The era of jobs is ending
thepavement.xyz
thepavement.xyz
They haven’t seen a model hold a complex conversation, remember context, suggest workflows, generate visuals, write scripts, and debug itself in one continuous flow."
You're absolutely right! I haven't seen these.
All your stuff is made by people. Often people with fancy machines, but people nonetheless. And the higher the degree of automation, the more non fungible skills you require of those people.
The pump in a vat of yogurt is cavitating. You can’t slow it down without endangering food safety. You can’t adjust the mix without affecting the final product. Somebody who understands all that needs to install a new impeller.
Stamped aircraft parts are coming off the line 500 microns thick. Somebody has to recognize that there’s a problem with the hydraulic cushion and fix it.
I could go on and on and on. There are few things I get ranty about on the internet, but pretending that physical world problems are solved by automation is one of them. You’re replacing a hard problem with another hard problem, with a side effect of higher productivity. Pretending Morlocks don’t exist doesn’t make them go away.
There is still a whole market for clothing; its just not led by people who use a loom.
The aircraft part is measured by Faro or some other tool. The person wielding the Faro just follows the QA instructions and marks if things are red/green. Another FARO type product measures the fixtures/etc for compliance. If they don't match, a fixtures consultant is brought in to make them match.
Other than those that happened to do the initial setup/machine/fixture construction, the people in the actual plant don't really have much non-fungible skills in your example, and they definitely don't have power/permission to go tweaking things using their personal non-fungible skills.
"Inside China's 'dark factories' where robots run the production lines" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ftY-MH5mdbw
"China’s Dark Factories: So Automated, They Don't Need Lights" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MCBdcNA_FsI
Bullet points I can forgive, it's a common blog post writing style. But the ranty prose here definitely has a whiff of silicon.
"Humans do not exist to be economic assets. The economy exists to provide for humans"
Most humans do not see themselves as existing to provide for others who either cannot or won't provide for themselves. As stated above, the economy is not a charity, it is about equal exchange. Those who have nothing to offer will receive nothing in return.
> Most humans do not see themselves as existing to provide for others who either cannot or won't provide for themselves. As stated above, the economy is not a charity, it is about equal exchange. Those who have nothing to offer will receive nothing in return.
The problem that this has run into throughout history has been the existence of those who don't take kindly to rules that appear to be there just to push them aside.
An economy that chooses to exclude the majority of the population as "no longer needed" as so much dystopian AI-true-believer babble these days does is going to lead to some major issues when the excluded decide they don't want to simply be excluded.
Society historically does not help those that the economy leaves behind exclusively out of the goodness of its heart - it also does it for self-preservation.
I think this completely ignores the role of government in the economy. By virtue of being born today, you are forced to participate in the economy. The government spends tax dollars in the economy, which it either collects from you, or spends on you, and the voting body has decided that, to some degree, the economy is indeed a charity.
> Most humans do not see themselves as existing to provide for others who either cannot or won't provide for themselves.
I'd disagree with the first part of that statement. Most people see themselves as good, and therefore see some level of responsibility for helping those that cannot provide for themselves.
> As stated above, the economy is not a charity, it is about equal exchange. Those who have nothing to offer will receive nothing in return.
Again, this ignores that the economy is, at least partially, structured by a government.
The slums of Mumbai are just a taste of what’s to come in America, at this rate.
Billionaires, take heed.
In Capitalism, the economy exists to provide for Capital.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_in_the_Twenty-First_Ce...
Pluribus is a more interesting meditation.
This article misses the key problem with the end of jobs. How else are 98% of the human population going to get income? With the coming of drones and old-timey 1900s chemical weapons they are probably no longer equipped as a class to win a military contest over redistribution against the asset holders.
Much like replacing religion with nothing has turned out, replacing jobs with nothing is going to be bad at best.
These don't magically appear - people have to create / store / distribute those things, and/or develop the science / engineering to do so.
Not sure about quality food.
1) choose not to simply coast on the social safety net, and seek out jobs for status and additional things than those. why do they do those when by historical standards they could be wildly comfortable without the bullshit work?
2) do coast (opting to just go on disability, say) but are generally extremely unhappy about it in ways that frequently cause problems for the rest of the people
3) opt out entirely from the social safety net and chose to try to live on the streets instead, whether for a desire for some sort of freedom or because of poor impulse control caused by addiction or similar (which also frequently leads to problems for the rest of the people)
As an analogy imagine you had a 6 hour driving commute each day (3 each way)
Imagine if now you move next to the office.
Will it be bad you get those 6 hours back?
If 15->9 is good then 9->0 is even better!
The problem is adjusting to that at scale. Will we get addicts or people who never leave the home? Maybe.
I'm not talking about replacing a block of time with nothing, people will still have 24 hours in the day. My worry is about replacing income with nothing, because most people don't have the power to seize any income that isn't freely available.
The public takes what they're offered and can't have anything that isn't on offer. If the offer of access to food is withdrawn, the public has no recourse.
If you think this is madness, the analogy (yes another) is you are playing uno with people you met. They have no money. You can say well never mind we wont play. Or you can just deal the cards because they are so cheap it costs you nothing just to do that. And that is more fun. This is what post scarcity could look like.
Post-scarcity requires a political choice. Everybody with political power, regardless of affiliation or nation, stands to benefit from reducing the political power of others who may stand to make demands. The economically surplus humans can't make those demands upon the powerful if they aren't around.
As an obvious trivial counter-example, plenty of people have jobs doing lawn care for other people who's income also comes from a job.
> As an obvious trivial counter-example, plenty of people have jobs doing lawn care for other people who's income also comes from a job.
That's not a counter-example, it's just nit-picking on the phrasing and missing the point: the lawn-care people get their income from "those who do own appreciating assets," just with a middleman or two in between.
The labour for wage model is rapidly becoming obsolete for the many, and a way forward that doesn't necessitate people working in order to gain access to the necessities of - modern - living needs to be paved. Otherwise it'll be grim for the vast majority when global automation of value creation gets upwards of say 85%. It's already pretty grim for an appreciable, though still relatively limited, number.
[0] - if robotics/ai can replace healthcare, healthcare costs would drop to zero...
Based on what? Certainly there are humans with crippling disabilities that remove them from pretty much any kind of work, but of the "normally functioning" population?
Most lack the necessary attention directed towards R&D as they're too busy living out other lives in other jobs. If that's what you mean, that is a fair point. But if those jobs went away as suggested earlier, they'd have nothing else to do but turn their attention towards R&D. That current world model wouldn't apply anymore.
Several decades of academic achievement data, psychology studies, etc. I get the argument that "the whole world would be different, so present data isn't applicable", but, if that's your argument, then it's totally unfalsifiable.
Right. That much was obvious. But what does that mean in more detail? If you pick a random, normally capable, person off the street and give them everything they need to become successful in R&D, what ends up happening?
Don't we run that experiment on every moderately wealthy child on the planet? I can tell you that the hit rate there is definitely not 100%.
If you are asking about what I've seen anecdotally, which is all you can expect of me given that I am not the one of us who is the subject matter expert between us, all those who were moderately wealthy children that I know have grown up into having success with R&D in at least some limited capacity. They haven't all dedicated their lives to R&D, but they've had no trouble being able to invent things when the situation necessitated it.
If they had more time to dedicate their life to it, I see no reason for why that would stop. But, again, you're the expert among us here. I don't know much about it — that is why I'm asking you.
Aside, R&D fundamentally isn't guaranteed to deliver fruit, so elaborate for us on how the research you spoke of differentiates between someone who is well suited to R&D work but never strikes gold due to the nature of the beast, and someone who cannot strike gold because they are straight up incapable as a person. That might help us communicate about this more effectively.
Not sure why the snark is necessary. Its pretty easy to look up academic achievement stratified by socioeconomic status. I'm not an expert, but the line for rich kids doesn't go to 100%.
> If they had more time to dedicate their life to it, I see no reason for why that would stop.
Because not everyone is a bottomless pit of ambition. Most people, given the option, engage in leisure in their free time.
> Aside, R&D fundamentally isn't guaranteed to deliver fruit, so elaborate for us on how the research you spoke of differentiates between someone who is well suited to R&D work but never strikes gold due to the nature of the beast, and someone who cannot strike gold because they are straight up incapable as a person. That might help us communicate about this more effectively.
I'm speaking in generalities. Research is generally a race, and the smartest and hardest working generally win the race. Even if everyone's IQ and ambition shot up, there would still be a smarter and harder working subset of people.
After that last paragraph, it isn't clear to me that you disagree with my core premise of "not everyone should do research".
Not sure why you think a computer screen is giving you snark, but you do you.
> I'm not an expert
You read through all of that data and research, as told earlier, and haven't become an expert...? Yeah right. No need to be so modest with me. Be proud of your achievements!
> Its pretty easy to look up academic achievement stratified by socioeconomic status.
It may be, but no need to waste time sauntering off on another, rather uninteresting, subject. We're talking about R&D, not academic achievement. Stay focused, by friend.
> Most people, given the option, engage in leisure in their free time.
R&D is the leisure activity of many people. We'll leave your data sources to quantify exactly what that means, but it is clearly large enough to be a recognizable set of the population.
> Research is generally a race
It can be where you are trying to be first to build a moat around something that scales massively. But not all R&D scales, or even wants to scale. Despite your unquantified "generally" claim, it remains unclear if most R&D is even trying to scale. There are a lot of hobbyists out there carrying out R&D with no plans for it beyond doing something for themselves.
> there would still be a smarter and harder working subset of people.
There is seemingly no end to how much R&D is possible. I guess at some point there is a pinnacle of human achievement, but it seems highly unlikely that we'll reach that point in the next thousand years. Humans are pretty shortsighted — the people from the year 1200 would have never imagined digital computers being a thing — but when the time comes we always find something new to immerse our thoughts in.
So what if someone is smarter and harder working?
Okay. You seem upset, so I'll disengage. Have a great day!
Okay bud.
If it is not in the data, you can say so, but it becomes impossible to know how the average person performs in R&D without it. Which then returns us to the original question: "Based on what?"
Did it fall over?
There was some stuff about you being a computer screen then asking me for sources then pointing out typos. Not really sure what you're asking me for at this point.
Does it change the point? If we say "GBI appears to work, let's try that" is that different?
I don't understand the questions you are asking at the end. Apologies for not having a good answer.
I was wondering if your correction from UBI to GBI changes that point; these trials seem to work and solve at least part of the problem that this whole thread discusses, so maybe we should try that at a national scale. Does GBI invalidate that?
The core thing that the studies have proven, I understand, is that if you guarantee people a basic living income, they don't sit around doing drugs and watching TV (or at least not for long). Which is usually the main objection from naysayers - the Theory X hypothesis that people are lazy and must be forced to do anything useful. And this is the thing that is disproved by these studies.
You seem more familiar with them, though, is that your reading too?
If you haven't socialized the means of production when you could strike and make it stop, there's no way you're going to do so when it doesn't need you anymore.
> We can choose to be the last generation that spent its best hours under fluorescent lights, pretending this was the height of civilization.
> Or we can be the first generation that looked at the robots walking onto the factory floor, looked at the models spinning up in the cloud, and said:
>> “Good. Take the work. We’ll take the world back.”
This article is stupid. How would Mr. Economically Irrelevant Former-worker "take the world back?" He just lost whatever power over that world that he had.
This is 15 pages of trying to put lipstick on a pig.
Way I see it, there isn't really a choice here. Once humanity gets to the point where they are literally no longer needed to produce value due to automation, the means of production will be - logically - accessible to all who survive. Those who don't have access will die. And the fewer the survivors, the less relevant the purpose of said means. The means will always "need" people to validate its continued existence.
And that's the part that the AI optimists in these discussions skip over. They want to talk about this new and glorious AI-infested future, but not mention the holocaust that will happen to get there. For most people, the holocaust is the only relevant part, because they'll be destroyed in it [1]. The glorious future of abundance without work is one they'll never see [2].
[1] Most likely through grinding poverty and deprivation, which is how capitalism does it. Not gas chambers or anything.
[2] That future, like you said, a smaller group. I think eventually it will roughly consist of the nepo babies of some billionaires and a smallish group of Lumon-employees (the cultists, not the severed) who must worship them to survive.
If there is a world of plenty and humans have little to no role in that what else is there?
... Eh?
"But the lying fantasist is _rich_" is not really a particularly convincing argument. Have you considered that possibly they shut up to avoid having a protracted argument with one of his tedious fans?
Doing things for enjoyment and/or interest.
Removing jobs is not like taking away the rock, it's more like making the rock way heavier.
Only God can make the rock disappear. And God is dead.
Well, if the work under the fluorescent lights is what allowed us to end the era of jobs, then maybe it is "a" height of civilization?
Is nuclear power safe from assault? I dunno. Visit Chernobyl and see.
If an even greater concentration of wealth is to lead to mass destruction/revolution, I advise a more even distribution.
Note to oligarchs: a post-apocalyptic world is no fun. Not even for you in your bunkers.
The power of science fiction!
Drones would be great for taking out substations.
its inevitable tbh
It's amusing to me that oligarchs don't seem to understand that if the economy goes to hell, their private security forces will just leave (or worse!). What do they think they will pay salaries with? Bitcoin? Do they really think an army of robot dogs is going to protect them?
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
Why would anyone think otherwise?
Anyone who has ever started their own business knows how hard (and rewarding) it can be- but you're just creating your own job. Nothing wrong with that. It is one of the best experiences in full accountability, but it's a job.
Yes
>The era of jobs is ending
What are you selling.
That being said, do I think it’ll happen? No, I don’t, for the simple reason that we still cannot fundamentally get a plurality of society to agree - on any conceivable level - that every human is entitled to and guaranteed shelter, nutritious foodstuffs, healthcare, and education. It’s 2025, we’re literally destroying resources to drive up profit margins and investment returns instead of dispersing surplus appropriately, and yet anyone who mentions this is slandered as a “socialist” and ostracized.
So instead, I fret that what will happen is the cementing of a two-tiered society indefinitely: one of immense wealth who owns the securities, the land, the datacenters that makes the world work, and a serf class who must engage with these ever-more-expensive systems for the gains of Capital, including via increasingly precarious gig work instead of reliable, structural jobs.
And I think folks roundly dismissing these sorts of posts as “unrealistic” just don’t appreciate how far and how fast we’ve gone from “humans have to engage in subsistence farming” to an interconnected global marketplace and digitized society. We have quite literally thrown out the “status quo” dozens of times since the end of Feudalism, and this time is no different.
Those who dare to dream big are often the victors of such profound change, provided they can craft a message relatable to the populace.
And a message of, “you don’t need a job anymore because necessities got so expensive that governments made them part of tax dollars, and are therefore free to live where you want, do what you want, and live an authentic life” is quite compelling to folks who have struggled harder for less and less their entire lives.
Not possible once we pass a some point in global automation, say (arbitrarily) 95%. The financial flows would've ceased to exist by then with the vast majority of humans being unable to contribute value, and hence having no earned income to participate in markets. And there's no deliberate prevention or slowing as the race is global and highly competitive at the political level (the US is very afraid of China getting (too far) ahead).
Also, I don’t think you fully appreciate the distance to which humans in power will scheme to preserve power long past the point of its utility. If future AI needs organic human data to improve, then we will be turned into data generation machines with money granted based on the quality, uniqueness, or importance of said data - which is kinda what Capitalism is already doing, if you squint a bit. Those systems, once entrenched, will survive long past the point of necessity provided the populace as a whole doesn’t become aware of that fact. After all, just look at the growing political extremism as more folks realize that not only is the current social contract irreparably broken (all work, no homes, no stability or security with which to take chances for most folks), but that current political mechanisms and institutions built to serve it are similarly unnecessary. It’s partly why, I suspect, Capital is latching so hard onto the idea that AI is their exit strategy, as it means their assets will continue appreciating in value along with their net worth even as the rest of the planet crumbles and burns around them - ensuring their safety, or so they think.
My point is: the future is unknowable, and you should’t underestimate the human desire to humiliate and enslave others to their will by any means necessary.
And yes, humans always hunger for power, when there's some kind of value to be had. It's a bit hard to think of any human data which hasn't already been siphoned off in some way and stored somewhere, so there's just going to be nothing more to be gained after full automation. What happens then is whoever has or can gain access to means of production will survive, and those who can't, won't.
[0] https://xcancel.com/deepseek_ai/status/1995452646459858977
No the China thing is an imminent invasion of a 20 million person democracy. Should the US not defend the World Order in this case, we'll have completely thrown off world police role and the rest of the scores of irredentist countries around the globe are now free to conquer others as they see fit, and all the chaos that follows.
If only the resources to sustain our meatsuits were provided by Someone Else, with no reciprocal obligations.
> with no reciprocal obligations.
The majority are coming around to feel office jobs making line go up are not sufficient reciprocal obligations relative to 12-13 year olds in textile factories ensuring you have clothing 996. So why value Excel and other keyboard experts?
By majority I mean the billions outside the US who have recovered from US imperialism of the latter 1900s and tire of being serfs for Wall-E culture of a smidge over 300 million.
When is the last time you did useful work for yourself rather than externalize it on Target?
How sad Americans have to grow up and live in reality and not some rhetorical hallucination induced by corporate propaganda.
This is false.
> the author says it's not the end of "work" but "jobs".
Yes, with the distinction being that "jobs" are done because they're useful and "work" that isn't a "job" is for personal spiritual fulfillment.
The anti-work crowd always paints a rosy picture of what life looks like without work. But there are regions scattered throughout the West where so-called abundance has manifested itself. Factory jobs that paid well were replaced with easy "service" jobs, and lots of people got on the dole. Lots of people, if not most, will not ascend into any higher form of actualization than getting high or drunk with their friends for years on end. Many have died from the rampant drug abuse we see everywhere.
Huxley's vision of abundance was accurate in this regard: people faced with abundance just did Soma and had casual sex with no higher aspirations. To maintain everyone's physical and mental health, and the gene pool, I expect that we will have to require people to do meaningful work after everything is automated. This stuff will likely have to be structured as a job market, because most people are not creative or independent enough to do anything interesting all alone.