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The era of jobs is ending
- 0x1ceb00da 10mo agoWe're at the bargaining stage now.
- andsoitis 10mo agoIs this end also intertwined with the end of consumerism? I was waiting for that connection in the article, but failed to find it.
- DaveZale 10mo agoAlso, what about stock options and getting vested? Some companies can offer tasty carrots. It's not always about the stick. Anyone who has ever started their own business knows how hard (and rewarding) it can be- but you're just creating your own job. Nothing wrong with that. It is one of the best experiences in full accountability, but it's a job.
- onlyhumans 10mo agoAll you need is a phone and lit TikTok feed. Just like in WALL·E
- jleyank 10mo agoCan’t read the article due to bandwidth. If the era of jobs is over, what’s going to support the masses of people who consume? Without those people, there’s no profit from making stuff. Star Trek looks great, but there’s a whole lot of time, politics and physics that has to occur to get there.
- itake 10mo agoits not though... there is literally an infinite amount of work. If humans become 10,000x more efficient, then we still have infinite amount of work to do.
- mothballed 10mo agoSure but at some point if literally everything tangible and essentially every imaginable commercial service can be done by robots and also designed by AI better than a human, humans are basically relegated to what kind of work? Something like being the exotic dancer or baby factory for a robot factory heir, or maybe a meat sacrifice on a Ukraine-esque battlefield to fight the other group of capital holders.
- BobbyJo 10mo agoNot necessarily true. There are non-human bottlenecks to productivity, like energy, land area, available raw materials, etc. You're assuming humans can find ways to meaningfully contribute that do not bump up against any of those constraints. R&D is probably the only area not bottlenecked by one of the above out of the gate, and most humans are ill suited for that line of work.
- itake 10mo agoJobs functions will change over time. Not everyone will be able to do research roles, but robotics is far away from replacing human hands in any meaningful way. Humans need plumbers, home construction, healthcare professionals [0], teachers, judges, relationship driven roles (sales, account managers). [0] - if robotics/ai can replace healthcare, healthcare costs would drop to zero...
- 9rx 10mo ago
- marcus_holmes 10mo agoUBI appears to work, in small-scale trials at least. We should try that out.
- Avicebron 10mo agoHas anyone figured out how to avoid everything mysteriously being repriced to account for UBI?
- tbrownaw 10mo agoIncrease Total Factor Productivity so that there's still just as much stuff to go around even with fewer people putting in less work to make the stuff.
- skeledrew 10mo agoForget UBI and implement UBS instead. Income is an unnecessary artifact in accessing services.
- akramachamarei 10mo agoWho or what will provide the services and how do you incentivize them or it?
- 9rx 10mo agoEvery basic income trial I come across ends up being GBI rather than UBI. Which UBI trials are you looking at?
- b3ing 10mo agoBS, at this same moment we could feed the entire planet but don’t because some need to have multitudes more money than ever existed. That won’t change until humanity dies out
- nradov 10mo agoFamines are caused by corrupt and ineffective governments, including armed conflicts. Not by lack of money or wealth inequality.
- marcus_holmes 10mo agoCorruption == wealth inequality
- jonahbenton 10mo agoYeah, jobs suck, and AI can do all kinds of things, but this really misunderstands...just about everything. Pluribus is a more interesting meditation.
- k310 10mo agoWell, it looks like the 90% plus of wealth hoarding just got a whole lot more unstable. Machines will do everything and the jobless have nothing to do but sever power lines. Is nuclear power safe from assault? I dunno. Visit Chernobyl and see. If an even greater concentration of wealth is to lead to mass destruction/revolution, I advise a more even distribution. Note to oligarchs: a post-apocalyptic world is no fun. Not even for you in your bunkers.
- mooreds 10mo agoIt's the choice from manna[0] all over again. 0: https://marshallbrain.com/manna1 https://marshallbrain.com/manna1
- wombatpm 10mo agoIf you are don’t station troop at nuclear facilities, then no they are not safe from assault.
- reducesuffering 10mo agoIt does not matter how many people you have against a sea of automated drone factories and billions of drones. The war against Ukraine is primarily a drone war
- wombatpm 10mo agoThe buildings are hardened against damage, but the facilities are only surrounded by chainlink fence. A small group seize any power plant and force a shutdown. Drones would be great for taking out substations.
- tbrownaw 10mo agoAh yes, if only our perfect beautiful souls were unchained from the travails of physical reality. If only the resources to sustain our meatsuits were provided by Someone Else, with no reciprocal obligations.
- dawgzill4 10mo agoTell us you didn't read the article without telling us you didn't read the article; the author says it's not the end of "work" but "jobs". > with no reciprocal obligations. The majority are coming around to feel office jobs making line go up are not sufficient reciprocal obligations relative to 12-13 year olds in textile factories ensuring you have clothing 996. So why value Excel and other keyboard experts? By majority I mean the billions outside the US who have recovered from US imperialism of the latter 1900s and tire of being serfs for Wall-E culture of a smidge over 300 million. When is the last time you did useful work for yourself rather than externalize it on Target? How sad Americans have to grow up and live in reality and not some rhetorical hallucination induced by corporate propaganda.
- tbrownaw 10mo ago> Tell us you didn't read the article This is false. > the author says it's not the end of "work" but "jobs". Yes, with the distinction being that "jobs" are done because they're useful and "work" that isn't a "job" is for personal spiritual fulfillment.
- sublinear 10mo agoI like how every time this topic comes up everyone agrees it's absurd, yet a stubborn subset insist it's inevitable and going to happen soon.
- jaimex2 10mo agoMusk thinks it's inevitable so in all likelihood it is. And yes, I'll take his opinions over pretty much everyone else who has no track record of achieving anything meaningful. If there is a world of plenty and humans have little to no role in that what else is there?
- lelandbatey 10mo agoI'll take the predictions of a straight up liar and near supervillain with... maybe less enthusiasm?
- maplethorpe 10mo agoI have a similar faith in Musk to you. I was arguing with one of his detractors recently, who said something to the tune of "Musk said we would have humans on Mars by 2025. He's a grifter. He'll say anything to drum up investment." They had a table of people laughing along with them, until I asked how much money they had in the bank, and whether it equaled even one one-thousandth of Musk's net worth. That shut them up pretty fast.
- sublinear 10mo agoWhere do you people come from and why are you on HN?
- maplethorpe 10mo agoHN has historically been very pro-Musk. The negativity is recent.
- deleted 10mo ago[deleted]
- marcus_holmes 10mo agotaps the sign: "Humans do not exist to be economic assets. The economy exists to provide for humans"
- Ferret7446 10mo agoThe economy is not a charity, nor is it a person. But if we're going to personify it, then it exists for the benefit of those who actively participate in it. It is indifferent to those who do not participate in it. Most humans do not see themselves as existing to provide for others who either cannot or won't provide for themselves. As stated above, the economy is not a charity, it is about equal exchange. Those who have nothing to offer will receive nothing in return.
- majormajor 10mo ago> The economy is not a charity, nor is it a person. But if we're going to personify it, then it exists for the benefit of those who actively participate in it. It is indifferent to those who do not participate in it. > Most humans do not see themselves as existing to provide for others who either cannot or won't provide for themselves. As stated above, the economy is not a charity, it is about equal exchange. Those who have nothing to offer will receive nothing in return. The problem that this has run into throughout history has been the existence of those who don't take kindly to rules that appear to be there just to push them aside. An economy that chooses to exclude the majority of the population as "no longer needed" as so much dystopian AI-true-believer babble these days does is going to lead to some major issues when the excluded decide they don't want to simply be excluded. Society historically does not help those that the economy leaves behind exclusively out of the goodness of its heart - it also does it for self-preservation.
- jrflowers 10mo agohttps://youtube.com/watch?v=pWdd6_ZxX8c https://youtube.com/watch?v=pWdd6_ZxX8c
- ausbah 10mo agosorry i was born disabled, or purposely excluded from the economy due to societal discrimination
- OgsyedIE 10mo agoThe point of jobs is for those who don't own appreciating assets to sell their work in exchange for income in the form of payment from those who do own appreciating assets. This article misses the key problem with the end of jobs. How else are 98% of the human population going to get income? With the coming of drones and old-timey 1900s chemical weapons they are probably no longer equipped as a class to win a military contest over redistribution against the asset holders. Much like replacing religion with nothing has turned out, replacing jobs with nothing is going to be bad at best.
- garbawarb 10mo agoWho needs jobs if you have food and internet entertainment in abundance?
- s3r3nity 10mo agoCan't tell if this is sarcasm or not. These don't magically appear - people have to create / store / distribute those things, and/or develop the science / engineering to do so.
- Squeeze2664 10mo agoCan you imagine someone willing to do those things because of some reason other than monetary gain, as it would be in OP's world? How many people currently stuck in Jobs would work toward accomplishing these things with the idea of ending world hunger, because they _want_ to do it, instead of having to do it because they have student loans and bills to pay?
- skeledrew 10mo agoI don't think there's anyone out there working on solving world hunger because they have loans and bills to pay. It isn't a monetarily profitable endeavor.
- OgsyedIE 10mo agoPeople have to have the buying power to support the chain you describe. If the buying power of a population vanishes, such as by being made superfluous, they get a large population reduction whether they like it or not.
- protocolture 10mo ago>Anyone who talks with certainty about 2030 is either lying or selling something. Yes >The era of jobs is ending What are you selling.
- stego-tech 10mo agoI mean, would I like the article to be correct? Gods yes I would. Jobs suck, and the mandate of “work = survival” means you get a whole bunch of shitty personalities arbitrarily holding back progress in the name of personal wealth or power; the end of jobs would mean those of us who approach our professions with passion and love can flatly eject the dead weight insisting that we schedule progress to a future fiscal year’s backlog, instead of just doing what we love, when we want to. That being said, do I think it’ll happen? No, I don’t, for the simple reason that we still cannot fundamentally get a plurality of society to agree - on any conceivable level - that every human is entitled to and guaranteed shelter, nutritious foodstuffs, healthcare, and education. It’s 2025, we’re literally destroying resources to drive up profit margins and investment returns instead of dispersing surplus appropriately, and yet anyone who mentions this is slandered as a “socialist” and ostracized. So instead, I fret that what will happen is the cementing of a two-tiered society indefinitely: one of immense wealth who owns the securities, the land, the datacenters that makes the world work, and a serf class who must engage with these ever-more-expensive systems for the gains of Capital, including via increasingly precarious gig work instead of reliable, structural jobs. And I think folks roundly dismissing these sorts of posts as “unrealistic” just don’t appreciate how far and how fast we’ve gone from “humans have to engage in subsistence farming” to an interconnected global marketplace and digitized society. We have quite literally thrown out the “status quo” dozens of times since the end of Feudalism, and this time is no different. Those who dare to dream big are often the victors of such profound change, provided they can craft a message relatable to the populace. And a message of, “you don’t need a job anymore because necessities got so expensive that governments made them part of tax dollars, and are therefore free to live where you want, do what you want, and live an authentic life” is quite compelling to folks who have struggled harder for less and less their entire lives.
- skeledrew 10mo ago> a serf class Not possible once we pass a some point in global automation, say (arbitrarily) 95%. The financial flows would've ceased to exist by then with the vast majority of humans being unable to contribute value, and hence having no earned income to participate in markets. And there's no deliberate prevention or slowing as the race is global and highly competitive at the political level (the US is very afraid of China getting (too far) ahead).
- sbinnee 10mo agoI actually believe that the era of lives will come. But I can't wait for UBI. Nobody can't. Even if the era of jobs ends, for us who are living in this era, the event is not going to be a period but an ellipsis. I can't wait to see how it unfolds. Yet, I doubt that I would see the end happening in my lifetime.
- WillAdams 10mo agoFor a fictional look at this see: https://marshallbrain.com/manna https://marshallbrain.com/manna
- wakawaka28 10mo agoThe possibility that we could reach nearly full automation has never been closer, BUT we are a long way off from it yet. Even if most of the white collar work is automated, we still don't have robots capable of doing everything at an acceptable price. I'm not going to waste time describing all the dystopian possibilities that would become possible if those robots were developed. The anti-work crowd always paints a rosy picture of what life looks like without work. But there are regions scattered throughout the West where so-called abundance has manifested itself. Factory jobs that paid well were replaced with easy "service" jobs, and lots of people got on the dole. Lots of people, if not most, will not ascend into any higher form of actualization than getting high or drunk with their friends for years on end. Many have died from the rampant drug abuse we see everywhere. Huxley's vision of abundance was accurate in this regard: people faced with abundance just did Soma and had casual sex with no higher aspirations. To maintain everyone's physical and mental health, and the gene pool, I expect that we will have to require people to do meaningful work after everything is automated. This stuff will likely have to be structured as a job market, because most people are not creative or independent enough to do anything interesting all alone.
- PoorRustDev 10mo ago"They haven’t seen the latest models that quietly chew through documents, write code, design websites, summarize legal contracts, and generate decent strategy decks faster than a middle manager can clear their throat. They haven’t seen a model hold a complex conversation, remember context, suggest workflows, generate visuals, write scripts, and debug itself in one continuous flow." You're absolutely right! I haven't seen these.
- jh00ker 10mo ago> We can choose to be the last generation that spent its best hours under fluorescent lights, pretending this was the height of civilization. Well, if the work under the fluorescent lights is what allowed us to end the era of jobs, then maybe it is "a" height of civilization?
- jh00ker 10mo agoGreat article to read as I sit down at my work computer on a Sunday to do pre-work and prep to make the rest of the week go more smoothly.
- palmotea 10mo ago> Democratize the machines. Public or cooperative ownership of major AI and robotics infrastructure. If you haven't socialized the means of production when you could strike and make it stop, there's no way you're going to do so when it doesn't need you anymore. > We can choose to be the last generation that spent its best hours under fluorescent lights, pretending this was the height of civilization. > Or we can be the first generation that looked at the robots walking onto the factory floor, looked at the models spinning up in the cloud, and said: >> “Good. Take the work. We’ll take the world back.” This article is stupid. How would Mr. Economically Irrelevant Former-worker "take the world back?" He just lost whatever power over that world that he had. This is 15 pages of trying to put lipstick on a pig.
- skeledrew 10mo ago> If you haven't socialized the means of production when you could strike and make it stop, there's no way you're going to do so when it doesn't need you anymore. Way I see it, there isn't really a choice here. Once humanity gets to the point where they are literally no longer needed to produce value due to automation, the means of production will be - logically - accessible to all who survive. Those who don't have access will die. And the fewer the survivors, the less relevant the purpose of said means. The means will always "need" people to validate its continued existence.
- palmotea 10mo ago> Once humanity gets to the point where they are literally no longer needed to produce value due to automation, the means of production will be - logically - accessible to all who survive. Those who don't have access will die. And that's the part that the AI optimists in these discussions skip over. They want to talk about this new and glorious AI-infested future, but not mention the holocaust that will happen to get there. For most people, the holocaust is the only relevant part, because they'll be destroyed in it [1]. The glorious future of abundance without work is one they'll never see [2]. [1] Most likely through grinding poverty and deprivation, which is how capitalism does it. Not gas chambers or anything. [2] That future, like you said, a smaller group. I think eventually it will roughly consist of the nepo babies of some billionaires and a smallish group of Lumon-employees (the cultists, not the severed) who must worship them to survive.
- periodjet 10mo ago[flagged]
- raincom 10mo agoWhatever people make goes to rent/mortgage, health insurance, auto insurance, etc. The zoning rules and strict enforcement in the West make it hard to start shanty towns across countries. What is left?
- mid-kid 10mo agoThis post is AI sludge and by the third bullet list I couldn't keep reading. This is stuff I deeply resonate with but jesus christ please respect my time and don't drown me in extremely verbose prose goop.
- hellisothers 10mo agoWhat indicates that to you?
- aoeusnth1 10mo agoLots of "it's not X. It's Y." Bullet points I can forgive, it's a common blog post writing style. But the ranty prose here definitely has a whiff of silicon.
- frizlab 10mo agoJokes on the article, I open it in Safari reader and use the Summarize (with AI) button.
- jaredcwhite 10mo agoAI slop. Flagged.
- deleted 10mo ago[deleted]
- GeoAtreides 10mo ago>Camus talked about imagining Sisyphus happy. Maybe the point now is to take away the rock and see what he does when he’s no longer condemned to push it. Does he climb the mountain just for the view? Does he build an observatory? Does he lie in the grass and finally sleep? Removing jobs is not like taking away the rock, it's more like making the rock way heavier. Only God can make the rock disappear. And God is dead.
- general1465 10mo agoIf humans are not needed anymore and they have no job, thus no income, then who is spinning the consumption wheel? Feels to me like capitalism is shortcutting itself by its own success.
- skeledrew 10mo agoCapitalism was never sustainable at any point, and so never really successful (well, depending on one's measure of "success"). The reality of that unsustainability is just being increasingly accelerated.
- frizlab 10mo agoBefore opening the link I thought this would be a post about Apple and the end of the Steve Jobs era.
- skeledrew 10mo agoThis really hits, solidifies and expands on thoughts I've been having for a while now. So many refuse to see or acknowledge it, but we're quickly approaching a point of reckoning which will require a major overhaul of the current dominant economic system. The labour for wage model is rapidly becoming obsolete for the many, and a way forward that doesn't necessitate people working in order to gain access to the necessities of - modern - living needs to be paved. Otherwise it'll be grim for the vast majority when global automation of value creation gets upwards of say 85%. It's already pretty grim for an appreciable, though still relatively limited, number.
- kaluga 10mo ago[dead]
- sevensor 10mo agoHogwash. Find me a “lights out” factory. They don’t exist. All your stuff is made by people. Often people with fancy machines, but people nonetheless. And the higher the degree of automation, the more non fungible skills you require of those people. The pump in a vat of yogurt is cavitating. You can’t slow it down without endangering food safety. You can’t adjust the mix without affecting the final product. Somebody who understands all that needs to install a new impeller. Stamped aircraft parts are coming off the line 500 microns thick. Somebody has to recognize that there’s a problem with the hydraulic cushion and fix it. I could go on and on and on. There are few things I get ranty about on the internet, but pretending that physical world problems are solved by automation is one of them. You’re replacing a hard problem with another hard problem, with a side effect of higher productivity. Pretending Morlocks don’t exist doesn’t make them go away.
- AbstractH24 10mo agoYour job won't be replaced by AI, it'll be replaced by someone who knows how to use AI. There is still a whole market for clothing; its just not led by people who use a loom.
- _DeadFred_ 10mo agoHuh? The facilities guy at the local nationally distributed yogurt based product company just swaps out impellers when told by the machine as it identifies there is an issue. He has less skill than your typical HVAC guy, and zero interests in the nuance and zero input about 'best yogurt cavitating' practices. The aircraft part is measured by Faro or some other tool. The person wielding the Faro just follows the QA instructions and marks if things are red/green. Another FARO type product measures the fixtures/etc for compliance. If they don't match, a fixtures consultant is brought in to make them match. Other than those that happened to do the initial setup/machine/fixture construction, the people in the actual plant don't really have much non-fungible skills in your example, and they definitely don't have power/permission to go tweaking things using their personal non-fungible skills.
- sevensor 10mo agoI’m confused about how you’ve characterized factory work. It’s nothing like the factories I’ve been in, so I’m assuming this is an imagined future state? Hope do you propose we get there?