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Comment by fallingfrog | Hacker News Reader

We should turn it off while we still can. It will most likely eliminate almost all programming jobs, most creative professions, etc. I mean, people keep saying, “oh, but it can’t do X yet.” But it will, and it won’t take long. How long do you think the world will last once anything you could do or achieve can be done better by a machine instantly? What is your purpose then? Why go to school? Why try at all? The great mass of people will descend into hopeless depression once they realize that there is literally no point to learn anything. Nothing that makes you special. Your talents, whatever they are, will become meaningless. No point in learning to play the piano, or draw, or code.

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> Your talents, whatever they are, will become meaningless. No point in learning to play the piano, or draw, or code.

That is assuming this is purely about economics. It may well not be; for example, if art is humanity’s version of peacock tails, then the effort is the point, and if so, then even an uploaded brain of some famous and well-regarded artist will be dismissed as “not capable of real art”[0].

Hobbies for social experience can certainly still be a thing, as evidenced by the fact that art clubs and music clubs survived the invention of recorded music and photography respectively.

Even code has forms of this: challenge devs to write games in 1k, or on old hardware, or code golf.

[0] https://kitsunesoftware.wordpress.com/2022/10/09/an-end-to-c...

I don't like this analysis because it equates purpose with having "a job".

Bunch of artist or creative people don't do it "because of the job", they do it for fun and reason that they like drawing, writing, programming etc. There is a lot of artist and writers who live in poverty all their lives. They could stick to their manual labor that provides food and get drunk, watch TV series in their free time but many people still go above and beyond that anyway.

There are of course many people who already have "why go to school, why even bother" attitude and somehow they are still alive waking up in the morning and going to work or whatever else they are busy with.

I think I should have been more specific about "work".

I don't really attach any significance to employment in the sense of doing work directed by someone else to make profits for some business in order to get more money. It might be a personality trait, but I don't really want or need more money and I hate being told what to do.

However- I have a ton of ideas and side projects and musical and art projects I'm always working on, and those things aren't done for pay, but they are work in the sense that they required sustained, focused effort. And that's hard even if you love what you're doing. And it sure helps if what you are creating is something that other people will appreciate when it's done, and I fear that if an AI can generate something ten times better with no effort at all, then it might start feeling pointless to do all those things. Self motivation will sustain you for a while, but external validation helps a lot after a certain point.

Or maybe we should question whether structuring society such that the only way to be rewarded is by making rich people even richer was really the best plan?

Seems to me like we should reward people for achieving sustainability rather than only rewarding growth.

Maybe it's time to start substituting a bit of competition with a bit more collaboration and looking out for the needs of everyone? Just a thought.

A machine can already run better, fly better, play chess better than me... how does that affect me? Zero.

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