8 ms·
Will AIs take all our jobs and end human history, or not? (2023)
- saberience 9mo agoChatGPT, please summarise this long essay by Stephen Wolfram into a couple of pithy sentences: TLDR: AI won’t “end work” so much as endlessly move the goalposts, because the universe itself is too computationally messy to automate completely. The real risk isn’t mass unemployment—it’s that we’ll have infinite machine intelligence and still argue about what’s worth doing.
- ori_b 9mo agoWhy would we argue if the machine is better at knowing what's worth doing? Why wouldn't we ask the machine to decide, and then do it?
- evilantnie 9mo agoThere are infinite things worth doing, a machines ability to actually know what's worth doing in any given scenario is likely on par with a human's. What's "Worth doing" is subjective, everything comes down to situational context. Machines cannot escape the same ambiguity as humans. If context is constant, then I would assume overlapping performance on a pretty standard distribution between humans and machines. Machines lower the marginal cost of performing a cognitive task for humans, it can be extremely useful and high leverage to off load certain decisions to machines. I think it's reasonable to ask a machine to decide when machine context is higher and outcome is de-risked. Human leverage of AGI comes down to good judgement, but that too is not uniformly applied.
- ori_b 9mo agoFor what human leverage of AGI may look like, look at the relationship between a mother and a toddler. As you said: There's an infinite number of things a toddler may find worth doing, and they offload most of the execution to the mother. The mother doesn't escape the ambiguity, but has more experience and context. Of course, this all assumes AGI is coming and super intelligent.
- c22 9mo agoWhy would we let a machine decide what's worth doing? In what way could its decisions be better? Better for who?
- ori_b 9mo agoWell, because people are lazy. They already ask it for advice and it gives answers that they like. I already see teams using AI to put together development plans. If you assume super intelligence, Why wouldn't that expand? Especially when it comes to competitive decisions that have a real cost when they're suboptimal? The end state is that agents will do almost all of the real decision making, assuming things work out as the AI proponents say.
- autokad 9mo agoback in 2023 when this article was written, you'd get downvoted into oblivion on hacker news for using AI to summarize a very long article/post.
- tim333 9mo agoI suspect that slop is fake! I don't think ChatGPT would have said "endlessly move the goal posts".
- reactordev 9mo ago(2023)
- dzdt 9mo ago(2023)
- eloisant 9mo agoAI is evolving so fast, and you post an article from 2023?
- AlexandrB 9mo agoWhat a weird complaint given that the post is trying to address the general question, not whether ChatGPT 3.5.0.1 or whatever replaces humans today.
- tony_cannistra 9mo agoNot much of a historian, I see.
- alexjray 9mo agoEven if they automate all our current jobs uniquely human experiences will always be valuable to us and will always have demand.
- wincy 9mo agoSounds like it’s time to become a Michelin Star chef. Or a plumber.
- scottyah 9mo agoSeems like entertainers/influencers are doing the best.
- akoboldfrying 9mo agoNo doubt the top influencer is doing better than the top plumber, but I'd say the median plumber is streets ahead of the median influencer.
- sramam 9mo agoWhat fraction of the remaining population would be able to pay for these services?
- b112 9mo agoFor AI, yes. For AGI? Do you care about uniquely ant experience? Bacteria? Why would AGI care? Which now runs the planet?
- IncreasePosts 9mo agoConsidering the lengths many people go to help preserve nature and natural areas, yes, I would sayany people care about the uniquely ant experience.
- AlexandrB 9mo agoI think it's academic because I suspect we're much further from AGI than anyone thinks. We're especially far from AGI that can act in physical space without human "robots" to carry out its commands.
- guluarte 9mo agoMore food chains keep opening up even when there is plenty of food available. The pie just gets bigger. Every tech shift was supposed to "end work" and yet here we are, busy with jobs that didn't exist 20 years ago. The real issue isn't jobs dying. It's who gets the money from all this and whether new needs show up fast enough to give people something to do. With software we don't really know the limit yet, unlike food where your stomach tells you when to stop.
- nemomarx 9mo agoIn the long run transitions like this work out and new jobs show up, but the people who had the old jobs don't always make the jump or keep equivalent pay. Could be it shakes out in a generation or two, of course.
- mips_avatar 9mo agoOutside of America people aren't really stressed about AI. Like you go to Vietnam or Vienna they mostly just think that they will have a good life with AI. It's uniquely American to believe that your life will end when AI takes your job. The problem isn't the AI it's that your access to basic rights is intermediated by a corporate job. American's need to decenter their self worth from their jobs. Like when I quit Microsoft I literally thought I was dying, but that's all an illusion from the corporations.
- skywhopper 9mo agoI admit I am suspicious of the claim that you know what all Americans, Austrians, or Vietnamese think about anything.
- testfrequency 9mo agoI would argue this says more about how Americans view and treat life as their work instead of treating the world as their life.
- briantakita 9mo agoIt's part of the messianic end-times fervor that has been with America since the beginning...which is useful for imperial management...As it provides a constant source of existential judgement and dread...that religious/quasi-religious administrators can exploit.
- pelasaco 9mo agoVienna? lol
- tomjakubowski 9mo agoAn art school in Vienna recently admitted an "AI student" as a publicity stunt. https://www.euronews.com/next/2025/04/02/this-ai-successfully-applied-to-become-an-art-student-at-a-university-in-vienna https://www.euronews.com/next/2025/04/02/this-ai-successfull...
- shevy-java 9mo ago
- BirAdam 9mo agoIf all jobs were taken by AI in a short time span, the companies owning and operating those AIs would go out of business as no one would be able to afford the products made by the AIs. This is an unlikely scenario. Not all things will be made/run by AIs in a short time. It is far more likely that specific jobs in specific industries will be taken by AI, and AI will slowly take the labor market. This will drive down prices on products, services, and labor. Once human labor's price is low, and once many product prices are low, the overall employment level of humans will rise. The effect of AI then is actually just deflationary pressure on all prices over time. The really scary part is what happens to all of the newly unemployed people between the falling prices part and the rising employment part. My guess is, governments and markets won't move quickly enough and unrest is what happens.
- kelseyfrog 9mo agoExcept the services that are intractably human: educators, judges, lawyers, social workers, personal trainers, childcare workers. Those will suffer the Baumol effect and their prices will rise to extraordinary levels.
- p1esk 9mo agoThe best educator I’ve ever had is ChatGPT.
- kelseyfrog 9mo agoHow scalable is that in the sense that teachers have been obsoleted and we can run zero-staff schools?
- onlyrealcuzzo 9mo agoOne would assume - if this were to happen - that supply and demand would bring prices back down, as everyone would rush to those fields.
- kelseyfrog 9mo ago
- shevy-java 9mo agoThis was written in 2023 though.
- recrush 9mo agoWe should enjoy using up our quota instead of working ourselves to the bone.
- empath75 9mo ago> “Computers can never show creativity or originality”. But—perhaps disappointingly—that’s surprisingly easy to get, and indeed just a bit of randomness “seeding” a computation can often do a pretty good job, --- This is, I think, not what people mean when they say "creative" or "original". Creativity is not simply writing something nobody has written before, as he said, that would be trivial and doesn't even require a computer, you could just shuffle a deck of cards and write out the full sequence and chances are no other person in history has written down that sequence before. And I think Borges made a reasonable argument that simply writing down the text of Don Quixote verbatim could be a creative act. Creativity is about _intentionally_ expressing a _point of view_ under some constraints. When people say LLMs can't be creative, what I think mostly they are getting at is that they lack intentionality and/or a distinct point of view. (i do not have a strong opinion about whether they do or if it's impossible for them to have them)
- myrmidon 9mo agoA big short-term risk that I see is that AI is going to cripple wealth redistribution mechanisms that we currently rely on. Most willing persons have access to income by providing labor right now. If the value of that labor diminishes because AI can do most of it for cheaper/free, that is a big problem because wealth/class barriers become insurmountable and the american dream basically dies completely. Automation in the past suffered much less from this because only a subset of jobs was affected by it, and it still relied on human labor to build, maintain and operate the machines, unlike AI. I'm curious if AI is gonna spawn comparable "workers rights" movements like in the past, but I would expect inequality to increase a lot until some solution is found.
- tim333 9mo agoIt'll probably go kinda socialist. From AI according to its ability to each according to his need.
- direwolf20 9mo agoWhat incentive do politicians have to make that happen, when they could more easily blame immigrants and transgender people?
- tim333 9mo agoThere have always been politicians offering that kind of thing - Berni, Corbyn etc. The issue is will people vote for them? So far mostly no because someone has to do the work and many workers prefer to keep the proceeds. If AIs can do the work it may be more attractive.
- deleted 9mo ago[deleted]
- ChrisArchitect 9mo ago(2023) Some discussion then: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35177257 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35177257
- pelasaco 9mo agoA country automates everything and builds paradise on Earth — and the next day, a neighboring country invades it. People are still people. Even with all the AI in the world, two rockets hitting the power plants and we´re back to the Stone Age. I hope the people making decisions for us have thought through all these scenarios and risks.
- tim333 9mo agoPeople certainly think about defence and invasions. AI millitary drones are already a thing in Ukraine https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidhambling/2026/01/02/ukraines-killer-ai-drones-are-back-with-a-vengeance/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidhambling/2026/01/02/ukrain... Also rockets hitting the power plants there is not ususual.
- pelasaco 9mo agowell in general it still is unusual, because it is considered "against the human rights". It will become more common and accepted, if everything is connected with AI. Then the primary goal in one invasion will be turn off the AI and therefore turn off the lights.
- yodon 9mo agoI read it. He used many words. Did he say anything?
- deleted 9mo ago[deleted]
- dang 9mo agoDiscussed at the time (of the article): Will AIs take all our jobs and end human history? It’s complicated - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35177257 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35177257 - March 2023 (172 comments)
- gizajob 9mo agoNot.
- HPsquared 9mo agoAI will Jevons Paradox human labour. Tasks that aren't currently feasible, will become feasible. That's if AI ends up being as productive as they say it will be
- CrzyLngPwd 9mo agoTake all jobs? Yes. End human history? No.
- einrealist 9mo agoUnless the economy crashes and I die to the consequences, there are so many pre-AI hard-cover books to read.....
- tsoukase 9mo agoIf an LLM hallucinates in 1% of occasions and gives subpar output in 5%, this kills his effectiveness to replace anyone. Imagine a support guy on the other side of the phone to speak gibberish 10 times a day. Now, imagine a doctor. These will never lose their jobs.
- Bratmon 9mo ago> Imagine a support guy on the other side of the phone to speak gibberish 10 times a day. A massive improvement?
- simianwords 9mo agobut llm's dont speak gibberish 10 times a day even now. from my usage, chatgpt has not said one obviously strange thing since o3 came out.
- HEmanZ 9mo agoWhat are you working on that they are so knowledgeable?Even the best models absolutely make stuff up, even to this day. I literally spend all day every day working with them (all latest ChatGPT models) and it’s still 10-15% BS. I had ChatGPT 5.2 thinking straight up make up an api after I pasted the full api spec to it earlier today. And built its whole response around a public api that did not exist. And Claude cli with sonnet 4.5 made up the craziest reason why my curl command wasn’t working (that curl itself was bugged, not the obvious it can’t resolve the dn it tried to use) and almost went down a path of installing a bunch of garbage tools. These are not ready to be unsupervised. Yet.
- HEmanZ 9mo agoBut maybe your point is that it isn’t gibberish, it’s “seems correct but isn’t” which is honestly more dangerous
- simianwords 9mo agoyou are incorrect. "seems correct but isn't" is fine as long as the other times it is accurate at high enough levels. "seems correct but isn't" is like the most common mode of humans getting things wrong.
- HNisCIS 9mo agoLets assume auto-complete does continue to progress at a rate that threatens most knowledge worker jobs and then we manage to automate the rest by using it. There is a particular mental disorder where people will horde wealth at absolutely all costs, personal or societal, until everyone else is dead (see NZ bunkers). We commonly see this as "the billionaire class". IF things go in that direction we need to be ready to depose all of these billionaires. I mean that quite seriously. IF this future comes, there is a very quickly closing window where preventing them from killing all of us for their own gain is possible. After a point, surveillance and their control over state violence will be so complete that it's impossible to do anything about it.
- fmlpp 9mo agoI think you are being severely oblivious about the amount of labor that's done every our on this world of us.
- dyauspitr 9mo agoEnd human history? There might be some pain for a few decades but then eventually there will be some sort of utopia.
- anilgulecha 9mo agoThe essay is direction-less. For someone looking at a cogent take, I think the recent post by Anthropic's CEO is one such: https://www.darioamodei.com/essay/the-adolescence-of-technology https://www.darioamodei.com/essay/the-adolescence-of-technol.... I'm still processing it, but it's put across logically, albeit biased viewpoint.
- victorbjorklund 9mo agoThere is a simple fact that means we won’t have zero jobs in the future. Human wants is endless. At no point will humans say ”that is enough we don’t need more” so will always have the incentive to use both capital and people. Is certain jobs gonna be replaced? Probably. Let’s say we make substantial advances in robotics and it makes sense to replace all the staff in McDonalds with machines? Yea, then those jobs are probably gone. But does it mean people won’t pay for an authentic restaurant experience? No, they might still wanna pay to eat food from a chef etc.
- tim333 9mo agoAlso people like working to an extent even if it's non economic stuff like working on their golf swing or catching all the Pokemon.
- direwolf20 9mo agoJobs do not occur because of wants. They occur at the intersection of wants and economic possibilities. Economic possibilities might go to zero.
- assimpleaspossi 9mo agoThe most relevant thing about this thought is that we humans can always pull the plug.
- tim333 9mo ago>I think the main conclusion that over the past half century, the ways people (at least in the US) spend their time have remained rather stable. I suspect that will continue in spite of AI. Human nature doesn't change much.
- ricardorivaldo 9mo agowhat most otimist people don't undestant is that AI is a capitalist dream, work without proletariat, everything automated to serve the rulling class, but anyway, we can always eat the rich.