I'm afraid. But I don't know for sure and even less _when_, so for now I'm adapting instead of giving up on a future for humanity.

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