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Comment by mdekkers | Hacker News Reader

Just like real people!

People pay me... to use StackOverflow haha

On a serious note this could potentially suck for developers. Just like the labor jobs and automation. You have a skill set? Well this computer can do your job. I guess be the guy building the code writing the code.

I do wonder what will we do when computers do everything for us. I have this motor that moves my neck to a look at a girl who also has a motor that moved her neck to look at me haha.

> People pay me... to use StackOverflow haha

Sorry but as another Google-coder I just had to say that from another perspective people pay you to do a job, to perform a task. You perform that task. How is up to you. ;)

Google-coder haha that sounds better.

Yeah can't be too copy-paste, gotta see what you're copying/pasting. Still the upvotes though/comments and date. Yeah really helpful and MDN/forums.

>I do wonder what will we do when computers do everything for us.

Yeah, this is a pretty existential question that has been posed a lot around here. What do you do if you do not have to do anything? It is like vacation, forever. You are free to be lazy, or creative, or adventurous, or somewhere in between, but will you be happier? I have been between significant work for a few months and I am itching to do something consequential but I also really enjoy the space to do anything, not that I take full advantage more often than when I was working full time.

The ongoing basic universal income study at YC, blog.ycombinator.com/hiring-for-basic-income/ I hope produces some more clarification.

I should check that out regarding the hiring-for-basic-income, I wonder is that a concept or... yeah should read. I don't understand how that proposed system would work as far as how things would be valued unless goods are just given to us/produced. Which you know, with regard to war I don't get what is to be gained, are there concentration camps, are there borders/lands trying to be gained. Also with the sun, what is this argument of diminishing resources if energy comes in from the sun, I mean are "nutrients" destroyed after being taken from the ground and into our bodies? sorry... ranting/rambling.

More so it was just, for me when I was not very busy I kind of felt unhappy, am I depressed? What is my purpose? I think the drive might disappear that made us evolve/try to do things in the first place. Then perhaps we become extinct haha. Got too darn efficient.

I also realize when we talk it's usually people reverting to themselves talking about themselves (I'm doing this right now). A friend of mine said "that's what people do, that's how you converse, offer your perspective tangible to the current discussion..." I don't know I just feel that I I I I I I (use the letter I) too much.

Yes, you might have just had the misfortune of crossing paths with an awkward person. Ha.

Thanks though for entertaining my thought. Wall-e is the answer.

edit: subbed awkward for neurotic

> It is like vacation, forever.

I guess that's one way to look at death from malnutrition, exposure or untreated illness.

We can wax optimistic about what post-automation life could be like, but let's be honest: right now, unless you are an investor in companies that have automated or provide automation solutions, you are in absolutely no position to see 'vacation, forever' on the horizon for yourself or your children in a post-automation world.

We should be frantically trying to do everything possible to fix that, however, because automation will be competing against the wage-labor relationship that the majority of people are dependent on.

If society can change from taxes on tea being too high, it can change when unemployment is 91%.

The revolution started from tea taxes being too high also had the backing of the richest people at the time in what would become the US.

The automation revolution also has the backing of the richest people in the world.

I don't think a populist movement was behind the revolution nor here.

Either we fix that, true, or there will be just far less people after a while. In the meantime, starvation may be a common "disease" in 1st world as well, just as it is already in the 3rd world.

It's just that automation needs many people. It is to fix the problem of mass production. If there are no consumer masses, there is no need for mass production and thus no need for automation.

But maybe the masses are just turned from consumers into products. That is what Google and Facebook already do today. Don't know If I would like to live in such a world. Already now I don't like it to be a Google product. Is that the choice, between starvation in freedom, or being nothing but a product, a second order slave?

If people are starving in the street they will just tear down the nation around them on their way out sounds like a non survival strategy.

Maybe, as a species, we've been in this situation before. Perhaps we realized we weren't ready, or never will be, to deal with a world in which all labor is replaced by technology, so we made one last high tech invention to destroy all the technology. The cycle continues!

I imagine, maybe wishful lyrics and hopefully, that we will still need and value human coders, if at least to maintain the AI developers

I remember Buck Rogers in the 1980s, the robots just built other robots and programmed them. No human being built robots because robots were better at it than human beings.

They thought the same was true of the robots flying their spaceships to fight the Marauders until Buck Rogers showed them he could fight the Marauders better than the robots. Something to do with red dogging the quarterback and going with gut instincts that robots could not do.

> Something to do with red dogging the quarterback and going with gut instincts that robots could not do.

There's a lot of hand-wavey wishful thinking about some innate capability humans have that robots/AI somehow will be unable to obtain in sci fi, that will semi-magically ensure we remain superior.

It's the same kind of blind-spot you run into if you try to get people to explain how free will could be possible and ask them to define it.

That's a tough one free will.

I usually default to "what if you killed yourself" but then you follow it up with "Well but by killing yourself..." ahhh

It does drive you insane to think you're just in this infinite sized thing and you're this thing that creates a perception of your external container and soon you'll cease to exist, does the world cease to exist as well, hard to imagine just not being. Guess time to find out haha.

I also laugh at my own problems and then you just imagine zooming out of the Earth and being in space. Nothing there, no laws, money, just you and your mortality.

I have a cat and I was just holding him one day and I was like "holy cow here is this living thing that evolve along side us" I just stared at my cat for a bit. Odd. this living thing independent of me. Why does a seed grow? hahaha why does the Gerbil run in circles.

We'll finally reach the point where we can gather by the fire in the evenings and tell stories, eat fresh apples from trees, swim in the ocean etc.

"I do wonder what will we do when computers do everything for us."

Depends how our social structures will morph to support a society where having a job is no longer the norm and most people are in fact jobless.

In our current societies the way things stand all these masses of people will be living in slums fighting for scraps while those elite who control the system live in their walled off mini-societies and palaces.

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