reality tv star on something like real housewives. I think AI/robotics would have a hard time being that irrational and illogical consistently. That behavior is pretty unique to humans.
I feel like Neuro-sama is essentially already that, but for the Twitch / YT crowd instead of television. It's trivial to train a model to maximize engagement (as one can see gestures broadly), so I'm sure if we can get robots looking nice and human, we'll have Futurama's All My Circuits in no time.
Though I guess there was a token human on that show, so maybe you're right!
The last job is going to be hairdresser, because billionaires have wives (not to assume all billionaires are men), and those wives will want a human to gossip to.
Worse, it was just almost all horses. There are a few in Central Park pulling tourists and that’s enough for the Pollyanna’s to point to and go “See! We’ll be fine!”
> the % of jobs not doable by AI and robotics approaches 0 over time.
Horse are an analogy. When they were more economically useful, there were about 5x the number of them. Now they are basically pets and we get comments like this suggesting the work they do is virtually meaningless.
> Are you a preschool teacher? Are you a doctor, a therapist, an artist?
We've already automated the artists. Doctors are currently a strong area of focus. In a world where AI replaces human thought, education becomes only for hobbyists. That leaves therapist.
I suppose we're going to need a lot of therapists.
LLMs have much better cognitive empathy than most humans have limbic+cognitive empathy - the therapists will also be automated - friction like licensing bodies will slow it down but not stop it.
It's not just the Scrooges in power. Previous attempts to actually make a better world often made a worse one, and not just because of capitalist opposition.
If you mean attempts like centralized communism - absolutely - and the failure mode should have been obvious from human nature: centralizing great power incentivizes corruption.
We don't fully know the failure modes of every alternative yet, but that doesn't mean powerful central governments + capitalism is the best alternative.
Interestingly, the Amish shape their lives around this sort of thing. With any technology, they ask themselves, "Does this make us dependent?" If the answer is yes, they refuse it.
They are more and more adopting modern technology. And where they haven't directly they have found ways to use it and be just as dependent while appearing to not. Go visit one and you discover they want to borrow your phone to buy things from Amazon...
If you're not economically useful, what pressure would you be able to bring against the government and it's drone-based police force if it does things you don't like? General strikes don't work in a world with no human labor needed.
Iran recently shot thousands to tens of thousands of its own people when they protested. If a sociopath were in power, what would stop them?
This is the Chinese century, and even if China charts a somewhat different course than Western capitalism, it still believes that human beings should spend most of their days in some employment, even if it is just makework. A population with mostly leisure time is viewed as very threatening to social stability. I can see that model being exported to the rest of the world far more than I can imagine your utopia.
The Chinese social-safety net, for individuals not covered by unemployment insurance, is strongly centered around public sector jobs (公益性岗位) that, if you see them in practice, are often plainly makework: the essence of the work has been mechanized/automated, but human beings will still be directed to be somewhere all day and look busy. There is no paying those people a dole while they stay home like in sone other countries.
Many of these jobs are things that improve quality of life for everyone else, too, like street beautification programmes. They do this alongside coming up with robotic means to also sweep streets, but yes, they find ways to hire people to just "make this place look nicer".
Not necessarily! In "Saturn's Children" by Stross, humanity managed to wipe itself out, but post-humans (evolved from former, ahem, entertainment androids) are doing just fine across the Solar System. There's a plot point where one of them discovers that some corporation back on Earth inherited full property rights to her body due to an old pre-human-extinction EULA, and she'll be recycled for parts if she ever sets foot in their jurisdiction (I'm paraphrasing from memory).
> HN: A site full of bold futurists where it's easier to imagine the end of the humanity than the end of capitalism.
That's an underrated comment! Totally agree. So so much of discussion on this topic sort of assumes business as usual (both literally and figuratively) and that AI quickly diffuses through the economy, sucking up all economically useful activity, with humans falling by the wayside as inevitable collateral damage.
There's a failure of imagination taking place here that there's no other outcome. Capitalism is an evolved solution to how human community works, but is not inevitable.
Massive changes in technology pretty much always involve wars and a reshuffling of power. This doesn't have much to do with capitalism at all. It's more of a question of how are those that currently have power going to adjust. In the case of technology we quite often see this end up with a concentration of power.
How to maintain stability in a world filled with greedy people in power that don't want to give up a single penny is a good question to ask at this point.
Edit: And today's industrial society is quite far from being capitalist. Feudalism is more close to reality, seeing as the one most important factor for almost everything in life is whether you own real estate or not.
That's a very loose definition of feudalism. However if you take in account nepotism and bribery, which are more and more widespread around the world, maybe we get close to that exchange of land for loyalty that was the basis of feudalism.
All the rich people become bankrupt or otherwise loose their political capital, new politicians are elected in that owe more to workers and thus enact anti-capitalist policy to win over the loyalty of workers.
That or, as rich people loose more and more of their political capital, workers get empowered and use direct action (such as strikes) to demand the end of more and more capitalistic policies, until there are none left. The rich get along with it because the alternative is loose everything.
Is it really that crazy though? Or is it an acknowledgement that the people in power would think like Peter Thiel and if given the choice between ending capitalism or ending humanity, would pick ending humanity?
Horses where the plaything of the rich. Farmers were using oxen not horses for the most part. However the modern plow (invented in the mid 1830s - John Deere being the best known inventor, but others were inventing them about the same time) needed the faster speed of a horse to work well, but if the previous farming technology worked for you then oxen (or donkeys ... - there are several other work animals used in different areas for farming) were better.
There are likely more horses today than there were in 1900 - but now they are play things for the upper middle class living in the exurbs (commuting via car to their city job). Sure there are a few Amish (and other similar groups) making a living with a horse, but most of them are toys for the wealthy.
Do you have a citation for the horse number? My research [0] shows we have a 1/5 out peak number in ~1900 and our population has 5x since then. This means per capita horses in the country is down 96%, while absolute count is down 80%. Both are huge numbers.
Good call! They have info on general population which shows about double the number of horses I originally thought (at least in 2016), and declining at a good clip of 10%+/decade)
. So drop is still large but just a bit smaller.
The general point is before cars horses were used a lot, entire industries were based around them and our now gone. The toy factor does not compensate because of cost and inconvenience of owning a horse.
>There’s no quick answers, but intuitively I think we all get that the % of jobs not doable by AI and robotics approaches 0 over time.
Can we really say that? I think that might be a prediction based on the current situation and on the assumption that jobs will neither be transformed nor created anew. We don’t know what the future holds for us in terms of jobs – or whether the problem of jobs will be a solved issue. Just as the blacksmith never gave a thought to what a mechanic actually was until he saw a car for the first time.
It is clear that at the limit, machines will be more capable in nearly every way. I suppose there might be some room for a few exceptions like working around big electromagnets that machines can't get close to... Does that sound great? Is there something else you had in mind which would be reserved for humans and fulfilling?
As someone that works in robotics/automation, it pains me to see people in creative/office verticals getting all the shit with AI these days while hard labor positions, the one that everyone could be doing a bit less because they take a toll on you (working the fields, farms, hazardous tasks) remain pretty much the same.
If you use a computer to do something, training an AI to use the computer to do the same thing just takes the computer, which was there anyway. (Yeah, plus training the model, that's not my point.) But if you do something physical, replacing you takes something physical to be there.
We may eventually manufacture the robots to do all these things. We aren't there yet.
I looked into this (or rather, had Google Deep Research do a 30-page report on it!) and it's still a very long way off. So long, that the AI, or any reference it found, would not even give me a rough timeline, but I suspect it is multiple decades away. The main blocker is a very severe crunch in the supply chain of critical materials, mostly rare earth elements which are essential to make those high power density + high precision motors feasibly.
Today we have a tiny fraction (like 2%?) of the global supply needed to make enough robots to replace all humans.
This is before we get to the other logistics like power and the rest of the materials, but we have a path to scale those up (except maybe Copper, that's another tough one.) Turns out rare earth elements are actually very abundant, but extremely hard to mine, very toxic to extract (which is partially why China has a strangehold on those) and we don't have a good path to scale those up.
All of this could be moot if we figure out alternative technologies for equally capable motors that could be manufactured at scale, but AFAIK whatever promising is on the horizon would still take a very long time to ramp up.
First, you make a robot that mines rare earth metals. Then construction robots. Then an automated factory for assembling robots. The whole premise is that the robots are faster at these tasks than humans would be.
If the robotics are feasible their rise should be exponential, not linear, since each robot built makes building the next faster and helps to remove whatever bottleneck you had.
> If the robotics are feasible their rise should be exponential, not linear
That totally does not follow. Robots can be feasible and their payback curve can still be linear or sublinear.
Take mining rare earth metals, for instance. The problem with mining rare earths isn't that it takes so much human labor. The problem is doing it without poisoning the surrounding 30 square miles. Replacing the driver of the earth mover with a robot doesn't fix the chemistry at all, nor (I suspect) does it significantly affect the economics.
Mining is not limited by human labor, we already use huge machines (and some robots) controlled by a few humans. The limitations are investment in huge machines and processing plants, and regulations on where/how you can mine/process.
You can't just have a robot start mining/processing rare earths, anywhere in the country. You need permits, and a lot of money. I guess that didn't stop AI companies ... but there isn't an "infinite" novelty/hype premium for rare-earths, like there is for LLMs.
Robots have been used in industry for decades already. Most jobs won't be worth investing in the robot doing it, since human labour is cheaper than the capital investment.
don't we already have lots of machines that do things like this though? Even if its human operated: excavators, combines, tractors, and other heavy machinery have reduced the physical burden involved in sustaining large societies tremendously.
Yes there are fewer hands on the job site but there are still hands at all. This is increasingly becoming not the case in the future. The goal is to fully eliminate all hands and all minds. There will be no more sponges of newly available labor. Then what happens exactly no one really knows or even wants to meaningfully try to answer, because the implications are too disturbing.
I would agree with you, if we taxed the ever-living fuck out of AI companies to enable UBI, so that the people replaced with robots did not end up homeless.
Ideologically I don't consider myself to be a communist or even leftist, so I'm confused by my own reaction as well, but maybe mandatory joint-stock where the government takes a large chunk of equity of any AI enterprise off the bat and manages it like a sovereign wealth fund is the right answer.
In the long run, we’re all dead anyway. (Unless something drastic changes.) That means how long it will take for robots to be practical matters. We don’t know how long it will be, but driverless cars have been coming for 15 years now and they’re still unavailable in most places.
People are more adaptable than horses and tech solutions usually require people to do some of the work. Dishwashers need loading and unloading. My robot vacuum still needs maintenance. Self-checkout means you do the scanning.
Amazon wants to get into drone delivery and there are cases where that might work, but the way news articles describe it, it’s not going to get a package onto my porch.
You seem to be living under a rock. Yes driverless cars started in 2009, but in 2026 it is very much here. Waymo recently crossed a milestone of more 500k trips I think, we will have millions of driverless cars in the coming years (we’re at 10k right now)
There's always exceptions. To not beat a dead horse(hah!) in Texas you can still find people on horseback in the drive through line at Starbucks from time to time.
For a while waymo didn't even serve the hillier parts of where they were deployed. These roads are challenging conditions for even a human rideshare driver, when you are down to about a cars width of winding road, with a moving truck trying to pass in front of you, and a dump truck trying to move behind you, cars increasingly piling on either end, no way to turn around or back out, everyone increasingly honking and cussing as if that would lubricate things. It is kind of hilarious in a way seeing how quickly things effectively blow up in those street conditions with just the perfect storm of two slightly larger vehicles passing at once.
Now you can imagine a waymo in this mix how it would just be on its knees in a situation like that. How is a waymo to interpret "fucking move already you dumb fuck" into any sort of meaningful instruction?
I'm reminded of that story about activists in SF requesting a dozen waymos at once at some one way street and creating a localized denial of service attack essentially.
Waymo works in a single digit number of cities with extremely rare, highly favorable climates, and still operate only on fixed pre-mapped routes. And it's taken 17 years to get that far.
We are still a long way from a self driving car being the default type of car
No. The horses were made redundant and no longer exist in such quantities
So, uh, maybe don't dwell on that too much.
Actually, dwell on that a lot. It's probably the only instructive example.
The rich and powerful only suffer us because they need us. They cannot assemble every lead painted doodad by their own hands. If they could, they never would have hired anyone. So what happens when they no longer need as many people?
Society is already far too constructed around catching some of the wealth that just spills off of the people who own it, by being in their orbit. That activity is not actually productive, but since the only people with money are the ones that have a lot of it (K shaped economy), there's just not enough wealth left in the bottom part of the market to support anything else.
There are more horses today than ever... Oxen got the short end of the deal - almost nobody uses oxen even though historically they were the backbone labor of the farm, while the horse was for the right.
The only data I can find ignores the majority of horses today - recreational riders. If you can find a better citation I'd stand corrected, but everything I can find counts race horses and horses used for farming.
So long as they can keep us fighting amongst ourselves in meaningless culture wars. If there is ever a broad alignment of populists spanning left to right, it could get spicy.
The phrase "sent to the glue factory" comes from this era where many horses made redundant were sent to be slaughtered for meat or raw materials.
> I think we all get that the % of jobs not doable by AI and robotics approaches 0 over time.
I also think that will be the case. However, not all the jobs are worth being automated. Say, if you are a modern-day horse-riding instructor, I very much doubt the robots will come knocking the door to take your job. Not because they can't, but because the headache is not economically worth it.
It'd be uneconomical today but I don't see any reason to believe it will always be that way. Any time you want a high standard of living for people it creates an incentive to eventually make a cheaper way of doing what those people make their high standard of living with.
About the only things I can think to guarantee will have some constancy are "for the sake of being human" type things. Much like buying handmade bowls is something you can do out of pure preference/taste/ideology even though it's cheaper to buy massed produced ones.
I can see that going away too. Eventually the average horse rider is going to be someone of stature of a saudi prince at the rate horse ownership coupled with inequality is going. They'd probably be all about buying the Gemini horse teacher over learning from some lesser birth stableboy. I bet eventually all tutoring from a human is seen as some lesser ick by the rich. People already think as much about you today when you talk about say not relying on claude code. It is all about optics and virtue signalling pedigrees at the end of the day.
zug_zug · · focus · HN ↗
There’s no quick answers, but intuitively I think we all get that the % of jobs not doable by AI and robotics approaches 0 over time.
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Though I guess there was a token human on that show, so maybe you're right!
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HN: A site full of bold futurists where it's easier to imagine the end of the humanity than the end of capitalism.
swid · · focus · HN ↗
Horse are an analogy. When they were more economically useful, there were about 5x the number of them. Now they are basically pets and we get comments like this suggesting the work they do is virtually meaningless.
ForHackernews · · focus · HN ↗
Are you a preschool teacher? Are you a doctor, a therapist, an artist? Does your work contribute anything to yourself or other humans around you?
Or do you get paid a lot of money to sit in an office and update JIRA tickets about tracking ad conversions and increasing engagement OKRs?
0c3ca83 · · focus · HN ↗
We've already automated the artists. Doctors are currently a strong area of focus. In a world where AI replaces human thought, education becomes only for hobbyists. That leaves therapist.
I suppose we're going to need a lot of therapists.
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Its very easy to imagine a better world.
Its much harder to imagine the Scrooges in power willfully giving it up so that we can build that better world.
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layla5alive · · focus · HN ↗
We don't fully know the failure modes of every alternative yet, but that doesn't mean powerful central governments + capitalism is the best alternative.
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Iran recently shot thousands to tens of thousands of its own people when they protested. If a sociopath were in power, what would stop them?
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<a href="http://big5.www.gov.cn/gate/big5/www.gov.cn/zhengce/content/202606/content_7072481.htm" rel="nofollow">http://big5.www.gov.cn/gate/big5/www.gov.cn/zhengce/content/...
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That's an underrated comment! Totally agree. So so much of discussion on this topic sort of assumes business as usual (both literally and figuratively) and that AI quickly diffuses through the economy, sucking up all economically useful activity, with humans falling by the wayside as inevitable collateral damage.
There's a failure of imagination taking place here that there's no other outcome. Capitalism is an evolved solution to how human community works, but is not inevitable.
pixl97 · · focus · HN ↗
How to maintain stability in a world filled with greedy people in power that don't want to give up a single penny is a good question to ask at this point.
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bluefirebrand · · focus · HN ↗
HN is literally owned and operated by venture capitalists why are you surprised by this.
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Edit: And today's industrial society is quite far from being capitalist. Feudalism is more close to reality, seeing as the one most important factor for almost everything in life is whether you own real estate or not.
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runarberg · · focus · HN ↗
That or, as rich people loose more and more of their political capital, workers get empowered and use direct action (such as strikes) to demand the end of more and more capitalistic policies, until there are none left. The rich get along with it because the alternative is loose everything.
Or capitalism ends in a big messy fight.
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bluGill · · focus · HN ↗
There are likely more horses today than there were in 1900 - but now they are play things for the upper middle class living in the exurbs (commuting via car to their city job). Sure there are a few Amish (and other similar groups) making a living with a horse, but most of them are toys for the wealthy.
Game_Ender · · focus · HN ↗
0 - <a href="https://datapaddock.com/usda-horse-total-1850-2012/" rel="nofollow">https://datapaddock.com/usda-horse-total-1850-2012/
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Game_Ender · · focus · HN ↗
The general point is before cars horses were used a lot, entire industries were based around them and our now gone. The toy factor does not compensate because of cost and inconvenience of owning a horse.
0 - <a href="https://datapaddock.com/" rel="nofollow">https://datapaddock.com/
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plastic-enjoyer · · focus · HN ↗
Can we really say that? I think that might be a prediction based on the current situation and on the assumption that jobs will neither be transformed nor created anew. We don’t know what the future holds for us in terms of jobs – or whether the problem of jobs will be a solved issue. Just as the blacksmith never gave a thought to what a mechanic actually was until he saw a car for the first time.
layla5alive · · focus · HN ↗
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AnimalMuppet · · focus · HN ↗
We may eventually manufacture the robots to do all these things. We aren't there yet.
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AnimalMuppet · · focus · HN ↗
To the end of it? Maybe 40?
keeda · · focus · HN ↗
Today we have a tiny fraction (like 2%?) of the global supply needed to make enough robots to replace all humans.
This is before we get to the other logistics like power and the rest of the materials, but we have a path to scale those up (except maybe Copper, that's another tough one.) Turns out rare earth elements are actually very abundant, but extremely hard to mine, very toxic to extract (which is partially why China has a strangehold on those) and we don't have a good path to scale those up.
All of this could be moot if we figure out alternative technologies for equally capable motors that could be manufactured at scale, but AFAIK whatever promising is on the horizon would still take a very long time to ramp up.
Borealid · · focus · HN ↗
First, you make a robot that mines rare earth metals. Then construction robots. Then an automated factory for assembling robots. The whole premise is that the robots are faster at these tasks than humans would be.
If the robotics are feasible their rise should be exponential, not linear, since each robot built makes building the next faster and helps to remove whatever bottleneck you had.
AnimalMuppet · · focus · HN ↗
That totally does not follow. Robots can be feasible and their payback curve can still be linear or sublinear.
Take mining rare earth metals, for instance. The problem with mining rare earths isn't that it takes so much human labor. The problem is doing it without poisoning the surrounding 30 square miles. Replacing the driver of the earth mover with a robot doesn't fix the chemistry at all, nor (I suspect) does it significantly affect the economics.
ploxiln · · focus · HN ↗
You can't just have a robot start mining/processing rare earths, anywhere in the country. You need permits, and a lot of money. I guess that didn't stop AI companies ... but there isn't an "infinite" novelty/hype premium for rare-earths, like there is for LLMs.
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People are more adaptable than horses and tech solutions usually require people to do some of the work. Dishwashers need loading and unloading. My robot vacuum still needs maintenance. Self-checkout means you do the scanning.
Amazon wants to get into drone delivery and there are cases where that might work, but the way news articles describe it, it’s not going to get a package onto my porch.
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asdff · · focus · HN ↗
Now you can imagine a waymo in this mix how it would just be on its knees in a situation like that. How is a waymo to interpret "fucking move already you dumb fuck" into any sort of meaningful instruction?
I'm reminded of that story about activists in SF requesting a dozen waymos at once at some one way street and creating a localized denial of service attack essentially.
queenkjuul · · focus · HN ↗
We are still a long way from a self driving car being the default type of car
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mrguyorama · · focus · HN ↗
So, uh, maybe don't dwell on that too much.
Actually, dwell on that a lot. It's probably the only instructive example.
The rich and powerful only suffer us because they need us. They cannot assemble every lead painted doodad by their own hands. If they could, they never would have hired anyone. So what happens when they no longer need as many people?
Society is already far too constructed around catching some of the wealth that just spills off of the people who own it, by being in their orbit. That activity is not actually productive, but since the only people with money are the ones that have a lot of it (K shaped economy), there's just not enough wealth left in the bottom part of the market to support anything else.
bluGill · · focus · HN ↗
handedness · · focus · HN ↗
The global horse population peaked in the 1910s.
bluGill · · focus · HN ↗
OroPla · · focus · HN ↗
Horse ownership isn't what it used to be, but the horse population seems fine.
rootusrootus · · focus · HN ↗
Well that and there are more guns than people and if a million people come for you then there is no army that will be able to save you.
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I also think that will be the case. However, not all the jobs are worth being automated. Say, if you are a modern-day horse-riding instructor, I very much doubt the robots will come knocking the door to take your job. Not because they can't, but because the headache is not economically worth it.
zamadatix · · focus · HN ↗
About the only things I can think to guarantee will have some constancy are "for the sake of being human" type things. Much like buying handmade bowls is something you can do out of pure preference/taste/ideology even though it's cheaper to buy massed produced ones.
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[dead]
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