6 ms·

I have said repeatedly that when AI eliminates the need for human creativity and work, the only thing left as the natural domain of humans will be bloodshed. T

I have said repeatedly that when AI eliminates the need for human creativity and work, the only thing left as the natural domain of humans will be bloodshed. The fact that we're using AI killer robots to wipe each other out in droves doesn't bode well for that future does it...

surgical_fire 7mo ago
If AI eliminates the need for creativity and work, it means that our creativity and work are not meaningful enough to warrant survival. I don't think we're anywhere near that point.
- throwaway28469 7mo ago
  [dead]
- yoz-y 7mo ago
  I don’t understand this take. For me creativity and thinking is the whole purpose of life.
  - surgical_fire 7mo ago
    Then you clearly don't understand my take.
    - phpnode 7mo ago
      Then you should explain yourself better
    - conartist6 7mo ago
      I understood it. Nature has had an amount of computing power to work on this problem that utterly dwarfs the tiny, tiny, tiny, tiny, tiny, amount of compute resources that humans have. Thinking that 10 years of Sam Altman is competitive with all of natural history isn't just out-of-control hubris, it's a complete failure to understand the ground-truth of the world we live in. You may as well try to pay a million dollar debt with a single dime.
      - surgical_fire 7mo ago
        Correct. At least someone here is able to read words and understand the meaning behind them. The funny thing is that I am a sort of misanthrope. And in that, in this forum, I seem to have a lot more respect and optimism for human potential and ingenuity than the majority here.
        conartist6 7mo ago
        It's funny that us curmudgeons are the ones they can't quite beat all the hope out of :'D
    - yoz-y 7mo ago
      I understood you well enough. I disagree with the idea that something that has been replaced or obsoleted does not warrant survival in general. And human creativity in particular.
      - surgical_fire 7mo ago
        It's not only that it would have been made obsolete.
- ekidd 7mo ago
  Personally, I would surprised if we are less than 3 years or more than 20 years from humans being obsolete. That is, humans would be economic dead weight, any job could be done better by AI/robots, and "comparative advantage" wouldn't apply because it's cheap enough to just make more robots. At this point, the average human would be completely useless to the billionaires (or to the AIs, if the billionaires fail to control the AIs). I can see two major delaying factors here: 1. Current generation LLM technology won't scale to true AGI. It's missing a number of critical things. But a lot of effort is being spent fixing those limitations. But until those limitations are overcome, humans will be needed to "manage" LLMs and work around their limitations, just like programmers do today. 2. Generalist robotics is far behind LLMs for multiple reasons, including insufficient sensors and fine motor control. This would require multiple scientific and engineering breakthroughs to fix. Investors will, presumably, spend a large chunk of the world's wealth to improve robotics to replace manual labor. But until they do, human hands will still be needed in the physical world. The real danger is if AI passes a point where it starts contributing substantially to its own development, speeding up the pace of breakthroughs. If we ever hit that tipping point, then things will get weird, and not in a good way.
  - freeone3000 7mo ago
    AI is already contributing substantially to its own development: https://novaknown.com/2026/03/12/ai-builds-ai-claude/ https://novaknown.com/2026/03/12/ai-builds-ai-claude/
  - conartist6 7mo ago
    [flagged]
  - surgical_fire 7mo ago
    > Personally, I would surprised if we are less than 3 years or more than 20 years from humans being obsolete. I think we are as far from it as we were 10 years ago. Or 100 years ago. I think LLM is a deadend technology. Useful, but that won't get anywhere beyond what it is. But that's the thing, "personally", "I think", etc. Not much of a debate to be had there. AI making humans obsolete is not really something that causes me any anxiety.
beepbooptheory 7mo ago
Listen I know this is a crazy thought around here, but what if creativity was "worth it" just for its own sake? Do you stop being creative when its not needed? Are the only options here being a good and "useful" worker/consumer, or a violent, irrational thug? Is there nothing else you can imagine?
- freeone3000 7mo ago
  People need to be physically sustained. Currently, this means working a job for money to buy (food/housing/medical). People also need their lives to have value. We are social animals. As a generalization, there is a strong desire to be (viewed as/able to view themselves as) a contributor to the community. These don’t have to be linked: we have (significantly!) stay-at-home-parents and philanthropists and retired community workers. But in our current values system, it is often linked - having a job in the household is viewed as a moral good. It might be hated, but it’s at least “contributing” something. If this goes away, and we have millions completely adrift? With no structure to contribute to? Even with the largest welfare expansion in history, I think we’re preparing for a very turbulent society.
  - Imustaskforhelp 7mo ago
    This, give me some french fries from time to time and a house and basic food necessities for human-living and I am happy to be creative. But what I worry about sometimes is when you snatch that away, then you just lead to stress over basic existence. > If this goes away, and we have millions completely adrift? With no structure to contribute to? Even with the largest welfare expansion in history, I think we’re preparing for a very turbulent society. Please look around and just try to remember how many things have happened in a year or two, We are already within a turbulent society but yes I also feel like this isn't the end and the cat is sort of out of the box and the world has to prepare itself for even more turbulences/radical changes.
  - beepbooptheory 7mo ago
    I don't see why you need to armchair philosophize about what people are or what they need "in general." How could we know such things? What we know is we find ourselves in certain historical circumstances, and we navigate. Right now we are, with exceptions like you mention, free only to be a worker or to be, essentialy, a homeless criminal. This whole prescriptive thing this response and others have where its like "ah surely it is up to us to find some meaning for the masses of plebs in our brave new world" is, IMO, presumptuous at best. Like literally just give people an actual chance to find their own meaning, and I promise you they will find it. If it seems hard to you or "full of turmoil", that suggests a poverty of inspiration on your end, not everyone elses. Meaning is not intrinsic to our particular mode of production at the moment, in fact, individuals find meaning despite this mode!
zozbot234 7mo ago
> I have said repeatedly that when AI eliminates the need for human creativity and work Yeah, this is not happening anytime soon. Have you even looked at AI-generated code or text? AI is just a dumb parrot, it's no match for human effort and creativity even in these "easy" domains. The business case for AI generation is just being able to generate huge amounts of unusable slop for next to nothing. For skilled workers it's a minor advantage in that they get a sloppy first draft that they can start the real work on - it makes their work a bit more creative than it used to be, by getting rid of the most tedious stuff.
- thunky 7mo ago
  > AI is just a dumb parrot You really need to look again. If you're still manually writing code you have your head in the sand. AI can produce better code than most devs produce. This is true for easy stuff like crud apps and even more true for harder problems that require knowledge of external domains.
  - moi2388 7mo ago
    It can produce better code than most devs in the hands of a good dev. The bullshit code I see coming from juniors using AI..
    - mapontosevenths 7mo ago
      I view it as a force multiplier, like a lever. In good hands it produces outsized gains. In the wrong hands it produces outsized losses. It just makes you MORE of whatever it was you already were.
      - thunky 7mo ago
        I partially agree. I can see the before and after difference in colleague's code. It's night and day. They're doing things now that they either flat out could not do before, or if they did it would be an giant mess (I realize they still can't really do it now, AI is doing it for them).
VoodooJuJu 7mo ago
[dead]
MontyCarloHall 7mo ago
I think you underestimate just how much we value human achievement. Why do we watch Olympic runners, when cars on your average city street easily exceed Usain Bolt's top speed on their morning drive to Starbucks? Why do we watch the Tour de France, when we can watch Uber Eats drivers on their 150cc scooters easily outpace top cyclists? I'm sure within a couple years a Boston Dynamics robot will be able to out-gymnast Simone Biles or out-skate Surya Bonaly. Would anyone watch these robots in competition? I doubt it. We watch Bolt, Biles, and Bonaly compete because their performance represents a profound confluence of human effort and talent. It is a celebration of human achievement, even though that achievement objectively pales in comparison to what our machines can accomplish. I think the same is true for other aspects of human creativity and labor. As we are able to automate more and more, we will place increasing importance on what inherently cannot be automated: celebration of our fellow humanity. Another poster wrote that "bullshit jobs" [0] exist primarily because we value human contact [1]. I am inclined to agree. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit_Jobs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit_Jobs [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47738865 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47738865
- prmph 7mo ago
  > "bullshit jobs" [0] exist primarily because we value human contact They are not "bullshit jobs" They will become so only after the day when AI "help" and "support" is actually better than talking to a human. Which is not happening anytime soon, possibly never. Call me when it happens
  - integralid 7mo ago
    Support jobs are very definitely not "bullshit jobs".
- vidarh 7mo ago
  And yet there are orders of magnitude more cars than olympic athletes, and most olympic athletes struggle to make much money on it. So, sure, there will be space for some human achievement for the sake of it, but, most fewer and fewer people will make a living off that.
Throaway199999 7mo ago
Nothing will ever eliminate the need for those things, people work today for MONEY. If technology eliminates scarcity thats a good thing, it's the hoarding of wealth that causes bloodshed.
- guzfip 7mo ago
  [flagged]
  - Throaway199999 7mo ago
    Why would it be bad for technology to get smaller, more productive and exponentially cheaper? As long as its available to everyone, which is impossible to prevent if its really that cheap and trivial to access & create, which is true as long as we have access to tech advanced enough to create it, which we increasingly do at increasingly cheaper and more widespread rates, etc...
michaelbuckbee 7mo ago
I feel like AI just raises the floor but doesn't push the ceiling on the quality of creative works. There's still space for creativity, novelty, invention and human intuition.
- ArnoVW 7mo ago
  agreed. The problem is, often, when you can have "for free" something that is "good enough", you stop looking for better. 40 years ago, there was a market for: * newspapers * cameras * navigation tools * HiFi equipment * photographers, translators, etc .. sure, there are still people with newspaper subscriptions, or DSLR cameras. But it's become a niche market. Those things have been replaced by your phone and a "free" service. Same thing will happen for all the other markets that AI will gradually eat. Sure, you can find a human that can do better. But that costs 90$ / hour and requires finding someone, negotiating a contract, etc. But when people can do something good enough in 30 seconds with something they already have access to, and move on with their life, then that's what they'll do. So just raising the floor will have a big effect on society.
- jacquesm 7mo ago
  This is a fantastic point.
strathmeyer 7mo ago
[dead]
thunky 7mo ago
> when AI eliminates the need for human creativity We haven't needed the overwhelming majority of human creativity. We still paint and play guitar even though it has no economic value. I think we'll continue to do these things regardless of AI. > and work This is another story.
GuB-42 7mo ago
At least for now, AI sucks at creativity. There is an initial "wow" effect when you can generate an image of an astronaut riding a unicorn on the moon with a simple prompt, but as you try to play a bit more with it, you notice that unless you inject some of your own creativity, you won't get very far, no matter the medium. Passed some point, if you are good at what you are doing, the AI will stop helping and become a burden, because you will want precise control, and AI in its current form (deep learning) is not good at it. There is a reason we talk about "AI slop", you simply cannot let an AI make creative decisions and expect a good result. By creative I don't just mean artistic. For code, AI works for the least creative tasks, like ports, generic-looking CRUD apps, etc... As for work, we have already eliminated most of the need for human work. By "need", I mean survival: food, shelter, these kinds of thing. Most of human production goes to comfort, entertainment, luxury, etc... We will find stuff to do that isn't bloodshed. In fact, as times went on, we spend more on saving people than killing them, judging by a global increase in life expectancy. Why would AI reverse the trend?

surgical_fire 7mo ago

If AI eliminates the need for creativity and work, it means that our creativity and work are not meaningful enough to warrant survival. I don't think we're anywhere near that point.

throwaway28469 7mo ago
[dead]
yoz-y 7mo ago
I don’t understand this take. For me creativity and thinking is the whole purpose of life.
- surgical_fire 7mo ago
  Then you clearly don't understand my take.
  - phpnode 7mo ago
    Then you should explain yourself better
  - conartist6 7mo ago
    I understood it. Nature has had an amount of computing power to work on this problem that utterly dwarfs the tiny, tiny, tiny, tiny, tiny, amount of compute resources that humans have. Thinking that 10 years of Sam Altman is competitive with all of natural history isn't just out-of-control hubris, it's a complete failure to understand the ground-truth of the world we live in. You may as well try to pay a million dollar debt with a single dime.
    - surgical_fire 7mo ago
      Correct. At least someone here is able to read words and understand the meaning behind them. The funny thing is that I am a sort of misanthrope. And in that, in this forum, I seem to have a lot more respect and optimism for human potential and ingenuity than the majority here.
      - conartist6 7mo ago
        It's funny that us curmudgeons are the ones they can't quite beat all the hope out of :'D
  - yoz-y 7mo ago
    I understood you well enough. I disagree with the idea that something that has been replaced or obsoleted does not warrant survival in general. And human creativity in particular.
    - surgical_fire 7mo ago
      It's not only that it would have been made obsolete.
ekidd 7mo ago
Personally, I would surprised if we are less than 3 years or more than 20 years from humans being obsolete. That is, humans would be economic dead weight, any job could be done better by AI/robots, and "comparative advantage" wouldn't apply because it's cheap enough to just make more robots. At this point, the average human would be completely useless to the billionaires (or to the AIs, if the billionaires fail to control the AIs). I can see two major delaying factors here: 1. Current generation LLM technology won't scale to true AGI. It's missing a number of critical things. But a lot of effort is being spent fixing those limitations. But until those limitations are overcome, humans will be needed to "manage" LLMs and work around their limitations, just like programmers do today. 2. Generalist robotics is far behind LLMs for multiple reasons, including insufficient sensors and fine motor control. This would require multiple scientific and engineering breakthroughs to fix. Investors will, presumably, spend a large chunk of the world's wealth to improve robotics to replace manual labor. But until they do, human hands will still be needed in the physical world. The real danger is if AI passes a point where it starts contributing substantially to its own development, speeding up the pace of breakthroughs. If we ever hit that tipping point, then things will get weird, and not in a good way.
- freeone3000 7mo ago
  AI is already contributing substantially to its own development: https://novaknown.com/2026/03/12/ai-builds-ai-claude/ https://novaknown.com/2026/03/12/ai-builds-ai-claude/
- conartist6 7mo ago
  [flagged]
- surgical_fire 7mo ago
  > Personally, I would surprised if we are less than 3 years or more than 20 years from humans being obsolete. I think we are as far from it as we were 10 years ago. Or 100 years ago. I think LLM is a deadend technology. Useful, but that won't get anywhere beyond what it is. But that's the thing, "personally", "I think", etc. Not much of a debate to be had there. AI making humans obsolete is not really something that causes me any anxiety.

beepbooptheory 7mo ago

Listen I know this is a crazy thought around here, but what if creativity was "worth it" just for its own sake? Do you stop being creative when its not needed? Are the only options here being a good and "useful" worker/consumer, or a violent, irrational thug? Is there nothing else you can imagine?

freeone3000 7mo ago
People need to be physically sustained. Currently, this means working a job for money to buy (food/housing/medical). People also need their lives to have value. We are social animals. As a generalization, there is a strong desire to be (viewed as/able to view themselves as) a contributor to the community. These don’t have to be linked: we have (significantly!) stay-at-home-parents and philanthropists and retired community workers. But in our current values system, it is often linked - having a job in the household is viewed as a moral good. It might be hated, but it’s at least “contributing” something. If this goes away, and we have millions completely adrift? With no structure to contribute to? Even with the largest welfare expansion in history, I think we’re preparing for a very turbulent society.
- Imustaskforhelp 7mo ago
  This, give me some french fries from time to time and a house and basic food necessities for human-living and I am happy to be creative. But what I worry about sometimes is when you snatch that away, then you just lead to stress over basic existence. > If this goes away, and we have millions completely adrift? With no structure to contribute to? Even with the largest welfare expansion in history, I think we’re preparing for a very turbulent society. Please look around and just try to remember how many things have happened in a year or two, We are already within a turbulent society but yes I also feel like this isn't the end and the cat is sort of out of the box and the world has to prepare itself for even more turbulences/radical changes.
- beepbooptheory 7mo ago
  I don't see why you need to armchair philosophize about what people are or what they need "in general." How could we know such things? What we know is we find ourselves in certain historical circumstances, and we navigate. Right now we are, with exceptions like you mention, free only to be a worker or to be, essentialy, a homeless criminal. This whole prescriptive thing this response and others have where its like "ah surely it is up to us to find some meaning for the masses of plebs in our brave new world" is, IMO, presumptuous at best. Like literally just give people an actual chance to find their own meaning, and I promise you they will find it. If it seems hard to you or "full of turmoil", that suggests a poverty of inspiration on your end, not everyone elses. Meaning is not intrinsic to our particular mode of production at the moment, in fact, individuals find meaning despite this mode!

zozbot234 7mo ago

> I have said repeatedly that when AI eliminates the need for human creativity and work Yeah, this is not happening anytime soon. Have you even looked at AI-generated code or text? AI is just a dumb parrot, it's no match for human effort and creativity even in these "easy" domains. The business case for AI generation is just being able to generate huge amounts of unusable slop for next to nothing. For skilled workers it's a minor advantage in that they get a sloppy first draft that they can start the real work on - it makes their work a bit more creative than it used to be, by getting rid of the most tedious stuff.

thunky 7mo ago
> AI is just a dumb parrot You really need to look again. If you're still manually writing code you have your head in the sand. AI can produce better code than most devs produce. This is true for easy stuff like crud apps and even more true for harder problems that require knowledge of external domains.
- moi2388 7mo ago
  It can produce better code than most devs in the hands of a good dev. The bullshit code I see coming from juniors using AI..
  - mapontosevenths 7mo ago
    I view it as a force multiplier, like a lever. In good hands it produces outsized gains. In the wrong hands it produces outsized losses. It just makes you MORE of whatever it was you already were.
    - thunky 7mo ago
      I partially agree. I can see the before and after difference in colleague's code. It's night and day. They're doing things now that they either flat out could not do before, or if they did it would be an giant mess (I realize they still can't really do it now, AI is doing it for them).

VoodooJuJu 7mo ago

[dead]

MontyCarloHall 7mo ago

I think you underestimate just how much we value human achievement. Why do we watch Olympic runners, when cars on your average city street easily exceed Usain Bolt's top speed on their morning drive to Starbucks? Why do we watch the Tour de France, when we can watch Uber Eats drivers on their 150cc scooters easily outpace top cyclists? I'm sure within a couple years a Boston Dynamics robot will be able to out-gymnast Simone Biles or out-skate Surya Bonaly. Would anyone watch these robots in competition? I doubt it. We watch Bolt, Biles, and Bonaly compete because their performance represents a profound confluence of human effort and talent. It is a celebration of human achievement, even though that achievement objectively pales in comparison to what our machines can accomplish. I think the same is true for other aspects of human creativity and labor. As we are able to automate more and more, we will place increasing importance on what inherently cannot be automated: celebration of our fellow humanity. Another poster wrote that "bullshit jobs" [0] exist primarily because we value human contact [1]. I am inclined to agree. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit_Jobs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit_Jobs [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47738865 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47738865

prmph 7mo ago
> "bullshit jobs" [0] exist primarily because we value human contact They are not "bullshit jobs" They will become so only after the day when AI "help" and "support" is actually better than talking to a human. Which is not happening anytime soon, possibly never. Call me when it happens
- integralid 7mo ago
  Support jobs are very definitely not "bullshit jobs".
vidarh 7mo ago
And yet there are orders of magnitude more cars than olympic athletes, and most olympic athletes struggle to make much money on it. So, sure, there will be space for some human achievement for the sake of it, but, most fewer and fewer people will make a living off that.

Throaway199999 7mo ago

Nothing will ever eliminate the need for those things, people work today for MONEY. If technology eliminates scarcity thats a good thing, it's the hoarding of wealth that causes bloodshed.

guzfip 7mo ago
[flagged]
- Throaway199999 7mo ago
  Why would it be bad for technology to get smaller, more productive and exponentially cheaper? As long as its available to everyone, which is impossible to prevent if its really that cheap and trivial to access & create, which is true as long as we have access to tech advanced enough to create it, which we increasingly do at increasingly cheaper and more widespread rates, etc...

michaelbuckbee 7mo ago

I feel like AI just raises the floor but doesn't push the ceiling on the quality of creative works. There's still space for creativity, novelty, invention and human intuition.

ArnoVW 7mo ago
agreed. The problem is, often, when you can have "for free" something that is "good enough", you stop looking for better. 40 years ago, there was a market for: * newspapers * cameras * navigation tools * HiFi equipment * photographers, translators, etc .. sure, there are still people with newspaper subscriptions, or DSLR cameras. But it's become a niche market. Those things have been replaced by your phone and a "free" service. Same thing will happen for all the other markets that AI will gradually eat. Sure, you can find a human that can do better. But that costs 90$ / hour and requires finding someone, negotiating a contract, etc. But when people can do something good enough in 30 seconds with something they already have access to, and move on with their life, then that's what they'll do. So just raising the floor will have a big effect on society.
jacquesm 7mo ago
This is a fantastic point.

strathmeyer 7mo ago

[dead]

thunky 7mo ago

> when AI eliminates the need for human creativity We haven't needed the overwhelming majority of human creativity. We still paint and play guitar even though it has no economic value. I think we'll continue to do these things regardless of AI. > and work This is another story.

GuB-42 7mo ago

At least for now, AI sucks at creativity. There is an initial "wow" effect when you can generate an image of an astronaut riding a unicorn on the moon with a simple prompt, but as you try to play a bit more with it, you notice that unless you inject some of your own creativity, you won't get very far, no matter the medium. Passed some point, if you are good at what you are doing, the AI will stop helping and become a burden, because you will want precise control, and AI in its current form (deep learning) is not good at it. There is a reason we talk about "AI slop", you simply cannot let an AI make creative decisions and expect a good result. By creative I don't just mean artistic. For code, AI works for the least creative tasks, like ports, generic-looking CRUD apps, etc... As for work, we have already eliminated most of the need for human work. By "need", I mean survival: food, shelter, these kinds of thing. Most of human production goes to comfort, entertainment, luxury, etc... We will find stuff to do that isn't bloodshed. In fact, as times went on, we spend more on saving people than killing them, judging by a global increase in life expectancy. Why would AI reverse the trend?