ChatGPT, please summarise this long essay by Stephen Wolfram into a couple of pithy sentences:
TLDR: AI won’t “end work” so much as endlessly move the goalposts, because the universe itself is too computationally messy to automate completely. The real risk isn’t mass unemployment—it’s that we’ll have infinite machine intelligence and still argue about what’s worth doing.
More food chains keep opening up even when there is plenty of food available. The pie just gets bigger. Every tech shift was supposed to "end work" and yet here we are, busy with jobs that didn't exist 20 years ago.
The real issue isn't jobs dying. It's who gets the money from all this and whether new needs show up fast enough to give people something to do. With software we don't really know the limit yet, unlike food where your stomach tells you when to stop.
Outside of America people aren't really stressed about AI. Like you go to Vietnam or Vienna they mostly just think that they will have a good life with AI. It's uniquely American to believe that your life will end when AI takes your job.
The problem isn't the AI it's that your access to basic rights is intermediated by a corporate job. American's need to decenter their self worth from their jobs. Like when I quit Microsoft I literally thought I was dying, but that's all an illusion from the corporations.
Yeah, a rural farmer who’s never exposed to AI except when it made it possible for her to communicate with someone visiting the farm who dint speak the same languages isn’t worried about AI.
But policy makers, technologists, economists, the elite abs other educated people aware of more than the basics of AI are all concerned about its impacts.
If all jobs were taken by AI in a short time span, the companies owning and operating those AIs would go out of business as no one would be able to afford the products made by the AIs. This is an unlikely scenario. Not all things will be made/run by AIs in a short time. It is far more likely that specific jobs in specific industries will be taken by AI, and AI will slowly take the labor market. This will drive down prices on products, services, and labor. Once human labor's price is low, and once many product prices are low, the overall employment level of humans will rise. The effect of AI then is actually just deflationary pressure on all prices over time.
The really scary part is what happens to all of the newly unemployed people between the falling prices part and the rising employment part. My guess is, governments and markets won't move quickly enough and unrest is what happens.
> the companies owning and operating those AIs would go out of business as no one would be able to afford the products made by the AIs
What do you think money is...?
Money is a way to indirectly trade
labour and goods. If a job is automated, that labour doesn't disappear into the aether, it's still in the tradable pot of total goods and services. You cannot empty a pot by filling it. A world where a company though automation has made there nobody else to productively sell to is a world where _by definition_ they own all the output that they could otherwise have traded for.
> If all jobs were taken by AI in a short time span, the companies owning and operating those AIs would go out of business as no one would be able to afford the products made by the AIs
I think The companies would go out of business if the government did not subsidize them as a matter of public or national security interest. Do you think that would not be the case? It doesn't take much for a company with money to lobby for this and for the power of marketing and mainstream media to make the public perceive this as the right decision - in fact a study of our history would reveal this as the more likely scenario so as a company racing to render the labor market obsolete its in their interest to disrupt it to capture any amount of it.
We might just keep making more jobs and coming up with more busy work to keep people grinding away for 40 hours a week.
If you look at 1940, women were ~24% of the workforce. Now in 2025 they are ~48%. The numbers are probably similar with immigrant workers having increased greatly in the last 80 years.
If you view AI workers as just more labor flooding the workforce it might have a similar affect. If we flooded the 1940s economy with 10s of millions of qualified women and immigrant laborers people would have viewed it as devastating to the economy, but introduced gradually over time we arrive at a point now where we fear what would happen if they went away.
> “Computers can never show creativity or originality”. But—perhaps disappointingly—that’s surprisingly easy to get, and indeed just a bit of randomness “seeding” a computation can often do a pretty good job,
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This is, I think, not what people mean when they say "creative" or "original".
Creativity is not simply writing something nobody has written before, as he said, that would be trivial and doesn't even require a computer, you could just shuffle a deck of cards and write out the full sequence and chances are no other person in history has written down that sequence before.
And I think Borges made a reasonable argument that simply writing down the text of Don Quixote verbatim could be a creative act.
Creativity is about _intentionally_ expressing a _point of view_ under some constraints.
When people say LLMs can't be creative, what I think mostly they are getting at is that they lack intentionality and/or a distinct point of view. (i do not have a strong opinion about whether they do or if it's impossible for them to have them)
A big short-term risk that I see is that AI is going to cripple wealth redistribution mechanisms that we currently rely on.
Most willing persons have access to income by providing labor right now. If the value of that labor diminishes because AI can do most of it for cheaper/free, that is a big problem because wealth/class barriers become insurmountable and the american dream basically dies completely.
Automation in the past suffered much less from this because only a subset of jobs was affected by it, and it still relied on human labor to build, maintain and operate the machines, unlike AI.
I'm curious if AI is gonna spawn comparable "workers rights" movements like in the past, but I would expect inequality to increase a lot until some solution is found.
A country automates everything and builds paradise on Earth — and the next day, a neighboring country invades it. People are still people. Even with all the AI in the world, two rockets hitting the power plants and we´re back to the Stone Age. I hope the people making decisions for us have thought through all these scenarios and risks.
If an LLM hallucinates in 1% of occasions and gives subpar output in 5%, this kills his effectiveness to replace anyone. Imagine a support guy on the other side of the phone to speak gibberish 10 times a day. Now, imagine a doctor. These will never lose their jobs.
Lets assume auto-complete does continue to progress at a rate that threatens most knowledge worker jobs and then we manage to automate the rest by using it.
There is a particular mental disorder where people will horde wealth at absolutely all costs, personal or societal, until everyone else is dead (see NZ bunkers). We commonly see this as "the billionaire class".
IF things go in that direction we need to be ready to depose all of these billionaires. I mean that quite seriously.
IF this future comes, there is a very quickly closing window where preventing them from killing all of us for their own gain is possible. After a point, surveillance and their control over state violence will be so complete that it's impossible to do anything about it.
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[ 0.24 ms ] story [ 65.0 ms ] threadTLDR: AI won’t “end work” so much as endlessly move the goalposts, because the universe itself is too computationally messy to automate completely. The real risk isn’t mass unemployment—it’s that we’ll have infinite machine intelligence and still argue about what’s worth doing.
The real issue isn't jobs dying. It's who gets the money from all this and whether new needs show up fast enough to give people something to do. With software we don't really know the limit yet, unlike food where your stomach tells you when to stop.
The problem isn't the AI it's that your access to basic rights is intermediated by a corporate job. American's need to decenter their self worth from their jobs. Like when I quit Microsoft I literally thought I was dying, but that's all an illusion from the corporations.
Yeah, a rural farmer who’s never exposed to AI except when it made it possible for her to communicate with someone visiting the farm who dint speak the same languages isn’t worried about AI.
But policy makers, technologists, economists, the elite abs other educated people aware of more than the basics of AI are all concerned about its impacts.
The really scary part is what happens to all of the newly unemployed people between the falling prices part and the rising employment part. My guess is, governments and markets won't move quickly enough and unrest is what happens.
What do you think money is...?
Money is a way to indirectly trade labour and goods. If a job is automated, that labour doesn't disappear into the aether, it's still in the tradable pot of total goods and services. You cannot empty a pot by filling it. A world where a company though automation has made there nobody else to productively sell to is a world where _by definition_ they own all the output that they could otherwise have traded for.
I think The companies would go out of business if the government did not subsidize them as a matter of public or national security interest. Do you think that would not be the case? It doesn't take much for a company with money to lobby for this and for the power of marketing and mainstream media to make the public perceive this as the right decision - in fact a study of our history would reveal this as the more likely scenario so as a company racing to render the labor market obsolete its in their interest to disrupt it to capture any amount of it.
If you look at 1940, women were ~24% of the workforce. Now in 2025 they are ~48%. The numbers are probably similar with immigrant workers having increased greatly in the last 80 years.
If you view AI workers as just more labor flooding the workforce it might have a similar affect. If we flooded the 1940s economy with 10s of millions of qualified women and immigrant laborers people would have viewed it as devastating to the economy, but introduced gradually over time we arrive at a point now where we fear what would happen if they went away.
Sure there's some other limits on social cohesion, but the idea that we can't squeeze upward and leave a bunch of poor people destitute is optimistic.
It's also how you ensure no one thinks: Hey, maybe capitalism isn't an optimal distribution of social good.
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This is, I think, not what people mean when they say "creative" or "original".
Creativity is not simply writing something nobody has written before, as he said, that would be trivial and doesn't even require a computer, you could just shuffle a deck of cards and write out the full sequence and chances are no other person in history has written down that sequence before.
And I think Borges made a reasonable argument that simply writing down the text of Don Quixote verbatim could be a creative act.
Creativity is about _intentionally_ expressing a _point of view_ under some constraints.
When people say LLMs can't be creative, what I think mostly they are getting at is that they lack intentionality and/or a distinct point of view. (i do not have a strong opinion about whether they do or if it's impossible for them to have them)
Most willing persons have access to income by providing labor right now. If the value of that labor diminishes because AI can do most of it for cheaper/free, that is a big problem because wealth/class barriers become insurmountable and the american dream basically dies completely.
Automation in the past suffered much less from this because only a subset of jobs was affected by it, and it still relied on human labor to build, maintain and operate the machines, unlike AI.
I'm curious if AI is gonna spawn comparable "workers rights" movements like in the past, but I would expect inequality to increase a lot until some solution is found.
Some discussion then: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35177257
Also rockets hitting the power plants there is not ususual.
Will AIs take all our jobs and end human history? It’s complicated - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35177257 - March 2023 (172 comments)
Tasks that aren't currently feasible, will become feasible.
That's if AI ends up being as productive as they say it will be
End human history? No.
There is a particular mental disorder where people will horde wealth at absolutely all costs, personal or societal, until everyone else is dead (see NZ bunkers). We commonly see this as "the billionaire class".
IF things go in that direction we need to be ready to depose all of these billionaires. I mean that quite seriously.
IF this future comes, there is a very quickly closing window where preventing them from killing all of us for their own gain is possible. After a point, surveillance and their control over state violence will be so complete that it's impossible to do anything about it.