The TLDR take: now that humans are no longer required for thinking, we will switch to something other than usage of our brains.
Eating, apparently, is completely optional for humans :-/
Just a thing to remember: our intelligence made us the apex predator on this planet. Is there any reason to believe that a superior intelligence, whether man-made or extraterrestrial, won't become the apex predator?
asgraham · 2026-10-26 06:22:44 UTC
That’s not really what it’s saying. The analogy it draws is between subsistence farmers and subsistence thinkers aka white collar workers/paper pushers etc. The argument would be that repetitive, brainless thinking will no longer be required (not thinking in general), so people will be freed up for currently unimaginable cognitive pursuits.
10111001 · 2026-10-26 06:31:28 UTC
> The argument would be that repetitive, brainless thinking will no longer be required, so people will be freed up for currently unimaginable cognitive pursuits.
Like what?
1. AI isn't going to stop at "repetitive, brainless thinking," just ask the math professors.
2. Even if that's true, is everyone capable of these "currently unimaginable cognitive pursuits"? Oh, there will still be cognitive work for the top-0.1% smartest people is little consolation to the other 99.9%.
3. That argument is basically trying to console people with a combination of "trust us" and the underpants gnome business plan ("1. Collect underpants, 2. ?, 3. Profit).
asgraham · 2026-10-26 16:03:56 UTC
1. Yeah, I’m not fully sold on the argument. I’m also oversimplifying it quite a bit by saying it’s just “brainless, repetitive.” That’s just where it’s obvious. But at the same time, my understanding of 95% of the current math results is that they are sort of the result of AI doing dull repetitive theory work, rather than inspired novel thinking. Either way, the article’s point is that the way we use intelligence to do work will change, not that the current cream of the crop will be unaffected.
2. A major and weird point of the article argues that most people are “stupid” because of a lack of incentives for intellectual labor. If you know you’re not that top 1%, why bother in school? If you’ve already missed the window for a fancy white collar job, why bother “thinking”? In this view, AI could have a democratizing effect on intellectual labor.
3. That does seem to be the upshot, but the author doesn’t seem to be very sympathetic to AI execs either (basically calling them rent seekers still in the mercantilist mindset despite developing the “transformative technology”). Still article doesn’t offer any path forward.
lelanthran · 2026-10-26 07:32:20 UTC
> The argument would be that repetitive, brainless thinking will no longer be required (not thinking in general), so people will be freed up for currently unimaginable cognitive pursuits.
That's a facile, superficial "argument" that is currently being made by everyone who is pro-AI when confronted with any claim of AI pushing humans out of the economy.
At this point in time, it's reasonable to dismiss the argument rather than engaging it, because each time this argument is made the proponent of the argument is completely mute on the fact that humans work to eat.
That's a big underlying counterargument, and no one making the argument is engaging with the counter-argument, they are instead setting up strawman counter-arguments.
asgraham · 2026-10-26 15:52:08 UTC
But… that’s exactly the substance of this argument. I’m not sold on the full extent of the metaphor and I’m definitely not out here cheerleading AI, but the central argument of this article is this analogy: when you say “but humans work to eat” you’re echoing exactly the concerns during the Industrial Revolution (slash advent of capitalism, depending how you and the article want to look at it).
Will that analogy hold? Who knows. But it’s more than a facile AI bro saying AI is bringing us a utopia. The article even raises a key part of the analogy: the transition to industry and capitalism (and the resulting freed up labor) led to an unprecedented wave of revolutions and death.
bayarearefugee · 2026-10-26 08:45:17 UTC
> people will be freed up for currently unimaginable cognitive pursuits.
54% of U.S. adults read below a sixth-grade level.
raised_by_foxes · 2026-10-26 06:19:44 UTC
Thankfully capitalism didn't have any negative consequences.
letwhile · 2026-10-26 06:20:15 UTC
The british flag on the boat, as if britain would play any role in current times.
lampe3 · 2026-10-26 07:41:23 UTC
Britain as one of the most aggressive nations ever roaming this world actually fits since this is also where Manchester capitalism was born.
visarga · 2026-10-26 06:28:53 UTC
I think the article is insightful. I want to contribute my perspective:
1. when an AI starts working on a task, it is within a human context, someone pays and decides to assign that work to AI
2. while it performs work on the task it continuously needs to interact with the context in order to act and observe the feedback
3. at the end of work, the outcomes remain in context, including gains, losses, costs, risks and liability.
So AI is great but can't do the beginning, middle and end of a task. They belong to context, which is us, the AI users. Context is maximally distributed, every human, team, or company that uses AI is a context, they are relational and indexical. You can't have my context, for example - you can't eat for me, or learn for me. Some things must loop back. Especially consequences of AI work. That is irreducible, AI can't improve to grow a skin like us. Its own skin is user base gain/loss, competition with other AI providers and dancing for investors. Every AI usage context is not theirs and they can't own it.
What happens to companies is that their investors expect AI usage already, their competitors use it to compete with them and fast follow, and customers use AI agents to arbitrate their buying opportunities. So even if they did nothing AI related they find themselves in a new world where.
1. anything visible can be easily imitated - code, text, media, and AI agents - I call it the fast follow effect
2. any apparent arbitrage opportunity will be quickly crowded by fast followers removing profit from it
3. AI it self is competitive and the whole stack is fungible - models, harnesses, tools, they can all be replaced easily, what matters more is the project context data which is usually a git backed folder on local disk
So my theory is that AI won't make anyone "rich". Instead we have a musical chairs moment. AI removes distinctiveness from everyone of us. Every time I use AI for myself it is just great and amazing. When others use it, they make our own work seem little and not as impressive. Companies are caught in a Red Queen effect, have to work harder just to stay in place.
And here I find the answer to what will we do with all our free time - compete, run for our own musical chair. We need to find our own niches again, they are now under rapid change. We will invest as much energy as needed to do it, we are ready to pay a lot of effort to differentiate back. But we can't predict it just as you can't predict where the ball in a football match will go 1 minute later, it depends on what every other player is doing.
wisty · 2026-10-26 07:01:22 UTC
So if I'm reading you right, the question is, is the context that matters a consumer, a government, or a business?
If a CEO just needs to write "optimise profits" ...
valesco · 2026-10-26 07:16:48 UTC
A CEO always just had to write “optimize profits”.
But IMHO what humans do is turn their intentions into reality using tools.
Intention is human, reality is perceived by humans. I feel that you need humans in the whole chain to communicate with reality (the context) and serve as translators and drivers for our tools.
Sorry that I can’t put more precise words here, but I am somehow convinced that there is a fundamental mechanism here that limits the reach of AI.
visarga · 2026-10-26 17:28:17 UTC
The context is that which can pay - a human or bank account. It's the liability sink which is immune to AI, nobody cares if your AI failed or you.
keybored · 2026-10-26 06:31:49 UTC
> Capitalism emerged when people began discovering that wealth could be created rather than merely captured, and that ordinary people could be sources of demand and initiative rather than merely labor to be commanded as a factor of production.
A worker under capitalism is exactly just another commodity commanded by capital. Only competing power centers like unions makes it not one-sided.
I dunno about “demand and initiative”. Is this how capitalism started, or are we jumping ahead to the post-WWII USA where the socialists and capitalists had won concessions from the bougies so that a “middle class” came about?
> The early capitalist worker voluntarily increased annual working days from 250 to 300 because a new universe of desirable goods had become accessible.
The weekly working hours increased for many who moved to the factories of the cities. Labor organizing is what lead to the two-day weekend.
> We are moving toward a world in which an ordinary person can command quantities and varieties of intelligence that would previously have required teams of highly trained specialists. Just as I can enjoy food without knowing how to farm, I can increasingly enjoy the products of intelligence without knowing how to produce them myself.
Some people are incapable of seeing power dynamics. An ordinary person might fear AI because of the explicit threats against his or her job.
How does power work? In this case it works by concentrating compute and access to the vaunted frontier models.
Another thing is the part about “hoarding”. AI is exactly about hoarding. Labor built the intelligence of centuries. Now AI wants to close that off.
EdwardDiego · 2026-10-26 06:45:56 UTC
> Labor organizing is what lead to the two-day weekend.
And the 8 hour work day. And, for miners, being able to have their lunch break above ground.
zkmon · 2026-10-26 06:37:19 UTC
The analogy between farm work and intelligence work breaks down at their transition continuation, which the author missed, I believe.
When the people were were freed from farm labour, due to farm automation, people could find another economic activity which required the other capacity of humans - intelligence.
The transition from muscle-power work to mind-work was meaningful, as both muscle and mind were attributes of humans, creating demand for humans having mind power instead of muscle power.
But the continuation of that transition breaks down. Muscle power -> Mind power -> ???
Those 3 questions marks at the end are what's scaring people, and what is threatening the stability of the transition from mind work. If both muscle power and mond power are not things of value, how would the humanity progress to create value? Who buys it? Why do they buy it? Who hires whom? Why?
pinkgolem · 2026-10-26 07:00:32 UTC
I mean some argue the 3d is creativity.
But I am sure people had the same question marks back then, for what's comes next
AnimalMuppet · 2026-10-26 14:12:37 UTC
Back then, how many people had a university education? How many even finished high school?
It was not obvious then that "mind power" was something that everyone could use - or even that a large fraction of the population could use.
shoobiedoo · 2026-10-26 07:08:57 UTC
Yes, if you look at the examples the author used such as Indian cotton or tobacco as drivers of increased voluntary labor, both of those carried immediate intangible value as status symbols or bragging rights on top of their material value. It further stratified society which led to more people wanting more stuff and... on and on. What is this cognitive surplus value going to bring? I don't get it.
I guess their point is that, for example-- instead of requiring heaps of study and a genius mind to learn to how to reverse engineer complex things over the course of years, their intelligence can go to something that... AI can't do yet?
zkmon · 2026-10-26 07:15:29 UTC
The author declares that it is fully written by AI using a few prompts. So, not surprising that the whole article is so weak at the core.
zzrrt · 2026-10-26 08:16:37 UTC
Out of curiosity, where did he say that? FWIW I ran the first half through Pangram (truncated to use free credits) and it said 73% AI, evenly interspersed. (I have no idea how much truncation breaks their algorithm.)
shoobiedoo · 2026-10-26 08:45:34 UTC
I'm curious myself, in fact I was kind of relieved to read a long, well written article and just thought it felt human. I hope I'm right
zkmon · 2026-10-26 12:48:24 UTC
There is an "about" page on their blog where author discusses extensively (probably written by AI as well) about how most of his writing is AI-written.
decidu0us9034 · 2026-10-26 07:19:32 UTC
For many here the answer seems to be that everyone will be product manager or a capitalist (one suspects the people saying this are product managers and capitalists).
aswegs8 · 2026-10-26 07:28:58 UTC
Will power seems to have become the new differentiator.
zarzavat · 2026-10-26 08:44:15 UTC
The ??? is capital power. If both human mind and muscle have lesser value then what matters is the capital you possess. Can be financial capital or other kinds of capital. Indeed this is the default in many less developed countries.
samrus · 2026-10-26 06:38:04 UTC
I think this analogy breaks down when considering that the agricultural revolution gave regular people more time to demand new things, but also more time to produce new things, and thus maintained or even increased their economic leverage
> My inability to produce food is economically almost irrelevant. What matters is that I can consume it, enjoy it, develop tastes for it, and devote my energies to other things.
What the author misses is that what mattered more was that people could now produce more things. People were free from manual labour to perform intellectual labour. But what do people do to produce things when intellectual labour is automated? And with emboddied AI, skilled manual labour too?
You need to produce things to be able to reap the fruits of economic progress. Thats what most working people did after the agricultural revolution. What will we produce in a post AI world? And if only the people who own AI will be able to produce things, then why would they give us any power or leverage in the economy?
reasonableklout · 2026-10-26 06:44:02 UTC
I suspect the author would respond with some form of "displaced people without capital will take on roles in the relational economy, or as human liability for the robots." I agree the material leverage of such jobs seems radically diminished.
logicchains · 2026-10-26 06:48:48 UTC
>But what do people do to produce things when intellectual labour is automated?
They do what AI can't do, entrepreneurialism, because AI doesn't have property rights. Like back to the 1800s when most Americans were self-employed, not working for large corporations, because corporate cog-in-the-machine work can be done better by AI. With AI it's far easier to run your own business than at any time in history.
chii · 2026-10-26 06:56:30 UTC
> far easier to run your own business than at any time in history.
But let me play the devil's advocate and argue the point: who will the business sell to, if most people are not in a position with wealth to spare to buy from your business?
samrus · 2026-10-26 21:12:47 UTC
Its businesses all the way around
IndeanCondor · 2026-10-26 06:59:42 UTC
... What do you believe 1800 America was like? Because it was govt backed credit sales, land grants and pre emption rights that gave the land to people. The "self employment" was subsistence agriculture on the granted land in the frontier. The land was granted by a mechanism very similar to the volkisch lebensraum.
Clearly a relevant and replicable analogy to AI making entrepreneurship easier /s
Your version of 1800s North America is a myth.
lioeters · 2026-10-26 07:01:24 UTC
> back to the 1800s when most Americans were self-employed
They were mainly wage employees and factory workers by the end of that century due to industrialization. And "AI" is the industrialization of intellectual work.
chrystalkey · 2026-10-26 07:03:12 UTC
Are you really arguing the singular benefit of being human that AI can't take away is a specific concept of law?
And then say that running your business with AI is easier than ever?
So if we are reduced to running our own business, and AI can do that pretty good, what do we do?
roenxi · 2026-10-26 08:39:12 UTC
If he is that does seem like a reasonable claim. There is precedent in concepts like citizenship, for example. Property rights. Inheritance. A lot of things give people advantages purely because that is how the legal superstructure works without reference to any inherent imbalance in economic or social power.
chrystalkey · 2026-10-26 14:57:38 UTC
Not really, no.
The question is not what distinguishes us at some point in time in some scenario, but what AI cannot take away, and changing a few laws seems not too far fetched.
Especially because the people in charge of AI do seem pretty unscrupulous and powerful to me, and there is no sign of that influence being reigned in.
atleastoptimal · 2026-10-26 06:51:00 UTC
150IQ comment
akanet · 2026-10-26 07:06:14 UTC
I think you did not read the post, or else missed its point entirely. VGR speaks directly to the induced demand of greater access to intelligence, namely, that people may redouble their efforts given that now so many more things are within reach with the aid of AI.
samrus · 2026-10-26 21:10:13 UTC
I did read it. The question is will you have the aid of AI? If the means of production get decoupled from a human being, then will normal people even have the respurces to afford access to AI to be able to make things? How would you afford it? You cant produce anything of value to sell to anyone since AI can just male whatever your making
If AI keeps going the way the author thinks (which isnt guaranteed) then there will come a point where the productivity of those who can afford to have access to AI will start becoming infinitely more than those who do not, and then those without AI are locked in the permanent underclass. Not much is within your reach then
dot42 · 2026-10-26 07:07:37 UTC
> And if only the people who own AI will be able to produce things, then why would they give us any power or leverage in the economy?
Nailed it! It’s a too powerful resource to be privately held.
lynx97 · 2026-10-26 07:19:43 UTC
Well, regarding manual labour. Putting aisde the "is working with AI drying out your brain" discussion... Quite frankly, even fast touch-typists like me will never outpace an LLM write a few obvious functions... Isn't that also more or less the same thing as being freed of manual labour. How much of the thinking/design process your outsource to your LLM is a totally different discussion. See vibe-coding vs "pair" programming. But all that aside, I very much feel like LLMs are pretty much saving me a lot of manual typing.
ehnto · 2026-10-26 08:21:12 UTC
You could out-type other prompters though. Words Per Minute might end up back on my resume yet!
jongjong · 2026-10-26 07:43:21 UTC
Surely it will also free people up to apply their intelligence (or stupidity) towards other things.
It's concerning because there is already way too much 'intelligence' in this society and most of it is used to propagate falsehoods, irrationality and to manipulate others in counter-productive ways. I hope AI educates people and doesn't merely steer them down deeper into their echo-chambers. That said, I also really hope that AI doesn't just bring everyone into alignment and agreement about ideas which aren't true. There are significant threats with both extremes.
latentsea · 2026-10-26 11:02:00 UTC
> I hope AI educates people and doesn't merely steer them down deeper into their echo-chambers.
Honestly, it feels like there is exceptionally little incentive to learn anything deeply anymore because the payoff might never be there.
I know, I know, do it because you love it or you find it interesting. Sure, I will to the degree that I love it or find it interesting. But I find even the incentives on that have changed weirdly enough.
Modern concepts of "work" and how we relate to work are quite new and it's just an assumption that we're "on the right path."
adventured · 2026-10-26 08:44:38 UTC
Seems like an exceptionally silly premise that boils down to: affluence as a concept is relative.
Well of course it is.
ElProlactin · 2026-10-26 08:52:16 UTC
You can focus on the word, but the substance is actually what I was more interested in.
Most people living today take it for granted that modern "work" is the way it is and the way it should be. Few people have the context of understanding that modern work, where you directly trade labor for money and money for the goods and services you need to live, and where your identity and social standing is largely based on your profession, is something only a minority of human beings have experienced.
In my experience, most people seem to treat human development as a one-way spear of progress. The dawn of agriculture, the industrial revolution, etc. are all just stops on a linear path that is the right path.
But maybe it's just a dead end. "Primitive" hunter-gatherer societies survived for way longer than our modern-day society has existed, and things aren't looking so promising for us right now.
simonbarker87 · 2026-10-26 10:23:02 UTC
> Most people living today take it for granted that modern "work" is the way it is and the way it should be.
Which is understandable when the alternative is generally poverty.
ElProlactin · 2026-10-26 12:01:13 UTC
My comment was clearly looking at the historical and anthropological context, and raising the philosophical question about whether modern work is ideal and ever was sustainable.
But if you want to have a less philosophical and more pragmatic discussion, I'd raise the issue of the billions of people who count themselves among the "working poor." For billions of people, modern work doesn't guarantee that you won't be poor.
simonbarker87 · 2026-10-26 12:23:16 UTC
Agreed, but so far the picture painted around mass AI adoption looks like it will make that situation worse not better. So until a viable alternative is produced people will be very concerned about loosing work.
ElProlactin · 2026-10-26 12:46:42 UTC
People should consider the possibility that a viable alternative isn't coming, and that humanity is entering a very dark period (on multiple fronts) that there's no guarantee it will survive.
pvab3 · 2026-10-26 12:26:44 UTC
I'm sure that many aspects of work and specialization are as old as humanity itself. Don't you think there was one guy in the tribe who was really good at starting fires, one woman who knew where to find the good berries, one guy who was the best at fixing spears, and some people who weren't that good at anything so they just joined the effort wherever they were needed? You don't have to have a physical exchange of currency or a 40hr desk job for that to be true.
ElProlactin · 2026-10-26 12:43:42 UTC
You can read up on hunter-gatherer societies if you're interested.
Labor and specialization are not unique to modern-day work. Both hunter-gatherer societies and our modern industrial society have labor and specialization. But they function in completely different ways.
Specialization in industrial society is much more complex whereas in hunter-gatherer societies it is generally based on age and gender. Hunter-gatherer societies are generally more egalitarian, there is more skill overlap between members of the group, expertise is leveraged in less formal and less institutionalized ways, learning is more distributed and knowledge is more likely to be treated as communal.
bigbadfeline · 2026-10-26 21:34:38 UTC
> In my experience, most people seem to treat human development as a one-way spear of progress. > But maybe it's just a dead end.
You're assuming "human development" is some dark force that controls humans but it's not controllable by them, I would describe this as a slightly amusing occultist belief.
Of course, the exact opposite is true, if humans fail to maintain the straight spear of progress it will be their fault and folly, because, objectively, it isn't even hard to maintain.
ElProlactin · 2026-10-27 02:37:51 UTC
Life on earth is a tree with branches.
The folly is believing that humans are the tip of the only branch that matters to the tree.
Upwards of 99% of all species that have ever existed on earth are now extinct. Human life is so special and important to us because...we're human. But our survival is not guaranteed, and for all of our truly unique attributes and advantages, we're statistically just as likely to reach the same outcome as the vast, vast majority of every other species.
bigbadfeline · 2026-10-27 20:47:52 UTC
> Upwards of 99% of all species that have ever existed on earth are now extinct.
And? The only conclusion I can draw, is that humans need to stop warring with each other and focus on global security and prosperity for all, even if there's only 1% chance of achieving it, that's where all of our efforts should go... but I'm not a death-cult believer, so what do I know.
> The folly is believing that humans are the tip of the only branch that matters to the tree.
Your "tree" resembles a Kali of mass-murder with the consciousness and agency necessary to exterminate any life on earth. Actually it's just chance and the chances are both favorable for humans and highly improvable with sufficient effort - that isn't hard to see when death-cult thinking is done away with.
latentsea · 2026-10-26 10:58:53 UTC
> What will we produce in a post AI world?
Sports games. Plays. Concerts. Sex work.
Take your pick.
croon · 2026-10-26 11:37:14 UTC
Everyone can't be a jester. Entertainment is an inherently asymmetrical profession in terms of creator per consumer.
latentsea · 2026-10-26 12:32:55 UTC
Well that's all there will be to do.
croon · 2026-10-27 07:38:34 UTC
I agree (at some point), which is why we seriously need to rethink current systems.
latentsea · 2026-10-27 09:36:37 UTC
There is no rethinking the path we're on. It's unsteerable. I say so because I think you can't convince people to steer it away from a potentially bad outcome faster than that outcome is arriving.
pzski · 2026-10-26 11:15:05 UTC
Article misses to mention that in past revolutions the potential value was in the people. With AI the potential value is inside objects (computers) so it is easier to control and centralize, easier than value in humans. No one said more advanced models in the future will be available to anyone. I feel like this revolution will go opposite way, we will go back to mercantillism or whatever.
AnimalMuppet · 2026-10-26 13:57:28 UTC
Feudalism. Or worse.
red_candle_wax · 2026-10-27 02:41:42 UTC
Feudalism without manorialism. No large self class will be needed Not sure what will be in its place. Maybe soylent green factories.
marcus_holmes · 2026-10-27 07:15:12 UTC
Disagree - the article made the point very clearly that pre-Mercantilism the value was in the land, not the people (who were low-value agricultural workers at best). Mercantilism was the revolution that made people valuable.
epsteingpt · 2026-10-26 06:39:50 UTC
Hate taking down these articles, but this is a very, very bad take. Rationalists always fall down on human behavior.
There is a comforting fairy tale popular among tech optimists: that human history is driven by mental upgrades that trickle down to the masses.
The first part of that sentence is absolutely true. The second part has a much darker side that optimists conveniently ignore.
1. Mercantilism is alive and well. Please see Hormuz, Straight of.
2. Mercantilist rent-seeking is alive and well, just at a layer up of abstraction. See Google, Meta, Microsoft. No single player can compete with them. Ones that somehow manage to even threaten get bought.
3. Tech doesn't solve issues broadly: a modern worker with a battery-powered chainsaw has more productive power than an 18th-century frontier settler. Yet we still have homelessness. Riddle me this, techno-optimist.
But you'll say, we're overall better off. Of course we are. But the gains have BY AND LARGE gone to the wealthiest individuals and countries. The idea that the dude can eat a variety of incredibly rare food sits on the backs of billions of impoverished people who don't spend time in our air conditioned offices on MacBooks.
Great men and discoveries move the world (see Musk, Elon) but their exploits spread wealth HIGHLY unevenly, and big nation states want to steal it in the most mercantile way possible - by forcing and scaling up supply (look at China for cars, steel, and basically any advanced manufacturing right now).
One man intelligence will be a boon for people with agency. But it's HIGHLY unlikely to undo the superstructure which captured the rules of mercantilism AND capitalism at the same time.
logicchains · 2026-10-26 06:43:12 UTC
>But the gains have BY AND LARGE gone to the wealthiest individuals and countries.
This is simply false, the average Chinese or Indian is incredibly better off now than they were 100 or 500 years ago. In fact for the past decade many of the wealthiest countries (many Western European countries, and Japan) have seen barely any growth in living standards at all, GDP-per-capita growth has been concentrated in developing countries.
selcuka · 2026-10-26 06:58:42 UTC
It is correct. The richest 10% now earn 53% of global income. The top 10% average income/bottom 50% average income ratio has went from 18x to 38x in the last 200 years.
cadamsdotcom · 2026-10-26 07:50:01 UTC
Ratios gonna ratio.
It's not mutually exclusive with enormous relative improvement at the bottom, from where people were to where they are now. China and India have all but ended open defecation and there's running water in places we'd never dream of a generation ago. Diseases are being eradicated saving huge numbers of lives.
Rich got richer contains zero information about how poor people fared - even accounting for relative numbers in your claim.
epsteingpt · 2026-10-26 12:29:23 UTC
The point is not that the poor aren't better off. They undoubtedly are.
It's the it's the nature of mercantilist systems to leave only scraps for the people at the bottom. The absolute bare minimum to stave off revolution in good times.
This is merely the nature of the beast.
We're way better off in capitalism than other systems (as you can see); but to assume that we just had better ideas like the article suggests to get there is laughable.
Capitalism was enabled by a superstructure of world power that, we must remember, very nearly didn't make it.
Leaving Omelas &c.
decidu0us9034 · 2026-10-26 07:35:03 UTC
If I'm being very cynical I think people at the AI labs suspect they're going to shrink the market for productive labor but are fine with that since they'll capture a larger share of profits, as perpetual rent-seekers for all intellectual production. They also have this hope that there will imminently be a lot less of us around (they telegraph fear of this outcome, but that feels insincere).
worthless-trash · 2026-10-26 06:43:22 UTC
This proves that brother has never done farming.
bozdemir · 2026-10-26 06:45:58 UTC
People need to think about the future now, it is more urgent than before, we have to decide what to do with our life when (assuming a positive future rather than skynet) AI does the stuff better than us in every category. We have to find a meaning. I know this comment isn't directly related to the AI trades, but every subject regarding AI keeps reminding me of the future we are not ready. I can't imagine what type of professions completely made unnecessary by AI in the following 5 years.
logicchains · 2026-10-26 06:55:26 UTC
>AI does the stuff better than us in every category
Current AI is never going to do better than us in every category, it can only do better in us in categories where it's possible to generate an infinite amount of verifiable synthetic data (math and programming). AI is still just as bad at sales, marketing, writing and anything involving human subjective appeal as it was a year ago. And it's fundamentally handicapped in being unable to acquire new domain knowledge that doesn't fit in a few hundred thousand tokens of context.
entropi · 2026-10-26 07:20:30 UTC
> Current AI is never going to do better than us in every category, it can only do better in us in categories where it's possible to generate an infinite amount of verifiable synthetic data (math and programming).
Even if this turns out to be true, I don't think it will necessarily matter.
So much money was already burned, by so powerful people in incestuous relationship with governments, that I don't think this is an important point anymore.
sgsjchs · 2026-10-26 07:42:57 UTC
> AI is still just as bad at sales, marketing, writing and anything involving human subjective appeal as it was a year ago.
All of these have objective metrics (units sold, clicks, likes, etc) and are thus verifiable in principle.
cesnja · 2026-10-26 20:13:42 UTC
It doesn't have to be good in any of these aspects, it just needs to be convincing enough.
233mhz · 2026-10-26 08:17:44 UTC
If AI delivers what accelerationists wants it to deliver you don't need to find a "meaning", you need a complete revamp of the financial, economical and political systems
aacid · 2026-10-26 08:28:22 UTC
The meaning you're looking for is living, enjoying life. We already have more books anyone could ever read in a lifetime. Same with movies, tv shows, documents or games. You have whole planet to travel around and explore. You have few billions of humans you can interact and socialize with...
I really do not understand why so many people are afraid of not working... meaning of my life was never to work for someone, that was always only means to finance my life.
Duralias · 2026-10-26 08:44:25 UTC
If you don't work then you don't have any means to live on. Our current system is going to break down completely before that changes.
aacid · 2026-10-26 12:57:53 UTC
sure, that is true, but that is what I'm saying. if AI will take over intellectual work and robots manual work (in the future) then our current system will have no other option than completely change.
bluefirebrand · 2026-10-26 13:23:47 UTC
"Our current system is broken and will have no other option than to completely change" is a scary future not an exciting one
There has never been a time in our history where excess labour has been treated with any grace, and I think it's rather delusional to think that will start suddenly now.
soco · 2026-10-26 13:27:29 UTC
The entire debate is, how exactly can it change. Because I see zero signs pointing towards the rosy future you mentioned, rather contrary. I only see the current AI overlords hoarding power, hoarding money, and the plebs fighting more and more for scraps - against each other or/and later in uprisings against those technofeudalists and their few selected minions. And when the AI gets advanced enough, I see less future even for the minions, and also less chances of the uprising winning against a robot army. Will the humans survive? Maybe, but after a violent culling. And not even that I see guaranteed, depending on the future alignment of the AGI (or whatever it will be called). But all this bleakness is based on today's inaction of the politics/people towards the bad actors, so I really hope we can still steer it away.
aacid · 2026-10-27 09:47:44 UTC
revolution, that is only option. yes, it may look overly optimistic and rosy tinted but what is the other option? be overly pessimistic, concluding that the rich won and we lost and just wait for the inevitable end?
most countries around the world still have democracy, so voting the the solution. what I don't know is how to fight populism... because that is the achilles heel of democracy... for now, spreading the knowledge is probably all we can do, people have to (and will in time) learn who can be trusted and who cannot.
but honestly I don't buy into sci-fi "AI will kill us all or enslave us" premise. that is only our anthropomorphisation of the artificial intelligence. what I see as more probably that AI could rule us in stead of the human politics that rule us now. why not have LLM political parties that could be voted? each one with open weights and transparent prompts? without emotion, corruption and greed? wouldn't that be better than current situation?
soco · 2026-10-27 11:21:36 UTC
AI gets so much diluted by the most important discussions about gendering the toilets and who was first in some valley, so I'm not surprised it slips by without real insight. But to answer your political party concept: the LLM learned their decisions from our flawed decisions, it learned corruption and greedy actions and wrong decisions resulted from human emotions, so I'm honestly not sure what good policy results we can expect from an uncontrollable amplifier.
sedan_baklazhan · 2026-10-26 12:17:11 UTC
Yeah right. Just a few hundred million dollars (that’s really not a lot!) will allow to live a joyful life! Why even spend these years working somewhere?
aacid · 2026-10-26 12:55:44 UTC
sorry I honestly don't understand what you meant (english is not my first language). do you imply that person needs few hundred million dollars to live? because if so I don't agree, you really don't need that much money to be happy. sure I'm living a comfortable life from money I earn, but I could live will far far less money and still be happy.
sedan_baklazhan · 2026-10-26 13:41:45 UTC
I was replying to a comment saying something like "why bother about having a job? Just read books, travel around the world, there's so much to see!"
To live such a life you need quite some money.
aacid · 2026-10-27 09:39:05 UTC
no, you don't. books are really cheap, libraries are everywhere. and you can also travel cheap, people backpack all around the world every day. sure you will still need some money, but certainly not "few hundred million dollars", that is way overblown...
Comments
Eating, apparently, is completely optional for humans :-/
Just a thing to remember: our intelligence made us the apex predator on this planet. Is there any reason to believe that a superior intelligence, whether man-made or extraterrestrial, won't become the apex predator?
Like what?
1. AI isn't going to stop at "repetitive, brainless thinking," just ask the math professors.
2. Even if that's true, is everyone capable of these "currently unimaginable cognitive pursuits"? Oh, there will still be cognitive work for the top-0.1% smartest people is little consolation to the other 99.9%.
3. That argument is basically trying to console people with a combination of "trust us" and the underpants gnome business plan ("1. Collect underpants, 2. ?, 3. Profit).
2. A major and weird point of the article argues that most people are “stupid” because of a lack of incentives for intellectual labor. If you know you’re not that top 1%, why bother in school? If you’ve already missed the window for a fancy white collar job, why bother “thinking”? In this view, AI could have a democratizing effect on intellectual labor.
3. That does seem to be the upshot, but the author doesn’t seem to be very sympathetic to AI execs either (basically calling them rent seekers still in the mercantilist mindset despite developing the “transformative technology”). Still article doesn’t offer any path forward.
That's a facile, superficial "argument" that is currently being made by everyone who is pro-AI when confronted with any claim of AI pushing humans out of the economy.
At this point in time, it's reasonable to dismiss the argument rather than engaging it, because each time this argument is made the proponent of the argument is completely mute on the fact that humans work to eat.
That's a big underlying counterargument, and no one making the argument is engaging with the counter-argument, they are instead setting up strawman counter-arguments.
Will that analogy hold? Who knows. But it’s more than a facile AI bro saying AI is bringing us a utopia. The article even raises a key part of the analogy: the transition to industry and capitalism (and the resulting freed up labor) led to an unprecedented wave of revolutions and death.
54% of U.S. adults read below a sixth-grade level.
1. when an AI starts working on a task, it is within a human context, someone pays and decides to assign that work to AI
2. while it performs work on the task it continuously needs to interact with the context in order to act and observe the feedback
3. at the end of work, the outcomes remain in context, including gains, losses, costs, risks and liability.
So AI is great but can't do the beginning, middle and end of a task. They belong to context, which is us, the AI users. Context is maximally distributed, every human, team, or company that uses AI is a context, they are relational and indexical. You can't have my context, for example - you can't eat for me, or learn for me. Some things must loop back. Especially consequences of AI work. That is irreducible, AI can't improve to grow a skin like us. Its own skin is user base gain/loss, competition with other AI providers and dancing for investors. Every AI usage context is not theirs and they can't own it.
What happens to companies is that their investors expect AI usage already, their competitors use it to compete with them and fast follow, and customers use AI agents to arbitrate their buying opportunities. So even if they did nothing AI related they find themselves in a new world where.
1. anything visible can be easily imitated - code, text, media, and AI agents - I call it the fast follow effect
2. any apparent arbitrage opportunity will be quickly crowded by fast followers removing profit from it
3. AI it self is competitive and the whole stack is fungible - models, harnesses, tools, they can all be replaced easily, what matters more is the project context data which is usually a git backed folder on local disk
So my theory is that AI won't make anyone "rich". Instead we have a musical chairs moment. AI removes distinctiveness from everyone of us. Every time I use AI for myself it is just great and amazing. When others use it, they make our own work seem little and not as impressive. Companies are caught in a Red Queen effect, have to work harder just to stay in place.
And here I find the answer to what will we do with all our free time - compete, run for our own musical chair. We need to find our own niches again, they are now under rapid change. We will invest as much energy as needed to do it, we are ready to pay a lot of effort to differentiate back. But we can't predict it just as you can't predict where the ball in a football match will go 1 minute later, it depends on what every other player is doing.
If a CEO just needs to write "optimise profits" ...
But IMHO what humans do is turn their intentions into reality using tools.
Intention is human, reality is perceived by humans. I feel that you need humans in the whole chain to communicate with reality (the context) and serve as translators and drivers for our tools.
Sorry that I can’t put more precise words here, but I am somehow convinced that there is a fundamental mechanism here that limits the reach of AI.
A worker under capitalism is exactly just another commodity commanded by capital. Only competing power centers like unions makes it not one-sided.
I dunno about “demand and initiative”. Is this how capitalism started, or are we jumping ahead to the post-WWII USA where the socialists and capitalists had won concessions from the bougies so that a “middle class” came about?
> The early capitalist worker voluntarily increased annual working days from 250 to 300 because a new universe of desirable goods had become accessible.
The weekly working hours increased for many who moved to the factories of the cities. Labor organizing is what lead to the two-day weekend.
> We are moving toward a world in which an ordinary person can command quantities and varieties of intelligence that would previously have required teams of highly trained specialists. Just as I can enjoy food without knowing how to farm, I can increasingly enjoy the products of intelligence without knowing how to produce them myself.
Some people are incapable of seeing power dynamics. An ordinary person might fear AI because of the explicit threats against his or her job.
How does power work? In this case it works by concentrating compute and access to the vaunted frontier models.
Another thing is the part about “hoarding”. AI is exactly about hoarding. Labor built the intelligence of centuries. Now AI wants to close that off.
And the 8 hour work day. And, for miners, being able to have their lunch break above ground.
When the people were were freed from farm labour, due to farm automation, people could find another economic activity which required the other capacity of humans - intelligence.
The transition from muscle-power work to mind-work was meaningful, as both muscle and mind were attributes of humans, creating demand for humans having mind power instead of muscle power.
But the continuation of that transition breaks down. Muscle power -> Mind power -> ???
Those 3 questions marks at the end are what's scaring people, and what is threatening the stability of the transition from mind work. If both muscle power and mond power are not things of value, how would the humanity progress to create value? Who buys it? Why do they buy it? Who hires whom? Why?
But I am sure people had the same question marks back then, for what's comes next
It was not obvious then that "mind power" was something that everyone could use - or even that a large fraction of the population could use.
I guess their point is that, for example-- instead of requiring heaps of study and a genius mind to learn to how to reverse engineer complex things over the course of years, their intelligence can go to something that... AI can't do yet?
> My inability to produce food is economically almost irrelevant. What matters is that I can consume it, enjoy it, develop tastes for it, and devote my energies to other things.
What the author misses is that what mattered more was that people could now produce more things. People were free from manual labour to perform intellectual labour. But what do people do to produce things when intellectual labour is automated? And with emboddied AI, skilled manual labour too?
You need to produce things to be able to reap the fruits of economic progress. Thats what most working people did after the agricultural revolution. What will we produce in a post AI world? And if only the people who own AI will be able to produce things, then why would they give us any power or leverage in the economy?
They do what AI can't do, entrepreneurialism, because AI doesn't have property rights. Like back to the 1800s when most Americans were self-employed, not working for large corporations, because corporate cog-in-the-machine work can be done better by AI. With AI it's far easier to run your own business than at any time in history.
But let me play the devil's advocate and argue the point: who will the business sell to, if most people are not in a position with wealth to spare to buy from your business?
Clearly a relevant and replicable analogy to AI making entrepreneurship easier /s
Your version of 1800s North America is a myth.
They were mainly wage employees and factory workers by the end of that century due to industrialization. And "AI" is the industrialization of intellectual work.
If AI keeps going the way the author thinks (which isnt guaranteed) then there will come a point where the productivity of those who can afford to have access to AI will start becoming infinitely more than those who do not, and then those without AI are locked in the permanent underclass. Not much is within your reach then
Nailed it! It’s a too powerful resource to be privately held.
It's concerning because there is already way too much 'intelligence' in this society and most of it is used to propagate falsehoods, irrationality and to manipulate others in counter-productive ways. I hope AI educates people and doesn't merely steer them down deeper into their echo-chambers. That said, I also really hope that AI doesn't just bring everyone into alignment and agreement about ideas which aren't true. There are significant threats with both extremes.
Honestly, it feels like there is exceptionally little incentive to learn anything deeply anymore because the payoff might never be there.
I know, I know, do it because you love it or you find it interesting. Sure, I will to the degree that I love it or find it interesting. But I find even the incentives on that have changed weirdly enough.
Modern concepts of "work" and how we relate to work are quite new and it's just an assumption that we're "on the right path."
Well of course it is.
Most people living today take it for granted that modern "work" is the way it is and the way it should be. Few people have the context of understanding that modern work, where you directly trade labor for money and money for the goods and services you need to live, and where your identity and social standing is largely based on your profession, is something only a minority of human beings have experienced.
In my experience, most people seem to treat human development as a one-way spear of progress. The dawn of agriculture, the industrial revolution, etc. are all just stops on a linear path that is the right path.
But maybe it's just a dead end. "Primitive" hunter-gatherer societies survived for way longer than our modern-day society has existed, and things aren't looking so promising for us right now.
Which is understandable when the alternative is generally poverty.
But if you want to have a less philosophical and more pragmatic discussion, I'd raise the issue of the billions of people who count themselves among the "working poor." For billions of people, modern work doesn't guarantee that you won't be poor.
Labor and specialization are not unique to modern-day work. Both hunter-gatherer societies and our modern industrial society have labor and specialization. But they function in completely different ways.
Specialization in industrial society is much more complex whereas in hunter-gatherer societies it is generally based on age and gender. Hunter-gatherer societies are generally more egalitarian, there is more skill overlap between members of the group, expertise is leveraged in less formal and less institutionalized ways, learning is more distributed and knowledge is more likely to be treated as communal.
You're assuming "human development" is some dark force that controls humans but it's not controllable by them, I would describe this as a slightly amusing occultist belief.
Of course, the exact opposite is true, if humans fail to maintain the straight spear of progress it will be their fault and folly, because, objectively, it isn't even hard to maintain.
The folly is believing that humans are the tip of the only branch that matters to the tree.
Upwards of 99% of all species that have ever existed on earth are now extinct. Human life is so special and important to us because...we're human. But our survival is not guaranteed, and for all of our truly unique attributes and advantages, we're statistically just as likely to reach the same outcome as the vast, vast majority of every other species.
And? The only conclusion I can draw, is that humans need to stop warring with each other and focus on global security and prosperity for all, even if there's only 1% chance of achieving it, that's where all of our efforts should go... but I'm not a death-cult believer, so what do I know.
> The folly is believing that humans are the tip of the only branch that matters to the tree.
Your "tree" resembles a Kali of mass-murder with the consciousness and agency necessary to exterminate any life on earth. Actually it's just chance and the chances are both favorable for humans and highly improvable with sufficient effort - that isn't hard to see when death-cult thinking is done away with.
Sports games. Plays. Concerts. Sex work.
Take your pick.
There is a comforting fairy tale popular among tech optimists: that human history is driven by mental upgrades that trickle down to the masses.
The first part of that sentence is absolutely true. The second part has a much darker side that optimists conveniently ignore.
1. Mercantilism is alive and well. Please see Hormuz, Straight of. 2. Mercantilist rent-seeking is alive and well, just at a layer up of abstraction. See Google, Meta, Microsoft. No single player can compete with them. Ones that somehow manage to even threaten get bought. 3. Tech doesn't solve issues broadly: a modern worker with a battery-powered chainsaw has more productive power than an 18th-century frontier settler. Yet we still have homelessness. Riddle me this, techno-optimist.
But you'll say, we're overall better off. Of course we are. But the gains have BY AND LARGE gone to the wealthiest individuals and countries. The idea that the dude can eat a variety of incredibly rare food sits on the backs of billions of impoverished people who don't spend time in our air conditioned offices on MacBooks.
Great men and discoveries move the world (see Musk, Elon) but their exploits spread wealth HIGHLY unevenly, and big nation states want to steal it in the most mercantile way possible - by forcing and scaling up supply (look at China for cars, steel, and basically any advanced manufacturing right now).
One man intelligence will be a boon for people with agency. But it's HIGHLY unlikely to undo the superstructure which captured the rules of mercantilism AND capitalism at the same time.
This is simply false, the average Chinese or Indian is incredibly better off now than they were 100 or 500 years ago. In fact for the past decade many of the wealthiest countries (many Western European countries, and Japan) have seen barely any growth in living standards at all, GDP-per-capita growth has been concentrated in developing countries.
It's not mutually exclusive with enormous relative improvement at the bottom, from where people were to where they are now. China and India have all but ended open defecation and there's running water in places we'd never dream of a generation ago. Diseases are being eradicated saving huge numbers of lives.
Rich got richer contains zero information about how poor people fared - even accounting for relative numbers in your claim.
It's the it's the nature of mercantilist systems to leave only scraps for the people at the bottom. The absolute bare minimum to stave off revolution in good times.
This is merely the nature of the beast.
We're way better off in capitalism than other systems (as you can see); but to assume that we just had better ideas like the article suggests to get there is laughable.
Capitalism was enabled by a superstructure of world power that, we must remember, very nearly didn't make it.
Leaving Omelas &c.
Current AI is never going to do better than us in every category, it can only do better in us in categories where it's possible to generate an infinite amount of verifiable synthetic data (math and programming). AI is still just as bad at sales, marketing, writing and anything involving human subjective appeal as it was a year ago. And it's fundamentally handicapped in being unable to acquire new domain knowledge that doesn't fit in a few hundred thousand tokens of context.
Even if this turns out to be true, I don't think it will necessarily matter.
So much money was already burned, by so powerful people in incestuous relationship with governments, that I don't think this is an important point anymore.
All of these have objective metrics (units sold, clicks, likes, etc) and are thus verifiable in principle.
There has never been a time in our history where excess labour has been treated with any grace, and I think it's rather delusional to think that will start suddenly now.
most countries around the world still have democracy, so voting the the solution. what I don't know is how to fight populism... because that is the achilles heel of democracy... for now, spreading the knowledge is probably all we can do, people have to (and will in time) learn who can be trusted and who cannot.
but honestly I don't buy into sci-fi "AI will kill us all or enslave us" premise. that is only our anthropomorphisation of the artificial intelligence. what I see as more probably that AI could rule us in stead of the human politics that rule us now. why not have LLM political parties that could be voted? each one with open weights and transparent prompts? without emotion, corruption and greed? wouldn't that be better than current situation?