After Work, We'll Have Each Other | Hacker News Reader

After Work, We'll Have Each Other

asteriskmag.com

23 pointsdevonnull8 comments

"Let’s start with 18th-century aristocrats. Aristocrats are (typically) rich, which we certainly will be if we have robots capable of all normal nonrelational labor."

I'm curious as to what aspects of modern society suggest anyone here, or the author themselves, will be part of this "we".

Likely because open conflict between 10 of millions of adults is a lose-lose

The last of the firmly 1900s pre-information age mindset are exiting the mortal plane faster and faster

Millennials on down make up the majority and what else are they going to do? They don't have the work the land skills of prior generations

GenX candidates are failing at the voting booth; they're likely to continue to be skipped over: https://fortune.com/2025/08/07/gen-x-ceos-decreasing-baby-bo...

The AI backlash is largely a data center backlash (though not entirely).

So Millennials can just do what Boomers and GenX have done and want to do; loot their retirements and wealth and ignore them screaming about it from their hospice bed

This is mostly seems to be looking at the past to define the future, as if we are going to go back to a similar way of living and that the current "work" was a fever-dream which captured the entire population.

But I see the past as more of a trajectory than a closed-circle.

Prior to industrialization, most of us would have though of ourselves and our work as physicality. We have physical bodies which do the farming, the sewing, the waring, the metal working, etc. etc.

Yes, we used our minds and understood the idea of a creative class, but that would have been a very small minority of the population.

As industrialization took over the physicality of many jobs, we transferred to our thinking selves. Most work does not involve physical inputs. They are mental inputs.

If we spoke to a pre-industrialized person, would they even recognize that their mental inputs would be considered work or a job?

Therefore, with this mentality, is there something we are doing today which is part of our humanness, which we don't currently recognize the value of, but will become the next level of "work"?

Emotional processing.

I think this is a direction as well, though I'm also conscious that it may be something else we're mostly unaware that we do.

It's a nice thought, but as an American why should I believe a word of this, when our country's Overton window ranges from "lip service" to "open contempt" for the unemployed? How can I feel confidence for my economic future when, in less than a decade, the frontier AI labs have abandoned any semblance of caution and are embracing a lobby for fewer guardrails? When "move fast, break things" is applied to the "mass cognition replacement machine"?

Filing this entire article under "I'll believe it when I fucking see it". The pollyannic nonsense is willfully ignorant and only serves to excuse more concentration of wealth and the mass theft of leverage from the average worker.

Anyone who has even slept through a history class will still have learned by osmosis that This Is Not How Things Have Ever Worked.

The wealthy and powerful have always held contempt for the poor and powerless, but for better or worse they needed them as a source of both cheap labor and, from time to time, as cannon fodder against their rivals. This part is what they can see possibly changing, and they are really, really, really hoping that they don't need you anymore.

People who say, "Well, who will they sell everything to if no one has a job" are stuck thinking in the past. When your existence is no longer tolerated, but now actively a nuisance, there is no need for a consumer economy supporting millions of people. While their vanity requires keeping some number of the permanent underclass around so they they will always have someone to degrade and feel superior to, I don't see this amounting to more than a few thousand underlings huddled in various competing compounds, and even this custom is likely be to be abandoned entirely by those who seek to transcend humanity itself.

I've been awake through enough history classes to know what happens when people get pushed too far

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