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Comment by Gigachad | Hacker News Reader

>And now that AI has solved all our problems, we can devote ourselves to more important work: going into quantitative finance, vibecoding sports-betting apps, consuming AI-generated TikTok shorts, and arguing with political bots on Twitter.

Grim but this is exactly where society is heading.

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There are no shortage of artistic pursuits, subcultures, pick-up leagues, and more that you're free to engage with. Get off the beaten path and you'll find humans enjoying life in a wide variety of ways that are uncorrupted by AI.

> you'll find humans enjoying life in a wide variety of ways that are uncorrupted by AI

Some of those people were mathematicians, engineers, physicists who found joy in being skilled at what they do and were able to be financially rewarded for their effort applying their skill. Are these artistic pursuits, subcultures, pick-up leagues, etc going to pay their mortgage? Will they help them get a job in a field they are trained in?

The "free to pursue more important things" is a hand-wavy statement that doesn't talk at all about what those people should be doing to provide for themselves after wages plummet. The hyperbole is drawing attention to the ridiculousness, not making a comment about there not being a rec soccer league or something.

> Some of those people were mathematicians, engineers, physicists who found joy in being skilled at what they do and were able to be financially rewarded for their effort applying their skill. Are these artistic pursuits, subcultures, pick-up leagues, etc going to pay their mortgage? Will they help them get a job in a field they are trained in?

IMHO, we should be structuring society to provide maximum opportunity and remuneration for creative, engaging professions. Instead we have capitalism.

> The "free to pursue more important things" is a hand-wavy statement that doesn't talk at all about what those people should be doing to provide for themselves after wages plummet. The hyperbole is drawing attention to the ridiculousness, not making a comment about there not being a rec soccer league or something.

Exactly, "free to pursue more important things" is a pleasant-sounding way to say "It's not my problem, fuck off an die for all I care."

Why should financial rewards be only for mathematical and programming work? What's the principle you're working with?

Are you by any chance born to rich parents in a western country?

Because most people in the world are working around the clock to supply food and shelter for their family. It's a bit unclear still how you are going to consolidate the two facts

GP was talking about how humans would spend their time after the "real work" is done, as if the only purpose of humanity is productivity or consumption.

The assumption is that there will be time left. But as it is the 'real work' takes up only 8 hours per day because the resulting pay is significant. But if that pay evaporates suddenly the real work will balloon to take up most of your waking hours.

We are referring to people in the context of "going into quantitative finance, vibecoding sports-betting apps, consuming AI-generated TikTok shorts, and arguing with political bots on Twitter.".

Those are hardly the "most people in the world are working around the clock to supply food and shelter for their family"

It's a bit unclear still how you are going to consolidate the two facts.

The article is satirical and hyperbolic, while the reply above is concrete in its suggestion

That is the future. Gambling would be the way that Ai can distribute money; only random odds can win against it.

> Get off the beaten path

I would really push back on this

What you're describing _is_ the beaten path. People who argue with bots on twitter are actually, vastly, the minority.

Go to your local park or bar and have a drink and try not to talk about the internet.

It's increasingly becoming more of a majority and it's spilling in to real life. In Melbourne, Australia there would be a weekly "cooker" protest where they shut down the street to get angry about covid mind control vaccines or whatever the latest facebook bots are programming them to be mad about.

Know your history - Australians have always loved any excuse to get out in a crowd and exercise their lungs - from the Eureka Rebellion through the Vietnam protests to defending wharfies from automation - all prior to both COVID and social media.

And that would absolutely be a tiny minority doing this.

I think that's not taking the most charitable reading of their intentions. They are simply concerned with unverified, untested vaccines, much like many here were during COVID.

Nice, fair enough.

I've been looking for a baseball or softball league for my kid. He doesn't want to play school ball, doesn't play travel ball, but loves the game. It's impossible to find baseball or softball leagues after the age of 12 that are not attached to a school or travel. Volleyball is about the only thing that exists.

Let's hope they have some land so they can farm potatoes in between their lives of artistic pursuits and other joys. Because those are not going fill the fridge.

No need to hope. 99 percent of the world outside of mathematics and programmers who had already figured it out pre ai. We'll just have to learn from them.

We're "solving" manual labour too. Those people could find themselves liberated from physical work in the next few years, unless some corrective force/action intervene.

"beaten path" is often used as if it as something lesser, but if you think about it, it's just people making something they all often do, going from a specific place to another specific place, easier for themselves and everybody else by using roughly the shortest route, rather than dancing their name or random thoughts on their mind every time. It's a good thing.

Now the "beaten paths" (our public spaces) are getting spammed, polluted and destroyed, turn into jungles to the point that actually just walking off into the jungle can be easier for some. But that is lame, even for the very few people who can do it (many people can't right now, future generations won't be able to at all if we let this slide), why not drive the parasitic assholes ruining our public spaces off into the jungle instead?

Except that engagement is not free. All of these things require money, and they require time that isn't already set towards the goal of making money to survive. And one of the selling points of AI is explicitly the redundancy of numerous workers, including ones parallel to myself.

For many things this is true nowadays. Where I live walking in nature or swimming in the ocean is still free. In Dubai nature as in a green park might raise an entry fee.

Arguably Dubai shouldn’t exist as a place where many humans live.

Why not? They are doing many things right, and unlike in many parts of the west, their leadership are investing heavily in their own citizenry and nation, and have a long term vision.

I mean more in the context of millions of people living in the middle of the desert

Dubai is not really in the "middle of the desert". Dubai is a coastal city.

I find puzzling such comments that present things as if they were possible in a capitalist society. People still need to buy food, clothes, pay rent. Are those off-the-beaten-path, uncorrupted pursuits going to provide for that? We would need a major societal change, the undoing of centuries of economic structure, and we're not heading that way just a little bit.

The unspoken prerequisite for a functional society in which human labor has ever decreasing "economic value" is the end of capitalism itself.

It's hard to see the path forward from this nadir, but Le Guin offers some words of hope:

> We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art, and very often in our art, the art of words.

The tech right would convince us we only need robot-remixed content, and that the future is slop all the way down. We have to prove them wrong.

Oh, nice. Where can I apply to get salary for riding my bike or reading books? I somehow missed the memo.

Let them eat cake.. all will be will be well!

I get that someone wanted to let steam off but this just sounds like they don't have any arguments so they went for the good old "in the future, you won't have free will and social media companies force you to be online" fable. An addicting algorithm isn't the same thing as fentanyl, you can uninstall the app in 5 seconds and getting it back with signing in takes atleast two minutes, enough to reconsider whether you actually want to spend time on it.

The toxicity of apps like Tiktok comes from muscle memory, not the quality of the content. Your thumb knows where the app icon is and opening the app happens quicker than you can think (literally). So offloading or uninstalling breaks this very effectively. The only thing that would still keep you on the platform is social connections. If somebody gets upset over you uninstalling Instagram or Snapchat, they aren't a good friend.

I don't think this goes far enough -- its a best case scenario.

There is no Utopia for mankind at the end of an AGI that is the labor force because people need a purpose; without that, degenerate behaviours and vice are easy to fall into and the spiral is not big. The state of the human race - particularly the internet-native generations - is a testament to that.

The only way the AGI Utopia works is with a massive reduction in the human population with a Spartan/Helot relationship between those remaining.

Let's face it, the people who want AGI so badly aren't the wam cuddly people who want to feed the poor, house the homeless, and cure the sick. Their motives here are not pure...

You don’t need pure motives to do good. In fact they often are detrimental to that (see e.g. Mother Teresa, Mao, Stalin, etc.)

> offloading or uninstalling breaks this very effectively

For you, maybe. You can't assume that applies to everyone.

N=2 but deleting my Facebook account (~4 years ago) has effectively stopped me from arguing online about things I don’t really care about with people who I don’t know.

I mean I still do it here to some extent but much less frequently

I think the post is full of pleasantly-detailed arguments, and was a joy to read. It’s grim, but necessary to have someone write this up without the LLM assistant du jour.

> now that AI has solved all our problems

Make it your problem to find problems that AI have not yet solved. Problem solved.

Nope. Someone will just ask an AI to do that as well.

Be like the guy in Asimov's "The Last Answer" [1]. Work on a problem that the AI cannot solve.

[1] https://www.highexistence.com/the-last-answer-short-story/

And how many people can be like that guy? Our jobs are part of an industrial process(literally). We get money performing a business function within a larger organisation.

I'm a pretty clever guy, a high achiever, yet at my very best, at my absolute peak efficiency I probably can do the job of 5-50 mediocre people.

And there are millions of people smarter, better and faster than me. And most of them have more money.

He forgot one, "creating AI slop games that no one will ever play".

guilty

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