Why Even Try If You Have A.I.?
newyorker.com
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There are two problems with this: machines can’t do that right now, despite everyone trying to make them, and somehow we humans are amazingly capable of inventing new and new jobs to do, because we somehow hate leisure.
Already almost a century ago Bertrand Russel observed in the Praise of Idleness that we have the capacity to greatly relieve ourselves from the burden of jobs, if not fully then enough to create the space to do excellent, intrinsically motivated things.
Alas, this never happens. We always have to invent some other job. And what’s the point of super AI (please forgive me for using this vague and misleading term, I’m doing so sarcastically) if it can’t even give us a minute more of time with our kids, or tinkering on our personal projects?
Humans like to feel useful AND validated. If you remove either we generally become more unhappy. If you remove both it becomes a real problem.
Hence why unemployed people (both of the working class and “too rich to work due my trust fund” variety) have much higher rates of depression. This even extends to people who have jobs, but that feel their jobs are not actually useful (re: big tech workers arbitraging the inefficiency of large organizations to get paid doing very little). They have the validation of the societal cost (the salary) but deep down they know it’s an inefficient mistake.
Intrinsic motivation beyond our base instincts is a myth. Everything you do as a human is in pursuit of external validation, hence why we are social creatures. It’s why you’ve bothered to take the time out of your day to type these words into a box.
Humans finding new useful things to do for other people (jobs) is the engine behind everything good in modern society. So no, it’s not a bad thing.
So all you need is someone who considers a task useful, and boom, you have another job.
What it that person is out of their mind?
Then, I believe, the job is called "psychiatric nurse".
We don't hate leisure. Everyone loves their leisure. What we hate is each other. Unless people are able to accept someone else getting a free ride (even when they're not getting one themselves), some form of ever-increasingly pointless work will be required, because that's how we define whether or not someone has 'earned' their leisure.
The average net profit rate of all business in the US is 7%. To think you’re not a primary beneficiary in such a system is just silly.
it never happens because the amount of energy we can collect and consume is still insufficient. We have not reached post-scarcity, not even close in fact.
And i don't see a superior AI being capable of giving us post-scarcity, at least, not within this life time, nor the next. Perhaps in 100 years, that would be possible, if you'd want to be optimistic.
Pretty much every developed country is overflowing with stuff, we just don't know how much is enough.
We don’t. We do generally crave meaning, the only people who hate leisure are the owner class, and they hate leisure for other people. Employees are not out there clamouring for 80h weeks or having to piss in bottles on your 12h shift. Some do like that (sometimes to an unhealthy extent) but that’s a very different consideration.
I would take it a step further and question why is everyone assuming that people have to work, whatever the work might be.
Of course the genetic answer is to pay the bills, but what if you didn't had to worry about paying them? How would your life change if you didn't had a mortgage or rent to pay? Would you still spend hours commiting to and back from the office? Would you stick with your current job? What would change in your life?
Once I came across a group of construction workers that were working on a construction site. Half a dozen of them were spending their days wearing fluorescent vests and holding hand-held stop signs on a crosswalk of a low-traffic road. There were more construction workers on that crosswalk than people actually crossing the road. They were there five days per week, from early morning to evening. What a colossal waste of time. I wondered how soul-crushing that would be. Is that how people expect to spend the bulk of their days? Does society benefit anything from those roles?
Till we invent machines that can replace construction workers yes we really do need those jobs still. Even if some of them looked like they were doing nothing of importance, I am sure they have periods were they are fully engaged in hard work (too hard I think) otherwise no one would pay them.
This is already the case for shareholders, and will still be the case in the future as long as automation remains privatized.
The rest of us will need to find a way to eat without working pointless jobs. We aren't getting a slice of the automation pie.
Who will own the machines that feed you?
If you aren't contributing anything, why would they care to give you more than the absolute bare minimum to survive?
I see a future where someone who has the skill and talent to be a surgeon earning millions of dollars is now living in a basic pod, eating rations of slop, exactly the same as everyone else, with no meaningful role or contribution to society.
It's also absurd. Machines can't make a person feel powerful because they're controlling another human being.
Your words.
No it is not absurd. That is the goal for AGI/ASI sytems and it is an existential threat to human civilization, currently being debated at a very high level.
And at the same time other people (way more numerous than your surgeon example) will get amazing healthcare, better shelter and be able to choose how to spend their time instead of hopping between soul crushing low pay jobs.
Certainly if we wanted to, so much of the advertising, scamming, copying other companies, etc. could be done away with without affecting life very much.
We don't even need to wait for AI.
Conversely, even with AI I suspect we will still be expected to work, if anything harder because our labor is relatively less useful
Many would question that, but if you think it through it probably even higher. Somehow we manage to automate and industrialize pretty much everything, yet everyone still have a job. Previously women stayed at home, removing half of the workforce, and that still worked out fine.
I had a client, they sell cheap furniture. They really didn't need me, because they really didn't need all the IT infrastructure they've built up. Rather than attempting to sell me new cheap ass plastic garden furniture every spring, how about they just sell me really high quality stuff once? Then I don't need to shop with them for the next 25 years. That would save a lot of work right there.
We need a systemic change before we can allow this to happen.
If we had some sort of post-money utopia where the machines would do the work and we could all just do whatever we wanted, AI would be great. But as-is, we'll have a dystopia where AI will allow the rich to hoard ever more while the rest of us loses all leverage.
Anything except do work that meaningfully contributes to society and makes the best use of your abilities, or that requires significant material resources beyond the bare subsistence level that the system has allocated to you.
What if you want to be a neurosurgeon or radiologist? Forget it. That will be done by machines better than you.
What if you want to travel the world? Why would you be entitled to any significant amount of international air travel, or any at all?
Also why should a person be entitled to being a neurosurgeon who has a worse success rate than the magical theoretical machine you're assuming? That's plain selfish.
Hanging out with friends? That's what we will be reduced to. Everyone living in a Trailer Park Boys episode.
> could all just do whatever we wanted
No we cannot, because that would be "selfish and entitled".
How many people are able to and get to be that , 2%? And how many of them actually fully enjoy that job? Or more importantly - how many got a fair opportunity to become that to begin with? I get what you're saying but it's not like things are great now for the majority.
Though of course, there is the argument that using calculators didn't make us more mentally inept, so why would AI? But I'm not sure, this seems different.
We (collectively) did lose some skills, that we no longer value as much because we (individually) grew up after the loss happened.
Just like losing a large part of our orientation skills in the GPS era.
Or how happily-single urban people in their 40s don't feel like they've lost anything compared to eg. their grandparents living a married life with three generations living under the same roof, but if you'd taken that person from the past and showed them the option to switch, they would feel the loss.
It is totally possible that the average "2045 human" could be significantly mentally/emotionally atrophied in several ways, while not feeling like anything is missing.
I live somewhere where (not in North America) where grocery delivery is the norm, food delivery is the norm... online shopping is easy. This all frees up time that we spend outside, in parks, in lessons and study... because these are communal values.
We don't spend our free time in front of screens (though nothing wrong with that if you want it), again, because of culture.
For some of these things there's insidious network effects. If everyone else is doing it being an outlier of resistance is not rewarding. We need ways to collective decide to do things differently.
AI is a powerful tool and it’s already changing the world but it’s still just a tool - the smarter you’re, the more efficiently you can use it. It might change our intelligence but I don’t think it will decrease it.
But we know this ideal version of events does not happen often, and large populations of people did in fact become a lot more sedentary as a result of not having to do physical activity in day-to-day life.
Whether for better or worse that depends on one's own interpretation and the technology itself. On one extreme you have people who reject all technology after a certain point in time, with rare exceptions thoroughly considered (the Amish). On the other you have people who see technology as the goal, even if it comes at the expense of the genocide of the human race.
Consider though, how many ramps would be built if each time they had to first design and injection-mould the ramps? This would slow iteration. Fortunately there are already ramps to play with. The ramps are a tool used to build ramp courses.
AI is also a tool, but it’s a tool for thinking at a certain level of abstraction. The author misses that infinite levels of abstraction exist in thought; in this way having tools of thought to lift you to higher levels lets you play in even more abstract thought-space.
Having AI for the basic bits of thought is like already having ramps ready to go.
The idea is that a device that gives you whatever you want was discovered, and this completely changed the priorities for people. The one that became the most important was "trust". You earn it, you lose it, you are defined by it. I like the concept.
I would be happy to not do a lot of things that are "socially accepted" - job, clean environment etc. and more focus on people relationships as a determinant.
You still have to think about how that introduction changed how humans lived. What are the changes that will happen here?
PS: I must add - we talk about LLMs as reasoning machines, but they are narrative machines. They do not reason because they do not have a model making mind. If the content generated is similar enough to expert output, it doesnt matter if it came from a parrot or from a person. Its "good enough" provided it passes inspection.
Any prognotication on our future work habits and mental resilience will have to recognize how verification is the crux of our physical and information economies.
So I’ll just sit at home and build robots till something interesting does pop up or my robots gain sentience and decide I’m the problem.
That's why I think it's a matter of mindset. This is going to sound dumb, but I keep thinking about the interactions between Robert Downey Jr. as Tony Stark and Jarvis in Iron Man. That's the AI I always wanted: something that could do deterministic (here's the weather, here's your schedule) and non-deterministic (research) things.
Jarvis wasn't the inventor. Jarvis was a tool Tony used to invent things.
They don't
Why try to engage in the arts when you won't be able to make a living as illustrator or musician because AI slop is good enough to feed the capital machine?
Why try to engage in engineering quality software when the power structure has decided that you better be using AI for it?
Why do anything that makes us think or exhibit any human qualities when it's not the most cost effective way in our lovely capitalist AI dystopia?
All that's going to be left for humans is going to be shitty manual labor that nobody wants to do - sweatshops coming back to the US again soon thanks to the Trump tarrifs! All the intellectually or creatively stimulating work is going away, sacrificed to the machine at the altar of mammon.
> Why try to engage in engineering quality software when the power structure has decided that you better be using AI for it?
Why engage in engineering quality software? The reasons haven't changed because AI exists. AI just adds new ways of achieving high quality software outcomes.
I don't mind admitting that I spent a lot of my childhood really annoyed at all the people who seemed to just be smarter than me and there was no clear way to catch up. It is a lot less fair than physical fitness where I could at least train more. Levelling that playing field somewhat is long overdue and - for most people - going to be quite a welcome change.
Our capitalist overlords don't want us to write quality software anymore. They want cheap, disposable AI slop.
horse riding has been obsolete as a primary mode of transportation, yet still people ride horses for fun.
I sing with my friends regularly. I'm not expecting to ever get paid a dime.
Many art forms can and should require more time and investment than simply getting together with friends a couple of times a month.
Even then, for some people getting enough free time to do that is a struggle. They need to monetise their spare time by working second jobs, and so on, instead of pursuing art.
Have people forgotten how enjoyable dancing, painting, making music or any of the other arts are, even if you don't get paid a penny
You keep asserting this but I have to say that I don’t know that to be true.
Can you explain a little more concretely why you draw this conclusion?
Except the dream includes first using a tech salary to pay off a mortgage or at least most of it, and then being able to comfortably work with my hands in some romantic artisanal manner.
AI probably gets me closer to spending 60 hours a week doing back breaking groundwork and struggling to pay the bills.
It isn't nearly good enough, as far as I can tell.
Systems that nobody understands because nobody wrote them are unsafe, unmaintainable, and brittle.
Art generated by AI can't be copyrighted so its use can't be controlled.
> Why do anything that makes us think or exhibit any human qualities when it's not the most cost effective way in our lovely capitalist AI dystopia?
If the most optimistic reasonable projections of the AI optimists are true, the decay of human capability by itself among people who rely on AI will be so damaging that those who don't rely on it will become more valuable on the labor market.
If the most optimistic projections aren't correct, then in all likelihood these will continue to be simple tools that nobody should use for anything serious.
And apart from market/labor dynamics, I have seen no evidence that those who shun the use of AI tools are worse off for it (quite the contrary), so the spread of these tools should, if the current tend continues, actually become a rallying cry for and proof of the value of human work and the intrinsicness and necessity of our participation in the worlds we make for ourselves.
The longer the hype continues, the surer I am that it won't replace humans.
Try applying your questions to other areas. Why engage in the study of philosophy, or history, or ancient languages, when barely anything of use ever comes out of it? For that matter, why engage in the study of the sciences, when you are statistically very unlikely to make a significant contribution. Why engage in the sports, if you almost certainly won't become an Olympic champion, and quite likely not even a professional sportsman? Why work in geriatrics or palliative care when your patients will keep dying?..
There are things that we do for fun, or for personal fulfilment, or just because...
> Why do anything that makes us think or exhibit any human qualities when it's not the most cost effective way in our lovely capitalist AI dystopia? ... All that's going to be left for humans is going to be shitty manual labor that nobody wants to do
Well, there you go then. The reason for doing something that 'makes us think' etc. is because this is much more desirable for the doer than 'shitty manual labor that nobody wants to do'.
Maybe this is an uncommon view on HN, but personally I engage in the arts to scratch that itch of creative expression and emotional release, not with the goal to eventually monetize it. Even without AI, my poetry would never realistically be "good enough" to make it into a career, but that doesn't make it any less fulfilling for me.