What Will Remain for People to Do?

Apparently we will still be washing our dishes (or at least loading and unloading our dishwashing machines); taking out our trash; and washing, drying, folding, and putting away our laundry. Since no later than The Jetsons we've known that the elimination of these low-value tasks is essential to human liberation and productivity, yet here we are with no relief in sight.

Sure, washing machines have helped, and community trash-removal takes care of a big chunk of the problem. But a few minutes per day or week add up quickly over time, and the very fact that we have to even think about these things creates substantial mental drag.

People may busy themselves with less productive work like getting their golf handicap down or catching all the Pokemon.

See the short story "With Folded Hands" by Jack Williamson (written in 1947).

Let's consider the other scenario:

AI plateus, bottlenecked by the lack of quality training data. It becomes obvious that it can only improve as humans improve.

For a while, AI companies trick humans that can come up with original thoughts to give them out for free, but it's not enough: there are not enough educated humans writing things anymore.

Worse of all, the amount of unoriginal useless content generated far outpaces the amount of "good content". It starts to make each AI iteration dumber than its predecessor. Filtering the data becomes an even tighter bottleneck.

Desperate, but with tons of money available, AI companies finally start to invest in education, figuring out it's the only way to remove the bottleneck. They say it's 30 years away now, the time it will take to educate a new generation of super-intelligent humans to train super-intelligent AIs, which will then form a feedback loop of improvement.

People fight back, remembering all those years of content that was stolen, all those original thoughts that were given for free to a machine. Governments start to create competing AI-free old fashioned education programs that outpace the AI-assisted education.

AI eventually fades to a few niche areas. Mostly, limited tasks like playing chess or nostalgia entertainment (faithfully mimicking old celebrities, for exemple). Laws are put in place to protect education and original thoughts, building on the lessons from what is dubbed "The Great Dumbing".

As a final blow, the old fashioned education programs deliver on a lot of actual human progress. True automation that doesn't displace jobs, smarter overall population, better laws and specially happier humans more satisfied with their roles in society.

See? Anything is possible.

meditate. become free from suffering. attain liberation from material existence.