Hacker News Reader

Comment by gigel82 | Hacker News Reader

Holy dystopian shit, you might be right. This might just be their new favorite answer when people ask what are all the jobless humans to do after the AI takeover? This... live in squalor, hooked up to VR headsets and doing menial work remotely for the oligarch class, while the AI learns the last few non-automated tasks from them. It's a theme I've seen in many movies over the years.

View on HN

Alex Rivera's 2008 movie Sleep Dealer is not without flaws, but it left quite an impression on me. I watched it it after seeing it recommended here in a comments thread on an article about military drone operators, I should probably watch it again with fresh eyes.

EDIT: Jeez, it looks like that's an 11 years old thread. Time does indeed fly.

EDIT 2: The source for the claim is paywalled, but this is how the Cultural impact chapter of the movie's Wikipedia page closes:

> In 2025, Rivera noted that a tech CEO claimed the film had been an inspiration for his company to employ a remote labour force in the Global South in order to operate robots in the Global North, and that the film has been used in pitch decks for various start-ups.

... once again bringing to mind the "At long last, we have created the Torment Nexus from the classic sci-fi novel Don't Create The Torment Nexus" meme.

The oligarchs just have people to come do these tasks.

The target audience is the “regular-rich bourgeoisie”.

That's an ever-dwindling section of the population. Middle class and upper middle class is going away, we're very clearly heading towards ultra-polarization.

For some reason I always get pushback for pointing it out, but we are very quickly heading towards a bifurcated world like Elysium, possibly minus the space station, where a tiny ultra-rich class lives in luxury while physically separated and protected from billions who live in squalor. We're producing everything needed to build and enforce that world!

Don't worry, Musk is working on the Space Station part ...

So, we'll have Elysium minus the space station..

The meek shall inherit the Earth… but not the moon.

That's a Patton Oswalt bit; "no, haha, the meek shall inherit the earth, that's right. we're going to Mars. Bye!"

How is it worse compared with workers that are currently employed by the oligarch class? It's not like they don't have people doing menial work for them right now. And automation of menial work is a good thing!

Do you think the current AI automated menial work and left only the fun parts? It seems like the opposite, it took any fun from coding and left the drudgery of debugging code one didn't write intact.

Please read the comment I’m replying to.

Or maybe it can be used to provide job opportunities to people currently underserved, for example, if you are bound to a hospital bed you can get a VR telepresence job to make some money and help pay your medical bills.

Gross.

We're doomed if regular people have fully absorbed the propaganda to the extent that they'd think asking invalid hospital-bed-ridden people to work remotely for the uber-rich rather than fixing the tax situation so that those uber-rich can buy one less golden toilet for their private planes (and the state can provide for those poor people) is a good idea.

I think (hope) the poster who suggested that was being sarcastic, although it's hard to tell anymore!

The math doesn't math. You could tax all the ultra rich people at 100% and it wouldn't significantly change the social contract. The part people don't like hearing is that it's a lot of the middle class that has to pay much higher taxes if you want those guarantees of minimum living standards.

Citation needed.

Here is one for the contrary (just a book review. The citation is the book).

https://cleantechnica.com/2026/04/06/we-need-to-tax-billiona...

That strongly supports my point. What do you think $250 billion a year worldwide pays for? That's $30 per person per year.

It's $250 billion less that goes to the ultrarich, so that they can't purchase another $250 billion of assets.

After a certain amount of money, financial engineers can basically build all kinds of leveraged instruments that will let you buy those assets anyway.

If you assume your taxation mechanism is actually perfect and actually gets you the theoretical maximum amount of money from the ultra rich, or even the fairly rich, it's still orders of magnitude less than it costs to make sure everyone is taken care of like the scenario we were talking about above.

I think that's a very different goal post. We were talking about the social contract, publicly funded services. You must realize it's just not a meaningful amount, right? That was my initial point. If you want a real safety net, you have to tax the middle class, and a lot.

That's not really how that works. Almost all of that money is tied up in operating businesses. Most very rich people mostly hold investments in stock - and generally at large companies. That's debt, not an asset I think the way you're thinking of. Overall, taking that money out of market holdings reduces the value of those holdings, for everyone else as well. You really end up lowering the retirement savings value of everyone who has a retirement plan by some amount.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com