And before you shrug and go “great, jobs are bullshit”:
Jobs, for all their cruelty, provide:
•structure (“I know where to be at 9”),
•community (office friendships, shared memes, gossip),
•identity (“I’m a nurse / teacher / carpenter,” for the lucky ones),
•a script (“I know what next year roughly looks like”).
Take that away and you don’t get instant utopia. You get a psychic freefall.
Imagine millions of people waking up one day structurally unnecessary to the economy, with no replacement narrative in place. Not “You’re free now,” but “The system doesn’t know what to do with you, please manage your own despair.”
That’s not liberation. That’s cruelty on a scale our nervous systems are not built for.
Think about Appalachia when the textile mills closed. Everywhere.
A yearn for the day when this “structure” is gone. I only have it for systemic reasons anyway. I do not need it outside of it being setup to provide the masses wkth housing, food, and water however scarcely.
I’m not a representative sample, but…
…my hobby is my job. I learnt to code and to build stuff as a hobby, and now it’s my job.
I don’t think I could exist without designing and building something interesting. Even if I know that someone out there does it better. Because I want to understand the process and be able to alter it. I’m OK with someone else doing something that I find boring. If the subject interests me, I want to do it myself.
As for the concept of being free, if someone said “you’re free now”, I would ask “in what sense - am I free to stop paying taxes and repaying debt? can I finally squat land, start a license free mobile phone network and start practising medicine, or free in some other sense?”. I would likely conclude that I’m not free yet, and mutual dependencies are in fact quite numerous.
I sure as heck don’t need a job to entertain me and if I did not need it to live. ie food, housing, healthcare, etc. Now without a job I might still do things that are job like in that the actions are something someone would do in a job. I would just be doing it for myself or others because I feel like it at the time.
I am in the same camp as you and I think most people will be as well. We all have heard about the person who retired with no hobbies and no purpose who just drinks beer and watches TV all day. This i think is more rare than this article suggests. I also think the younger you are the easier the switch would be because you would have less time for a job to break your spirit.
I have found that purposely working less and caring less has allowed other interests to grow.
There are some good points in there somewhere about how losing one’s job affects the mind. I’m just hung up on the proffered idea that LLMs are actually going to replace anybody in an efficient sustainable way, or even reach AGI someday. They’re not. We’re already reaching the limit of how much power and silicon we can throw at this, and LLMs still can’t actually replace a thinking person. Also the post completely misses the reason billionaires are pushing LLMs so hard, and ignores the water and electricity resource limitations we’re already up against.
I’m just hung up on the proffered idea that LLMs are actually going to replace anybody in an efficient sustainable way, or even reach AGI someday.
I share your concern with that point, to some degree. On the other hand, Cory Doctorow makes a great point: an AI cannot do your job as well as you can, but a salesman can convince your boss to fire you and replace you with an AI, because it’ll make your boss money:
The promise of AI – the promise AI companies make to investors – is that there will be AIs that can do your job, and when your boss fires you and replaces you with AI, he will keep half of your salary for himself, and give the other half to the AI company.
And even if AI is shit at your job, the cost savings from not paying humans means corporations will still make more money providing a shitty AI product than a good human product, just like corporations make more money now selling shitty mass produced plastic crap than they do quality products from skilled workers.
And from there you get mass unemployment and all the social and cultural impacts therefrom.
(What is your view on why billionaires are pushing AI? I think it’s a combination of “number go up” and an excuse to build the data centers the surveillance state needs for mass real time facial recognition, travel monitoring, and conversation recording/sentiment analysis, but that’s just me.)
AI cannot do your job as well as you can, but a salesman can convince your boss to fire you and replace you with an AI, because it’ll make your boss money
Agreed, exactly. In the short term, at least. The LLM industry is the world’s biggest ponzi scheme right now though. If they had to start charging people enough to float themselves without borrowing from investors, the whole thing would collapse overnight because no one would pay for it. The endgame is not a profitable product to bring to market, because that’s not possible with this technology.
What is your view on why billionaires are pushing AI?
They’re trying to race as fast as possible to the closest they can get to AGI (a delusion) for their own use before climate change starts killing off billions of people in the near future. They know that humanity is near-term fucked, and they’re feathering their nests and ripping the copper out of the walls at our expense. Some of them, like Musk and Yavin, are deluded though to think they can actually rule over a scaled-down human population (only the ones they can’t replace with AI) in a dystopian techno-feudal system. Either way, we’re expendable assets to be shoveled into their furnace.
LLMs suck and anyone who tries to replace people with them is a stupid asshole who deserves to fail.
Good, humans & jobs suck.
The system doesn’t know what to do with you, please manage your own despair.
That’s not liberation. That’s cruelty on a scale our nervous systems are not built for.
Pathetic: get a life, learn markdown, find a better purpose, whatever.
