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Comment by mitthrowaway2 | Hacker News Reader

I don't know about your labor, but as far as my labor goes, there are basically only three things I am capable of doing: manual labor with my hands and legs, mental labor with my mind, and selling personal charm with my handsome face.

If you can perform all the same jobs I can for a penny a day, and food and rent cost a dollar a day, I'll have a hard time earning enough to remain fed and housed.

Until now, I've always been competing against other flesh-and-blood humans who needed to eat and pay rent, so I've never had to worry about the labor price floor too much.

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Even though the three categories you describe include niches like museum attraction or vehicle piloting in legal niches that still respect humans, a little creativity expands your options for post-ASI work:

1: verbal/literary labour with your vocal cords, or the use of an output tool, to playback existing works in environments where mechanical methods are disallowed,

2: aesthetic labour through precise recreations of other's mental labour in the performing arts,

3: legal labour in acting as an agent to help or hinder existing legal processes in systems that give humans standing,

4: biological labour as a substrate for growing certain transplantable products,

5: smuggling labour (either non-invasive or surgically invasive),

6: political labour to incrementally sway electoral results in any polity where you are still enfranchised,

7: security labour as a canary for infohazards (such as 'diplomat' programs produced by another ASI) inside of a quarantined environment,

8: frontman work as a deniable patsy to enable economic forgery, deception, revenge or warfare by a patron ASI, possibly without your knowledge.

There are plenty of ways to gain some currency token that can pay for your negentropy upkeep costs.

I had to get to 4 to realize this is sarcasm

Sometimes the easiest method of communicating something is the best one. That said, every one of these jobs has had multiple historical examples of humans giving paid employment to other humans for them, even #7.

> Until now, I've always been competing against other flesh-and-blood humans

Unless you're a few centuries old, you haven't. You've had the potential to be competing agaist industrial and computational technology your whole life. Go back further, and the prevalence of slaves served as a similar cost differential (free humans versus enslaved, human versus AI).

Yes, and even in prehistoric eras people could attempt to compete with the wind at blowing air, but I've restricted my above description of "labor" to activities in which I was not already outcompeted to the point where I couldn't hope to make a living. So I've written off the once-profitable career of "calculator" from the get-go.

Slaves at least still need to be fed and housed, but I'm sure they were tough competition indeed for independent laborers.

> I've restricted my above description of "labor" to activities in which I was not already outcompeted

Then you've constructed a tautology. Humans remain competitive in various applications of their labour, broadly defined, despite entire categories having become uncompetitive. If we exempt those categories then the historical record looks static. But only because we defined away the change.

> Slaves at least still need to be fed and housed, but I'm sure they were tough competition indeed for independent laborers

I believe there is evidence for this all over the place. By analogy, however, AI is orders of magnitude less power efficient than humans. This places a floor on the price of AI and thus human labour that competes with it. (Though that floor, as with pre-information age floors, is well below almost everyone on this forum.)

My point of concern is that this domain may shrink to the empty set. There is no law of economics that says this will, with certainty, not happen.

And while AI might be less power efficient than me on some tasks, power is cheap enough that I don't think the energy price floor affords my continued survival.

> concern is that this domain may shrink to the empty set

My argument is this is, as presented, baseless.

> power is cheap enough that I don't think the energy price floor affords my continued survival

Again, slaves were cheap enough. Industry is cheap enough. Yet global labour rates remain far from homogenous.

> By analogy, however, AI is orders of magnitude less power efficient than humans.

It is both more and less power efficient, depending on the task. When a coding task is easy enough that an LLM can actually do it, I've seen e.g. Claude do a week's worth of human labour in a few hours of wall-clock time for what amounted to 0.25 euro of subscription cost. When it can't, it will churn as many tokens as you've got and leave a big ball of mud behind, as seen with the recent attempt at a vibe-coded browser.

When Stable Diffusion is good enough, the energy cost per image output is comparable to the calorific consumption of a human living long enough to type the prompt. When Stable Diffusion isn't good enough, no amount of re-prompting gets you something it can't do.

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