Ask HN: Will Humans Become Useless?

In the ancestral environment, prior to even agriculture, was the “use” of humans merely to hunt and to gather? To reproduce? What is your “use” to your friends and family? What is the “use” in a smile, or a laugh, or tears, that an LLM could possibly take from you?

The primary use case for humans today is the metabolism of fossil fuels into carbon dioxide, long-chain polymers, pornography, machines for generating pornography, shit, and other environmental contaminants.

Are you suggesting something’s changed?

No, not in our lifetime. Our kids - maybe. But not in our lifetime. Although work-life balance will look different in the next 10-15 years for sure.

Too bad most societies are built around the concept of utility, it's going to lead to a lot of issues (it already does) once both mental and physical human labor can be mostly replaced by capital. I always liked the world view of indigenious societies like e.g. native American tribes regarding this (not all their views), as they see humans simply as part of nature, you do not need to fulfill a purpose or be useful, you can just exist.

Why should I care of what others think if am I useful/pretty/cool/interesting enough or not?

This posts sounds like the capitalistic equivalent of those '80s movies where the losers are afraid of not being part of the cool clique in high school.

Don't worry about what some myopic idiots think about your perceived "usefulness". It's their problem, not yours.

No.

Being useless requires situational circumstances, and there's 9 billion people.

Even if AI takes over everything, humans will still create situational circumstances that require other humans; via desires and needs for various kinds of fulfillment.

Remember that there are people who do not buy Chinese products. There's people who will never work for Americans or trust Russians.

There are enterprises who just won't use AI for anything because they know they can hire and pay people. If it gets to the point where an enterprise, whatever size, cannot compete without AI, then it's game over, which isn't even ridiculous but makes for a fun story like shooting up stuff in the strait of Hormuz or blocking it for fun & gas prices.

This feels like a bit of a philosophical question, and in that sense I think our usefulness may be a bit questionable already, so I'm not sure AI changes too much on that term. Seems like we're largely just a circular dependency anyway.

The unstated premise of this question is that the goals we all aim for are about business/productivity, not the human experience. As I completely disagree with that premise, the question becomes absurd. Humans can never be useless - our existence and experience is the meaning we seek in life.

yes

The purpose of the system cannot be derived from inside the system (or reduced to the parts of the system). So your question requires defining of “who” or “what” is using humans.

I think people just need to use their time to have fun. Is that not what our use is right now? We’ll find new work to do, new problems to explore, new ways to have fun. Our original use was hunting and gathering. We then went to farming but I doubt people thought they didn’t have a use anymore because they weren’t hunting

Much as it is today, with the vast majority of humans looking at the tech bubble dwellers and saying to their peers, what are those folk talking about?

Let's just say the majority of us are going to be unemployable.

There is nothing a human brain can do that a computer theoretically could not do. Likewise there is nothing the human muscular or sensory systems could do which machines could not be made which do better or more accurately. Thus, as long as computers and machines improve at a rate which is not slowing down exponentially, it is inevitable computers and machines will be better than all humans in any thing they can do with their brains or bodies.