Can’t read the article due to bandwidth. If the era of jobs is over, what’s going to support the masses of people who consume? Without those people, there’s no profit from making stuff. Star Trek looks great, but there’s a whole lot of time, politics and physics that has to occur to get there.
BS, at this same moment we could feed the entire planet but don’t because some need to have multitudes more money than ever existed. That won’t change until humanity dies out
Well, it looks like the 90% plus of wealth hoarding just got a whole lot more unstable. Machines will do everything and the jobless have nothing to do but sever power lines.
Is nuclear power safe from assault? I dunno. Visit Chernobyl and see.
If an even greater concentration of wealth is to lead to mass destruction/revolution, I advise a more even distribution.
Note to oligarchs: a post-apocalyptic world is no fun. Not even for you in your bunkers.
The point of jobs is for those who don't own appreciating assets to sell their work in exchange for income in the form of payment from those who do own appreciating assets.
This article misses the key problem with the end of jobs. How else are 98% of the human population going to get income? With the coming of drones and old-timey 1900s chemical weapons they are probably no longer equipped as a class to win a military contest over redistribution against the asset holders.
Much like replacing religion with nothing has turned out, replacing jobs with nothing is going to be bad at best.
I mean, would I like the article to be correct? Gods yes I would. Jobs suck, and the mandate of “work = survival” means you get a whole bunch of shitty personalities arbitrarily holding back progress in the name of personal wealth or power; the end of jobs would mean those of us who approach our professions with passion and love can flatly eject the dead weight insisting that we schedule progress to a future fiscal year’s backlog, instead of just doing what we love, when we want to.
That being said, do I think it’ll happen? No, I don’t, for the simple reason that we still cannot fundamentally get a plurality of society to agree - on any conceivable level - that every human is entitled to and guaranteed shelter, nutritious foodstuffs, healthcare, and education. It’s 2025, we’re literally destroying resources to drive up profit margins and investment returns instead of dispersing surplus appropriately, and yet anyone who mentions this is slandered as a “socialist” and ostracized.
So instead, I fret that what will happen is the cementing of a two-tiered society indefinitely: one of immense wealth who owns the securities, the land, the datacenters that makes the world work, and a serf class who must engage with these ever-more-expensive systems for the gains of Capital, including via increasingly precarious gig work instead of reliable, structural jobs.
And I think folks roundly dismissing these sorts of posts as “unrealistic” just don’t appreciate how far and how fast we’ve gone from “humans have to engage in subsistence farming” to an interconnected global marketplace and digitized society. We have quite literally thrown out the “status quo” dozens of times since the end of Feudalism, and this time is no different.
Those who dare to dream big are often the victors of such profound change, provided they can craft a message relatable to the populace.
And a message of, “you don’t need a job anymore because necessities got so expensive that governments made them part of tax dollars, and are therefore free to live where you want, do what you want, and live an authentic life” is quite compelling to folks who have struggled harder for less and less their entire lives.
Not possible once we pass a some point in global automation, say (arbitrarily) 95%. The financial flows would've ceased to exist by then with the vast majority of humans being unable to contribute value, and hence having no earned income to participate in markets. And there's no deliberate prevention or slowing as the race is global and highly competitive at the political level (the US is very afraid of China getting (too far) ahead).
I actually believe that the era of lives will come. But I can't wait for UBI. Nobody can't. Even if the era of jobs ends, for us who are living in this era, the event is not going to be a period but an ellipsis. I can't wait to see how it unfolds. Yet, I doubt that I would see the end happening in my lifetime.
The possibility that we could reach nearly full automation has never been closer, BUT we are a long way off from it yet. Even if most of the white collar work is automated, we still don't have robots capable of doing everything at an acceptable price. I'm not going to waste time describing all the dystopian possibilities that would become possible if those robots were developed.
The anti-work crowd always paints a rosy picture of what life looks like without work. But there are regions scattered throughout the West where so-called abundance has manifested itself. Factory jobs that paid well were replaced with easy "service" jobs, and lots of people got on the dole. Lots of people, if not most, will not ascend into any higher form of actualization than getting high or drunk with their friends for years on end. Many have died from the rampant drug abuse we see everywhere.
Huxley's vision of abundance was accurate in this regard: people faced with abundance just did Soma and had casual sex with no higher aspirations. To maintain everyone's physical and mental health, and the gene pool, I expect that we will have to require people to do meaningful work after everything is automated. This stuff will likely have to be structured as a job market, because most people are not creative or independent enough to do anything interesting all alone.
"They haven’t seen the latest models that quietly chew through documents, write code, design websites, summarize legal contracts, and generate decent strategy decks faster than a middle manager can clear their throat.
They haven’t seen a model hold a complex conversation, remember context, suggest workflows, generate visuals, write scripts, and debug itself in one continuous flow."
> Democratize the machines. Public or cooperative ownership of major AI and robotics infrastructure.
If you haven't socialized the means of production when you could strike and make it stop, there's no way you're going to do so when it doesn't need you anymore.
> We can choose to be the last generation that spent its best hours under fluorescent lights, pretending this was the height of civilization.
> Or we can be the first generation that looked at the robots walking onto the factory floor, looked at the models spinning up in the cloud, and said:
>> “Good. Take the work. We’ll take the world back.”
This article is stupid. How would Mr. Economically Irrelevant Former-worker "take the world back?" He just lost whatever power over that world that he had.
This is 15 pages of trying to put lipstick on a pig.
Whatever people make goes to rent/mortgage, health insurance, auto insurance, etc. The zoning rules and strict enforcement in the West make it hard to start shanty towns across countries. What is left?
This post is AI sludge and by the third bullet list I couldn't keep reading. This is stuff I deeply resonate with but jesus christ please respect my time and don't drown me in extremely verbose prose goop.
>Camus talked about imagining Sisyphus happy. Maybe the point now is to take away the rock and see what he does when he’s no longer condemned to push it. Does he climb the mountain just for the view? Does he build an observatory? Does he lie in the grass and finally sleep?
Removing jobs is not like taking away the rock, it's more like making the rock way heavier.
Only God can make the rock disappear. And God is dead.
32 comments
[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 43.0 ms ] threadPluribus is a more interesting meditation.
Is nuclear power safe from assault? I dunno. Visit Chernobyl and see.
If an even greater concentration of wealth is to lead to mass destruction/revolution, I advise a more even distribution.
Note to oligarchs: a post-apocalyptic world is no fun. Not even for you in your bunkers.
If only the resources to sustain our meatsuits were provided by Someone Else, with no reciprocal obligations.
"Humans do not exist to be economic assets. The economy exists to provide for humans"
This article misses the key problem with the end of jobs. How else are 98% of the human population going to get income? With the coming of drones and old-timey 1900s chemical weapons they are probably no longer equipped as a class to win a military contest over redistribution against the asset holders.
Much like replacing religion with nothing has turned out, replacing jobs with nothing is going to be bad at best.
Yes
>The era of jobs is ending
What are you selling.
That being said, do I think it’ll happen? No, I don’t, for the simple reason that we still cannot fundamentally get a plurality of society to agree - on any conceivable level - that every human is entitled to and guaranteed shelter, nutritious foodstuffs, healthcare, and education. It’s 2025, we’re literally destroying resources to drive up profit margins and investment returns instead of dispersing surplus appropriately, and yet anyone who mentions this is slandered as a “socialist” and ostracized.
So instead, I fret that what will happen is the cementing of a two-tiered society indefinitely: one of immense wealth who owns the securities, the land, the datacenters that makes the world work, and a serf class who must engage with these ever-more-expensive systems for the gains of Capital, including via increasingly precarious gig work instead of reliable, structural jobs.
And I think folks roundly dismissing these sorts of posts as “unrealistic” just don’t appreciate how far and how fast we’ve gone from “humans have to engage in subsistence farming” to an interconnected global marketplace and digitized society. We have quite literally thrown out the “status quo” dozens of times since the end of Feudalism, and this time is no different.
Those who dare to dream big are often the victors of such profound change, provided they can craft a message relatable to the populace.
And a message of, “you don’t need a job anymore because necessities got so expensive that governments made them part of tax dollars, and are therefore free to live where you want, do what you want, and live an authentic life” is quite compelling to folks who have struggled harder for less and less their entire lives.
Not possible once we pass a some point in global automation, say (arbitrarily) 95%. The financial flows would've ceased to exist by then with the vast majority of humans being unable to contribute value, and hence having no earned income to participate in markets. And there's no deliberate prevention or slowing as the race is global and highly competitive at the political level (the US is very afraid of China getting (too far) ahead).
https://marshallbrain.com/manna
The anti-work crowd always paints a rosy picture of what life looks like without work. But there are regions scattered throughout the West where so-called abundance has manifested itself. Factory jobs that paid well were replaced with easy "service" jobs, and lots of people got on the dole. Lots of people, if not most, will not ascend into any higher form of actualization than getting high or drunk with their friends for years on end. Many have died from the rampant drug abuse we see everywhere.
Huxley's vision of abundance was accurate in this regard: people faced with abundance just did Soma and had casual sex with no higher aspirations. To maintain everyone's physical and mental health, and the gene pool, I expect that we will have to require people to do meaningful work after everything is automated. This stuff will likely have to be structured as a job market, because most people are not creative or independent enough to do anything interesting all alone.
They haven’t seen a model hold a complex conversation, remember context, suggest workflows, generate visuals, write scripts, and debug itself in one continuous flow."
You're absolutely right! I haven't seen these.
Well, if the work under the fluorescent lights is what allowed us to end the era of jobs, then maybe it is "a" height of civilization?
If you haven't socialized the means of production when you could strike and make it stop, there's no way you're going to do so when it doesn't need you anymore.
> We can choose to be the last generation that spent its best hours under fluorescent lights, pretending this was the height of civilization.
> Or we can be the first generation that looked at the robots walking onto the factory floor, looked at the models spinning up in the cloud, and said:
>> “Good. Take the work. We’ll take the world back.”
This article is stupid. How would Mr. Economically Irrelevant Former-worker "take the world back?" He just lost whatever power over that world that he had.
This is 15 pages of trying to put lipstick on a pig.
Removing jobs is not like taking away the rock, it's more like making the rock way heavier.
Only God can make the rock disappear. And God is dead.