17 karma · joined October 19, 2026
"However, I do think in the long run AI will become so broadly effective and so cheap that this [this being areas were humans are likely to maintain a relative (or even absolute) advantage for a significant time that keeps them employed] will no longer apply. At that point our current economic setup will no longer make sense, and there will be a need for a broader societal conversation about how the economy should be organized." [1]
"Over the weekend, Musk responded to an user on X that said that the humanoid’s Total Addressable Market (TAM) was the entire global labor market, [...]" [2]
Altman is a little more cautious and thinks (out loud, I doubt he actually does) we'll all be artists on UBI, or something:
"[...] maybe the jobs of the future will look like playing games to us [...] find new ways to play status games, ability to find new methods for creative expression" "And I think we need something like basic income to have a cushion and a smooth transition to the jobs of the future." "In a world where technology eliminates jobs, it will mean that the cost of having a great life goes down a lot." [3]
These aren't very realistic or popular scenarios, but the people building frontier AI (ok, well, one of those three is not like the others...) wanted to get them out there. Seems people don't want to sign up for the questionable utopias.
[1] https://darioamodei.com/essay/machines-of-loving-grace#3-eco...
[2] https://eletric-vehicles.com/tesla/tesla-q2-earnings-here-ar...
[3] all on X, https://x.com/sama
I'm much more sympathetic to the views of this anonymous postdoc here: https://proofsandprompts.com/2026/10/22/the-rules-cannot-cha... (unfortunately also in LLM-"polished" English). Quote: "A field that fails to attract and support its next generation cannot preserve itself through inspiring statements alone."
(*If you extrapolate a little, for now you can also substitute with 'math departments' there.)
It would be interesting to know if the reason is truly automation. Apparently the equity firm owning Suse considered selling it off recently, see last paragraph.
This is sounds a little too grandiose for me. Our physical lives at least seem quite unchanged. If you don't produce code or papers for a living you might even succeed in not thinking about LLMs at all. The "signals" we're getting have certainly multiplied and increased in amplitude, though.
Regarding Pi: If hands-off code production is the future wouldn't a harness with subagents be the obvious choice? I personally enjoy minimalism in software, if only for aesthetic reasons, but even then: Can't you spin up your own bespoke version easily?
A very important point, which was also made more forcefully in "Human Routers of Machine Words" by Fernando Borretti, shared on this site previously. It's good that Fowler brings up a very legitimate use case in the next paragraph, though.
Edit: Or maybe not? At least one service on their IT-department's list seems to be working again. :-)
Also I find the suggestion that the people unhappy with the AI-in-mathematics situation are psychologically unwell to be presumptuous, to put it mildly.