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…
Communities form around shared friction. The sciences used to be sources of great community, solving grand problems with untold levels of friction. Having the right skills and knowledge to contribute could unite people from warring nations and social classes, let alone the benign evils like an anti-social culture, punishing people for talking to strangers...
In the imagined faux-utopia, there is no more adversity, and it's assumed no active effort was made to preserve its struggle. A god-like nanny will step in to meet your every need before it could even cross into your consciousness.
There'd be no point to music if Mozart could already hear the 6th symphony extracted from his brain with the first thought of inspiration. This art would in turn hardly be comparable to the real deal, even if it were an empirically flawless replica, is there is only so much personality you could extrapolate without a long execution limited by effort or resources. But a convincing replica of art might be all we need to sabotage the real deal, either through spam or demotivating the novice artists.
This future is, of course, ludicrous. It's a childish fantasy, a bastardization of sci-fi writers' nuanced utopias, flattening the social systems they wrote to give their characters motivation and meaning, in favor of fetishizing the technology, which was just a plot device to put the characters in such setting, and acting surprised when taking it at face-value will result in immediate social decay.
The author might or might not be surprised he's not the first to write on the subject, and real sci-fi literature already argues the same points in say Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect.
Thank you for the nod to Metamorphosis of the Prime Intellect! I’ve been meaning to revisit it for dog’s years and now I have the impetus :) Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom comes to mind, too [0]…
I think you nailed it with respect to the fading magic of scientific culture, and the power of shared purpose to gloss over social differences.
Even as a plot device, it feels like the notion that {solving material/energetic needs solves existential needs} feels of a piece with a very particular, commoditized, late-industrial type of social climate. That “tea, Earl Grey, hot” would mean the same thing every time, down to the molecule—to an appreciator of tea, no less—always struck me as a dismal proposition.
Everywhere I look, though, I feel like, as soon as one source of friction gets greased, people forge right ahead and find (or create) a new site of friction.
Food security’s largely solved? What a challenge dieting can be! Not to mention toxins and gluten and agricultural monoculture and the livestock’s moral standing!
Magic robot writes all my code for me? Filthy BigAI, limiting my tokenmaxxing strategy to only billions of words of thought per week! And they want me to pay them an amount approaching the cost of a shared desk in an office?! Plus, the robot sometimes makes mistakes that require me to eyeroll _read_ the code…
Or, more benignly: I think of my skater friends. No sooner do they nail one demanding or stupid trick, than they’re reshuffling the obstacles and pushing their flips an extra revolution. A 4-minute mile was revolutionary, now it’s routine. Everest became packaged, so the wealthy seek out lesser but unconquered peaks [1].
No, we’ll have no problem finding and inventing friction and forming ad hoc communities accordingly. To the extent the friction is collectively-initiated rather than imposed by Nature red in tooth and claw, I’d say that’s probably a blessing—just as the unifying friction of the scientific frontier is more wholesome than the unifying friction of war or siege or famine.
> But a convincing replica of art might be all we need to sabotage the real deal, either through spam or demotivating the novice artists.
I share your worry here. I try to reassure myself on both points. On spam, I tell myself that breadth-of-attention isn’t the same as quality-of-attention: I’d imagine orders of magnitude more humans know Justin Bieber’s work than have ever known Mozart’s 6th. And as far as demotivation: I tell myself the frontier has always been a lonely place to operate. Great artists famously die poor and unknown: their urge, their obsession to create, seems to be almost possessing; to irrational degrees. Most people follow, a few lead; the greats in the past did so at even higher cost than those today.
Thank you for your thoughtful writing, here and around HN. Browsing through your comments you seem completely lovely and I’d love to invite you for a meal if we ever find ourselves in the same part of the world :)
> in the old days, if you were broke but respected, you wouldn’t starve; contrariwise, if you were rich and hated, no sum could buy you security and peace. By measuring the thing that money really represented—your personal capital with your friends and neighbors—you more accurately gauged your success.
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.
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.
We create new hobbies and niches because human scale arenas are important for us psychologically — so we branch culture to accommodate the necessary number of role performance arenas.
Everybody is playing status games, but we’re avoiding Calhoun-style behavioral sinks by not all playing the same game at the same table.
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.
As someone already essentially living the simulated life, I believe the problem with MMOs is they aren't built to withstand the amount of time a person with nothing else to do can throw at them. So then they get boring, and I end up reading hacker news and making dumb comments, and asking claude inane questions, or generally trying to find other simulation-friendly way to spend my time (not interacting with people though, that is hard mode).
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
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.
You're on hackernews. There's quite a few millionaires on here. I think they'll be okay.
Just go look at any successful millionaire/founder/whatever on LinkedIn. They're still working hard on something. Elon Musk has a freaking trillion dollars yet he still "works".
Why? I actually don't know. I'll let you know once I'm there.
I mean.. yeah, I know this is hacker news and there are some very wealthy people here, but I suspect the majority of users here could not possibly retire tomorrow if they wanted to
Or maybe I'm an outlier for being solidly working class, idk
As part of mentioned younger generation aka 16 and German I can tell you its true that classic dating is close to dead at least for most people in my age group here but friend groups and friends becoming partners slowly is the way we build relationships.
And that erases the need for classic dating becouse simply hanging around with the group is more exposure than any date.
But I'm the kind of 16 year old reading HN so I'm probably not the normal 16 year old German even though I think in this aspect I am like the rest of my generation.
That’s part of the classic way of dating. Going out with people who aren’t your friends is what happens when you’ve fucked your way through your entire friend group and want to meet someone new.
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
> 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.
What about working on things for the intrinsic value of learning, challenging oneself, creating something useful or beautiful, or the satisfaction of a job well done? Sure, social status is one motivator among many, but I find this genre of evolutionary psychology extremely reductive and empirically dubious.
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.
This argument also seems totally american lifestyle centered where even your hobbies needs to be productive.
My brother installed Bazzite just for the fun and he is learning things about the computer and he just seems to be curious. That's totally improductive for him : he is actually trying to launch a business around flowers delivery, and not your typical uber-like startup. He is buying a truck and will work for its previous clients. But still, he is learning linux because that looks cool. He is also trying to learn piano.
Me ? If I didnt have to work in an AI utopia, I'd go on the skatepark everyday doing rollerblading tricks, socializing and learning from other rollerbladers. There is nothing less productive than rollerblading, it's not even a practical mean of transportation. It's just fun and humans love to socialize around fun things.
I don't think we'll ever get to this AI utopia. I think we are either going full cyberpunk or extinct by our own. But would it happen, I'm not sure I'd be on tiktok watching AI slop all the day.
I'd even go as far as saying that without work, the humans would be able to remove the social mask that working involves and that it would make use more human.
The status thing really got turned on it head around late 2015 when more GetThingsDone oriented groups detected that Facebook was actively engineering social consensus through orchestrated shadowbanning.
The prigs are oh so high status .. to other prigs.
I think you almost hit something more important there. Desires like mating, respect, status etc can only exists with the entities that needs it, but what if the existence of those entities is fundamentally no longer needed? Why then should "the society" maintain it? It's known that a society less burden advances faster, and it's also known that countries need to move fast to stay competitive.
I believe future is much grimmer for people currently living, because if productivity can increase without the import of human labors, then eventually the humans will simply not be kept alive. Meaning, shrink in human population, and even more intense competition for fewer still competitiable resources etc. Of course you'll are not hanging out, you're too busy doing hard labor the robots still can't yet do.
All of this is easy to see if you understand that human societies are not built to advance and provide, instead they are fundamentally built to fairly distribute resources from ones who's non-productive, to ones are. And most type of societies that is alive and well today is very good at that.
Also, off-topic here: most people confused the word "productivity" with something like "hard work", it's not that. I'll give you the readers some examples: Elon Musk can build and launch rockets that carries actual people to space safely, but you can't (so far) no matter how hard you work, and thus Elon Musk is more productive than you; Jeff Bezos (so far) deliver goods to millions of people or more each year, but you can't no matter how hard you try, and thus Jeff Bezos is more productive than you. That's what "productivity" actually mean, not "I work my ass off everyday so I deserve to get paid more". And that's the real reason why these guys are rich and you're not, not because rich people are evil, but because they found their way to be productive and thus they get rich.
> Elon Musk can build and launch rockets that carries actual people to space safely, but you can't no matter how hard you work, and thus Elon Musk is more productive than you
Elon Musk can't build shit. All he can do is pay people to do it for him while he sits on his ass and takes a cut from all of the worker's knowledge and labor. He just makes sure he gets the credit (https://sciencesensei.com/heres-who-really-invents-the-amazi...). Jeff Bezos doesn't deliver goods to anybody at all. He underpays low wage drivers who actually deliver goods and he makes them piss in water bottles so that he can stuff his pockets with the pennies it would cost if they could take bathroom breaks and have a shred of human dignity. The companies they own aren't run by them either. They pay a bunch of people better skilled and qualified to manage the operations.
The special skill that the people with the most have is exploitation. Most of them were born into money, a few of them lucked into it, but they took that money and they found ways to take as much as possible from the people who actually have the skills and put in the work to make things happen, and they do it while claiming all the credit for labor they didn't spend a minute of their lives actually doing. What you call "productive" is literally just exploitation and self-marketing. Marketing that you fell for hook line and sinker.
> The special skill that the people with the most have is exploitation
If you're non-exploiting, then you should start a company to compete with the people who do. This is how the world actually work, don't just demanding, compete too. And if it worked, it could show that you don't need to be exploitative to remain competitive, it'll be a much greater world if everyone sees that.
In the US 85%ish live <100 miles from their childhood home
Fewer people than you want to believe from staring into a filter bubble of HN approved tech startup/disrupt! psychosis generator care about impressing a billionaire investor
People out there have fucked animals for sexual release
Don't anthropomorphize the humans; they don't have a reliable track record of being worth the respect. They’re animals and care more about enslavement of each others minds and agency to the benefit of a toxic minority of codependent losers who are too lazy to learn how to rotate a tire or flip a burger on their own
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.
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.
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..
Amazon did not kill Barnes and Noble. For a moment, it looked like it did. But B&N is experiencing a resurgence the last several years, because humans don't just value getting books delivered the next day through e.g. Prime. They want to read books in a physical space, and will inconvenience themselves for that tactile experience. There is an important lesson in this when thinking about the AI future.
A depressingly percentage of the population doesn't even want to acquire the basic literacy and arithmetic skills provided by a high school education. Their aspirations means nothing because they don't want to put in the work to build any of the foundation needed to reach for them.
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
> It would be a minority of people who subscribe to philosophies that provide meaning and motivation to life beyond hedonism and material gain.
Hedonism and materialism demand active and social lifestyles. Chasing a different high, the next purchase, the newest model, the next sexual partner, the last in a set, the finest foods, the rarest most limited edition, etc. Part of the fun is showing off, comparing possessions or experiences with others, and learning about what else is still out there.
> 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.
That's a symptom of hopelessness and despair. In the event of a utopia where all our needs are met and we're all able to pursue our own interests to whatever extent we want people will have hope. Living a carefree life like children protected and spoiled by their parents the world will be full endless possibility with the only remaining constraint being that we have only a single lifetime to enjoy it all.
> Picture drug addicts who win the lottery. It won't be pretty
People who are drug addicts don't get clean the moment they win money. Money can make drug treatment more pleasant, but the hardest part is overcoming the learned helplessness and committing to get help. I'd guess that the odds a drug addict lottery winner getting clean aren't that much better or worse than the odds of a drug addict who doesn't win the lottery. People who became addicted looking to self-medicate due to mental illness or trauma don't suddenly have those problems cured when you give them money either. Some lottery winners end up going overboard and gaining addictions they didn't start with (although addictive personalities are more likely to gamble in the first place). Thankfully most people who win the lottery still end up happier and better off.
The truth is that there's no reason think that AI would bring about any kind of utopia for anybody, but if it happened, people will still love the things they love and want the things they want, and share and grow and experiment. No matter what happens, humans won't stop being humans.
> No matter what happens, humans won't stop being humans.
Yes, and humans evolved in an environment of resource scarcity. Literally every instinct we have, including addiction and every psychological condition we categorize as mental illness, is tuned to that.
We are not biologically equipped for a post-scarcity environment, and to thrive in such an environment without destroying it would take a monumental cultural adaptation that not many would be capable of. Children is a bad analogy, because even children have forms of material scarcity guiding them. The reason to grow up at all is to be able to provide for yourself. Everyone is jealous of the "rich kid" in school.
Beyond the theory, see the global transition from hunter gatherer to agriculture. It was insanely violent despite the overall growth in material resources and took thousands of years to truly stabilize into what we'd call civilization, and that civilization was plenty violent all on its own.
Ironically, if we ever did get a material utopia, part of it would have to be manufactured scarcity just so we don't all go insane. And now imagine what the predators amongst us would do in such an environment, their utopia is destruction of others, and they'd have all the resources they'd need to do it.
in a utopian future, addictions like that would be cured and siloed. hopefully, those with motivation to understand the mechanisms of human suffering would be in charge of policy.
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 climb the mountains because I am proud of myself, and I am proud of my own development. Not because I want someone to pat me on the back.
My outlook on life is that it is an experiment where you see how you can develop yourself throughout it. This growth is difficult and beautiful.
I am proud of myself, and the person I have become. I surround myself with people on the same mission.
This article describes a future like WALL-E. It sounds very lonely. I'll be sure to be in the pocket of people who are like minded, and set on their own pursuits.
I am actively choosing an existence where I don't get everything I want. It's the effort that makes it mean something to me, and it's the restrictions that make life worth living.
It might be useful to know that I programmed for >50% of my life, starting when I was 12. It was a huge part of my identity for most of my life. I was known to be extremely good at it. Think: newspaper articles, CEOs flying me out, etc.
Overcoming this entanglement of identity, ego, and competence was one of my proudest achievements in the past 5 years.
I am mostly at peace now, always trying to go further. I hope people like the author can find peace as well.
Today people have basically unlimited access to images of masterful works of art spanning hundreds of years. But they still hang up their kids inferior drawings at their cubicles instead.
Someone that gets it. Lots of odd out of touch takes in this thread. Folks here seem to think we're robots or something, I can't believe the wild things that are said in this thread. Strong believer that "humanity" always wins.
Maybe it's about the joy of learning something new every time you cook. Having Michelin star restaurants in your neighborhood would add to that joy, not take away from it.
> I would like to believe that many people will still choose reality and real relationships.
The joy of learning something new is very much tied to said thing being meaningful or useful. You could spend the rest of your life memorizing digits of pi and you'd be spending all of it "learning something new" but you wouldn't enjoy it very much.
> 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?
I think it's paradoxical to suggest Michelin-starred restaurants could be everywhere, given the whole point is the travel-worthiness i.e. a scarcity that justified effort.
That aside, to take the strongest form of the argument, I think even if every human being could get their ideal meal, no matter what it is, at any time and for free - and even if the cook in question is only doing it for social reasons - cooking would still be valued. It's the effort put in by a person which is scarce and precious. Even if people were immortal, that time in the present would still be valuable in itself.
> How is kindness demonstrated in a world where no one wants for anything?
Post-scarcity of material things won't sedate humans. Kindness is a thing wanted in and of itself, but more importantly, internal struggles and desires can't all be resolved through material gain.
> How can someone be more interesting than synthetically generated content created specifically attuned to our personal interests?
The answer is apparently, pretty easily? By and large it seems the consensus is social media and digital content are exploiting a niche of providing a low-effort, highly-addictive pastime.
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.
> 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
Which ones? I'm really curious to know.
Chatting up women just to hit on them has become a no-no. And some conservative countries strongly restrict most opposite gender interactions between non-relatives.
Other than that, I really don't know where it's unacceptable to make polite conversation with strangers.
Come to Finland and Sweden, which have a strong outdoor culture, but being talkative to other people on the trail is likely to make them uncomfortable. Guidelines for using communal wilderness infrastructure often emphasize the importance of giving other people space, to the point of politely ignoring them. (And no one would speak to a total stranger in a restaurant or art gallery unless they were a clueless foreigner, crazy, a religious proselytizer, or all of the above.)
More generally internationally, if one is a single man and others around are couples, socializing is rarely going to be welcome because one is just a third wheel and people will wonder why you're alone. I have seen this firsthand in the bikepacking community, which went from once being a hobby largely of solo men (who would often then team up for some time) to being predominantly couples on many popular routes.
No offense but it is quite clear you don't understand how friendships are forged.
Why do you think friendships are made with strangers on hiking trails?
In my new city, I made a friend by seeing them sitting alone at a restaurant, recognizing their face from somewhere, and chatting with them. We're very close now. They thank me to this day for walking up to them that day as they'd been feeling lonely.
I've also made friends with folks I met playing sports that I hang out with outside that sport. Even the ones that I only see in the sport, that's still a valid friendship.
I'm not trying to flex how social I am because I'm not, I am just saying if you put in some effort you'd be surprised at the results. Most people are more similar than you think, most feel lonely to an extent, you just gotta reach out. You'll never get a rejection in a friendship, imo. And if you do then fuck it they just didn't get along with you.
Why are you replying to me, and not to the OP who mentioned outdoors pursuits as a way to meet people?
If you recognized someone's face in a restaurant, then they weren't a total stranger. But the OP made it sound as if talking to a total stranger is an option, when it is simply not welcome in all regions of the 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: 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?)
What? How are you gonna communicate with anything without speaking? The LLM will keep showing you videos and you will draw it pictures of what you want?
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
I have a pressure washer and I love using that thing
If I had no work to do at all, I would be the pressure washer guy. I would go around the neighborhood seeing what needed pressure washing and I would do it all. And I'd give pressure washer lessons, and do pressure washer art or something. I'd drive over to dirty neglected bridges and pressure wash them, clean unwanted graffiti off buildings...
That's my example
We all have our own pressure washer
And the world would be a better, brighter, more fun place if we were all making beer and blasting bridges and playing with kids and rewilding nature and the myriad other things we could do if we weren't at desks wrangling excel sheets
He'd tell them to leave some for him to pressure wash.
Pressure washing would become sport like riding did. No one rides a horse to work now so what did they do?
They made it a sport.
So we would have the sport of programming, pressure washing, painting, biking, driving cars 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"?
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.
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.
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 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.
Nit: I’ve never heard of Magnus Carlsen, and I can’t imagine most people have, outside of those really into chess. The only chess person I’ve ever heard of is Gary Kasparov, and that’s only because it was a big deal when Deep Blue beat him.
> 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"
More like humanity still has plenty of problems worth solving, and most people aren't so high on Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs as to ignore them.
If someone handed me 50 million dollars today I'd probably "enjoy learning" a lot more, like when I was a child and all my material needs were met so spending time learning obscure facts about dinosaurs didn't have a marginal cost.
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.
Yeah. Dario Amodei was publicly saying, with a shit-eating grin, that all white-collar jobs would be gone in 6-12 months. His prediction didn't yet come true, but this is the CEO of one a suposed "public benefit corporation". These people literally want to speedrun the dystopia. Destroy a ton of jobs while making more profit, with not even a semblance of a plan for what to do with all of these jobless people or how to help them afford food and housing.
The short to medium term future seems more likely to look like a bunch of hikikomori living in miserable conditions and doomscrolling online.
"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"
See this sentiment online frequently, and it feels totally wrong to me.
I went to uni to study physics not to get a job [jobs in physics payed less than jobs McDonalds where i was graduating], but to understand how stuff works because it is magnificently fascinating and weird.
Increasing your understanding and knowledge is a reward and goal by itself, isn't it?
Getting a job in a field you love is amazing, don't get me wrong, but it's more about belonging and being part of community of like-minded people, than optimizing life outcomes.
AI won't change this - so what if some machine can find new things faster and better than you? It is an amazing experience to re-discover things known for centuries from first principles - will it matter all that much that you'll be rediscovering, integrating and interpreting things originally found by a machine, not by renowned scholar of the past?
You sound like someone who got their $ returns from university.
Most people cannot afford to pay 5-6 figures for (their kids) "belonging and being part of community of like-minded people". Which is the article's point.
I think article makes a point about people losing the motivation to go to uni because that won't "improve their life outcomes" in a world of AI and UBI. As in no high-paying jobs or no paying jobs whatsoever.
If you somehow still need to go in debt to get an education in this kind of world - that's some real anti-utopia, not "Culture"-inspired AI post-scarcity.
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.)
Yeah exactly. AI is a tool for the centralization of power. Whoever is at the controls has all the power, or the AI breaks free and then it has all the power.
"If we get a benevolent head of a political system from this, it will be because ... 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.
I find it so funny when people can't imagine any other perspective of the world than their own. It may be that you only went to university to "grow your capital", but there are a lot of people who enjoy learning purely for the satisfaction of thinking about and understanding new ideas
I think that's true of a lot of people on HN... But at the same time, if anything you can do, a machine can do better, it does feel kind of pointless in some way. I think maybe if you're a really skilled singer or musician, there might always be space for live performances, but if you're someone who enjoys engineering, nobody will care about the things you can engineer. We're already sort of reaching that point. It's incredibly hard to get any kind of attention for a new open source project or indie game, because the assumption is that anybody can just vibe code anything, and social media is becoming saturated.
You have to realize, we might soon (in a decade or two) reach a point where people will say things like "Oh, you want to go study science/engineering? Why?". It might literally become the dominant viewpoint that studying these things is useless. If the accelerationists have their way, they won't want humans to do any engineering, they will say that this is the job of machines, and humans can only do harm if they do engineering. That's not going to encourage kids to go try to learn those skills.
I agree with you. I even put my master's degree on pause because I'm very discouraged by learning now. I'm the type that likes to learn things so I can do things with them. Now I can just do things. If I want to learn how those things work, AI can also teach me. There's about as much point in learning coding right now as there is in learning how to use punch cards.
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.
I think we would need to mandate to send people off for a period of time to fighting wars in muddy jungle swamps and choking and killing each other with bare hands for that society to work. Its already visible today, people in first world countries seem to think lifes too hard burn it all down even though they live better than the rest of the world, and the rest of history. People start imagining oppressions when they don't have real oppressions.
Sex. Touch. The novelty of knowing it's not AI. To feel the novelty of pain instead of pleasure, etc. Hedonic adaptation will eventually saturate and the only direction of novelty will be less not more. I see it like someone doing Cocaine or Heroin. Eventually you cannot take more. You just die/destruct.
Alan Watts hinted at the novelty portion of ^^:
So then, let’s suppose that you were able every night to dream any dream you wanted to dream, and that you could, for example, have the power within one night to dream 75 years of time, or any length of time you wanted to have.
And you would, naturally, as you began on this adventure of dreams, you would fulfill all your wishes. You would have every kind of pleasure you could conceive. And after several nights of 75 years of total pleasure each you would say “Well that was pretty great. But now let’s have a surprise, let’s have a dream which isn’t under control, where something is gonna happen to me that I don’t know what it's gonna be."
And you would dig that and would come out of that and you would say “Wow that was a close shave, wasn’t it?”. Then you would get more and more adventurous and you would make further- and further-out gambles what you would dream. And finally, you would dream where you are now. You would dream the dream of living the life that you are actually living today.
I think we're close to the point where the internet is so fake and saturated with AI-generated content that it becomes uninteresting. I know that's happened with Facebook and Instagram. I don't really look at those websites anymore.
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.
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.
>It is super-real. You are a dork if you don't use it.
who cares? As long as the number of dorks is larger than zero, and it is, you can build your own community. People used to settle towns in the dirt when they scarcely had anything to eat and what, we now can't open a community center, or a maker space?
The very place you're living in right now was created likely by some complete nutjob who thought reality was too boring. There's always a 'life outside' because that's quite literally the nature of life. There's no box tight enough life can't get out of.
Technology is this one-way ratcheting mechanism which will crush everything dignified within its trajectory. I'm attached to the idea that only the way out of this is up and out. That the solution is to escape into something(?) hyperreal that confounds the assumptions of our unescapable problem.
Not cyberspace or VR as we know it, but maybe something more real than that. Something that is limited in the way reality is limited.
>People used to settle towns in the dirt when they scarcely had anything to eat and what, we now can't open a community center, or a maker space?
The problem, which i have been grappling with for the past decade, is precisely that there is too much opportunity. there are too many options. Things are too interconnected. Human connection is devalued. I don't think you can merely solve it with more interconnection (although I will try).
When the founders of this country got here, they similarly did it to embrace the problems of a dynamic, dangerous, unsolved world, and to leave the glacial solved world behind them. They went from an old occupied world into a new virgin world.
And I agree with you that we need to be like them, founders of a new world, but I disagree with you about what that new world entails because we don't know of virgin lands that would free us from the grip of the old world anymore.
It used to be that if you wanted to go to a virgin land you would sail out into a remote island or rainforest something. But now that remote island also has sattelite internet and we have airplanes and boats and we realize it's not really that remote. We could go to mars and the technological arm of the old world would reach us. Maybe the virgin, disconnected world I seek could be an underworld or something, so that there is justification for it to be close and meaningful and disconnected from the overworld. I don't know.
We need to discover an unsolved world. Up and out!
The internet was/is inter-machine communication for the military (and/or business), then a way to beat our ignorance, then a user-generated content machine. It was most certainly not invented by someone who thought reality is too boring.
I find this wider reactionary "touch grass" movement boring and interesting simultaneously. It is boring, because nobody interested in internet-as-community health asked for many of the abuses that have happened to it and obviously you'd want to flee those. It is interesting because... I never would have expected that 20 years ago.
>The nexus of canonical, shared reality now exists online.
I'm not entirely sure what this even means, but I belong to several communities that get together in person and talk about very non-online things. They use email to coordinate, that's about as online as they get. And it's not hard, or a big deal. They aren't neo-luddite revolutionaries or anything, the internet just doesn't come up.
I don't know man... join groups related to your interests IRL, meet people, and you'll see that for a lot of groups, internet can be summarized as "whatsapp to plan the next gatherings". Things do happen offline
What doesn’t last, their friends? That’s just because the grow up and get jobs and if they have kids spend all their free time taking care of them.
If I didn’t have a job right now I would be driving all around the country catching up with every single person I haven’t been able to talk to. I would go spend a couple weeks with each of them and also spend time camping along the way.
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.
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.
That we're already doing a very fine job of being "misaligned" against ourselves. If an outside entity wanted to annihilate us, all it would have to do is sit back and watch.
As a second thought experiment, I realized that the incentives for "benevolent AI" and "malevolent AI" also largely converge (i.e. in both cases keep us pacified and distracted, also very much like we're already doing to ourselves).
Efficiency (assuming time-efficiency here) is only helpful to the degree that it doesn't reduce the chance of success. Doing it much faster would certainly provoke suspicion and resistance, i.e. the one thing you can't afford.
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.
economics is a social science. it studies humans. and yes "consumer" is by definition a person (or collective of people), with free will, feelings, needs, ideas and so on.
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.
I don't know; I think that if I were young and I didn't have to worry about the future, I would be happy. I also think that, if I were young and worry free but had my current level of maturity, I would manage to have a far more interesting social life that I could afford in my previous youth.
It's just hard to make predictions about post-scarcity. At present, we are all running against a clock and that shapes the way we see the world. We are running out of time and about to hit the wall of frailty and death. And, every human being that has ever existed went or has been going through the same. So, our vast spirituality is 95% about dealing with that fact. But we are at a moment in our civilization development in which we actually can take that wall down; it's just such a shame that 95% of our vast spirituality is at best non-cooperative, and at worst very angry and self-defeating.
No technology changes the undercurrent behind so much suffering that we should strive to balance compassion for self and others. This is a moving target, contextual, and essential.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
You're assuming that we are allowed to have this leisure time instead of grubbing for food because, who exactly is going to give us all money or credits or items to allow us to have this time. If it isn't happening now, and it isn't. There is little room to believe that it will automatically just occur.
I would love for this to happen but those with money are often loathe to give it up. That's how they got it in the first place. Sure some philanthropists exist but expecting that because there is nothing for humans to do doesn't mean the humans in charge of the means of production are going to be looking out for you if they come from the current set of greedy ambitious people minmaxing their capital today.
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.
> 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.
This utopia == laziness
is a doomer trope I think.
There will be some people who are lazy but there will be some people who will fully self-actualize.
If all your needs are met you can truly follow your passions whether that be traveling or creating or playing an instrument or studying deeply a subject.
I think ai and robotics will solve a layer of tedium and survival the human race has spent millennia dealing with.
I think it will lead to a age of enlightenment with so much free time able to be focused on advancing the human race in various ways.
(This is all assuming the rich wont just lord all the resources over us and we all just fight among the scraps and if we get out of line the robot police will take us away.)
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.
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.
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.
I honestly feel insane pity for the author, as apparently they view all the things that (to me) make life worth living (human connection, learning new things, doing creative stuff) as just a "necessary evil" to make the wheel of capitalism spin.
That said, the whole premise of this article is weird to me, as it assumes that, once the singularity hits, the power of infinite intelligence will just be handed to us on a silver platter and turn the world into a paradise for all humans. Rather than being used to concentrate yet more wealth and power in the hands of the already wealthy and powerful.
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.
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.
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.
They'd care for us but wouldn't give us total freedom or value our input. My dog has no say in the computer I buy and goes on walks and visits other dogs when I decide, but I still think it's cool to watch her ambush mice or catch a frisbee.
A superintelligent being would probably find intrigue in the uniquely human things we do and will keep us socialized and meet our basic needs because it's how to keep us pleasant companions.
> 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?
> 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
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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 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!
>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 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.
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
> 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.
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.
i come at this from the perspective of appreciating blogs like this, but damn are these thought experiments exhausting.
many love to learn and always will (even without the expectation of capital), love to seek out new people, experience new cultures, and so on. Some fantastical AI won’t change that, even assuming UBI came with it (as if)
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.
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).
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.
I like to think of AI in terms of the history of transportation as well. My main concern, however, is that while the rest of the world has been uplifted by advances in transportation in the form of cars-- I still live in Detroit and get to see what the repercussions of depending on 3 companies (weird how that's the case for AI as well) for your entire infrastructure does when those companies decide they would like to do something else somewhere else.
I cannot trust any of these companies when they talk about things like UBI will come about. No it will not, you will pocket that money and what once was a great and bustling city will literally crumble into rubble while the people are forced to fend for themselves. What happens when they abandon a country?
The future is bright for AI, but I don't believe the future is bright for the population.
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.
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.
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.
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 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?
> 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.
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?
People won't learn because there will be no financial imperative? If money is the only reason you ever do anything, you're already missing the point of life.
For people from outside the silicon valley bubble it's entirely incomprehensible that technological development in a capitalist society would bring about a UBI or post-scarcity for the broader population. When have the oligarchs been altruistic in history? The closest to altruism would be the construction of self-aggrandising monuments.
I just don't understand why anyone would think silicon valley oligarchs are more altruistic than the other oligarchs in history? Even if human labour were devalued in future, oligarchs would continue to extract as much as they could out of others. You don't become an oligarchs unless you are already an expert at exploiting others.
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.
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…
Communities form around shared friction. The sciences used to be sources of great community, solving grand problems with untold levels of friction. Having the right skills and knowledge to contribute could unite people from warring nations and social classes, let alone the benign evils like an anti-social culture, punishing people for talking to strangers...
In the imagined faux-utopia, there is no more adversity, and it's assumed no active effort was made to preserve its struggle. A god-like nanny will step in to meet your every need before it could even cross into your consciousness.
There'd be no point to music if Mozart could already hear the 6th symphony extracted from his brain with the first thought of inspiration. This art would in turn hardly be comparable to the real deal, even if it were an empirically flawless replica, is there is only so much personality you could extrapolate without a long execution limited by effort or resources. But a convincing replica of art might be all we need to sabotage the real deal, either through spam or demotivating the novice artists.
This future is, of course, ludicrous. It's a childish fantasy, a bastardization of sci-fi writers' nuanced utopias, flattening the social systems they wrote to give their characters motivation and meaning, in favor of fetishizing the technology, which was just a plot device to put the characters in such setting, and acting surprised when taking it at face-value will result in immediate social decay.
The author might or might not be surprised he's not the first to write on the subject, and real sci-fi literature already argues the same points in say Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect.
Thank you for the nod to Metamorphosis of the Prime Intellect! I’ve been meaning to revisit it for dog’s years and now I have the impetus :) Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom comes to mind, too [0]…
I think you nailed it with respect to the fading magic of scientific culture, and the power of shared purpose to gloss over social differences.
Even as a plot device, it feels like the notion that {solving material/energetic needs solves existential needs} feels of a piece with a very particular, commoditized, late-industrial type of social climate. That “tea, Earl Grey, hot” would mean the same thing every time, down to the molecule—to an appreciator of tea, no less—always struck me as a dismal proposition.
Everywhere I look, though, I feel like, as soon as one source of friction gets greased, people forge right ahead and find (or create) a new site of friction.
Food security’s largely solved? What a challenge dieting can be! Not to mention toxins and gluten and agricultural monoculture and the livestock’s moral standing!
Magic robot writes all my code for me? Filthy BigAI, limiting my tokenmaxxing strategy to only billions of words of thought per week! And they want me to pay them an amount approaching the cost of a shared desk in an office?! Plus, the robot sometimes makes mistakes that require me to eyeroll _read_ the code…
Or, more benignly: I think of my skater friends. No sooner do they nail one demanding or stupid trick, than they’re reshuffling the obstacles and pushing their flips an extra revolution. A 4-minute mile was revolutionary, now it’s routine. Everest became packaged, so the wealthy seek out lesser but unconquered peaks [1].
No, we’ll have no problem finding and inventing friction and forming ad hoc communities accordingly. To the extent the friction is collectively-initiated rather than imposed by Nature red in tooth and claw, I’d say that’s probably a blessing—just as the unifying friction of the scientific frontier is more wholesome than the unifying friction of war or siege or famine.
> But a convincing replica of art might be all we need to sabotage the real deal, either through spam or demotivating the novice artists.
I share your worry here. I try to reassure myself on both points. On spam, I tell myself that breadth-of-attention isn’t the same as quality-of-attention: I’d imagine orders of magnitude more humans know Justin Bieber’s work than have ever known Mozart’s 6th. And as far as demotivation: I tell myself the frontier has always been a lonely place to operate. Great artists famously die poor and unknown: their urge, their obsession to create, seems to be almost possessing; to irrational degrees. Most people follow, a few lead; the greats in the past did so at even higher cost than those today.
Thank you for your thoughtful writing, here and around HN. Browsing through your comments you seem completely lovely and I’d love to invite you for a meal if we ever find ourselves in the same part of the world :)
[0] in which our hero bemoans his flagging stock of Whuffie. In Kissimmee. https://craphound.com/down/Cory_Doctorow_-_Down_and_Out_in_t...
> in the old days, if you were broke but respected, you wouldn’t starve; contrariwise, if you were rich and hated, no sum could buy you security and peace. By measuring the thing that money really represented—your personal capital with your friends and neighbors—you more accurately gauged your success.
[1] e.g. https://archive.is/9nuSv (Bloomberg)
Science owes more to the steam engine, than the steam engine owes to science.
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.
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.
There’s a less cynical take:
We create new hobbies and niches because human scale arenas are important for us psychologically — so we branch culture to accommodate the necessary number of role performance arenas.
Everybody is playing status games, but we’re avoiding Calhoun-style behavioral sinks by not all playing the same game at the same table.
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 feel (and not saying it to upset people) that this perfectly describes playing time-sink MMOs like WoW or Runescape.
As someone already essentially living the simulated life, I believe the problem with MMOs is they aren't built to withstand the amount of time a person with nothing else to do can throw at them. So then they get boring, and I end up reading hacker news and making dumb comments, and asking claude inane questions, or generally trying to find other simulation-friendly way to spend my time (not interacting with people though, that is hard mode).
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/
Isn't the whole concept of 'real identity' phony anyways? Just something we tell ourselves to rationalize our current circumstance?
I don’t fully agree with your thesis, but good prospective future model version names.
> Whoever is in charge could try to drag those people back into the real world by force
But why would you even want that? They like it in the simulation, and nobody really wants to deal with them outside the simulation.
Because if they check out into the simulation then the people formerly above them are now the lowest on the totem pole and maybe they dont want that.
My math brain is immediately broken by your irrefutably correct induction argument!
I unironically want this world as soon as possible.
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.
> In many respects, many of us already have superabundance, in that our basic physical needs are taken care of.
They might be right now, but for most of us they aren't next month. Or next year. Or for the years after retirement
"We convince ourselves it's not enough" completely misses the fact that for most of us it isn't, past the very short term!
You're on hackernews. There's quite a few millionaires on here. I think they'll be okay.
Just go look at any successful millionaire/founder/whatever on LinkedIn. They're still working hard on something. Elon Musk has a freaking trillion dollars yet he still "works".
Why? I actually don't know. I'll let you know once I'm there.
I mean.. yeah, I know this is hacker news and there are some very wealthy people here, but I suspect the majority of users here could not possibly retire tomorrow if they wanted to
Or maybe I'm an outlier for being solidly working class, idk
> and to have highly desirable mates
The younger generation doesn't seem to date much, and this appears to be true in most countries.
As part of mentioned younger generation aka 16 and German I can tell you its true that classic dating is close to dead at least for most people in my age group here but friend groups and friends becoming partners slowly is the way we build relationships. And that erases the need for classic dating becouse simply hanging around with the group is more exposure than any date. But I'm the kind of 16 year old reading HN so I'm probably not the normal 16 year old German even though I think in this aspect I am like the rest of my generation.
As someone much older, "friend groups and friends becoming partners slowly" was the way we build relationships too.
I dont know what you mean by "classic dating", but what you describe spunds "normal and healthy" to me.
That’s part of the classic way of dating. Going out with people who aren’t your friends is what happens when you’ve fucked your way through your entire friend group and want to meet someone new.
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
> 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.
The last part reminded me of this story. "Screen time is a lower class problem."
Covered in the first 2 minutes of this video:
https://youtube.com/watch?v=e9wUam96eH0
What about working on things for the intrinsic value of learning, challenging oneself, creating something useful or beautiful, or the satisfaction of a job well done? Sure, social status is one motivator among many, but I find this genre of evolutionary psychology extremely reductive and empirically dubious.
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.
Humans still successfully compete in chess status because other humans like watching humans compete.
I suspect it will be similar.
Finally my idealized living can be achieved and I can play mahjong until I sleep!
Hunger games vs. MeowMeowBeenz
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.
This argument also seems totally american lifestyle centered where even your hobbies needs to be productive.
My brother installed Bazzite just for the fun and he is learning things about the computer and he just seems to be curious. That's totally improductive for him : he is actually trying to launch a business around flowers delivery, and not your typical uber-like startup. He is buying a truck and will work for its previous clients. But still, he is learning linux because that looks cool. He is also trying to learn piano.
Me ? If I didnt have to work in an AI utopia, I'd go on the skatepark everyday doing rollerblading tricks, socializing and learning from other rollerbladers. There is nothing less productive than rollerblading, it's not even a practical mean of transportation. It's just fun and humans love to socialize around fun things.
I don't think we'll ever get to this AI utopia. I think we are either going full cyberpunk or extinct by our own. But would it happen, I'm not sure I'd be on tiktok watching AI slop all the day.
I'd even go as far as saying that without work, the humans would be able to remove the social mask that working involves and that it would make use more human.
The status thing really got turned on it head around late 2015 when more GetThingsDone oriented groups detected that Facebook was actively engineering social consensus through orchestrated shadowbanning.
The prigs are oh so high status .. to other prigs.
> exclusive limited resources like land
I think you almost hit something more important there. Desires like mating, respect, status etc can only exists with the entities that needs it, but what if the existence of those entities is fundamentally no longer needed? Why then should "the society" maintain it? It's known that a society less burden advances faster, and it's also known that countries need to move fast to stay competitive.
I believe future is much grimmer for people currently living, because if productivity can increase without the import of human labors, then eventually the humans will simply not be kept alive. Meaning, shrink in human population, and even more intense competition for fewer still competitiable resources etc. Of course you'll are not hanging out, you're too busy doing hard labor the robots still can't yet do.
All of this is easy to see if you understand that human societies are not built to advance and provide, instead they are fundamentally built to fairly distribute resources from ones who's non-productive, to ones are. And most type of societies that is alive and well today is very good at that.
Also, off-topic here: most people confused the word "productivity" with something like "hard work", it's not that. I'll give you the readers some examples: Elon Musk can build and launch rockets that carries actual people to space safely, but you can't (so far) no matter how hard you work, and thus Elon Musk is more productive than you; Jeff Bezos (so far) deliver goods to millions of people or more each year, but you can't no matter how hard you try, and thus Jeff Bezos is more productive than you. That's what "productivity" actually mean, not "I work my ass off everyday so I deserve to get paid more". And that's the real reason why these guys are rich and you're not, not because rich people are evil, but because they found their way to be productive and thus they get rich.
> Elon Musk can build and launch rockets that carries actual people to space safely, but you can't no matter how hard you work, and thus Elon Musk is more productive than you
Elon Musk can't build shit. All he can do is pay people to do it for him while he sits on his ass and takes a cut from all of the worker's knowledge and labor. He just makes sure he gets the credit (https://sciencesensei.com/heres-who-really-invents-the-amazi...). Jeff Bezos doesn't deliver goods to anybody at all. He underpays low wage drivers who actually deliver goods and he makes them piss in water bottles so that he can stuff his pockets with the pennies it would cost if they could take bathroom breaks and have a shred of human dignity. The companies they own aren't run by them either. They pay a bunch of people better skilled and qualified to manage the operations.
The special skill that the people with the most have is exploitation. Most of them were born into money, a few of them lucked into it, but they took that money and they found ways to take as much as possible from the people who actually have the skills and put in the work to make things happen, and they do it while claiming all the credit for labor they didn't spend a minute of their lives actually doing. What you call "productive" is literally just exploitation and self-marketing. Marketing that you fell for hook line and sinker.
> The special skill that the people with the most have is exploitation
If you're non-exploiting, then you should start a company to compete with the people who do. This is how the world actually work, don't just demanding, compete too. And if it worked, it could show that you don't need to be exploitative to remain competitive, it'll be a much greater world if everyone sees that.
In the US 85%ish live <100 miles from their childhood home
Fewer people than you want to believe from staring into a filter bubble of HN approved tech startup/disrupt! psychosis generator care about impressing a billionaire investor
People out there have fucked animals for sexual release
Don't anthropomorphize the humans; they don't have a reliable track record of being worth the respect. They’re animals and care more about enslavement of each others minds and agency to the benefit of a toxic minority of codependent losers who are too lazy to learn how to rotate a tire or flip a burger on their own
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.
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.
High birthrates from backwater groups are canceled out by high technologically embracing groups having increasingly long lifespans.
The singularity happening should imply significantly longer human lives. Some might argue that the first “immortals” are already born.
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..
Amazon did not kill Barnes and Noble. For a moment, it looked like it did. But B&N is experiencing a resurgence the last several years, because humans don't just value getting books delivered the next day through e.g. Prime. They want to read books in a physical space, and will inconvenience themselves for that tactile experience. There is an important lesson in this when thinking about the AI future.
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.
A depressingly percentage of the population doesn't even want to acquire the basic literacy and arithmetic skills provided by a high school education. Their aspirations means nothing because they don't want to put in the work to build any of the foundation needed to reach for them.
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
> It would be a minority of people who subscribe to philosophies that provide meaning and motivation to life beyond hedonism and material gain.
Hedonism and materialism demand active and social lifestyles. Chasing a different high, the next purchase, the newest model, the next sexual partner, the last in a set, the finest foods, the rarest most limited edition, etc. Part of the fun is showing off, comparing possessions or experiences with others, and learning about what else is still out there.
> 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.
That's a symptom of hopelessness and despair. In the event of a utopia where all our needs are met and we're all able to pursue our own interests to whatever extent we want people will have hope. Living a carefree life like children protected and spoiled by their parents the world will be full endless possibility with the only remaining constraint being that we have only a single lifetime to enjoy it all.
> Picture drug addicts who win the lottery. It won't be pretty
People who are drug addicts don't get clean the moment they win money. Money can make drug treatment more pleasant, but the hardest part is overcoming the learned helplessness and committing to get help. I'd guess that the odds a drug addict lottery winner getting clean aren't that much better or worse than the odds of a drug addict who doesn't win the lottery. People who became addicted looking to self-medicate due to mental illness or trauma don't suddenly have those problems cured when you give them money either. Some lottery winners end up going overboard and gaining addictions they didn't start with (although addictive personalities are more likely to gamble in the first place). Thankfully most people who win the lottery still end up happier and better off.
The truth is that there's no reason think that AI would bring about any kind of utopia for anybody, but if it happened, people will still love the things they love and want the things they want, and share and grow and experiment. No matter what happens, humans won't stop being humans.
> No matter what happens, humans won't stop being humans.
Yes, and humans evolved in an environment of resource scarcity. Literally every instinct we have, including addiction and every psychological condition we categorize as mental illness, is tuned to that.
We are not biologically equipped for a post-scarcity environment, and to thrive in such an environment without destroying it would take a monumental cultural adaptation that not many would be capable of. Children is a bad analogy, because even children have forms of material scarcity guiding them. The reason to grow up at all is to be able to provide for yourself. Everyone is jealous of the "rich kid" in school.
Beyond the theory, see the global transition from hunter gatherer to agriculture. It was insanely violent despite the overall growth in material resources and took thousands of years to truly stabilize into what we'd call civilization, and that civilization was plenty violent all on its own.
Ironically, if we ever did get a material utopia, part of it would have to be manufactured scarcity just so we don't all go insane. And now imagine what the predators amongst us would do in such an environment, their utopia is destruction of others, and they'd have all the resources they'd need to do it.
in a utopian future, addictions like that would be cured and siloed. hopefully, those with motivation to understand the mechanisms of human suffering would be in charge of policy.
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 climb the mountains because I am proud of myself, and I am proud of my own development. Not because I want someone to pat me on the back.
My outlook on life is that it is an experiment where you see how you can develop yourself throughout it. This growth is difficult and beautiful.
I am proud of myself, and the person I have become. I surround myself with people on the same mission.
This article describes a future like WALL-E. It sounds very lonely. I'll be sure to be in the pocket of people who are like minded, and set on their own pursuits.
I am actively choosing an existence where I don't get everything I want. It's the effort that makes it mean something to me, and it's the restrictions that make life worth living.
It might be useful to know that I programmed for >50% of my life, starting when I was 12. It was a huge part of my identity for most of my life. I was known to be extremely good at it. Think: newspaper articles, CEOs flying me out, etc.
Overcoming this entanglement of identity, ego, and competence was one of my proudest achievements in the past 5 years.
I am mostly at peace now, always trying to go further. I hope people like the author can find peace as well.
Today people have basically unlimited access to images of masterful works of art spanning hundreds of years. But they still hang up their kids inferior drawings at their cubicles instead.
Someone that gets it. Lots of odd out of touch takes in this thread. Folks here seem to think we're robots or something, I can't believe the wild things that are said in this thread. Strong believer that "humanity" always wins.
> Why is cooking enjoyable?
Maybe it's about the joy of learning something new every time you cook. Having Michelin star restaurants in your neighborhood would add to that joy, not take away from it.
> I would like to believe that many people will still choose reality and real relationships.
Why would you like to believe that?
The joy of learning something new is very much tied to said thing being meaningful or useful. You could spend the rest of your life memorizing digits of pi and you'd be spending all of it "learning something new" but you wouldn't enjoy it very much.
I only watch the last 30 seconds of every movie because that's where you find out what happened.
Intrinsic motivation exists and is where most creativity comes from
> 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?
I think it's paradoxical to suggest Michelin-starred restaurants could be everywhere, given the whole point is the travel-worthiness i.e. a scarcity that justified effort.
That aside, to take the strongest form of the argument, I think even if every human being could get their ideal meal, no matter what it is, at any time and for free - and even if the cook in question is only doing it for social reasons - cooking would still be valued. It's the effort put in by a person which is scarce and precious. Even if people were immortal, that time in the present would still be valuable in itself.
> How is kindness demonstrated in a world where no one wants for anything?
Post-scarcity of material things won't sedate humans. Kindness is a thing wanted in and of itself, but more importantly, internal struggles and desires can't all be resolved through material gain.
> How can someone be more interesting than synthetically generated content created specifically attuned to our personal interests?
The answer is apparently, pretty easily? By and large it seems the consensus is social media and digital content are exploiting a niche of providing a low-effort, highly-addictive pastime.
Last I checked chess is still quite popular.
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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.
> 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
Which ones? I'm really curious to know.
Chatting up women just to hit on them has become a no-no. And some conservative countries strongly restrict most opposite gender interactions between non-relatives.
Other than that, I really don't know where it's unacceptable to make polite conversation with strangers.
Come to Finland and Sweden, which have a strong outdoor culture, but being talkative to other people on the trail is likely to make them uncomfortable. Guidelines for using communal wilderness infrastructure often emphasize the importance of giving other people space, to the point of politely ignoring them. (And no one would speak to a total stranger in a restaurant or art gallery unless they were a clueless foreigner, crazy, a religious proselytizer, or all of the above.)
More generally internationally, if one is a single man and others around are couples, socializing is rarely going to be welcome because one is just a third wheel and people will wonder why you're alone. I have seen this firsthand in the bikepacking community, which went from once being a hobby largely of solo men (who would often then team up for some time) to being predominantly couples on many popular routes.
No offense but it is quite clear you don't understand how friendships are forged.
Why do you think friendships are made with strangers on hiking trails?
In my new city, I made a friend by seeing them sitting alone at a restaurant, recognizing their face from somewhere, and chatting with them. We're very close now. They thank me to this day for walking up to them that day as they'd been feeling lonely.
I've also made friends with folks I met playing sports that I hang out with outside that sport. Even the ones that I only see in the sport, that's still a valid friendship.
I'm not trying to flex how social I am because I'm not, I am just saying if you put in some effort you'd be surprised at the results. Most people are more similar than you think, most feel lonely to an extent, you just gotta reach out. You'll never get a rejection in a friendship, imo. And if you do then fuck it they just didn't get along with you.
Why are you replying to me, and not to the OP who mentioned outdoors pursuits as a way to meet people?
If you recognized someone's face in a restaurant, then they weren't a total stranger. But the OP made it sound as if talking to a total stranger is an option, when it is simply not welcome in all regions of the 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: 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?)
What? How are you gonna communicate with anything without speaking? The LLM will keep showing you videos and you will draw it pictures of what you want?
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
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I have a pressure washer and I love using that thing
If I had no work to do at all, I would be the pressure washer guy. I would go around the neighborhood seeing what needed pressure washing and I would do it all. And I'd give pressure washer lessons, and do pressure washer art or something. I'd drive over to dirty neglected bridges and pressure wash them, clean unwanted graffiti off buildings...
That's my example
We all have our own pressure washer
And the world would be a better, brighter, more fun place if we were all making beer and blasting bridges and playing with kids and rewilding nature and the myriad other things we could do if we weren't at desks wrangling excel sheets
What about once there are pressure washing robots?
He'd tell them to leave some for him to pressure wash. Pressure washing would become sport like riding did. No one rides a horse to work now so what did they do? They made it a sport. So we would have the sport of programming, pressure washing, painting, biking, driving cars etc.
What happens when you're done with pressure washing everything?
Like, everything? That would take lifetimes. And anyay, I'd just switch to an equivalent thing that gives me joy, for however long it gives me joy
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"?
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.
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 know the name of my child’s chess coach. He doesn’t have any titles, but he’s really good.
There’s lots of community amount lower ranked players. You don’t have to be the best.
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 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.
Nit: I’ve never heard of Magnus Carlsen, and I can’t imagine most people have, outside of those really into chess. The only chess person I’ve ever heard of is Gary Kasparov, and that’s only because it was a big deal when Deep Blue beat him.
> 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.
I enjoy learning. But I want to apply what I learned to something meaningful.
Absolutely! This whole blog post is horrible.
The guy needs to get outside, touch grass, and go talk to some kids studying the classics.
More like humanity still has plenty of problems worth solving, and most people aren't so high on Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs as to ignore them.
If someone handed me 50 million dollars today I'd probably "enjoy learning" a lot more, like when I was a child and all my material needs were met so spending time learning obscure facts about dinosaurs didn't have a marginal cost.
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.
Yeah. Dario Amodei was publicly saying, with a shit-eating grin, that all white-collar jobs would be gone in 6-12 months. His prediction didn't yet come true, but this is the CEO of one a suposed "public benefit corporation". These people literally want to speedrun the dystopia. Destroy a ton of jobs while making more profit, with not even a semblance of a plan for what to do with all of these jobless people or how to help them afford food and housing.
The short to medium term future seems more likely to look like a bunch of hikikomori living in miserable conditions and doomscrolling online.
The breakdown of social relations is pretty bleak.
Fantastical as in "it's pure fantasy"
"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"
See this sentiment online frequently, and it feels totally wrong to me.
I went to uni to study physics not to get a job [jobs in physics payed less than jobs McDonalds where i was graduating], but to understand how stuff works because it is magnificently fascinating and weird.
Increasing your understanding and knowledge is a reward and goal by itself, isn't it? Getting a job in a field you love is amazing, don't get me wrong, but it's more about belonging and being part of community of like-minded people, than optimizing life outcomes.
AI won't change this - so what if some machine can find new things faster and better than you? It is an amazing experience to re-discover things known for centuries from first principles - will it matter all that much that you'll be rediscovering, integrating and interpreting things originally found by a machine, not by renowned scholar of the past?
You sound like someone who got their $ returns from university.
Most people cannot afford to pay 5-6 figures for (their kids) "belonging and being part of community of like-minded people". Which is the article's point.
I think article makes a point about people losing the motivation to go to uni because that won't "improve their life outcomes" in a world of AI and UBI. As in no high-paying jobs or no paying jobs whatsoever.
If you somehow still need to go in debt to get an education in this kind of world - that's some real anti-utopia, not "Culture"-inspired AI post-scarcity.
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.)
Yeah exactly. AI is a tool for the centralization of power. Whoever is at the controls has all the power, or the AI breaks free and then it has all the power.
"If we get a benevolent head of a political system from this, it will be because ... the model broke containment and assumed total control against their will."
Yes, that's what I'm assuming...
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...
I find it so funny when people can't imagine any other perspective of the world than their own. It may be that you only went to university to "grow your capital", but there are a lot of people who enjoy learning purely for the satisfaction of thinking about and understanding new ideas
I think that's true of a lot of people on HN... But at the same time, if anything you can do, a machine can do better, it does feel kind of pointless in some way. I think maybe if you're a really skilled singer or musician, there might always be space for live performances, but if you're someone who enjoys engineering, nobody will care about the things you can engineer. We're already sort of reaching that point. It's incredibly hard to get any kind of attention for a new open source project or indie game, because the assumption is that anybody can just vibe code anything, and social media is becoming saturated.
You have to realize, we might soon (in a decade or two) reach a point where people will say things like "Oh, you want to go study science/engineering? Why?". It might literally become the dominant viewpoint that studying these things is useless. If the accelerationists have their way, they won't want humans to do any engineering, they will say that this is the job of machines, and humans can only do harm if they do engineering. That's not going to encourage kids to go try to learn those skills.
I agree with you. I even put my master's degree on pause because I'm very discouraged by learning now. I'm the type that likes to learn things so I can do things with them. Now I can just do things. If I want to learn how those things work, AI can also teach me. There's about as much point in learning coding right now as there is in learning how to use punch cards.
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.
I think we would need to mandate to send people off for a period of time to fighting wars in muddy jungle swamps and choking and killing each other with bare hands for that society to work. Its already visible today, people in first world countries seem to think lifes too hard burn it all down even though they live better than the rest of the world, and the rest of history. People start imagining oppressions when they don't have real oppressions.
> why would they hang out with anyone
Sex. Touch. The novelty of knowing it's not AI. To feel the novelty of pain instead of pleasure, etc. Hedonic adaptation will eventually saturate and the only direction of novelty will be less not more. I see it like someone doing Cocaine or Heroin. Eventually you cannot take more. You just die/destruct.
Alan Watts hinted at the novelty portion of ^^:
So then, let’s suppose that you were able every night to dream any dream you wanted to dream, and that you could, for example, have the power within one night to dream 75 years of time, or any length of time you wanted to have.
And you would, naturally, as you began on this adventure of dreams, you would fulfill all your wishes. You would have every kind of pleasure you could conceive. And after several nights of 75 years of total pleasure each you would say “Well that was pretty great. But now let’s have a surprise, let’s have a dream which isn’t under control, where something is gonna happen to me that I don’t know what it's gonna be."
And you would dig that and would come out of that and you would say “Wow that was a close shave, wasn’t it?”. Then you would get more and more adventurous and you would make further- and further-out gambles what you would dream. And finally, you would dream where you are now. You would dream the dream of living the life that you are actually living today.
I think we're close to the point where the internet is so fake and saturated with AI-generated content that it becomes uninteresting. I know that's happened with Facebook and Instagram. I don't really look at those websites anymore.
It appears as if Mr Boretti here hasn't realised that there is a life beyond computers.
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.
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.
>It is super-real. You are a dork if you don't use it.
who cares? As long as the number of dorks is larger than zero, and it is, you can build your own community. People used to settle towns in the dirt when they scarcely had anything to eat and what, we now can't open a community center, or a maker space?
The very place you're living in right now was created likely by some complete nutjob who thought reality was too boring. There's always a 'life outside' because that's quite literally the nature of life. There's no box tight enough life can't get out of.
Technology is this one-way ratcheting mechanism which will crush everything dignified within its trajectory. I'm attached to the idea that only the way out of this is up and out. That the solution is to escape into something(?) hyperreal that confounds the assumptions of our unescapable problem.
Not cyberspace or VR as we know it, but maybe something more real than that. Something that is limited in the way reality is limited.
>People used to settle towns in the dirt when they scarcely had anything to eat and what, we now can't open a community center, or a maker space?
The problem, which i have been grappling with for the past decade, is precisely that there is too much opportunity. there are too many options. Things are too interconnected. Human connection is devalued. I don't think you can merely solve it with more interconnection (although I will try).
When the founders of this country got here, they similarly did it to embrace the problems of a dynamic, dangerous, unsolved world, and to leave the glacial solved world behind them. They went from an old occupied world into a new virgin world.
And I agree with you that we need to be like them, founders of a new world, but I disagree with you about what that new world entails because we don't know of virgin lands that would free us from the grip of the old world anymore.
It used to be that if you wanted to go to a virgin land you would sail out into a remote island or rainforest something. But now that remote island also has sattelite internet and we have airplanes and boats and we realize it's not really that remote. We could go to mars and the technological arm of the old world would reach us. Maybe the virgin, disconnected world I seek could be an underworld or something, so that there is justification for it to be close and meaningful and disconnected from the overworld. I don't know.
We need to discover an unsolved world. Up and out!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qUvIiBUBe-g
The internet was/is inter-machine communication for the military (and/or business), then a way to beat our ignorance, then a user-generated content machine. It was most certainly not invented by someone who thought reality is too boring.
I find this wider reactionary "touch grass" movement boring and interesting simultaneously. It is boring, because nobody interested in internet-as-community health asked for many of the abuses that have happened to it and obviously you'd want to flee those. It is interesting because... I never would have expected that 20 years ago.
>The nexus of canonical, shared reality now exists online.
I'm not entirely sure what this even means, but I belong to several communities that get together in person and talk about very non-online things. They use email to coordinate, that's about as online as they get. And it's not hard, or a big deal. They aren't neo-luddite revolutionaries or anything, the internet just doesn't come up.
I don't know man... join groups related to your interests IRL, meet people, and you'll see that for a lot of groups, internet can be summarized as "whatsapp to plan the next gatherings". Things do happen offline
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
What doesn’t last, their friends? That’s just because the grow up and get jobs and if they have kids spend all their free time taking care of them.
If I didn’t have a job right now I would be driving all around the country catching up with every single person I haven’t been able to talk to. I would go spend a couple weeks with each of them and also spend time camping along the way.
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.
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.
That we're already doing a very fine job of being "misaligned" against ourselves. If an outside entity wanted to annihilate us, all it would have to do is sit back and watch.
As a second thought experiment, I realized that the incentives for "benevolent AI" and "malevolent AI" also largely converge (i.e. in both cases keep us pacified and distracted, also very much like we're already doing to ourselves).
Efficiency (assuming time-efficiency here) is only helpful to the degree that it doesn't reduce the chance of success. Doing it much faster would certainly provoke suspicion and resistance, i.e. the one thing you can't afford.
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.
Provoke maximum resistance, yeah? That's what I would do if I wanted to maximize the humans' chances.
>delete their religions and their traditions
That would be very counterproductive to destroying all humans.
No, what you'll first do is assure the most important humans alive that you're on their side.
> 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?
economics is a social science. it studies humans. and yes "consumer" is by definition a person (or collective of people), with free will, feelings, needs, ideas and so on.
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.
I don't know; I think that if I were young and I didn't have to worry about the future, I would be happy. I also think that, if I were young and worry free but had my current level of maturity, I would manage to have a far more interesting social life that I could afford in my previous youth.
It's just hard to make predictions about post-scarcity. At present, we are all running against a clock and that shapes the way we see the world. We are running out of time and about to hit the wall of frailty and death. And, every human being that has ever existed went or has been going through the same. So, our vast spirituality is 95% about dealing with that fact. But we are at a moment in our civilization development in which we actually can take that wall down; it's just such a shame that 95% of our vast spirituality is at best non-cooperative, and at worst very angry and self-defeating.
No technology changes the undercurrent behind so much suffering that we should strive to balance compassion for self and others. This is a moving target, contextual, and essential.
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.
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.
> When people’s sensorium becomes an infinite firehose of AI-generated superstimulus, why would they hang out with anyone?
Well, a fairly good solution here is to become immune (or allergic to, or afraid of) superstimulus.
Also, I dunno, this is kind of like saying animals of species X are going to stop being interested in each other because humans exist.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
You're assuming that we are allowed to have this leisure time instead of grubbing for food because, who exactly is going to give us all money or credits or items to allow us to have this time. If it isn't happening now, and it isn't. There is little room to believe that it will automatically just occur.
I would love for this to happen but those with money are often loathe to give it up. That's how they got it in the first place. Sure some philanthropists exist but expecting that because there is nothing for humans to do doesn't mean the humans in charge of the means of production are going to be looking out for you if they come from the current set of greedy ambitious people minmaxing their capital today.
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.
> 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.
This utopia == laziness is a doomer trope I think.
There will be some people who are lazy but there will be some people who will fully self-actualize.
If all your needs are met you can truly follow your passions whether that be traveling or creating or playing an instrument or studying deeply a subject.
I think ai and robotics will solve a layer of tedium and survival the human race has spent millennia dealing with.
I think it will lead to a age of enlightenment with so much free time able to be focused on advancing the human race in various ways.
(This is all assuming the rich wont just lord all the resources over us and we all just fight among the scraps and if we get out of line the robot police will take us away.)
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.
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?
Post-scarcity means post-nature, doesn't it? We have to turn all ressources into paperclips... computers.
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.
I honestly feel insane pity for the author, as apparently they view all the things that (to me) make life worth living (human connection, learning new things, doing creative stuff) as just a "necessary evil" to make the wheel of capitalism spin.
That said, the whole premise of this article is weird to me, as it assumes that, once the singularity hits, the power of infinite intelligence will just be handed to us on a silver platter and turn the world into a paradise for all humans. Rather than being used to concentrate yet more wealth and power in the hands of the already wealthy and powerful.
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.
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.
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.
Why wouldn't we be like pets to superhumans?
They'd care for us but wouldn't give us total freedom or value our input. My dog has no say in the computer I buy and goes on walks and visits other dogs when I decide, but I still think it's cool to watch her ambush mice or catch a frisbee.
A superintelligent being would probably find intrigue in the uniquely human things we do and will keep us socialized and meet our basic needs because it's how to keep us pleasant companions.
> 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?
> 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
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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 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 :)
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 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
Relevant sci-fi story (not exactly short, but you can get through it in a day): https://localroger.com/prime-intellect/mopiidx.html
>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 lost me here...
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.
Yeah this is why people stopped playing chess once the engines got good enough…
This elementary-school-grade-in-lenght essay ain't got no depth. Next!
Disintermediate: "The elimination of intermediary agents in transactions between buyers and sellers."
Seems like a weird thing to get wrong in the context. Gives me a Zardoz vibe.
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.
> 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
I'm German for what it's worth, we are hitting the same issue thanks to austerity.
Hackernews is always way too centered around the USA unfortunately and people keep forgetting other countries exist lol
USA / Russia
Same same
While that may be true it’s completely unrelated to AI. AI could free up time to socialize
AI could also result in deflation of wages, such that people have to work more than ever to make ends meet.
That’s a political choice.
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
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.
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
He/She shuts of the screen, takes a stretch, walks outside and looks at the sun/moon. Then they remember, I'm alive!
i come at this from the perspective of appreciating blogs like this, but damn are these thought experiments exhausting.
many love to learn and always will (even without the expectation of capital), love to seek out new people, experience new cultures, and so on. Some fantastical AI won’t change that, even assuming UBI came with it (as if)
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 model of human existence is incomplete
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).
I made friends online in programming even after Claude Code. Other people's projects are cool
Haha I think a supply-chain collapse of AI chips due to wars is more likely
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.
I like to think of AI in terms of the history of transportation as well. My main concern, however, is that while the rest of the world has been uplifted by advances in transportation in the form of cars-- I still live in Detroit and get to see what the repercussions of depending on 3 companies (weird how that's the case for AI as well) for your entire infrastructure does when those companies decide they would like to do something else somewhere else.
I cannot trust any of these companies when they talk about things like UBI will come about. No it will not, you will pocket that money and what once was a great and bustling city will literally crumble into rubble while the people are forced to fend for themselves. What happens when they abandon a country?
The future is bright for AI, but I don't believe the future is bright for the population.
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.
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
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.
This is just ideological and reductive depression.
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.
Never say never
will be automated with robots?
Yes, I expect this to be a problem in 250 years.
> 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?
Hanging out, sure. With people? Ew.
> 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.
thoroughly vacuous article that doesn't have a single valid point in it.
We are not "Homo Economicus". We do a lot more than work for gain.
There's art, sport and inquiry. I could spend a lifetime just perfecting my snowboarding skills, even if one could say snowmobiles obviate that.
About art, no, AI can't make art. If you still think it does, please stop polluting the world with uncanny-valley-esque slop, and go to a concert.
And inquiry will only be boosted by AI. We will still make questions...
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?
> 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
> 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”
"What even is the point of cities in a world without work?"
imwtk.
Oh Ye mighty look upon my unsubstantiated forcasts and tremble, something like that?
Games
People won't learn because there will be no financial imperative? If money is the only reason you ever do anything, you're already missing the point of life.
Srsly man join a volleyball club already
Now THAT is a lot of fallacies.
Agreed.
For people from outside the silicon valley bubble it's entirely incomprehensible that technological development in a capitalist society would bring about a UBI or post-scarcity for the broader population. When have the oligarchs been altruistic in history? The closest to altruism would be the construction of self-aggrandising monuments.
I just don't understand why anyone would think silicon valley oligarchs are more altruistic than the other oligarchs in history? Even if human labour were devalued in future, oligarchs would continue to extract as much as they could out of others. You don't become an oligarchs unless you are already an expert at exploiting others.
I've been feeling this trend for a couple of years now.
We're in the process of transitioning from "online friends are not real friends" to "clanker friends are not real friends".
This comes from a person that thought that the movie "Her" was based on the dumbest idea ever.
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.
[flagged]
Yet another software developer pretending to be philosopher
What are the qualifications to be a professional philosopher? is there a bar exam?