Why Even Try If You Have A.I.?

we somehow hate leisure

We don't hate leisure. Everyone loves their leisure. What we hate is each other. Unless people are able to accept someone else getting a free ride (even when they're not getting one themselves), some form of ever-increasingly pointless work will be required, because that's how we define whether or not someone has 'earned' their leisure.

> Alas, this never happens.

it never happens because the amount of energy we can collect and consume is still insufficient. We have not reached post-scarcity, not even close in fact.

And i don't see a superior AI being capable of giving us post-scarcity, at least, not within this life time, nor the next. Perhaps in 100 years, that would be possible, if you'd want to be optimistic.

I really don't want that. The rich will find a way to force us into jobs we dont want. I'd rather develop software than cleaning toilets to be honest...

Because at its core a “job” is just doing something useful for other people, validated by the incurrence of a large societal cost (your salary).

Humans like to feel useful AND validated. If you remove either we generally become more unhappy. If you remove both it becomes a real problem.

Hence why unemployed people (both of the working class and “too rich to work due my trust fund” variety) have much higher rates of depression. This even extends to people who have jobs, but that feel their jobs are not actually useful (re: big tech workers arbitraging the inefficiency of large organizations to get paid doing very little). They have the validation of the societal cost (the salary) but deep down they know it’s an inefficient mistake.

Intrinsic motivation beyond our base instincts is a myth. Everything you do as a human is in pursuit of external validation, hence why we are social creatures. It’s why you’ve bothered to take the time out of your day to type these words into a box.

Humans finding new useful things to do for other people (jobs) is the engine behind everything good in modern society. So no, it’s not a bad thing.

> we humans are amazingly capable of inventing new and new jobs to do, because we somehow hate leisure.

We don’t. We do generally crave meaning, the only people who hate leisure are the owner class, and they hate leisure for other people. Employees are not out there clamouring for 80h weeks or having to piss in bottles on your 12h shift. Some do like that (sometimes to an unhealthy extent) but that’s a very different consideration.

> I really wish that machines could just take over at some point and we could be free of the pointless jobs we have.

I would take it a step further and question why is everyone assuming that people have to work, whatever the work might be.

Of course the genetic answer is to pay the bills, but what if you didn't had to worry about paying them? How would your life change if you didn't had a mortgage or rent to pay? Would you still spend hours commiting to and back from the office? Would you stick with your current job? What would change in your life?

Once I came across a group of construction workers that were working on a construction site. Half a dozen of them were spending their days wearing fluorescent vests and holding hand-held stop signs on a crosswalk of a low-traffic road. There were more construction workers on that crosswalk than people actually crossing the road. They were there five days per week, from early morning to evening. What a colossal waste of time. I wondered how soul-crushing that would be. Is that how people expect to spend the bulk of their days? Does society benefit anything from those roles?

> I really wish that machines could just take over at some point and we could be free of the pointless jobs we have.

This is already the case for shareholders, and will still be the case in the future as long as automation remains privatized.

The rest of us will need to find a way to eat without working pointless jobs. We aren't getting a slice of the automation pie.

> I really wish that machines could just take over at some point and we could be free of the pointless jobs we have.

Who will own the machines that feed you?

If you aren't contributing anything, why would they care to give you more than the absolute bare minimum to survive?

That's a pretty narrow view, I think it depends more on culture.

I live somewhere where (not in North America) where grocery delivery is the norm, food delivery is the norm... online shopping is easy. This all frees up time that we spend outside, in parks, in lessons and study... because these are communal values.

We don't spend our free time in front of screens (though nothing wrong with that if you want it), again, because of culture.

> using calculators didn't make us more mentally inept

We (collectively) did lose some skills, that we no longer value as much because we (individually) grew up after the loss happened.

Just like losing a large part of our orientation skills in the GPS era.

Or how happily-single urban people in their 40s don't feel like they've lost anything compared to eg. their grandparents living a married life with three generations living under the same roof, but if you'd taken that person from the past and showed them the option to switch, they would feel the loss.

It is totally possible that the average "2045 human" could be significantly mentally/emotionally atrophied in several ways, while not feeling like anything is missing.

After the Spanish blackout people said there was a silver lining in that it was so nice that people were forced to simultaneously disconnect.

For some of these things there's insidious network effects. If everyone else is doing it being an outlier of resistance is not rewarding. We need ways to collective decide to do things differently.

It’s always a responsibility of an individual. You can look at it the other way around: instead of going outside to do chores you can do them more efficiently online and use the saved time to enjoy higher quality time outside, e.g. in a park instead of a shopping centre.

AI is a powerful tool and it’s already changing the world but it’s still just a tool - the smarter you’re, the more efficiently you can use it. It might change our intelligence but I don’t think it will decrease it.

Technology shapes humanity. Cars preclude roads, roads shape cities, the shape of car-first cities has fundamentally changed how humans interact. The same is true for any technology to an extent.

Whether for better or worse that depends on one's own interpretation and the technology itself. On one extreme you have people who reject all technology after a certain point in time, with rare exceptions thoroughly considered (the Amish). On the other you have people who see technology as the goal, even if it comes at the expense of the genocide of the human race.

In my current job hunt, 80% of startups I talked to were AI for X and I fully agree - nalmost all of them were uninteresting or could even articulate why AI would make a difference.

But people treat them as if they could. You can already see them using LLM output as "proof" in discussions...

If anyone has been going in to art for the commercial opportunities then someone needs to sit them down and explain how bad a strategy that is. Art is a recreational activity that happens to involve money sometimes. Besides, I don't care how good the AI is it can't make a $100 million equivalent to Blue Poles. People are clearly paying for the connection with the human artist rather than the quality of the art.

> Why try to engage in engineering quality software when the power structure has decided that you better be using AI for it?

Why engage in engineering quality software? The reasons haven't changed because AI exists. AI just adds new ways of achieving high quality software outcomes.

I don't mind admitting that I spent a lot of my childhood really annoyed at all the people who seemed to just be smarter than me and there was no clear way to catch up. It is a lot less fair than physical fitness where I could at least train more. Levelling that playing field somewhat is long overdue and - for most people - going to be quite a welcome change.

Well I can only speak for myself, but my interest in poetry (which was non-existent) has spiked thanks to AI responding to random questions on poetry. To the point now, I spend sometime everyday thinking about poems, writing little notes to people and experiencing some real connection over it.

Chess has been mastered by computers long ago, and yet people still play it.

The dream of many (if not most) people here on Hacker News has always seemed to eventually leave tech and work with their hands. AI will just get us there sooner for many professions.

> good-enough slop

It isn't nearly good enough, as far as I can tell.

Systems that nobody understands because nobody wrote them are unsafe, unmaintainable, and brittle.

Art generated by AI can't be copyrighted so its use can't be controlled.

> Why do anything that makes us think or exhibit any human qualities when it's not the most cost effective way in our lovely capitalist AI dystopia?

If the most optimistic reasonable projections of the AI optimists are true, the decay of human capability by itself among people who rely on AI will be so damaging that those who don't rely on it will become more valuable on the labor market.

If the most optimistic projections aren't correct, then in all likelihood these will continue to be simple tools that nobody should use for anything serious.

And apart from market/labor dynamics, I have seen no evidence that those who shun the use of AI tools are worse off for it (quite the contrary), so the spread of these tools should, if the current tend continues, actually become a rallying cry for and proof of the value of human work and the intrinsicness and necessity of our participation in the worlds we make for ourselves.

The longer the hype continues, the surer I am that it won't replace humans.

https://smbc-comics.com/comic/sad-2

> Why try to engage in the arts ... Why try to engage in engineering quality software

Try applying your questions to other areas. Why engage in the study of philosophy, or history, or ancient languages, when barely anything of use ever comes out of it? For that matter, why engage in the study of the sciences, when you are statistically very unlikely to make a significant contribution. Why engage in the sports, if you almost certainly won't become an Olympic champion, and quite likely not even a professional sportsman? Why work in geriatrics or palliative care when your patients will keep dying?..

There are things that we do for fun, or for personal fulfilment, or just because...

> Why do anything that makes us think or exhibit any human qualities when it's not the most cost effective way in our lovely capitalist AI dystopia? ... All that's going to be left for humans is going to be shitty manual labor that nobody wants to do

Well, there you go then. The reason for doing something that 'makes us think' etc. is because this is much more desirable for the doer than 'shitty manual labor that nobody wants to do'.

"Why try to engage in the arts if you won't make money" is perhaps the most capitalist dystopian statement I've read the whole year.

I sing with my friends regularly. I'm not expecting to ever get paid a dime.