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Ask HN: What will everyone do if everything is automated?

23 points by typest ↗ HN
This is a question that I feel comes up a lot, and it's not often engaged with seriously. I feel sci-fi doesn't really engage with the concept (you'll get super smart AI, but somehow humans still just have plenty of jobs). Technologists frequently respond that we are very far away from being able to automate all jobs, but this assumption ignores the possibility that we do automate everything -- and also, AI continues to advance faster than even AI researchers predict.

In the past I used to think that with all jobs automated, we would just all devote ourselves to higher pursuits like art, science, math, etc. However, now I think this claim didn't give AI enough credibility -- it's totally within the realm of possibility, and even near future possibility, that AI easily exceeds human performance in art, science, math -- all the things we generally think of as uniquely human and morally valuable pursuits. Recent LLM progress should make this point very clear to everyone.

So. Since I don't see this idea being taken too seriously in society, I thought we on HN could take a stab at thinking through the possibility.

For example, here is one possible outcome I can envision. Pre agricultural revolution, all humans were hunter gatherers who simply did not have to work that hard (I think estimates I've read said that people spent maybe 15 hours a week hunting/gathering). In this time, as far as I understand, people's lives largely revolved around things like their local community, relationship with others, culture, and leisure (I am not an anthropologist or historian, so I may be totally correct here). Is it possible our lives become more like this? Without jobs to do, without the ability to, say, make meaningful advances to science, with governmental decision making being better handled by AI...do we spend our time building and forming meaningful relationships and communities with others?

Would love your thoughts.

47 comments

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fabbari
I always tell people - when talking about unemployment rate - that our target rate should be 100%. Many of the things I do for work I would happily do for free - and sometimes do.

Labor as a choice is a great outcome. You're not a woodworker because someone needs to be - but because you love it. So: if there is no work to do, it doesn't mean that work wouldn't be done, it just changes the motivation to do it.

PartiallyTyped
I saw a great expression on this, it goes along the lines of:

I code for free, I am just paid to deal with the business side of things.

gus_massa
Including military? Just hide inside the underground bunkers like in Terminator.
rl3
>... Just hide inside the underground bunkers like in Terminator.

I should probably learn how to cook rat ahead of time so by the time the machine apocalypse arrives I'm able to command the respect of a five-star chef.

adversaryIdiot
get a chance to enjoy life not burdened by capitalistic chains hopefully.
giantg2
This brought up an interesting question. Without work, people who have worked would likely treasure that freedom and not abuse it. But would people who have never worked understand the constraints of resources and not abuse the system?

This might be worded too absolutely, but I'm sure there are some abusers in any group. Or perhaps our stereotypes of rich kids are completely unfounded?

escapedmoose
Do you really think the rich kid stereotype comes from lack of working? Or is it lack of exposure to the things that make life hard for other people, leading to lack of empathy?
giantg2
I think both. However, I'm talking about if someone doesn't have to work for anything but isn't necessarily rich - the second generation after a post-work automated society. There would still be some constrained resources. Will a democratic society have the necessary understanding to control their consumption, or will they realize they have the keys to the treasury without understanding the natural limits? If not in a democratic society, would the people tolerate and understand the limits that were set for them? And of course we also get into the premise behind that game with solid snake in it - if nobody has to fight in a fully mechanized war, then will that lead to more wars over resources?
stev-0
There is no “everything is automated”.

“Everything is automated” is similar to “finished software”. It just doesn’t happen.

Besides that there are many services you want to purchase where interaction with the other is part of the value of said service.

Think of going to a barber or a nice restaurant. Think about education, designers. There is also artisanal products. People pay a pretty penny for a teapot made by a master ceramist even though perfect products are made in much more automated ways.

I’m pretty hopeful about people having to work less. Maybe even about most people not having to work at all. But being able to afford luxuries like having a master chef cook your dinner from time to time is likely to require you do to some paid work and I think there will be plenty of work left for us humans.

helsontaveras18
Could the rise of AGI mean software no longer has to be written by humans? Sure it won't be finished. But we wouldn't need to be the ones to work on it anymore.
wvoch235
Yes, and once this happens it significantly lowers the cost of automation in general, which then will continue to drive exponential acceleration. It will take time to get there but I believe it to be a lot closer than most believe.
hacoo
If we are headed towards a post-labor society (which I doubt, but that’s a different topic), the first thing we need to do is radically reconsider how our society thinks about property and wealth. Otherwise, we’ll have a small class of property holding aristocrats and everyone else is screwed.
giantg2
I generally agree, but want to add that we aren't that far off from your last sentence.
PartiallyTyped
We are already there.
Gud
No we are not? I’m having a great life and have zero property and no investments.
PartiallyTyped
You and I are two datapoints. As we speak, there are millions of kids in UK without enough to eat. UK is a first world country, and this should not be happening.
giantg2
It shouldn't be happening. Perhaps the grants of money need to be earmarked for food to ensure parents spend it on that?
PartiallyTyped
It's not that the parents are exploiting their children to fund their lifestyles, it's that they really have little to no income because people are living on poverty.

The government is not working for the average person, and it is beyond me why so many people in England still vote for Torries after so many years of ineptitude on public display.

feet
>we’ll have a small class of property holding aristocrats and everyone else is screwed

I must be living in the future then, because that's what I see currently

giantg2
"What will everyone do if everything is automated?"

It seems the dream is to become an influencer. People want to "be" some person, not an AI. So that seems pretty safe for now.

johngalt
Until we have AGI, I expect automation to be similar to the past. Where productivity increases along with material wealth and standard of living. After AGI, "what jobs will people do?" is probably the most uninteresting part.
steve1977
Yeah the question then might as well end up being “what people?”
mFixman
We've had automatic coffee machines since the 1950s, and yet Starbucks employs over 300k people.

Everything being possibly automated doesn't mean everything will be automated. There is always value in human work, even if we are objectively worse at working than robots and AI.

v-erne
Imagine cofee shop where You just sit at first empty table, says few words to and hologram and than the food and cofee materializes (let's just ignore the technoloy side of this thought experiment). And after You are finisheed the table cleans itself and bill is automatically settled without any interaction.

Are You sure that in this kind of world cofee shops with real people waiting tables and baristas making cofee would still exist? Because I am not sure that badly paid people are the essential part of Starbucks experience.

mFixman
Of course. Human contact is an integral part of the Starbucks experience; otherwise they wouldn't do things like writing your name on the drink or having a million different coffee customisation options.

Your scenario could work with McDonald's, where people go for the cheap convenient food. But the fact that Starbucks exists along with good butchers, grocers, and fancy independent coffee shops is proof that the human factor will always be a crucial part of food shopping.

poulpy123
Looking at the current trend, there will be 3 classes: the elites, owners of the automates, the domestics, with a status somewhere between servants, slave and pets, and the useless, the masses.
solarmist
Completely ignoring all the other thoughts and comments. And working from first principles.

The human brain is a problem-solving machine; one that is somewhat optimized for connecting with other people (I say somewhat because the social parts are still a very new addition).

If AI could do all labor and creative activities at levels far beyond human levels, then we'd still do many of them to try and understand how they do it. We'd also invent new problems to solve and new ways of interacting with labor and creativity.

It's like asking what rich people do all day. They find stuff to do or make it up. Sometimes that's productive, and sometimes it's destructive. Or another similar thing would be the pursuits of landed gentlemen in the 1700 and 1800s, which invented many of the fields we call science.

verdenti
You can always find something to do. Read, travel, cook, socialize, build things etc. none of this has to be monetized so even if everything in the world is automated, the fun is in the process.
pharmakom
There’s a great novel called Mockingbird. The humans mostly consume content and study music appreciation and so on. Everyone lives on daily tokens like a UBI.
SquibblesRedux
I suspect that the majority of people would begin to act like teenagers. It seems like a world where everything is automated would remove many of the consequences we have now. I see a strong likelihood that human conflict would significantly increase.
DantesKite
Probably play games, eat good food, and learn cool new things.
escapedmoose
I don’t make art to make “high-performance” art. I make it because I enjoy the process and it makes me feel connected to the world around me in a way nothing else does. I don’t appreciate art because it’s “good” either. I like art that makes me feel something from another human.

If I didn’t have to work, I would spend my days drawing, reading, gardening, hiking, camping, meeting friends, eating and cleaning. A little bit of time creating things and a lot of time admiring the creations of others and of nature. A life centered around making and discovering beauty in the world… it sounds like a dream!

I would also love to see more of my friends’ children and have a more active hand in helping to raise them.

If many other people spent their time similarly, the world would be very fun imo

regularjack
Just because an AI can make music, doesn't mean it can make the music you would make.

Even if it could, if your motivation is genuine, i.e. you're not making music for profit but because you enjoy the process, then it doesn't matter anyway if an AI can or cannot do it.

devlife
I think people will work longer hours. This story has been played before.
readonthegoapp
without organizing, the vast majority of us will be doomed.

i figure a couple of clues as to where we're headed...

1) the black population in america. largely discarded, warehoused in prisons and and kept in poor, hopeless neighborhoods. add in large populations of poor white people in vast swaths of rural land areas.

and, possibly in a much more extreme situation,

2) palestinians in the west bank, and particularly gaza. gaza has been described as the world's largest open-air prison, with good reason. at the current rate, they're doomed, too.

both situations are just US policy - they're not magic, or what other people or governments choose to do.

what do all these people do in their current circumstances? try to survive. try to maintain some semblence of dignity. try to hold onto their humanity and that of the people doing this to them.

so, our current neoliberalism craze is stratifying the US population by income even more, creating more and more extraneous/disposable populations.

automation might be exacerbating our move towards faciscm and domination and extraneous populations, but it's only that -- just helping, not a primary driver, imo.

  - 4-day work week could help.
  - things like GBI could help.
  - billionaires and rich people paying taxes could help.
  - organizing obviously could help.
  - technology sanity (ludditism) could help.
  - a less insane intellectual culture could help.
  - more democracy could help.
my take on automation is that there are shocks to the system, but over the long haul, there is plenty of work to do, but without popular organizing, most of us are doomed.
ilaksh
People forget that humans are primates. Hierarchy and status are built-in (sub-conscious) concerns. There will be things like jobs and companies and co-ops and socialist committees, but many of them will involve humans leveraging AIs that they control. Or they will involve integrating AI and or robots with brain computer interfaces.

You status may depend largely on your ability to leverage AI and robotics.

PartiallyTyped
No human can ever stand up to stockfish, and yet people like Magnus still play the game, and this has been one of the best years in chess.

There’s already so many things to learn and understand that even if I could devote my life to learning, it won’t be enough. Heck, even if we solved all the big problems in math, a couple of lifetimes would still not be enough to understand them, and that’s just one field.

I can order takeout, but I prefer to cook in because I enjoy the process.

We have experiences to live through, people to share them with, and feelings to feel.