Society will adapt. It always has.
People can make much more meaningful contributions to society than working at a desk in some software company. Let the AI do that. Humans are way too valuable for that. Meaningfulness of the work one does is one of the most important features of work satisfaction. Not everyone needs to be a doctor, nurse or teacher. Those are just the most common examples, but there are many more meaningful jobs where you are not simply an AI in human form slaving away at a desk job.
It is also simply not true that things like suicide and addiction rates were higher in the recent past. For example, look at drug overdose rates that have risen sharply in the past decades.
So for the last few millennia, technology has automated away mostly manual labor and created room for knowledge work. The stuff that used to require a human brain. The “slave jobs” you’re talking about.
AI has the opposite effect. Engineers, teachers, doctors, lawyers, nurses are going to be mostly worthless (surgeons will still be necessary for a while and nurses will still need to administer IVs and such, but largely anything that’s not physically interacting with a patient will be automated away quicker). Anything creative is out the window too. AI can write 500 movie scripts in the time you can write one… And we were already trending towards slop with streaming.
The jobs that are safest for now are the ones where you don’t need to use your brain but your body. Physical automatons are more expensive to buy and maintain than subscribing to some AI agent service and the workers they replace are cheaper.
You’re sweeping a lot under the rug with that first sentence: Society will adapt. Yeah sure, barring global catastrophe, it will. Doesn’t mean people won’t die and suffer in the process.
I’m making no claims about good vs. bad jobs here; people can self-actualize however they like in my book. Nor was I making any specific point about epidemiology of deaths of despair in the recent past, but I think that trend serves to illustrate the overall point.
What am I sweeping under the rug? I’m not saying that change will be easy, but I’m talking about the end result. Too many people have made the wrong choices and got fooled by companies dangling big paychecks in front of their noses to work shitty office jobs.
You insinuated that in the past, people killed themselves more and had more addiction problems due to the fact that they couldn’t get the job they wanted. That is simply not true and just guessing at things you can’t back up. I’m showed you that the opposite is true: the data only shows that deaths of despair are getting worse than before we had all these bullshit jobs. Whether that is because of them or not cannot be said, but it shows that what you’re saying is not true.
Society will adapt. It always has. People can make much more meaningful contributions to society than working at a desk in some software company. Let the AI do that. Humans are way too valuable for that. Meaningfulness of the work one does is one of the most important features of work satisfaction. Not everyone needs to be a doctor, nurse or teacher. Those are just the most common examples, but there are many more meaningful jobs where you are not simply an AI in human form slaving away at a desk job.
It is also simply not true that things like suicide and addiction rates were higher in the recent past. For example, look at drug overdose rates that have risen sharply in the past decades.
So for the last few millennia, technology has automated away mostly manual labor and created room for knowledge work. The stuff that used to require a human brain. The “slave jobs” you’re talking about.
AI has the opposite effect. Engineers, teachers, doctors, lawyers, nurses are going to be mostly worthless (surgeons will still be necessary for a while and nurses will still need to administer IVs and such, but largely anything that’s not physically interacting with a patient will be automated away quicker). Anything creative is out the window too. AI can write 500 movie scripts in the time you can write one… And we were already trending towards slop with streaming.
The jobs that are safest for now are the ones where you don’t need to use your brain but your body. Physical automatons are more expensive to buy and maintain than subscribing to some AI agent service and the workers they replace are cheaper.
You’re sweeping a lot under the rug with that first sentence: Society will adapt. Yeah sure, barring global catastrophe, it will. Doesn’t mean people won’t die and suffer in the process.
I’m making no claims about good vs. bad jobs here; people can self-actualize however they like in my book. Nor was I making any specific point about epidemiology of deaths of despair in the recent past, but I think that trend serves to illustrate the overall point.
What am I sweeping under the rug? I’m not saying that change will be easy, but I’m talking about the end result. Too many people have made the wrong choices and got fooled by companies dangling big paychecks in front of their noses to work shitty office jobs.
You insinuated that in the past, people killed themselves more and had more addiction problems due to the fact that they couldn’t get the job they wanted. That is simply not true and just guessing at things you can’t back up. I’m showed you that the opposite is true: the data only shows that deaths of despair are getting worse than before we had all these bullshit jobs. Whether that is because of them or not cannot be said, but it shows that what you’re saying is not true.