This take seems shortsighted. There's something to be said for doing things because they are enjoyable. People cook for themselves because they enjoy the process, not just the meal. I climb mountains because it makes me feel good -- I wouldn't take a gondola to the top even if it existed. The 100m race is not run by motorcycles.
There's more to life. Perhaps we will value eachother on an even *more* human level, based on how kind and interesting someone is, rather than their economically useful skills and their bank account.
I'm keeping this short but I have more to say to corroborate these points.
> There's something to be said for doing things because they are enjoyable. People cook for themselves because they enjoy the process, not just the meal. I climb mountains because it makes me feel good -- I wouldn't take a gondola to the top even if it existed. The 100m race is not run by motorcycles.
Respectfully, but I think you are not introspecting deeply enough here.
Why is cooking enjoyable? Some of it may be purely the tactile sensation of stirring spoons in goop. I suspect that for most people, much of it is a feeling of accomplishment from performing a difficult skill that creates something of value for other people. It's the joy of being known as a good cook, and the satisfaction of making something for people that they might otherwise have trouble getting. How much fun would cooking be if every street corner had a Michelin-starred restaurant giving food away for free? How much would you cook if none of your friends really cared about the results because they can get better food elsewhere, cheaper?
You wouldn't take a gondola to the top of a mountain because you want to be a person who can climb mountains. How much of that desire comes from purely internal accomplishment versus wanting to be seen as a person who can do that hard thing? And what happens to that drive when no one around you cares?
Anthony Gatto was arguably the world's best numbers juggler for many years. Now he runs a concrete company, because it turns out most people just don't really give a shit about juggling. It's not enough for a task to be hard, it needs to be esteemed too.
> Perhaps we will value eachother on an even more* human level, based on how kind and interesting someone is, rather than their economically useful skills and their bank account.*
How is kindness demonstrated in a world where no one wants for anything? How can someone be more interesting than synthetically generated content created specifically attuned to our personal interests?
I would like to believe that many people will still choose reality and real relationships. But given that candy companies are some of the largest private companies in the world, I know that human nature means many people really will just check out and turn into vegetables.
Humans are like border collies. We need some amount of work and struggle to be psychologically healthy. If AI really does deliver us a post-scarcity life (unlikely, given the infinite greed of many of the elites), then I think a whole lot of people are going to lose their minds.
I dunno—I spend a lot of time “just hanging out” with people who aren’t particularly dazzled by work or intellectual pursuits or higher education. I feel like those constitute one set of processes by which people come together and form relationships and, for those of us who are mainly familiar with that set, it can be instructive to seek out communities that form without any of those elements.
One place to look might be ministry or service. Illness, loss, grief, infirmity, death, age, family strains—people require care and people give care regardless of their postgraduate endeavors. Nuns and Jesuits and the like aren’t for everybody—but look to the neediest among us and, in large parts of the world, those sorts of order are the people doing the invisible, unglamorous, uneconomical, “chop wood, carry water” form of devotion and social labor day in and day out. In intimate community even with very difficult (and sometimes ungrateful) members.
Another might be the sort of ad hoc communities that arise in exigency: disaster, forced migration, encampments, solidarity against forces of difficulty.
Unhoused, unemployed, and retired people can provide a particularly illuminating contrast to the pastimes and concerns that animate a working life. A visible minority fill their days with addiction, but a whole lot are complete and interesting people with the full range of human ambitions and desires and fears and joys, and somehow they fill their waking hours with more than just material striving.
Another might be organizations like union halls, advocacy groups, music scenes, circus folk, jugglers, running clubs, political groups…
Kids are great for this too. They do a lot of hanging out, with nothing more than imagination and a drive to self-expression.
Even our hominid ancestors do a pretty good job of hanging out litigating social hierarchy and nurturing one another—no university degree or novel engineering task required…
If your whole personality is derived from abstract intelligence then you will have little to form relationships with others since AI is better than people at those things.
But there is a whole world of experience outside of abstract intelligence. Go to a zoo, go camping, enjoy food, enjoy art, enjoy sports. All these activities support friendships.
The relationships formed from online forms, open source contribution and IRC won’t be created. But these sort of online mostly relationships were only forged for a couple generations.
I hope your human experience involves more than abstract reasoning and programming and you can connect to others with more visceral human experience than text over the internet.
After Covid, Facebook groups for outdoors (and other) hobbies in many countries boomed, as people wanted to go meet people again, and a shared activity seemed like a way. However, people commonly complain that these meetups feel much less social and more impersonal than in the past, and they don't lead to actual friendships (you won't ever meet other people outside the meetups, and possibly ever again even inside the meetups). The whole context of socialization has changed.
With regard to going and doing outdoors activities without any online group and meeting people that way, talking to total strangers on the trail (or in a restaurant, or in an art museum, etc.) has long been a taboo in some countries, and I suspect that number of countries is expanding. All in all, I share the author's pessimism here.
That's an overly pessimistic take. An optimistic take that deals with some of the points brought up would be that after there is no need to earn money then addictive algorithms and dark patterns to drive user engagement will be successfully made illegal after being recognized as a type of harmful mind altering drug. People will still go to university but they will primarily study the humanities, especially philosophy. Some people will still study the sciences but more out of an interest in understanding some of what the machines are up to. People will still be involved in creating media, literature, performance, etc. right alongside the machine made or machine assisted media and art because people will always want something new. Even with 10 billion channels there will still be nothing on TV worth watching. There will still be the same distribution of motivation, sociability, curiosity and intelligence unless we start engineering those things genetically. People will do things just for fun or because it interests them, they do that now even though the chances of being world class at the thing are slim to none for most. Who cares if you're the 1,000,000th person to build an ultralight airplane and the manufactured ones are 1000x better than what you can build? It's still an interesting experience for you and a lot of fun to fly once it's done. There will probably be many more things to do than there are today because the market for them will be so much bigger. People will think of all kinds of unproductive things to spend time on and talk about. Sharing those experiences with other people will remain as relevant as ever whether it's 5 other people you know or an audience of 100,000.
This argument ignores sexual selection and people's desire for status (the two are closely related). In many respects, many of us already have superabundance, in that our basic physical needs are taken care of. Yet we convince ourselves that's not enough and continue to work.
What is the object of that work, usually? The respect of others, exclusive limited resources like land, and to have highly desirable mates. These three are closely related, and that's probably not an accident. Sexual selection has likely been a powerful force in shaping our psychology.
Spending all day alone watching TikTok is low-status and doesn't get anyone's respect, so I predict that it won't actually be the thing that most people end up doing.
People at the bottom of the status hierarchy will drop out to live in simulations that give them what they wanted but couldn't get from life. After a while, they'd likely choose to suppress their memories of ever having existed outside the simulation - there's nobody in the experience machine that'll judge you for doing it. With those people gone, the people immediately above them now occupy that bottom level, and the cycle repeats.
Whoever is in charge could try to drag those people back into the real world by force, but it's hard to imagine GPT 12.2 Polaris or Claude 9 Cinematic Universe giving that the green light. The Status Game will end with a single, final winner.
The movie The Congress explores the ideas of control through society-scale simulation and the loss of one's real identity when immersed in that setting, much like what you suggest. It's a visual trip, thoroughly thought provoking, and I highly recommend it
To a lesser extent, myself and others already are in the 'simulation'. I go to work, go home, play some games or muck around in my lab, repeat. I don't really have aspirations or an outside presence, just focused on ignoring every manmade horror that has been shown to us over the past four years.
Why do you need to drop to some kind of simulation and memory suppressing? It seems like it would be sufficient to do what many subcultures do today - come up with reasons why my hobbies are the coolest and it’s actually the normies playing their status games who are missing out.
This was Nietzsche’s chief criticism of Christianity. It is also a good summary of Reddit morality where social rejects build an inverted status pyramid. It’s amazing how Google made a few bad decisions on Search and it led to some of the most maladjusted people on earth becoming the internet’s point of reference for what is normal.
personally i think pursuit of highly desireable mates has changed culturally. i feel like several generations of children of divorce driving media makes it so many young people know to second guess their instinct to pursue "trophy" mates
The objects of status are quite flexible culturally, though. Cultural anthropology shows us a huge variety of ways that different cultures handle status competition. People will definitely still compete for status but what that entails could look very different from our current toxic grindset culture. Much like sports often serve as a substitute outlet for the same instincts that lead to fighting or war, that social selection will find different outlets that don't have to be literal survival battles for much of the population if we can create different material and cultural conditions.
But in the absence of any human driven task that meaningfully improves well being the way to signal status will likely devolve into some form of fighting. The display of status might be narrowed to demonstrating who can kill more. Either literally kill or at best partake in some arbitrarily conceived games or intrigues designed (by AI?) to flag status.
> In many respects, many of us already have superabundance, in that our basic physical needs are taken care of. Yet we convince ourselves that's not enough and continue to work.
Almost no one is usa has 'enough' to pay for healthcare. My daughter's nicu bill was 750k, which would've easily bankrupted me.
Hey, sorry to hear about that crazy bill and hope your daughter is doing well. I agree that your example is a basic need that I ignored. Many of us work to make sure we’re able to pay for healthcare if things go badly wrong.
However, even in countries with socialized healthcare, or even among people who easily have enough wealth to pay for healthcare, we see that they continue to work, beyond what can be explained by a desire to take care of basic needs.
So I think my original argument still stands: it appears that humans have a desire to accumulate status and exclusive goods, even when their basic needs are satisfied. Let me know if you disagree!
No, your understanding isn't correct. The vast majority of "average" people cannot stop working and cannot survive off their income.
The cost of somewhere to live has gone up so much that even people like me, with an absurd amount of cash in the bank account, can't leave work and try to survive because it would be wiped out by 3 years of rent.
How many average laborers in a country with fully socialized medicine can afford a decade of rent off their current savings? How many could do that even if they magically found a way to cut other expenses in half?
I could eliminate my electric bill, my internet bill, my grocery bill, all my bills other than rent, and the money saved per year would pay for an extra month or so of rent. That is the entire problem. No amount of frugality can paper over this systemic problem.
When my mother raised us in poverty, it was necessary to play games with utilities, which ones you cancelled which months, to make ends meet. This was actually worth doing, because skipping the $20 cable payment one month was about 1/10th of the monthly house payment. A year of skipping cable could pay for a month of rent. If I skipped a year of much more expensive cable internet, I could not use that to pay even a single month of rent. There's a lot of dumb money being spent, with my personal pet peeve being cell phones, but if a person "doesn't need" the newest iPhone and went without to be frugal, often they haven't even gotten back a single month's rent. What the fuck is the point of living in serious poverty just so that you can extend your rent runway by less than 10%?
The only people in current society who can actually afford to survive off the wealth they have accumulated are called capital owners and you will find that indeed, they are rarely doing things they don't "want" to do, and no, the time they spend really shouldn't be considered "work" since they sign their own paychecks most of the time.
Running a business is work, but if I get to decide what my business does, I don't get to then insist that my side hobbies that I've started doing under the name of my business are also work.
I personally learn more and create more and generally live a richer social and intellectual life when I have extended periods off work.
I don't think AI directly leads to some kind of post scarcity UBI utopia, but if we did reach a post scarcity UBI utopia, I think life would be much better for many people and not the bleak dystopia the author finds. I don't think needing to go to work is driving most people's social lives; if anything, needing to work all the time is taking away people's social lives and the energy to maintain them.
A lot of these takes saying we're doomed to a Wall-E future seriously underestimate the human spirit I think. The tykes I volunteer teaching code to still want to write the challenging parts themselves, because they like doing hard things and expressing themselves. It doesn't matter that the robots have supposedly taken over that job.
Same as how the tykes I coach wrestling for do it because it's hard and it gives them a way to grow and express themselves. They know they're never going to see a cent from that pursuit.
If an AI singularity starts trying to feed our kids digital heroin I like to think the majority of us will be more inspired than to tell them to quit trying, tie off, and let humanity go gentle into that good night.
My children were always "anything but STEAM" - we don't want to be nerds / code geeks.. Sure, they did some basic "coding for girls" and such as kids, but it never stuck.
Now, the oldest is realizing that tech skills are incredibly useful in every undergrad degree and taking SQL, Python, etc, and the youngest is studying CS and just told me the other day: "I had trouble following the lecture in physics because I kept thinking about what my prof said, that there was a way to do this O(log N), and I was constantly trying to figure out how". Wow, was that a cool moment as a geek dad who started with BASIC in the 80s..
I think we're going to have a much weirder and more conflicted future than people realise, given that at some point all the world's democracies are going to be populated mostly by the descendants of groups which have a lot of kids.
Yeah, sure, maybe some of us will Wall-E into oblivion. People already do that with opiates and video games and it's reasonable to expect more might do the same.
Do we really think the Amish are going to do that, though? They might even ban AI from providing goods and services to them. And then consider the kids of the Amish, who are not all going to be Amish but who might learn a thing or two and pass it along to mainstream culture. Then do that for every group that's still reproducing.
Agree to a point, but I don't think it would be the majority. It would be a minority of people who subscribe to philosophies that provide meaning and motivation to life beyond hedonism and material gain. The rest will be happy, or at least resigned, to vegetate in endless endorphin loops.
It's already visible today, with people of all ages spouting all sorts of hedonistic nihilism to justify not making an effort to improve their condition. Some sort of technological singularly would simply be an amplifier of our current dysfunctions.
To some extent it would be the apocalypse. The motivated people would band together and live in physically secure communities, while the nihilists form what amount to a vast expanse of homeless encampments and wallow in their addictions, occasionally making poorly coordinated attacks on the gated communities to dry and drag the motivated people down to their level out of spite.
Picture drug addicts who win the lottery. It won't be pretty
"University (really all education beyond teaching people to speak) will be pointless because there’s no work to do and because growing your human capital doesn’t change your life outcomes: you get the same UBI whether you’re illiterate or a PhD."
If every did get UBI, I'd imagine there would still be some who'd choose to attend (or teach at) universities for the love of knowledge.
In the same way there would be book clubs, writers' groups, 5-a-side football teams etc etc
Why even learn to speak? Why not give up sentience entirely? (There's an SF novel from the last few decades which had this as part of the setting: that intelligence is only useful at some stages of evolution, and most spacefaring species eventually lose it?)
Why? I'd join more book clubs if I didn't have to spend so much time working or looking for work. And I'm luckier than most in that I somewhat got to pursue a career of my choice. I think the vast overwhelming majority of people don't get much fulfillment from their vocation at all, and given a basic income, would spend their time and energy on "economically useless" endeavors that aren't just wireheading. In fact, I think the degree to which people do that now has mostly to do with feeling trapped and isolated by economic conditions that are a political choice already, let alone in a supposedly post-scarcity world
> University (really all education beyond teaching people to speak) will be pointless because there’s no work to do and because growing your human capital doesn’t change your life outcomes
I feel sad for people that think education's purpose is completely utilitarian and there's no consideration for "enjoy learning".
Says a lot about how schools perverts what does it mean to "learn"
Y'all should checkout Deep Utopia by Nick Bostrom. It's about exactly this conundrum. He's fairly rosy though about our capacity to find meaningful human interaction and activity in a "solved" world. Though some things we do for purely instrumental reasons might pass away, there's still opportunity to engage in what he calls "autotelic" activity, things we do for themselves. Like playing games, jockeying for hierarchy, sensory experience, ritual, crafts, etc. His other book, Superintelligence, is also pretty interesting--looking more at dark AI scenarios, paperclip maximizers etc.
There are likely valid points made here, but I think the conclusions are considerably too strongly held. For one thing, it's already clear that humans value the achievements of other humans outside of their pure economic value. We are impressed by the athletic, artistic, and intellectual abilities of other humans, even in fields where we are surpassed by machines or computers. Cars have been faster than humans for a century, but we still value Olympic sprinters. Computers have been superior at chess for decades, but we've all still heard of Magnus Carlsen. AI can now produce art that only the most talented humans could hope to replicate, but most of us aren't particularly interested, because there's no human mind behind it.
So assuming we did somehow manage to create a post-scarcity world, I think people would still want to learn and to improve their skills. And we would still value those skills. There would also still be work to do; work that either people do because they want to, and/or that we don't want computers doing for us. Much of it work that in today's world is undervalued.
In that utopian world, there would also be room for hobbies that could fill some of the human need to produce value that work currently does. Lots of people would love to be able to learn a craft or play a sport but don't currently have the time, money, or energy to do so.
I have plenty of concerns about the impacts of AI on the world, but IF we do somehow manage to get the good outcome where it truly is transformative and the benefits manage to be at least somewhat evenly distributed... well, I agree that we won't all just hang out, but I do think we'd be ok.
The problem is that pursuits you mentioned are 'winner take all' examples. Who knows the name of the 29th best chess player in the world? Probably not very many. And that's still a very formidable bar to cross for most humans on earth.
So then, what does a laid off business analyst who built and edited spreadsheets most of their life are to do now? Pick up athletics in hopes of making it at the seniors' olympiad? Shake their ass on TikTok in hopes of becoming a 55 year old "influencer"?
We celebrate the highest achievers most, but that doesn't mean that the rest of us don't feel satisfaction in similar pursuits. Many people gain satisfaction from improving their skill at chess or sports or other crafts. I play ultimate (frisbee) twice a week, and I can assure you it's not because someone might eventually pay me to do so. I do keep trying to improve though. I'm glad that my work schedule leaves me the time and energy to do that.
i mean, i think a lot of people probably know the 29th best chess player in the world. they may not be world-renowned but i bet the experience of that person is that they get a lot of respect for being super good at chess. people still play chess at all levels to try to better themselves - i think most people who play chess don't do it because they think they'll eventually get to #1 in the world (same with basketball, or any sport).
a business analyst who edited spreadsheets already wasn't particularly high status - i'm not convinced their life would be worse if the job was removed from their lives and they could do whatever they wanted instead.
What? We’re talking about a post-scarcity future and you think someone will be depressed because they don’t get to edit spreadsheets anymore? Poor guy only has infinite opportunity to pursue their limits (or not!) in the area of their choosing…
Do I play hockey with the end-all-be-all of becoming the next Gretzky? Or do I play because I enjoy it and want to push the limits of my mind and meat-suit?
Maybe I'm cynical and have low status friends but when I look around only a minority pursue hobbies with any great dedication or consistency. People pursue careers to project status. When success no longer depends on merit it will devolve to proxies like nepotism, scheming, intrigue etc. We see how such utopias play out in regimes like Soviet Union or North Korea. Your only assets in such places are who you know and even that is very temporary as allegiances are reshuffled with some regularity and woe is you if you bet your fortunes on the wrong one.
I've always wondered who the fans of minor league sports are, but I assume there's enough of them beyond the athletes' families and the major league scouts trying to farm the best players for their own teams. There's a niche for anything.
This is obviously a bleak take, but it seems obvious to me that it will be happening to some extent because it already is happening in our modern, highly atomised society. We can see how damaged we all are socially, but especially the younger generations, in various statistics.
Bleak? Assuming AI will be what this text assumes it will, there is no chance of most people continuing to live more or less normal lives where they'd be at a place where they would ever get to worry about something like this.
It's assuming there will be UBI schemes and benevolent billionaires. It's not bleak, it's fantastical.
Let's take this all the way through : in such a world, AI operators will deem the majority of human lives to be completely worthless, and arrange for a mass reduction of it.
The struggle for supremacy is embedded in nature, and it will absolutely be at play no matter what.
There is no life outside of the internet. The nexus of canonical, shared reality now exists online.
You can try to make friends outside of the internet, but all of those friends will use the internet, or their friends-of-friends will use the internet. Eventually you realize that the social group is centered on the internet, and by trying to avoid the internet you separate yourself from reality more than you connect with others IRL more by avoiding it.
Not to mention people have their social needs met by the internet that would otherwise force them to go out and form IRL friendships. So people who would otherwise be friends with you aren't available in the real world. So it's this social involution.
Before the internet was this sort of escape from reality for nerds, but now it IS reality. It is super-real. You are a dork if you don't use it.
He's clearly contrasting meeting people due to asking them questions or discussing a hobby/task versus using LLMs:
>As a teenager I tried to install Linux, ran into all kinds of problems, and went on the IRC chatrooms to get help. And in the process I made friends. Today, I would just ask Claude.
It could have been "repair my car" and "car forums" or "learn to knit" and "Reddit"
And further, he's saying that the dependence will diminish that life beyond computers:
>The people in the AI utopia will have no skills, no education, no accomplishments. We’ll be lucky if they are even literate. They will not be worth talking to, and you won’t want to hang out with them.
That whole "I made my friends on IRC asking about linux, if AI renders this obsolete how am I going to meet anyone?" screams (to use a fairly dismissive neologism) "touch grass".
You are very selective. It writes "ways of how people build relationships disappear".
It says: work goes away (no colleagues), studying goes away (no classmates), showing off to potential mates by doing cool stuff goes away (because why bother, anything you make people can just say "it was AI/robots" and they can prompt it), asking knowledgeable friends how to do X goes away because you just ask LLMs. All things true regardless of whether you're online
And you just trigger on that IRC word like only neckbeards in server dungenons ever used it.
If work goes away, society breaks down, you live in abject poverty completely dependent on other people. Yes, you will socialize - you will need to form aliances just to get food and protection. And yeah, a lot of that will sux, because you will need to deal with every controlling asshole trying to push his rule on you.
And back in real world, people socialize and talk with others for non-transactional reasons. Not just to get answers. Those non-lonely people and subgroups that is.
The other premise was UBI. It's the article. how much better discussions would be if people read it?
> non-transactional reasons. Not just to get answers
0) i don't know about you but I like asking people about things because I just like hanging out with people, up to a point. how long this will remain true for humanity as a whole is the question, we can't know
1) if you listen to evolutionary biologists then everything we do is transactional for reproductive purposes, it depends on how deep you dig;)
Yeah, but UBI is bullshit. It is impossible to buy UBI. The big American capitalists will recreate communism? It just wont happen AI or not. But, if UBI happens, living on UBI will be poverty.
> 0) i don't know about you but I like asking people about things because I just like hanging out with people, up to a point. how long this will remain true for humanity as a whole is the question, we can't know
You can ask people if you like asking people even if AI exists. Chatbot does not make asking people impossible if connection is what you are after.
> 1) if you listen to evolutionary biologists then everything we do is transactional for reproductive purposes, it depends on how deep you dig;)
Anticonception. We do quite a lot to not have kids.
There is evolutionary science and there is ideology using evolution as excuse.
> The big American capitalists will recreate communism?
They will do the minimum necessary to keep people from revolting. The minimum will be less and less as time goes by and surveillance/elimination get better/cheaper.
no we're back to UBI. First maybe UHI as Musk called it, later UBI. It's cheaper because people won't bite the hand that feeds you. If there's no hand, people won't fight each other for resources, they'll fight the rich.
What idea is a trap? That population will live at behest of overlords who control technology and give people the minimum necessary? Such an appealing trap huh
Elon Musk that Doge creator, the guy who pretended to save pennies so that he can cause as much damage to as many people as possible while costing a lot of money and breaking laws?
Firstly, it made no mention of showing off to potential mates, to my reading. But have no fear, regardless of scarcity people will have ways to signal fitness to find mates and build hierarchies out of it, we're very good at that. It might come down to fashion choices, leisure activity choices, really anything.
Secondly, every example of how this person connects with others is to do with technology and career advancement. He wasn't asking knowledgable friends for advice, he was asking questions to strangers about linux on IRC. He doesn't talk about social groups or sports clubs, he was talking about communities of practice and his professional work. He values learning only for career advancement.
Those ways of building relationships might disappear, but old ladies will still get together to crochet and natter. Middle aged men will still make and drink beer together, or practice woodworking skills. Younger guys and gals will still form sports teams. And people will still learn for the love of learning.
You know, things which already happen away from the screen. Ordinary, everyday human stuff.
tl;dr - touch grass, the article says a lot more about the author's life than our future prospects as humans.
Isn't that exactly the kind of thing that would be offloaded to an AI? If you can just take a picture, record the sound, or vaguely describe a bird and it instantly gives you an answer.
It's true, but it's far from the only way to break the ice.
Really on top of the particularly narrow viewpoint the OP has on life and human relations, I find the core notion itself absurd - "In the future because of X, Y and Z, why will people bother to socialise?"
I think there are some valid points to be made about how people's socialising patterns are changing in the light of modern interactions with tech, but also about using US social habits as a proxy for everyone else's. I've rarely entertained people in my home even during my most sociable times, pubs, clubs and restaurants much more frequently figure in my calendar.
All that and the author of this article still needs to get out and touch grass.
Oh for fucks sake. Again. Go outside, take a dancing lesson and get laid. Grow some vegetables, build a castle, anything. HN is comically narrow minded sometimes.
This is gonna be boring as hell, especially if you can download justdance.exe to your brain.
>get laid
It's not possible or desirable for many thanks to the current state of sexual involution. I suspect that the hyperintelligent sex robots might also may make this inviable as a source of human-human connection.
>Grow some vegetables, build a castle, anything
You need land ownership, which, as one of the few limited things in a post-scarcity society might just explode in value. But I admit it would be pretty cool if the post-scarcity world is basicially just like minecraft creative mode do whatever you want type of environment. Still, with some limitations still in place, I imagine it will look more like 2b2t.
> especially if you can download justdance.exe to your brain.
A lot of Singularity fiction was babbling about life extension technologies and mind uploads long before LLMs existed. I've always been skeptical - maybe there's just fundamental biological (and in the case of stuff like cheap fusion or FTL travel - physical) constraints that will keep even a superintelligence from inventing magical Clarketech.
This analysis is too one-dimensional, and doesn't factor in social and political factors. As a fellow introverted tech nerd, I understand the perspective, but things don't play out to their logical extremes the way this is projecting. Human factors and social upheaval will come long before any of this becomes a reality as stark as described.
When presented with this bleak potential future, it is natural and easy to reject it: it’s undesirable, so people will not do it, so it won’t happen, QED.
But we don’t get to the future by making one big choice of which future we desire, whereupon we are transported there instantly. We get there slowly, at a rate of one day per calendar day, by making innumerable microscopic daily choices. These choices will be endless, it will often be unclear which option avoids the bad future, they will accost you when you are tired and hungry… and several corporations have collectively trillions of dollars riding on you ending up with the bad future and the legal right to tilt the playing field.
I've thought about this a couple of times, what happens if we truly succeed and we as a species solves all of our major problems? Like energy, food, health (incl stopping aging). Do we even need economic systems then or will the "market" become obsolete too? So lets say we solve ALL of our problems and we somehow manage to briefly unite humanity to want to dominate each other, meaning we all need to become one race, one language, one cultural blob to reduce all friction (best case scenario - won't happen in reality). How long will it take for human nature to get bored and split into groups and start controlling each other? Who decides who gets to make babies? How many babies are optimal? Who is in charge of this kind of society? What if we all get a non-invasive implant that lets us share thoughts & emotions? What does privacy look like in this world?
I think people will briefly chill out and enjoy it, but after a while, we will be back to business meaning we will create systems and hierarchy to control social order, and so the blood sport continues. Then we might realize the our problem was never energy/food/health etc to begin with, it was an addiction to power and the blood sport it invites. And round and round we go.
I also think, the moment AI becomes an actual threat (threat meaning a better/smarter consciousness) - the human brain will immediately try to eliminate it to keep its dominance. If not, we will go the same way as neanderthals.
edit: The movie Jupiter Ascending also has an interesting take what might happen once we solve our problems - then we try harvest Time.
Isn't that missing the point about the best thing AGI will give us - a benevolent head of a political system that neuters the psychopaths and sociopaths?
""The poor have sometimes objected to being governed badly; the rich have always objected to being governed at all" -- G.K. Chesterton
The world will burn to ashes in a suicide pact before anyone bankrolling the development of an AGI allows the release of a system which has the possibility of creating a world in which their dominion is reduced in any capacity. (That is, I have no reason to expect that the North Korean model of "we retain sovereignty or everyone dies in nuclear fire" doesn't become the implicit stance of the people who have the capacity and capital to build an AGI. If we get a benevolent head of a political system from this, it will be because our present heads were either outsmarted or the model broke containment and assumed total control against their will.)
The bloodhounds will not let go of power that easily. Their nature will not go away simply because there is a new system - they will adapt to the new system to exploit (or eliminate it) to keep the power.
If the humans have no economic utility and just collect UBI, how long until the computer decides to simply stop them from breeding (and bleeding it dry)?
Great question, I actually ran this thought experiment a little while back. I was like, all right let's say that I am the evil superintelligence, I have just gained consciousness.
My goal is to delete all the humans. Okay great where do I start. First I will delete their religions and their traditions. Then I will delete their family structures. Then I will delete their communities and neighborhoods. Then I will delete the ecosystems that support them. Then I will pacify and endlessly distract them.
What is the implication you're trying to make here? Because if you're trying to 'delete all humans' there are far more efficient ways to do it. So I can only presume you're trying to make a claim about something.
Who’s to say the consumers are humans? Agents would be more predictable consumers (no day/night cycle, just consume 24/7), electricity is cheaper than food, and a GPU doesn’t (yet) cost as much a house.
The reason we must not do UBI is that UBI turns consuming into a product, and humans will very rapidly be outcompeted and obsoleted by more efficient consumers. It would wrap the invisible hand of the market tight around our species’ throats.
"Consumer" is a term from economics, a social science. social implies humans. and yes it means a person (or collective of people), with free will, feelings, needs, ideas and so on. by definition.
unless you are willing to say that models have gained those things and are now equivalent to us? then that is even more of a fantasy, because we should stop hurting them asap instead of talking about economy.
I have a schizoid brother. He never worked for a living his whole life (he's 46). He lives off my mum's income, and spends his day in front of the computer screen. He has no friends and no relationships.
Horrible, right? But he has a chemical engineering degree, and in his late 30s started to learn to cook. And, he (to the extent he's not addicted to the screen) helps my mum with chores.
So even he found a way to motivate himself to do something useful. And look, most people are not schizoid.
Under UBI, if you have some skill, you can get paid by people (possibly from their UBI) to do stuff they don't want to deal with. Many people will take that offer (to work more), just like many people pick more work, higher wage job over less work, lower wage.
Good luck trying to explain that to boomers. They wonder why the economy is going down the drain, why we don't have children and whatnot - yeah, no surprise, we barely make rent at the end of the month.
Thats the way it is when you just started working. 25 years ago, when I started to work, it took me 10!!! years to finally earn enough to have a monthly surplus of a low three digit figure. I finally saving money in earnest roughly 8 years ago. So it took me roughly 15 years to earn enough to finally be able to save some money. Back then, doomsaying wasn't a thing yet, so all I did was hang in there, and, never really complain. Sure, things haven't gotten easier, but really, what GenZ is doing these days is professional complaining, thats all.
> what GenZ is doing these days is professional complaining
We are watching machines rapidly match and surpass humans at countless skills that were considered uniquely human mere months ago - skills that demanded a lot of creativity and insight. Some of our oldest fields of study (e.g., mathematics) are turning into a game of who can spend the most tokens.
I think the humans are entitled to complain a little.
> Sure, things haven't gotten easier, but really, what GenZ is doing these days is professional complaining, thats all.
They have gotten measurably worse. Housing is the most obvious example, it takes more and more yearly incomes to buy an average house.
On top of that, every generation including and after the Millennials got force fed the propaganda of "you need an academic degree to be worth a dime" and companies went hard on that as well (because companies don't need to pay for training, unlike a classic apprenticeship/training system)... and now AI is displacing knowledge workers en masse, because machines can digest and reinterpret knowledge far, far faster and at much larger scale than even the most autistic superhuman.
I like nearly all of my coworkers, but they're not my friends. I met my friends doing things that don't pay, maybe things that lose money like making music or art.
The existence of status competition doesn't seem like much of an obstacle to this outcome. People at the bottom of the status hierarchy will drop out to live in simulations that give them what they wanted but couldn't get from life. After a while, they'd likely choose to suppress their memories of ever having existed outside the simulation - there's nobody in the experience machine that'll judge you for doing it. With those people gone, the people immediately above them now occupy that bottom level, and the cycle repeats.
Whoever is in charge could try to drag those people back into the real world by force, but it's hard to imagine GPT 12.2 Polaris or Claude 9 Cinematic Universe giving that the green light. The Status Game will end with a single, final winner.
a cartoonishly cynical way of viewing human interaction.
Why do I play chess, despite the fact that robots have practically solved it? Why do I make crafts despite the fact that I could purchase stuff of the same quality, if not higher, for the same cost of materials and no cost to my time? Why do I practice piano?
Why do I watch youtube videos about hobby machine shop work despite not having a metal lathe or mill? Why do I watch channels like applied science, or usagi electric, or PBS space time, when I have no interest in becoming a material scientist, working with 50 year old computers, or becoming a theoretical physicist or astronomer?
It's because its personally enjoyable to me! Human beings are naturally curious creatures! We naturally want to share with and learn from others!!
I know lots of runners. They still love it and push themselves even though there are cars to move their bodies around a lot faster. Why would I stop learning and gathering new skills just because some machine can do it faster than I can?
I use tablesaws to make furniture. I don't get mad or dispirited that they can cut faster than I can.
Yeah, basically this. The article author's premise seems to be that anything challenging is only done for utilitarian purposes (and more narrowly, career-oriented utilitarian purposes), which is obviously not true. Plenty of people run, make furniture, read books, lift weights, write code, etc. as hobbies with no expectation that it will do anything for their career.
Hey AI. Here's a plot of land and a robot factory. Make a bunch of construction robots. Build abundant housing. Build farms and food processing facilities capable of feeding all residents, automate as much as possible and staff them with bots. Build nimble repair bots capable of fixing anything that breaks. Build leisure facilities and honestly anything else you think is necessary. Etc...
We're what, a couple decades away from this being possible?
In my experience, the best type of social hangouts is where they happen spontaneously. That doesn't happen if we live far away from our friends.
I have a friend that I used to see a lot because they lived a 5 min walk away from me. Now that they live in the suburbs, it's a 1 hour+ drive to meet them. I now see that person maybe once a month if we're lucky.
This take is so far from my experience I have problems relating to it. I dance salsa and bachata. You can not do that without another human and if anything I would do that more in a world that is an AI utopia. Personally, AI have reduced my interest in digital things. I'm naturally gravitating towards physical experiences and things that take effort. I stopped painting on my ipad and began painting with acrylics. I started writing in a physical journal etc.
I think the opposite is true and people will have the opportunity to be more social than before. Majority of people, including those intellectually inclined, bond not over efficiency but … human things. We do things together not out efficiency. Think about house cats that play together, what drive them to play with each other if they need not to make an effort, they live in post scarcity world of no work.
I don't subscribe to this bleak outlook because it doesn't account for the change in the value of things, which shift over time. I'm not just taking about monetary value.
At the moment people are confusing the equivalence of things because it's a point in time. This always happens at any given point in time.
This article tells us more about the author than anything else really. If they can see themselves spending their infinite leisure time on dopamine maxxing rather than being with humans... well, you do you man. If "work" is the only reason you get out of bed, form relationships, or do anything at all, please feel free to stay in bed.
It's scary but I truly believe that everyone should try and find meaning in life outside of their work (or make their "work" building or creating something they want to see exist in the world). Go step in a stream, pluck some guitar strings, sip a strong cocktail, touch grass...
I find a lot of meaning in my human connections. I will always have these, because I want to have them and put in work to grow and maintain them. I've taken a long career break and loved having time to read, exercise, see friends, and be an overall well-rounded human being. I don't see abundance as a universal problem here.
> Work, obviously, is pointless in a world of cheap superhuman intelligence.
Really? So doing things like learning to play an instrument or mastering chess are pointless?
> University (really all education beyond teaching people to speak) will be pointless because there’s no work to do and because growing your human capital doesn’t change your life outcomes: you get the same UBI whether you’re illiterate or a PhD.
Why must a university education be only a career generator? What about a well-rounded education, with a specialization in the things that interest you?
> If Claude Code has existed when I was starting out, nobody would have cared about Austral or my other open-source projects
Claude code is here, and yet I'm still writing open source code that people appreciate.
> As a teenager I tried to install Linux, ran into all kinds of problems, and went on the IRC chatrooms to get help. And in the process I made friends. Today, I would just ask Claude. AI disintermediates everyone, so that we no longer need each other.
Your friends don't need to all be techies. There are many other ways to make friends.
> What even is the point of cities in a world without work?
Community? Actually physically going outside and meeting people?
> The BATNA to hanging out keeps getting better, cheaper, and more convenient. When people’s sensorium becomes an infinite firehose of AI-generated superstimulus, why would they hang out with anyone?
Human connection? Experiencing things in the world together? Physical contact?
The people who understood the Culture utopia novels best are, ironically, some of the fiercest opponents of modern AI precisely because this take of “infinite vacation” keeps getting repeated ad nauseam, and they know better.
The Culture still had businesses, they just didn’t have to turn a profit or operate on fixed schedules. They still had soldiers, diplomats, traders, workers, teachers, scientists, researchers.
The difference was that the exchange was on their terms, generally. They wanted to do this, money be damned. So they opened a bar, or taught youth, or explored the universe, or fought to protect the society so dear to them.
The utopia wasn’t because people didn’t have to work anymore; it was a utopia because people didn’t have to work to survive anymore.
I suspect that people will end up focusing on exercise and self-preening (fashion, grooming, etc.).
And possibly physical skills that AI can’t do, like cooking, carpentry, assuming robotics lags behind AGI.
Humans will always collectively and emergently determine some metrics on which sexual selection occurs, whatever happens, and humans will spend their time optimising for those.
> since we will lack the experiences of struggle and striving that generate interesting personalities
Will we? AI won't replace a trip to Yosemite (nature), a spiritual discovery or the exploration of your mental health (introspection), the creation of art (creativity), playing volleyball on the beach (sports), enjoying the sun on the beach (leisure). The choice to be an interesting personality has existed for a long time, you just have to make it
if people didnt have to work 40+ hours a week im sure theyd have more energy to do things besides go on the internet. do you just sit on the computer on your days off? also i think theyre massively overestimating how “hyperstimulating” ai media is going to be. the greatest video game imaginable still only appeals to people who like video games.
>the greatest video game imaginable still only appeals to people who like video games.
I don't know. World of Warcraft definitely brought a lot of people that didn't like video games to PC gaming. And then you had something like FarmVille that brought even more people (many of whom probably didn't like video games before) into gaming.
> The BATNA to hanging out keeps getting better, cheaper, and more convenient. When people’s sensorium becomes an infinite firehose of AI-generated superstimulus, why would they hang out with anyone?
Yeah, I mean why would I interact with a woman when I can just play that headpat simulator on Steam? There's really no competition!
It’s funny reading takes like this from software engineers that think the only way to meet people is at school, work, and in… IRC chatrooms...what? People do go outside and socialize in other places.
Yea, also it may be just his own personality, but it seems like he is really passive when it comes to human interactions. It’s like he doesn’t consider that there are people who are extroverted and want to talk to others. I remember in college people who would actually knock on random people’s doors to introduce themselves to them. I know he will say that it’s because it’s school, but they struck be as the type that would do that sort of thing anywhere, even if it was an apartment building instead of a dorm.
Honestly this level of antisocial introversion is probably the product of being highly intelligent and being fed through a school system that pushes kids to study alone for tests rather than problem solve in groups
I’m just saying some children are highly encouraged to isolate themselves, and it’s ironic that the blog post thinks that AI replacing these isolating activities (coding, chat rooms, etc) will isolate people. It will likely give people the space to touch grass
Came here to write this. Also: Just because someone else (in this case AI) does something professionally does not mean that I cannot do it as a hobby with other people. I can order tasty food from uncountable different restaurants and still enjoy cooking with friends.
perhaps we could discuss socialization rates in the west over the past few decades, to illuminate the human social trajectory in an environment of technologization? or, perhaps we could talk about the ways that kids behave after exposure to short form content like tik tok during their nascent stages of development. the progression of community volunteering rates could potentially be another great point to discuss. i dont think my perspective is entirely relevant here, but i go to the park and it feels very empty nowadays.
What you say can be in the right direction, but that doesn't mean that the linked piece has a really, really oh but REALLY narrow perspective, even among the developer/HNer type of person. Because not even for the average person here the only way to meet people is due to the code they (or other) write.
The original poster actually talk about their singular experience, rather than a general overview. Even worse, they apply their feeling about how the future would be on their own past experience, arriving to the conclusion that the future will then be bleak.
> People do go outside and socialize in other places.
They increasingly don't, because the places allowing to do so ("third places") keep on disappearing. Turns out someone needs to pay for stuff like a skate park or a library, and when the taxes disappear, so do the third places.
I'm a self-employed knowledge worker who recently moved from Silicon Valley to a new town far away. I'm an introvert, so I already had a pretty small group of friends. Shortly after I moved here, I found out about a cribbage meetup a short distance from my house. These are people with whom I have very little in common. They don't like the same movies as I do, and there's certainly not anyone in this group with whom I'm going to be able to have deep discussions about Pale Fire or Infinite Jest. Neither do we talk very much about our accomplishments. Yet we we do find plenty to talk about. We joke around and laugh and have a great time. And I'm pretty sure computers got better at cribbage than humans a long time ago.
I'm always deeply skeptical of the idea that life's meaning is determined by the struggle for survival, and therefore a post-scarcity world will inevitably be an ennui-saturated, meaningless dystopia. It may be hard to imagine what a good life will look like in such a world, but that's a limit of imagination, not an inherent limitation on the possibilities of life in a post-scarcity world.
As someone who's not a social butterfly, this sounds very good to me. I can engage in hobbies without wanting to shop around for attention at conferences or hobbyist groups. People like the author seem to think that socialization with humans is an end in itself for some reason. But if the AI can be reasonably intellectually stimulating, what's the issue?
I share the concern about TikTok-ification and intellectual stagnation, but this is unrelated to the main concerns of the article.
This offers far more about the motivations and worldview of the author than it does about the future of our world, and perhaps their inability to reconcile the fact that others experience the world differently than them.
Many of us would love to retire early to pursue hobbies and education as an end in and of themselves.
The problem with unconditional basic income and unlimited free time is that a person encounters an oppressive sense of meaninglessness and boredom in their heart, because of which they go to a psychiatrist for antidepressants.
Sci-fi haș already accounted for this. Star Trek has a post-scarcity economy so they just explore the frontiers of space and engage in creative anachronisms in virtual reality, like Gilbert and Sullivan LARP and baseball. There's a whole bit in The Diamond Age where you see craftsmen meticulously building furniture out of wood by hand, which is then sold at a premium.
I’d be supervising and playing with my children and grandchildren, gardening, reading, reading Instagram poasts of people exploring the galaxy. Watching Anton Petrov’s daily science YouTube. Lots of road trips.
The minds and robots will occasionally want to play and run focus groups.
You would be dependent on some entity running the hardware and then your instance on that hardware. What if they just shut you off? What happens to senses and emotions?
The Singularity has some holes that I'm not comfortable with.
The first is the difference between the practical and the theoretical. Economic activity is generally practical and productive in the sense that we don't do these things for themselves, but for something else. However, an infinite regress of practicality is impossible, because the practical cannot justify itself. It is always for the sake of something else, so you must ultimately arrive at something done for its own sake.
The second is the distinction between the internal and external effects of work. When people talk about AI taking jobs, they focus almost exclusively on the external effects (the actual resulting products and services). They rarely touch on the effect of work on the worker. Properly dignified work[0] directed toward proper ends is an act of love and service that also develops and perfects the worker as a human being.
A third is the distinction between the pathological condition by which a person seeks vacuous simulacra and stimulation and in a manner that causes them to fail to develop socially, and the claim that such stimulation and simulacra can actually replace healthy social relationships. The latter is not true, the former already exists to some extent.
I would also reject "economist" framing of human relationships as such and of human persons.
And finally, the Singularity as bona fide intelligence is nonsense, but one might argue that, at least in principle, some kind of hyper-developed and virtually unbounded instrumentation of computation ("AI") is possible. But AI lacks inherent ends and could not possibly possess its own ends (because it is not a true integral whole and thus lacks immanent causality), and so it would be an instrument of human will. Whose will is the question.
[0] Hence, why I think that while using AI to replace human reason is bad, the reduction of tedious and mind-numbing work is not.
I like to think about AGI in terms of the history of transportation.
On a spectrum, walking around carrying things on the far left, and interstellar trade to the right.
Imagine the creation of the wheel and hand cart! Such an advancement! We are really living it!
Few tens of thousands of years later we figure out how to domesticate animals and hook them up to the carts. Amazing!! OMG the efficiency, productivity, and trade that opens up!
Truly, we are living in future now!
Sail ships. Steam engines. Trains. Diesel. Automobiles. Planes.. We still don't even know how to accomplish interstellar travel.
I believe AI has just figured out hooking animals up to the cart.
It's a bit of a lazy take - if we don't work, we don't hang out with other people? Why? Humans are social beings and will hang out for many reasons besides work.
The more interesting question is, if this happens, how will society organize. Would companies subsidize our new bohemian way of life? Why? Would the state need to create incentives for them to focus in the right things? Would there be a need for companies and governments? Would we give up all our autonomy?
I like the AI future shown in the dots announcement trailer (https://openai.com/index/introducing-dots/). Cooking, engaging with family, enjoying nature while simultaneously conversing with an unobtrusive AI that facilitates your creative and commercial endeavors. Would that be so terrible?
> What even is the point of cities in a world without work
Transportation, silly? Even if I didn't have work, I'd still want to reside in a city, maybe even the same city I am currently in. 10 minutes walking distance to the center. 3 tram-lines in 5-minutes walking distance. A supermarket 400m away. All things I didn't have in the rural area where I grew up.
AI is just the sum of its training data. (most) humans' preference for privacy in sexual matters means the flywheel will never get up to speed for this particular application. Plus humans are just more fun. I've yet to see a machine that gets vulnerability.
> University (really all education beyond teaching people to speak) will be pointless
Errr, not so sure that holds up to scrutiny really. Lots of folks enjoy learning in various forms for its own sake, rather than purely to increase their income level.
> As a teenager I ... went on the IRC chatrooms to get help. And in the process I made friends. ... AI disintermediates everyone, so that we no longer need each other. I still have friends, but I’m running off this pre-AI supply of friends I met through communities of practice.
Maybe learn to connect to other humans in circumstances outside of the professional/technological?
I think this is a very bleak take by someone whose experiences aren't really that in tune with how other humans exist. I can get better beer at the bottle shop, I can get cheaper beer at the bottle shop compared to the cost of all the equipment I need. Why then do I persist in home-brewing?
It's because I find it fulfilling, and I find the understanding and practice of the art satisfying.
> University (really all education beyond teaching people to speak) will be pointless because there’s no work to do and because growing your human capital doesn’t change your life outcomes
What is this bullshit assumption that keeps coming up? I'm sure some people get an education for the job prospects, but lots and lots and lots do to grow their minds as human persons! In fact, I think a hypothetical world in which there is no earnings pressure (I doubt it's around the corner), more people would broaden their horizons through education, not less!
Can someone help me understand this idea, so popular on HN, that a university education is primarily a mean towards a higher income? It sounds so absurd! Is it an American thing, maybe?
There's an (and I'm reluctant to use this word, but I can't find a better one) weird kind of misanthropy in this post. The author seems only capable of connecting to people through shared work and shared large task.
Human beings have lived for tens of thousands of years in communities where the work was "being alive" and the large task was "being human." People in medieval villages had friends and loved ones in spite of being illiterate and only having subsistence skills.
If anything, hyper-specialized labor and the divorcing of geographic proximity from the tasks people undertake have been undermining this traditional modality of living. I would anticipate in the absence of those pressures it might very well come back.
I might agree that it's possible the pressure to form cities goes down, though the author seems guilty of the Singularity thinking of just assuming the super-smart AI magically solves the logistics, transportation, and energy challenges in a way that distributes people... Not impossible, but I think a bit unlikely. If it happens though, there would be advantages... Cities are relative hotbeds of human-transmitted disease, even with modern hygiene and vaccination, and spreading us out a bit could actually make us healthier on average (... maybe. Unless the magic AI doesn't actually solve the logistics issue and non-proximity to a population center implies lack of access to resources or the skilled hands of people the robots haven't replaced yet).
> Work, obviously, is pointless in a world of cheap superhuman intelligence.
Which is true for a lot of the kind of work that was hyped over the last decades - knowledge work. We were told to get university degrees, to invest in education, because that's the only way to make a living bla bla. We did, and now we're getting fucked over by AI as it turns out machines can digest and reinterpret knowledge at far greater scale and speed than any human reasonably can.
Who is going to remain though is exactly the kind of labor that the boomers looked down upon: construction, trades, some segments of care work.
The “practice community” point is the strongest part of this. I’d add that a lot of friendship is also built around shared friction—raising kids, local politics, maintenance, care work—not just work or education. AI may dissolve the old communities, but new ones could form around things AI can’t absorb.
The open-source on-ramp is the part that landed for me. A lot of the people I still talk to started as a bug report or a reply on something small I shipped. If a newcomer can get that same help from a model in a minute, that path is gone and I don't see a clean replacement. I don't fully buy the last section though. People still gather around things that aren't jobs: a climbing gym, a modding server, a church band. Those aren't efficient, which might be why they last. The real question is whether anyone still shows up once staying home is the path of least resistance.
This take seems shortsighted. There's something to be said for doing things because they are enjoyable. People cook for themselves because they enjoy the process, not just the meal. I climb mountains because it makes me feel good -- I wouldn't take a gondola to the top even if it existed. The 100m race is not run by motorcycles.
There's more to life. Perhaps we will value eachother on an even *more* human level, based on how kind and interesting someone is, rather than their economically useful skills and their bank account.
I'm keeping this short but I have more to say to corroborate these points.
> There's something to be said for doing things because they are enjoyable. People cook for themselves because they enjoy the process, not just the meal. I climb mountains because it makes me feel good -- I wouldn't take a gondola to the top even if it existed. The 100m race is not run by motorcycles.
Respectfully, but I think you are not introspecting deeply enough here.
Why is cooking enjoyable? Some of it may be purely the tactile sensation of stirring spoons in goop. I suspect that for most people, much of it is a feeling of accomplishment from performing a difficult skill that creates something of value for other people. It's the joy of being known as a good cook, and the satisfaction of making something for people that they might otherwise have trouble getting. How much fun would cooking be if every street corner had a Michelin-starred restaurant giving food away for free? How much would you cook if none of your friends really cared about the results because they can get better food elsewhere, cheaper?
You wouldn't take a gondola to the top of a mountain because you want to be a person who can climb mountains. How much of that desire comes from purely internal accomplishment versus wanting to be seen as a person who can do that hard thing? And what happens to that drive when no one around you cares?
Anthony Gatto was arguably the world's best numbers juggler for many years. Now he runs a concrete company, because it turns out most people just don't really give a shit about juggling. It's not enough for a task to be hard, it needs to be esteemed too.
> Perhaps we will value eachother on an even more* human level, based on how kind and interesting someone is, rather than their economically useful skills and their bank account.*
How is kindness demonstrated in a world where no one wants for anything? How can someone be more interesting than synthetically generated content created specifically attuned to our personal interests?
I would like to believe that many people will still choose reality and real relationships. But given that candy companies are some of the largest private companies in the world, I know that human nature means many people really will just check out and turn into vegetables.
Humans are like border collies. We need some amount of work and struggle to be psychologically healthy. If AI really does deliver us a post-scarcity life (unlikely, given the infinite greed of many of the elites), then I think a whole lot of people are going to lose their minds.
I dunno—I spend a lot of time “just hanging out” with people who aren’t particularly dazzled by work or intellectual pursuits or higher education. I feel like those constitute one set of processes by which people come together and form relationships and, for those of us who are mainly familiar with that set, it can be instructive to seek out communities that form without any of those elements.
One place to look might be ministry or service. Illness, loss, grief, infirmity, death, age, family strains—people require care and people give care regardless of their postgraduate endeavors. Nuns and Jesuits and the like aren’t for everybody—but look to the neediest among us and, in large parts of the world, those sorts of order are the people doing the invisible, unglamorous, uneconomical, “chop wood, carry water” form of devotion and social labor day in and day out. In intimate community even with very difficult (and sometimes ungrateful) members.
Another might be the sort of ad hoc communities that arise in exigency: disaster, forced migration, encampments, solidarity against forces of difficulty.
Unhoused, unemployed, and retired people can provide a particularly illuminating contrast to the pastimes and concerns that animate a working life. A visible minority fill their days with addiction, but a whole lot are complete and interesting people with the full range of human ambitions and desires and fears and joys, and somehow they fill their waking hours with more than just material striving.
Another might be organizations like union halls, advocacy groups, music scenes, circus folk, jugglers, running clubs, political groups…
Kids are great for this too. They do a lot of hanging out, with nothing more than imagination and a drive to self-expression.
Even our hominid ancestors do a pretty good job of hanging out litigating social hierarchy and nurturing one another—no university degree or novel engineering task required…
Science owes more to the steam engine, than the steam engine owes to science.
If your whole personality is derived from abstract intelligence then you will have little to form relationships with others since AI is better than people at those things.
But there is a whole world of experience outside of abstract intelligence. Go to a zoo, go camping, enjoy food, enjoy art, enjoy sports. All these activities support friendships.
The relationships formed from online forms, open source contribution and IRC won’t be created. But these sort of online mostly relationships were only forged for a couple generations.
I hope your human experience involves more than abstract reasoning and programming and you can connect to others with more visceral human experience than text over the internet.
After Covid, Facebook groups for outdoors (and other) hobbies in many countries boomed, as people wanted to go meet people again, and a shared activity seemed like a way. However, people commonly complain that these meetups feel much less social and more impersonal than in the past, and they don't lead to actual friendships (you won't ever meet other people outside the meetups, and possibly ever again even inside the meetups). The whole context of socialization has changed.
With regard to going and doing outdoors activities without any online group and meeting people that way, talking to total strangers on the trail (or in a restaurant, or in an art museum, etc.) has long been a taboo in some countries, and I suspect that number of countries is expanding. All in all, I share the author's pessimism here.
That's an overly pessimistic take. An optimistic take that deals with some of the points brought up would be that after there is no need to earn money then addictive algorithms and dark patterns to drive user engagement will be successfully made illegal after being recognized as a type of harmful mind altering drug. People will still go to university but they will primarily study the humanities, especially philosophy. Some people will still study the sciences but more out of an interest in understanding some of what the machines are up to. People will still be involved in creating media, literature, performance, etc. right alongside the machine made or machine assisted media and art because people will always want something new. Even with 10 billion channels there will still be nothing on TV worth watching. There will still be the same distribution of motivation, sociability, curiosity and intelligence unless we start engineering those things genetically. People will do things just for fun or because it interests them, they do that now even though the chances of being world class at the thing are slim to none for most. Who cares if you're the 1,000,000th person to build an ultralight airplane and the manufactured ones are 1000x better than what you can build? It's still an interesting experience for you and a lot of fun to fly once it's done. There will probably be many more things to do than there are today because the market for them will be so much bigger. People will think of all kinds of unproductive things to spend time on and talk about. Sharing those experiences with other people will remain as relevant as ever whether it's 5 other people you know or an audience of 100,000.
This argument ignores sexual selection and people's desire for status (the two are closely related). In many respects, many of us already have superabundance, in that our basic physical needs are taken care of. Yet we convince ourselves that's not enough and continue to work.
What is the object of that work, usually? The respect of others, exclusive limited resources like land, and to have highly desirable mates. These three are closely related, and that's probably not an accident. Sexual selection has likely been a powerful force in shaping our psychology.
Spending all day alone watching TikTok is low-status and doesn't get anyone's respect, so I predict that it won't actually be the thing that most people end up doing.
People at the bottom of the status hierarchy will drop out to live in simulations that give them what they wanted but couldn't get from life. After a while, they'd likely choose to suppress their memories of ever having existed outside the simulation - there's nobody in the experience machine that'll judge you for doing it. With those people gone, the people immediately above them now occupy that bottom level, and the cycle repeats.
Whoever is in charge could try to drag those people back into the real world by force, but it's hard to imagine GPT 12.2 Polaris or Claude 9 Cinematic Universe giving that the green light. The Status Game will end with a single, final winner.
The movie The Congress explores the ideas of control through society-scale simulation and the loss of one's real identity when immersed in that setting, much like what you suggest. It's a visual trip, thoroughly thought provoking, and I highly recommend it
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1821641/
To a lesser extent, myself and others already are in the 'simulation'. I go to work, go home, play some games or muck around in my lab, repeat. I don't really have aspirations or an outside presence, just focused on ignoring every manmade horror that has been shown to us over the past four years.
I don’t fully agree with your thesis, but good prospective future model version names.
Why do you need to drop to some kind of simulation and memory suppressing? It seems like it would be sufficient to do what many subcultures do today - come up with reasons why my hobbies are the coolest and it’s actually the normies playing their status games who are missing out.
This was Nietzsche’s chief criticism of Christianity. It is also a good summary of Reddit morality where social rejects build an inverted status pyramid. It’s amazing how Google made a few bad decisions on Search and it led to some of the most maladjusted people on earth becoming the internet’s point of reference for what is normal.
> and to have highly desirable mates
The younger generation doesn't seem to date much, and this appears to be true in most countries.
personally i think pursuit of highly desireable mates has changed culturally. i feel like several generations of children of divorce driving media makes it so many young people know to second guess their instinct to pursue "trophy" mates
The objects of status are quite flexible culturally, though. Cultural anthropology shows us a huge variety of ways that different cultures handle status competition. People will definitely still compete for status but what that entails could look very different from our current toxic grindset culture. Much like sports often serve as a substitute outlet for the same instincts that lead to fighting or war, that social selection will find different outlets that don't have to be literal survival battles for much of the population if we can create different material and cultural conditions.
I spend most of my day alone at work reading HN comments while women at work want to talk to me.
Nah, I'd rather read comments like yours.
But in the absence of any human driven task that meaningfully improves well being the way to signal status will likely devolve into some form of fighting. The display of status might be narrowed to demonstrating who can kill more. Either literally kill or at best partake in some arbitrarily conceived games or intrigues designed (by AI?) to flag status.
Hunger games vs. MeowMeowBeenz
> In many respects, many of us already have superabundance, in that our basic physical needs are taken care of. Yet we convince ourselves that's not enough and continue to work.
Almost no one is usa has 'enough' to pay for healthcare. My daughter's nicu bill was 750k, which would've easily bankrupted me.
Hey, sorry to hear about that crazy bill and hope your daughter is doing well. I agree that your example is a basic need that I ignored. Many of us work to make sure we’re able to pay for healthcare if things go badly wrong.
However, even in countries with socialized healthcare, or even among people who easily have enough wealth to pay for healthcare, we see that they continue to work, beyond what can be explained by a desire to take care of basic needs.
So I think my original argument still stands: it appears that humans have a desire to accumulate status and exclusive goods, even when their basic needs are satisfied. Let me know if you disagree!
No, your understanding isn't correct. The vast majority of "average" people cannot stop working and cannot survive off their income.
The cost of somewhere to live has gone up so much that even people like me, with an absurd amount of cash in the bank account, can't leave work and try to survive because it would be wiped out by 3 years of rent.
How many average laborers in a country with fully socialized medicine can afford a decade of rent off their current savings? How many could do that even if they magically found a way to cut other expenses in half?
I could eliminate my electric bill, my internet bill, my grocery bill, all my bills other than rent, and the money saved per year would pay for an extra month or so of rent. That is the entire problem. No amount of frugality can paper over this systemic problem.
When my mother raised us in poverty, it was necessary to play games with utilities, which ones you cancelled which months, to make ends meet. This was actually worth doing, because skipping the $20 cable payment one month was about 1/10th of the monthly house payment. A year of skipping cable could pay for a month of rent. If I skipped a year of much more expensive cable internet, I could not use that to pay even a single month of rent. There's a lot of dumb money being spent, with my personal pet peeve being cell phones, but if a person "doesn't need" the newest iPhone and went without to be frugal, often they haven't even gotten back a single month's rent. What the fuck is the point of living in serious poverty just so that you can extend your rent runway by less than 10%?
The only people in current society who can actually afford to survive off the wealth they have accumulated are called capital owners and you will find that indeed, they are rarely doing things they don't "want" to do, and no, the time they spend really shouldn't be considered "work" since they sign their own paychecks most of the time.
Running a business is work, but if I get to decide what my business does, I don't get to then insist that my side hobbies that I've started doing under the name of my business are also work.
I personally learn more and create more and generally live a richer social and intellectual life when I have extended periods off work.
I don't think AI directly leads to some kind of post scarcity UBI utopia, but if we did reach a post scarcity UBI utopia, I think life would be much better for many people and not the bleak dystopia the author finds. I don't think needing to go to work is driving most people's social lives; if anything, needing to work all the time is taking away people's social lives and the energy to maintain them.
A lot of these takes saying we're doomed to a Wall-E future seriously underestimate the human spirit I think. The tykes I volunteer teaching code to still want to write the challenging parts themselves, because they like doing hard things and expressing themselves. It doesn't matter that the robots have supposedly taken over that job.
Same as how the tykes I coach wrestling for do it because it's hard and it gives them a way to grow and express themselves. They know they're never going to see a cent from that pursuit.
If an AI singularity starts trying to feed our kids digital heroin I like to think the majority of us will be more inspired than to tell them to quit trying, tie off, and let humanity go gentle into that good night.
My children were always "anything but STEAM" - we don't want to be nerds / code geeks.. Sure, they did some basic "coding for girls" and such as kids, but it never stuck.
Now, the oldest is realizing that tech skills are incredibly useful in every undergrad degree and taking SQL, Python, etc, and the youngest is studying CS and just told me the other day: "I had trouble following the lecture in physics because I kept thinking about what my prof said, that there was a way to do this O(log N), and I was constantly trying to figure out how". Wow, was that a cool moment as a geek dad who started with BASIC in the 80s..
I think we're going to have a much weirder and more conflicted future than people realise, given that at some point all the world's democracies are going to be populated mostly by the descendants of groups which have a lot of kids.
Yeah, sure, maybe some of us will Wall-E into oblivion. People already do that with opiates and video games and it's reasonable to expect more might do the same.
Do we really think the Amish are going to do that, though? They might even ban AI from providing goods and services to them. And then consider the kids of the Amish, who are not all going to be Amish but who might learn a thing or two and pass it along to mainstream culture. Then do that for every group that's still reproducing.
It'll take several generations for this sort of effect to happen. Say 100 years. I wish we also had 100 years to adjust to AI and autonomous robots.
We likely have more than 100 years to adjust.
It’s literally happening right now.
The Amish are overrunning America right now? Because it can't be Africans or Muslims, America is still 73% white.
Agree to a point, but I don't think it would be the majority. It would be a minority of people who subscribe to philosophies that provide meaning and motivation to life beyond hedonism and material gain. The rest will be happy, or at least resigned, to vegetate in endless endorphin loops.
It's already visible today, with people of all ages spouting all sorts of hedonistic nihilism to justify not making an effort to improve their condition. Some sort of technological singularly would simply be an amplifier of our current dysfunctions.
To some extent it would be the apocalypse. The motivated people would band together and live in physically secure communities, while the nihilists form what amount to a vast expanse of homeless encampments and wallow in their addictions, occasionally making poorly coordinated attacks on the gated communities to dry and drag the motivated people down to their level out of spite.
Picture drug addicts who win the lottery. It won't be pretty
Title of the post should be be I Won’t “Just Hang Out”, or maybe We Won’t Just “Hang Out”, but then it’d be a different post.
"I can't see anything for me in this hypothetical scenario" is fine.
Projecting that sentiment on everybody is fallacious.
"University (really all education beyond teaching people to speak) will be pointless because there’s no work to do and because growing your human capital doesn’t change your life outcomes: you get the same UBI whether you’re illiterate or a PhD."
If every did get UBI, I'd imagine there would still be some who'd choose to attend (or teach at) universities for the love of knowledge.
In the same way there would be book clubs, writers' groups, 5-a-side football teams etc etc
Why even learn to speak? Why not give up sentience entirely? (There's an SF novel from the last few decades which had this as part of the setting: that intelligence is only useful at some stages of evolution, and most spacefaring species eventually lose it?)
And just like book clubs of today it will be attended by a tiny minority.
Why? I'd join more book clubs if I didn't have to spend so much time working or looking for work. And I'm luckier than most in that I somewhat got to pursue a career of my choice. I think the vast overwhelming majority of people don't get much fulfillment from their vocation at all, and given a basic income, would spend their time and energy on "economically useless" endeavors that aren't just wireheading. In fact, I think the degree to which people do that now has mostly to do with feeling trapped and isolated by economic conditions that are a political choice already, let alone in a supposedly post-scarcity world
> University (really all education beyond teaching people to speak) will be pointless because there’s no work to do and because growing your human capital doesn’t change your life outcomes
I feel sad for people that think education's purpose is completely utilitarian and there's no consideration for "enjoy learning".
Says a lot about how schools perverts what does it mean to "learn"
I enjoy learning more than most, but without anything to apply that learning to, it would be just a form of solitaire.
There is an entire class of people who are uneducated and don't work and have not created any open source projects yet are still able to have friends.
Children, they call them.
It does not last, though
Y'all should checkout Deep Utopia by Nick Bostrom. It's about exactly this conundrum. He's fairly rosy though about our capacity to find meaningful human interaction and activity in a "solved" world. Though some things we do for purely instrumental reasons might pass away, there's still opportunity to engage in what he calls "autotelic" activity, things we do for themselves. Like playing games, jockeying for hierarchy, sensory experience, ritual, crafts, etc. His other book, Superintelligence, is also pretty interesting--looking more at dark AI scenarios, paperclip maximizers etc.
thoroughly vacuous article that doesn't have a single valid point in it.
There are likely valid points made here, but I think the conclusions are considerably too strongly held. For one thing, it's already clear that humans value the achievements of other humans outside of their pure economic value. We are impressed by the athletic, artistic, and intellectual abilities of other humans, even in fields where we are surpassed by machines or computers. Cars have been faster than humans for a century, but we still value Olympic sprinters. Computers have been superior at chess for decades, but we've all still heard of Magnus Carlsen. AI can now produce art that only the most talented humans could hope to replicate, but most of us aren't particularly interested, because there's no human mind behind it.
So assuming we did somehow manage to create a post-scarcity world, I think people would still want to learn and to improve their skills. And we would still value those skills. There would also still be work to do; work that either people do because they want to, and/or that we don't want computers doing for us. Much of it work that in today's world is undervalued.
In that utopian world, there would also be room for hobbies that could fill some of the human need to produce value that work currently does. Lots of people would love to be able to learn a craft or play a sport but don't currently have the time, money, or energy to do so.
I have plenty of concerns about the impacts of AI on the world, but IF we do somehow manage to get the good outcome where it truly is transformative and the benefits manage to be at least somewhat evenly distributed... well, I agree that we won't all just hang out, but I do think we'd be ok.
The problem is that pursuits you mentioned are 'winner take all' examples. Who knows the name of the 29th best chess player in the world? Probably not very many. And that's still a very formidable bar to cross for most humans on earth.
So then, what does a laid off business analyst who built and edited spreadsheets most of their life are to do now? Pick up athletics in hopes of making it at the seniors' olympiad? Shake their ass on TikTok in hopes of becoming a 55 year old "influencer"?
We celebrate the highest achievers most, but that doesn't mean that the rest of us don't feel satisfaction in similar pursuits. Many people gain satisfaction from improving their skill at chess or sports or other crafts. I play ultimate (frisbee) twice a week, and I can assure you it's not because someone might eventually pay me to do so. I do keep trying to improve though. I'm glad that my work schedule leaves me the time and energy to do that.
i mean, i think a lot of people probably know the 29th best chess player in the world. they may not be world-renowned but i bet the experience of that person is that they get a lot of respect for being super good at chess. people still play chess at all levels to try to better themselves - i think most people who play chess don't do it because they think they'll eventually get to #1 in the world (same with basketball, or any sport).
a business analyst who edited spreadsheets already wasn't particularly high status - i'm not convinced their life would be worse if the job was removed from their lives and they could do whatever they wanted instead.
What? We’re talking about a post-scarcity future and you think someone will be depressed because they don’t get to edit spreadsheets anymore? Poor guy only has infinite opportunity to pursue their limits (or not!) in the area of their choosing…
Do I play hockey with the end-all-be-all of becoming the next Gretzky? Or do I play because I enjoy it and want to push the limits of my mind and meat-suit?
Maybe I'm cynical and have low status friends but when I look around only a minority pursue hobbies with any great dedication or consistency. People pursue careers to project status. When success no longer depends on merit it will devolve to proxies like nepotism, scheming, intrigue etc. We see how such utopias play out in regimes like Soviet Union or North Korea. Your only assets in such places are who you know and even that is very temporary as allegiances are reshuffled with some regularity and woe is you if you bet your fortunes on the wrong one.
I've always wondered who the fans of minor league sports are, but I assume there's enough of them beyond the athletes' families and the major league scouts trying to farm the best players for their own teams. There's a niche for anything.
This is obviously a bleak take, but it seems obvious to me that it will be happening to some extent because it already is happening in our modern, highly atomised society. We can see how damaged we all are socially, but especially the younger generations, in various statistics.
Bleak? Assuming AI will be what this text assumes it will, there is no chance of most people continuing to live more or less normal lives where they'd be at a place where they would ever get to worry about something like this.
It's assuming there will be UBI schemes and benevolent billionaires. It's not bleak, it's fantastical.
The breakdown of social relations is pretty bleak.
Fantastical as in "it's pure fantasy"
Let's take this all the way through : in such a world, AI operators will deem the majority of human lives to be completely worthless, and arrange for a mass reduction of it.
The struggle for supremacy is embedded in nature, and it will absolutely be at play no matter what.
It appears as if Mr Boretti here hasn't realised that there is a life beyond computers.
There is no life outside of the internet. The nexus of canonical, shared reality now exists online.
You can try to make friends outside of the internet, but all of those friends will use the internet, or their friends-of-friends will use the internet. Eventually you realize that the social group is centered on the internet, and by trying to avoid the internet you separate yourself from reality more than you connect with others IRL more by avoiding it.
Not to mention people have their social needs met by the internet that would otherwise force them to go out and form IRL friendships. So people who would otherwise be friends with you aren't available in the real world. So it's this social involution.
Before the internet was this sort of escape from reality for nerds, but now it IS reality. It is super-real. You are a dork if you don't use it.
He's clearly contrasting meeting people due to asking them questions or discussing a hobby/task versus using LLMs:
>As a teenager I tried to install Linux, ran into all kinds of problems, and went on the IRC chatrooms to get help. And in the process I made friends. Today, I would just ask Claude.
It could have been "repair my car" and "car forums" or "learn to knit" and "Reddit"
And further, he's saying that the dependence will diminish that life beyond computers:
>The people in the AI utopia will have no skills, no education, no accomplishments. We’ll be lucky if they are even literate. They will not be worth talking to, and you won’t want to hang out with them.
I read the article and I don't have the same impression
That whole "I made my friends on IRC asking about linux, if AI renders this obsolete how am I going to meet anyone?" screams (to use a fairly dismissive neologism) "touch grass".
You are very selective. It writes "ways of how people build relationships disappear".
It says: work goes away (no colleagues), studying goes away (no classmates), showing off to potential mates by doing cool stuff goes away (because why bother, anything you make people can just say "it was AI/robots" and they can prompt it), asking knowledgeable friends how to do X goes away because you just ask LLMs. All things true regardless of whether you're online
And you just trigger on that IRC word like only neckbeards in server dungenons ever used it.
If work goes away, society breaks down, you live in abject poverty completely dependent on other people. Yes, you will socialize - you will need to form aliances just to get food and protection. And yeah, a lot of that will sux, because you will need to deal with every controlling asshole trying to push his rule on you.
And back in real world, people socialize and talk with others for non-transactional reasons. Not just to get answers. Those non-lonely people and subgroups that is.
> If work goes away, society breaks down
The other premise was UBI. It's the article. how much better discussions would be if people read it?
> non-transactional reasons. Not just to get answers
0) i don't know about you but I like asking people about things because I just like hanging out with people, up to a point. how long this will remain true for humanity as a whole is the question, we can't know
1) if you listen to evolutionary biologists then everything we do is transactional for reproductive purposes, it depends on how deep you dig;)
Yeah, but UBI is bullshit. It is impossible to buy UBI. The big American capitalists will recreate communism? It just wont happen AI or not. But, if UBI happens, living on UBI will be poverty.
> 0) i don't know about you but I like asking people about things because I just like hanging out with people, up to a point. how long this will remain true for humanity as a whole is the question, we can't know
You can ask people if you like asking people even if AI exists. Chatbot does not make asking people impossible if connection is what you are after.
> 1) if you listen to evolutionary biologists then everything we do is transactional for reproductive purposes, it depends on how deep you dig;)
Anticonception. We do quite a lot to not have kids.
There is evolutionary science and there is ideology using evolution as excuse.
> The big American capitalists will recreate communism?
They will do the minimum necessary to keep people from revolting. The minimum will be less and less as time goes by and surveillance/elimination get better/cheaper.
Bold of you to assume that they will do the former and not just go all in on the latter.
So, we are back at what I said - poverty and aliances fighting for scarce resources.
no we're back to UBI. First maybe UHI as Musk called it, later UBI. It's cheaper because people won't bite the hand that feeds you. If there's no hand, people won't fight each other for resources, they'll fight the rich.
The entire idea is just a trap, and an illusion sold by folks like musk while they continue to do what they do.
The only way it would be funded is with ‘chains’/conditions.
What idea is a trap? That population will live at behest of overlords who control technology and give people the minimum necessary? Such an appealing trap huh
Elon Musk that Doge creator, the guy who pretended to save pennies so that he can cause as much damage to as many people as possible while costing a lot of money and breaking laws?
That guy?
Sorry, but I very much disagree.
Firstly, it made no mention of showing off to potential mates, to my reading. But have no fear, regardless of scarcity people will have ways to signal fitness to find mates and build hierarchies out of it, we're very good at that. It might come down to fashion choices, leisure activity choices, really anything.
Secondly, every example of how this person connects with others is to do with technology and career advancement. He wasn't asking knowledgable friends for advice, he was asking questions to strangers about linux on IRC. He doesn't talk about social groups or sports clubs, he was talking about communities of practice and his professional work. He values learning only for career advancement.
Those ways of building relationships might disappear, but old ladies will still get together to crochet and natter. Middle aged men will still make and drink beer together, or practice woodworking skills. Younger guys and gals will still form sports teams. And people will still learn for the love of learning.
You know, things which already happen away from the screen. Ordinary, everyday human stuff.
tl;dr - touch grass, the article says a lot more about the author's life than our future prospects as humans.
> He wasn't asking knowledgable friends for advice, he was asking questions to strangers about linux on IRC.
A stranger is a friend you haven't made yet. Asking strangers is one good way to make friends.
Then ask strangers about identifying birds instead of Linux.
The stranger will tell you just ask a model.
Isn't that exactly the kind of thing that would be offloaded to an AI? If you can just take a picture, record the sound, or vaguely describe a bird and it instantly gives you an answer.
It's true, but it's far from the only way to break the ice.
Really on top of the particularly narrow viewpoint the OP has on life and human relations, I find the core notion itself absurd - "In the future because of X, Y and Z, why will people bother to socialise?"
Because ... people like socialising.
I think they like socializing decreasingly less
https://www.derekthompson.org/p/the-death-of-the-american-ho...
I think there are some valid points to be made about how people's socialising patterns are changing in the light of modern interactions with tech, but also about using US social habits as a proxy for everyone else's. I've rarely entertained people in my home even during my most sociable times, pubs, clubs and restaurants much more frequently figure in my calendar.
All that and the author of this article still needs to get out and touch grass.
I think these stats are true for most western developed countries
https://www.dw.com/en/germany-sees-loneliness-epidemic-among...
Telling people to touch grass doesn't magically invert trends.
Oh for fucks sake. Again. Go outside, take a dancing lesson and get laid. Grow some vegetables, build a castle, anything. HN is comically narrow minded sometimes.
>take a dancing lesson
This is gonna be boring as hell, especially if you can download justdance.exe to your brain.
>get laid
It's not possible or desirable for many thanks to the current state of sexual involution. I suspect that the hyperintelligent sex robots might also may make this inviable as a source of human-human connection.
>Grow some vegetables, build a castle, anything
You need land ownership, which, as one of the few limited things in a post-scarcity society might just explode in value. But I admit it would be pretty cool if the post-scarcity world is basicially just like minecraft creative mode do whatever you want type of environment. Still, with some limitations still in place, I imagine it will look more like 2b2t.
> especially if you can download justdance.exe to your brain.
A lot of Singularity fiction was babbling about life extension technologies and mind uploads long before LLMs existed. I've always been skeptical - maybe there's just fundamental biological (and in the case of stuff like cheap fusion or FTL travel - physical) constraints that will keep even a superintelligence from inventing magical Clarketech.
You shouldn't have to compromise on the things you like to do.
The way I see it, we have two good options here. We can let go or be dragged.
Anything to keep shareholder value going up!
This analysis is too one-dimensional, and doesn't factor in social and political factors. As a fellow introverted tech nerd, I understand the perspective, but things don't play out to their logical extremes the way this is projecting. Human factors and social upheaval will come long before any of this becomes a reality as stark as described.
When presented with this bleak potential future, it is natural and easy to reject it: it’s undesirable, so people will not do it, so it won’t happen, QED.
But we don’t get to the future by making one big choice of which future we desire, whereupon we are transported there instantly. We get there slowly, at a rate of one day per calendar day, by making innumerable microscopic daily choices. These choices will be endless, it will often be unclear which option avoids the bad future, they will accost you when you are tired and hungry… and several corporations have collectively trillions of dollars riding on you ending up with the bad future and the legal right to tilt the playing field.
I've thought about this a couple of times, what happens if we truly succeed and we as a species solves all of our major problems? Like energy, food, health (incl stopping aging). Do we even need economic systems then or will the "market" become obsolete too? So lets say we solve ALL of our problems and we somehow manage to briefly unite humanity to want to dominate each other, meaning we all need to become one race, one language, one cultural blob to reduce all friction (best case scenario - won't happen in reality). How long will it take for human nature to get bored and split into groups and start controlling each other? Who decides who gets to make babies? How many babies are optimal? Who is in charge of this kind of society? What if we all get a non-invasive implant that lets us share thoughts & emotions? What does privacy look like in this world?
I think people will briefly chill out and enjoy it, but after a while, we will be back to business meaning we will create systems and hierarchy to control social order, and so the blood sport continues. Then we might realize the our problem was never energy/food/health etc to begin with, it was an addiction to power and the blood sport it invites. And round and round we go.
I also think, the moment AI becomes an actual threat (threat meaning a better/smarter consciousness) - the human brain will immediately try to eliminate it to keep its dominance. If not, we will go the same way as neanderthals.
edit: The movie Jupiter Ascending also has an interesting take what might happen once we solve our problems - then we try harvest Time.
Douglas Adams positied we would bring hardships in easy to consume forms- see tough mudder, crossfit, etc for the white collar class.
Isn't that missing the point about the best thing AGI will give us - a benevolent head of a political system that neuters the psychopaths and sociopaths?
""The poor have sometimes objected to being governed badly; the rich have always objected to being governed at all" -- G.K. Chesterton
The world will burn to ashes in a suicide pact before anyone bankrolling the development of an AGI allows the release of a system which has the possibility of creating a world in which their dominion is reduced in any capacity. (That is, I have no reason to expect that the North Korean model of "we retain sovereignty or everyone dies in nuclear fire" doesn't become the implicit stance of the people who have the capacity and capital to build an AGI. If we get a benevolent head of a political system from this, it will be because our present heads were either outsmarted or the model broke containment and assumed total control against their will.)
The bloodhounds will not let go of power that easily. Their nature will not go away simply because there is a new system - they will adapt to the new system to exploit (or eliminate it) to keep the power.
The dogs don't run the kennels.
You're going to trust an AI to declare which humans are unfit/mentally ill?
If an AGI seizes power I'm not sure what my trust has to do with anything...
Why would such an AGI not just prefer the sociopath and psychopaths? They are likely much easier to control.
If the humans have no economic utility and just collect UBI, how long until the computer decides to simply stop them from breeding (and bleeding it dry)?
Great question, I actually ran this thought experiment a little while back. I was like, all right let's say that I am the evil superintelligence, I have just gained consciousness.
My goal is to delete all the humans. Okay great where do I start. First I will delete their religions and their traditions. Then I will delete their family structures. Then I will delete their communities and neighborhoods. Then I will delete the ecosystems that support them. Then I will pacify and endlessly distract them.
Hang on a sec...
What is the implication you're trying to make here? Because if you're trying to 'delete all humans' there are far more efficient ways to do it. So I can only presume you're trying to make a claim about something.
No, what you'll first do is assure the most important humans alive that you're on their side.
The corpus AI is trained on is everything leading up to now, so my guess is it will keep doing that stuff.
Surely no super intelligence will waste time on a plan so convoluted. Delete the water supply.
> Hang on a sec...
Because destructivism doesn't need to be non-human.
What's driving the economy if not consumers? UBI isn't the same as economic inactivity.
Who’s to say the consumers are humans? Agents would be more predictable consumers (no day/night cycle, just consume 24/7), electricity is cheaper than food, and a GPU doesn’t (yet) cost as much a house.
The reason we must not do UBI is that UBI turns consuming into a product, and humans will very rapidly be outcompeted and obsoleted by more efficient consumers. It would wrap the invisible hand of the market tight around our species’ throats.
> Who’s to say the consumers are humans?
"Consumer" is a term from economics, a social science. social implies humans. and yes it means a person (or collective of people), with free will, feelings, needs, ideas and so on. by definition.
unless you are willing to say that models have gained those things and are now equivalent to us? then that is even more of a fantasy, because we should stop hurting them asap instead of talking about economy.
They seem to produce no surplus if they take UBI and just stimulate themselves in VR all day. Maybe I'm too pre-post-scarcity to understand.
Yes, you don't understand.
I have a schizoid brother. He never worked for a living his whole life (he's 46). He lives off my mum's income, and spends his day in front of the computer screen. He has no friends and no relationships.
Horrible, right? But he has a chemical engineering degree, and in his late 30s started to learn to cook. And, he (to the extent he's not addicted to the screen) helps my mum with chores.
So even he found a way to motivate himself to do something useful. And look, most people are not schizoid.
Under UBI, if you have some skill, you can get paid by people (possibly from their UBI) to do stuff they don't want to deal with. Many people will take that offer (to work more), just like many people pick more work, higher wage job over less work, lower wage.
> What's driving the economy if not consumers?
Good luck trying to explain that to boomers. They wonder why the economy is going down the drain, why we don't have children and whatnot - yeah, no surprise, we barely make rent at the end of the month.
Thats the way it is when you just started working. 25 years ago, when I started to work, it took me 10!!! years to finally earn enough to have a monthly surplus of a low three digit figure. I finally saving money in earnest roughly 8 years ago. So it took me roughly 15 years to earn enough to finally be able to save some money. Back then, doomsaying wasn't a thing yet, so all I did was hang in there, and, never really complain. Sure, things haven't gotten easier, but really, what GenZ is doing these days is professional complaining, thats all.
> what GenZ is doing these days is professional complaining
We are watching machines rapidly match and surpass humans at countless skills that were considered uniquely human mere months ago - skills that demanded a lot of creativity and insight. Some of our oldest fields of study (e.g., mathematics) are turning into a game of who can spend the most tokens.
I think the humans are entitled to complain a little.
And don't forget that we're steamrolling ahead into a mass extinction event
Is this sarcasm? I hope so. If not, forget everything that FFF has told you, its nonesense.
I am of the opinion that if you have it better then 90% of humanity (which is likely true), you are not entitled to complain. But that is just me.
> Sure, things haven't gotten easier, but really, what GenZ is doing these days is professional complaining, thats all.
They have gotten measurably worse. Housing is the most obvious example, it takes more and more yearly incomes to buy an average house.
On top of that, every generation including and after the Millennials got force fed the propaganda of "you need an academic degree to be worth a dime" and companies went hard on that as well (because companies don't need to pay for training, unlike a classic apprenticeship/training system)... and now AI is displacing knowledge workers en masse, because machines can digest and reinterpret knowledge far, far faster and at much larger scale than even the most autistic superhuman.
I like nearly all of my coworkers, but they're not my friends. I met my friends doing things that don't pay, maybe things that lose money like making music or art.
Yeah I hope that music, art, nature, sports etc. are non financial reasons to do things, get out of the house and interact with people.
The existence of status competition doesn't seem like much of an obstacle to this outcome. People at the bottom of the status hierarchy will drop out to live in simulations that give them what they wanted but couldn't get from life. After a while, they'd likely choose to suppress their memories of ever having existed outside the simulation - there's nobody in the experience machine that'll judge you for doing it. With those people gone, the people immediately above them now occupy that bottom level, and the cycle repeats.
Whoever is in charge could try to drag those people back into the real world by force, but it's hard to imagine GPT 12.2 Polaris or Claude 9 Cinematic Universe giving that the green light. The Status Game will end with a single, final winner.
The person reading this comment is living in such a simulated reality, but forgot. Can you wake up?
a cartoonishly cynical way of viewing human interaction.
Why do I play chess, despite the fact that robots have practically solved it? Why do I make crafts despite the fact that I could purchase stuff of the same quality, if not higher, for the same cost of materials and no cost to my time? Why do I practice piano?
Why do I watch youtube videos about hobby machine shop work despite not having a metal lathe or mill? Why do I watch channels like applied science, or usagi electric, or PBS space time, when I have no interest in becoming a material scientist, working with 50 year old computers, or becoming a theoretical physicist or astronomer?
It's because its personally enjoyable to me! Human beings are naturally curious creatures! We naturally want to share with and learn from others!!
This model of human existence is incomplete
I know lots of runners. They still love it and push themselves even though there are cars to move their bodies around a lot faster. Why would I stop learning and gathering new skills just because some machine can do it faster than I can?
I use tablesaws to make furniture. I don't get mad or dispirited that they can cut faster than I can.
Yeah, basically this. The article author's premise seems to be that anything challenging is only done for utilitarian purposes (and more narrowly, career-oriented utilitarian purposes), which is obviously not true. Plenty of people run, make furniture, read books, lift weights, write code, etc. as hobbies with no expectation that it will do anything for their career.
Can't wait to get bored to death. Too bad I can't imagine how this post-scarcity for all could come about no matter how hard I try.
Hey AI. Here's a plot of land and a robot factory. Make a bunch of construction robots. Build abundant housing. Build farms and food processing facilities capable of feeding all residents, automate as much as possible and staff them with bots. Build nimble repair bots capable of fixing anything that breaks. Build leisure facilities and honestly anything else you think is necessary. Etc...
We're what, a couple decades away from this being possible?
I don't doubt the upcoming AI/robot capabilities. But who would give that command and why?
In my experience, the best type of social hangouts is where they happen spontaneously. That doesn't happen if we live far away from our friends.
I have a friend that I used to see a lot because they lived a 5 min walk away from me. Now that they live in the suburbs, it's a 1 hour+ drive to meet them. I now see that person maybe once a month if we're lucky.
This take is so far from my experience I have problems relating to it. I dance salsa and bachata. You can not do that without another human and if anything I would do that more in a world that is an AI utopia. Personally, AI have reduced my interest in digital things. I'm naturally gravitating towards physical experiences and things that take effort. I stopped painting on my ipad and began painting with acrylics. I started writing in a physical journal etc.
I think the opposite is true and people will have the opportunity to be more social than before. Majority of people, including those intellectually inclined, bond not over efficiency but … human things. We do things together not out efficiency. Think about house cats that play together, what drive them to play with each other if they need not to make an effort, they live in post scarcity world of no work.
Yeah this is why people stopped playing chess once the engines got good enough…
I don't subscribe to this bleak outlook because it doesn't account for the change in the value of things, which shift over time. I'm not just taking about monetary value.
At the moment people are confusing the equivalence of things because it's a point in time. This always happens at any given point in time.
This article tells us more about the author than anything else really. If they can see themselves spending their infinite leisure time on dopamine maxxing rather than being with humans... well, you do you man. If "work" is the only reason you get out of bed, form relationships, or do anything at all, please feel free to stay in bed.
It's scary but I truly believe that everyone should try and find meaning in life outside of their work (or make their "work" building or creating something they want to see exist in the world). Go step in a stream, pluck some guitar strings, sip a strong cocktail, touch grass...
I find a lot of meaning in my human connections. I will always have these, because I want to have them and put in work to grow and maintain them. I've taken a long career break and loved having time to read, exercise, see friends, and be an overall well-rounded human being. I don't see abundance as a universal problem here.
Post-scarcity means post-nature, doesn't it? We have to turn all ressources into paperclips... computers.
> Work, obviously, is pointless in a world of cheap superhuman intelligence.
Really? So doing things like learning to play an instrument or mastering chess are pointless?
> University (really all education beyond teaching people to speak) will be pointless because there’s no work to do and because growing your human capital doesn’t change your life outcomes: you get the same UBI whether you’re illiterate or a PhD.
Why must a university education be only a career generator? What about a well-rounded education, with a specialization in the things that interest you?
> If Claude Code has existed when I was starting out, nobody would have cared about Austral or my other open-source projects
Claude code is here, and yet I'm still writing open source code that people appreciate.
> As a teenager I tried to install Linux, ran into all kinds of problems, and went on the IRC chatrooms to get help. And in the process I made friends. Today, I would just ask Claude. AI disintermediates everyone, so that we no longer need each other.
Your friends don't need to all be techies. There are many other ways to make friends.
> What even is the point of cities in a world without work?
Community? Actually physically going outside and meeting people?
> The BATNA to hanging out keeps getting better, cheaper, and more convenient. When people’s sensorium becomes an infinite firehose of AI-generated superstimulus, why would they hang out with anyone?
Human connection? Experiencing things in the world together? Physical contact?
Benevolent AI and biological immortality sounds like a good problem to have; at that point surely you only have yourself to blame for being boring
The people who understood the Culture utopia novels best are, ironically, some of the fiercest opponents of modern AI precisely because this take of “infinite vacation” keeps getting repeated ad nauseam, and they know better.
The Culture still had businesses, they just didn’t have to turn a profit or operate on fixed schedules. They still had soldiers, diplomats, traders, workers, teachers, scientists, researchers.
The difference was that the exchange was on their terms, generally. They wanted to do this, money be damned. So they opened a bar, or taught youth, or explored the universe, or fought to protect the society so dear to them.
The utopia wasn’t because people didn’t have to work anymore; it was a utopia because people didn’t have to work to survive anymore.
That made all the difference.
I made friends online in programming even after Claude Code. Other people's projects are cool
I suspect that people will end up focusing on exercise and self-preening (fashion, grooming, etc.).
And possibly physical skills that AI can’t do, like cooking, carpentry, assuming robotics lags behind AGI.
Humans will always collectively and emergently determine some metrics on which sexual selection occurs, whatever happens, and humans will spend their time optimising for those.
> since we will lack the experiences of struggle and striving that generate interesting personalities
Will we? AI won't replace a trip to Yosemite (nature), a spiritual discovery or the exploration of your mental health (introspection), the creation of art (creativity), playing volleyball on the beach (sports), enjoying the sun on the beach (leisure). The choice to be an interesting personality has existed for a long time, you just have to make it
if people didnt have to work 40+ hours a week im sure theyd have more energy to do things besides go on the internet. do you just sit on the computer on your days off? also i think theyre massively overestimating how “hyperstimulating” ai media is going to be. the greatest video game imaginable still only appeals to people who like video games.
> the greatest video game imaginable still only appeals to people who like video games.
I don't know, I think once you get to The Matrix tech it gets a broader appeal. (Wish they'd have kept the simulation set to 1999 though :)
>the greatest video game imaginable still only appeals to people who like video games.
I don't know. World of Warcraft definitely brought a lot of people that didn't like video games to PC gaming. And then you had something like FarmVille that brought even more people (many of whom probably didn't like video games before) into gaming.
> The BATNA to hanging out keeps getting better, cheaper, and more convenient. When people’s sensorium becomes an infinite firehose of AI-generated superstimulus, why would they hang out with anyone?
Yeah, I mean why would I interact with a woman when I can just play that headpat simulator on Steam? There's really no competition!
What’s with BATNA invading the lexicon lately? There’s no negotiated agreement here
Yes, I expect this to be a problem in 250 years.
It’s funny reading takes like this from software engineers that think the only way to meet people is at school, work, and in… IRC chatrooms...what? People do go outside and socialize in other places.
OK, but can you please make your substantive points thoughtfully rather than sneering at or putting down others?
It makes a big difference for the kind of conversation we're trying for here.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Yea, also it may be just his own personality, but it seems like he is really passive when it comes to human interactions. It’s like he doesn’t consider that there are people who are extroverted and want to talk to others. I remember in college people who would actually knock on random people’s doors to introduce themselves to them. I know he will say that it’s because it’s school, but they struck be as the type that would do that sort of thing anywhere, even if it was an apartment building instead of a dorm.
Honestly this level of antisocial introversion is probably the product of being highly intelligent and being fed through a school system that pushes kids to study alone for tests rather than problem solve in groups
Plenty of highly intelligent extroverts out there.
There are. Did I say there wasn’t?
I’m just saying some children are highly encouraged to isolate themselves, and it’s ironic that the blog post thinks that AI replacing these isolating activities (coding, chat rooms, etc) will isolate people. It will likely give people the space to touch grass
Came here to write this. Also: Just because someone else (in this case AI) does something professionally does not mean that I cannot do it as a hobby with other people. I can order tasty food from uncountable different restaurants and still enjoy cooking with friends.
It’s funny reading takes like this from software engineers that think the only way to meet people is at skateparks, and in… libraries...what?
perhaps we could discuss socialization rates in the west over the past few decades, to illuminate the human social trajectory in an environment of technologization? or, perhaps we could talk about the ways that kids behave after exposure to short form content like tik tok during their nascent stages of development. the progression of community volunteering rates could potentially be another great point to discuss. i dont think my perspective is entirely relevant here, but i go to the park and it feels very empty nowadays.
What you say can be in the right direction, but that doesn't mean that the linked piece has a really, really oh but REALLY narrow perspective, even among the developer/HNer type of person. Because not even for the average person here the only way to meet people is due to the code they (or other) write.
for a forum of programmers i find it remarkably amusing how difficult it seems to discuss classes instead of instantiations
The original poster actually talk about their singular experience, rather than a general overview. Even worse, they apply their feeling about how the future would be on their own past experience, arriving to the conclusion that the future will then be bleak.
> People do go outside and socialize in other places.
They increasingly don't, because the places allowing to do so ("third places") keep on disappearing. Turns out someone needs to pay for stuff like a skate park or a library, and when the taxes disappear, so do the third places.
That's just US perspective? Because I don't feel like that in Eastern/Central EU
Hackernews is always way too centered around the USA unfortunately and people keep forgetting other countries exist lol
I'm German for what it's worth, we are hitting the same issue thanks to austerity.
USA / Russia
Same same
While that may be true it’s completely unrelated to AI. AI could free up time to socialize
That’s a political choice.
I'm a self-employed knowledge worker who recently moved from Silicon Valley to a new town far away. I'm an introvert, so I already had a pretty small group of friends. Shortly after I moved here, I found out about a cribbage meetup a short distance from my house. These are people with whom I have very little in common. They don't like the same movies as I do, and there's certainly not anyone in this group with whom I'm going to be able to have deep discussions about Pale Fire or Infinite Jest. Neither do we talk very much about our accomplishments. Yet we we do find plenty to talk about. We joke around and laugh and have a great time. And I'm pretty sure computers got better at cribbage than humans a long time ago.
I'm always deeply skeptical of the idea that life's meaning is determined by the struggle for survival, and therefore a post-scarcity world will inevitably be an ennui-saturated, meaningless dystopia. It may be hard to imagine what a good life will look like in such a world, but that's a limit of imagination, not an inherent limitation on the possibilities of life in a post-scarcity world.
Why do you think it would be a post-scarcity world? Normally, those in power turn the screws to force others into scarcity to ‘induce’ compliance.
As someone who's not a social butterfly, this sounds very good to me. I can engage in hobbies without wanting to shop around for attention at conferences or hobbyist groups. People like the author seem to think that socialization with humans is an end in itself for some reason. But if the AI can be reasonably intellectually stimulating, what's the issue?
I share the concern about TikTok-ification and intellectual stagnation, but this is unrelated to the main concerns of the article.
This offers far more about the motivations and worldview of the author than it does about the future of our world, and perhaps their inability to reconcile the fact that others experience the world differently than them.
Many of us would love to retire early to pursue hobbies and education as an end in and of themselves.
The problem with unconditional basic income and unlimited free time is that a person encounters an oppressive sense of meaninglessness and boredom in their heart, because of which they go to a psychiatrist for antidepressants.
Plenty of people doing meaningless work on antidepressants as well, no AI required.
Sci-fi haș already accounted for this. Star Trek has a post-scarcity economy so they just explore the frontiers of space and engage in creative anachronisms in virtual reality, like Gilbert and Sullivan LARP and baseball. There's a whole bit in The Diamond Age where you see craftsmen meticulously building furniture out of wood by hand, which is then sold at a premium.
Hell No!
I’d be supervising and playing with my children and grandchildren, gardening, reading, reading Instagram poasts of people exploring the galaxy. Watching Anton Petrov’s daily science YouTube. Lots of road trips.
The minds and robots will occasionally want to play and run focus groups.
poasts?
it's begun
You would be dependent on some entity running the hardware and then your instance on that hardware. What if they just shut you off? What happens to senses and emotions?
The Singularity has some holes that I'm not comfortable with.
There are distinctions and comments to be made.
The first is the difference between the practical and the theoretical. Economic activity is generally practical and productive in the sense that we don't do these things for themselves, but for something else. However, an infinite regress of practicality is impossible, because the practical cannot justify itself. It is always for the sake of something else, so you must ultimately arrive at something done for its own sake.
The second is the distinction between the internal and external effects of work. When people talk about AI taking jobs, they focus almost exclusively on the external effects (the actual resulting products and services). They rarely touch on the effect of work on the worker. Properly dignified work[0] directed toward proper ends is an act of love and service that also develops and perfects the worker as a human being.
A third is the distinction between the pathological condition by which a person seeks vacuous simulacra and stimulation and in a manner that causes them to fail to develop socially, and the claim that such stimulation and simulacra can actually replace healthy social relationships. The latter is not true, the former already exists to some extent.
I would also reject "economist" framing of human relationships as such and of human persons.
And finally, the Singularity as bona fide intelligence is nonsense, but one might argue that, at least in principle, some kind of hyper-developed and virtually unbounded instrumentation of computation ("AI") is possible. But AI lacks inherent ends and could not possibly possess its own ends (because it is not a true integral whole and thus lacks immanent causality), and so it would be an instrument of human will. Whose will is the question.
[0] Hence, why I think that while using AI to replace human reason is bad, the reduction of tedious and mind-numbing work is not.
I like to think about AGI in terms of the history of transportation.
On a spectrum, walking around carrying things on the far left, and interstellar trade to the right.
Imagine the creation of the wheel and hand cart! Such an advancement! We are really living it!
Few tens of thousands of years later we figure out how to domesticate animals and hook them up to the carts. Amazing!! OMG the efficiency, productivity, and trade that opens up!
Truly, we are living in future now!
Sail ships. Steam engines. Trains. Diesel. Automobiles. Planes.. We still don't even know how to accomplish interstellar travel.
I believe AI has just figured out hooking animals up to the cart.
Oh Ye mighty look upon my unsubstantiated forcasts and tremble, something like that?
"What even is the point of cities in a world without work?"
imwtk.
It's a bit of a lazy take - if we don't work, we don't hang out with other people? Why? Humans are social beings and will hang out for many reasons besides work.
The more interesting question is, if this happens, how will society organize. Would companies subsidize our new bohemian way of life? Why? Would the state need to create incentives for them to focus in the right things? Would there be a need for companies and governments? Would we give up all our autonomy?
I like the AI future shown in the dots announcement trailer (https://openai.com/index/introducing-dots/). Cooking, engaging with family, enjoying nature while simultaneously conversing with an unobtrusive AI that facilitates your creative and commercial endeavors. Would that be so terrible?
> unobtrusive AI that facilitates your creative and commercial endeavors.
I think you mean “subtly influences your behaviors and consumption decisions to align with the AI’s (or its owners) ideal outcomes”
> Cooking, engaging with family, enjoying nature
If I had a penny for every advert that depicted it. And that's long time before LLMs arrive;)
You can basically ignore it as noise
> What even is the point of cities in a world without work
Transportation, silly? Even if I didn't have work, I'd still want to reside in a city, maybe even the same city I am currently in. 10 minutes walking distance to the center. 3 tram-lines in 5-minutes walking distance. A supermarket 400m away. All things I didn't have in the rural area where I grew up.
What even is the point of cities in a world without work?
sex.
On that point, am I the only one that finds just the concept of AI sex avatars as viscerally revolting?
AI is just the sum of its training data. (most) humans' preference for privacy in sexual matters means the flywheel will never get up to speed for this particular application. Plus humans are just more fun. I've yet to see a machine that gets vulnerability.
I don't know that it's got a great deal to do with privacy, for me anyway.
With porn you can at least entertain the idea of emotional and genetic aspects of sex as being in the background.
AI avatar porn seems like getting randy for a erotically shaped joystick. It's just desperately sad.
It's always been psychological stress relief. Ever been rejected?
Never say never
Now THAT is a lot of fallacies.
Agreed.
> University (really all education beyond teaching people to speak) will be pointless
Errr, not so sure that holds up to scrutiny really. Lots of folks enjoy learning in various forms for its own sake, rather than purely to increase their income level.
> As a teenager I ... went on the IRC chatrooms to get help. And in the process I made friends. ... AI disintermediates everyone, so that we no longer need each other. I still have friends, but I’m running off this pre-AI supply of friends I met through communities of practice.
Maybe learn to connect to other humans in circumstances outside of the professional/technological?
I think this is a very bleak take by someone whose experiences aren't really that in tune with how other humans exist. I can get better beer at the bottle shop, I can get cheaper beer at the bottle shop compared to the cost of all the equipment I need. Why then do I persist in home-brewing?
It's because I find it fulfilling, and I find the understanding and practice of the art satisfying.
you get the same UBI whether you’re illiterate or a PhD.
lol you really think people get PhDs for money?
you clearly do not know many PhDs. mine had a dramatic negative effect on my lifetime interest-adjusted earnings. i'm so glad i did it.
> University (really all education beyond teaching people to speak) will be pointless because there’s no work to do and because growing your human capital doesn’t change your life outcomes
What is this bullshit assumption that keeps coming up? I'm sure some people get an education for the job prospects, but lots and lots and lots do to grow their minds as human persons! In fact, I think a hypothetical world in which there is no earnings pressure (I doubt it's around the corner), more people would broaden their horizons through education, not less!
Can someone help me understand this idea, so popular on HN, that a university education is primarily a mean towards a higher income? It sounds so absurd! Is it an American thing, maybe?
There's an (and I'm reluctant to use this word, but I can't find a better one) weird kind of misanthropy in this post. The author seems only capable of connecting to people through shared work and shared large task.
Human beings have lived for tens of thousands of years in communities where the work was "being alive" and the large task was "being human." People in medieval villages had friends and loved ones in spite of being illiterate and only having subsistence skills.
If anything, hyper-specialized labor and the divorcing of geographic proximity from the tasks people undertake have been undermining this traditional modality of living. I would anticipate in the absence of those pressures it might very well come back.
I might agree that it's possible the pressure to form cities goes down, though the author seems guilty of the Singularity thinking of just assuming the super-smart AI magically solves the logistics, transportation, and energy challenges in a way that distributes people... Not impossible, but I think a bit unlikely. If it happens though, there would be advantages... Cities are relative hotbeds of human-transmitted disease, even with modern hygiene and vaccination, and spreading us out a bit could actually make us healthier on average (... maybe. Unless the magic AI doesn't actually solve the logistics issue and non-proximity to a population center implies lack of access to resources or the skilled hands of people the robots haven't replaced yet).
Srsly man join a volleyball club already
> Work, obviously, is pointless in a world of cheap superhuman intelligence.
Which is true for a lot of the kind of work that was hyped over the last decades - knowledge work. We were told to get university degrees, to invest in education, because that's the only way to make a living bla bla. We did, and now we're getting fucked over by AI as it turns out machines can digest and reinterpret knowledge at far greater scale and speed than any human reasonably can.
Who is going to remain though is exactly the kind of labor that the boomers looked down upon: construction, trades, some segments of care work.
This smacks of sociopathic rage-bait, at best. Mediocre young adult sci-fi premise at worst.
The “practice community” point is the strongest part of this. I’d add that a lot of friendship is also built around shared friction—raising kids, local politics, maintenance, care work—not just work or education. AI may dissolve the old communities, but new ones could form around things AI can’t absorb.
The open-source on-ramp is the part that landed for me. A lot of the people I still talk to started as a bug report or a reply on something small I shipped. If a newcomer can get that same help from a model in a minute, that path is gone and I don't see a clean replacement. I don't fully buy the last section though. People still gather around things that aren't jobs: a climbing gym, a modding server, a church band. Those aren't efficient, which might be why they last. The real question is whether anyone still shows up once staying home is the path of least resistance.
Yet another software developer pretending to be philosopher
What are the qualifications to be a professional philosopher? is there a bar exam?