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Comment by bluedel | Hacker News Reader

I think the crosswords framing is a little silly, but I have to wonder what comes when we use our technology to optimize the fun and interesting parts out of every job. There's only so many years of my life I can dedicate to back-and-forths with a chatbot. What if we advance our glorious civilization but our jobs just get more and more thoughtless and miserable?

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I don't know about you, but my job has become a lot more fun ever since it's become a lot more back-and-forth with the robot. It does all the tedious things for me. It gathers data. It creates prototypes. It makes the mechanical code changes that I want. It allows me to talk with it for a design discussion, and then my design simply appears. I ask it for monitoring dashboards and they simply appear. It records what we talked about, which is something that I never do.

Largely I thought that this is what you do once you're established in math (or any field) anyway. You have some ideas, but the details are kind of too tedious for you to work out, so you give it to grad students/postdocs. Senior engineers have some ideas, but the details are tedious to work out, so you give them to junior engineers.

Now, obviously in the meantime, there's the question of how do we train the next generation? Or do we need to train the next generation? And maybe while we work that out the answer becomes more shadowing/apprenticeship instead of farming out easy tasks.

Sure, but part of me feels like we've got a good 5 years left of that fun until we're not needed...

I'm not confident in that statement, but I think it's well within the realm of possibility. Then again, so is needing humans to architect / steer for another 2 decades. We live in exciting times!

Unless AI companies are willing to take on liability for bad decisions the bot makes some human who can be promoted or fired will need to roughly understand risks and tradeoffs of what ai does

I think that's where people hope some kind if UBI or "universal high income" will save the day. Just don't think too hard about how it would actually be paid for, or how we can all have high income when that's a relative measure and we're all given the same amount of table scraps.

"universal high income" is not when everyone has high income, it's when everyone who doesn't have a high income is excluded from the universe. There will be few high income people, robots those people own, and the rest of us will be undesirables/illegals/felons/noncitizens of Ms-Apple-Meta-Tesla-Google-topia, who for arbitrary reasons XYZ (they didn't accept the EULA!) don't deserve universal high income (i.e. most people here will fall into that category).

What you're describing could well be how it ends up, but that isn't the future described by universal high income.

Yours is more likely in my opinion though, mainly because universal high income is completely infeasible and shaky even at the level of definition.

Then work part time, and enjoy your higher wealth to have fun in free time. Don't demand to have your cake and eat it too.

What higher wealth?

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