17 Comments
User's avatar
& Monetization Architect™'s avatar

This hits hard 😢…I’m a 55 yr old accountant

Lawrence Lundy-Bryan's avatar

Lobby, lobby hard for human in the loop tax filings

Ash Stuart ✅'s avatar

Mass unemployment won’t arrive. There will always be things to do.

Errol Pinto's avatar

Good analysis @law! Small typo here

We have drone piltos

Rachel J. Cox's avatar

Yes and no.. some industries will pay people to hang around and be security blankets for the rest of the employees but the less profitable ones won't have the luxury.

dsham's avatar

The only dynamic missing here is the class warfare between neuralinkers and mushybrainers

Swag Valance's avatar

Something tells me that modern business leadership can adopt modern tech. But modern business leadership is really attached to RTO.

When your lordship over your minions is counted in AI agents, the modern business leadership ego deflates like a kid who hosted a birthday party and nobody came.

Might be a good time to become a professional therapist or coach for supremely lonely CEOs surrounded by bots with no one to truly dominate anymore.

Lawrence Lundy-Bryan's avatar

Yeah ego is important, but maybe the margins will help them sleep at night

Hard Head and Soft Heart's avatar

Lawrence, you're on to something here. I see countless numbers of people that "work from home" but seem to have time for going grocery shopping, working out, walking the dog, taking a nap, and other things during the day. In the 1990s, if I wanted to work out, I needed to get up at 4am to be finished by 5:30 and get my butt to the office.

Even in the office, how many people are working, and how many are scrolling on Facebook or Instagram or something else? My kids are shocked when they hear the kinds of things that I accomplished in a week, back when I was in an entry-level job. They think it's impossible because they don't realize that 12 hours each day is a LONG TIME when you're really humping.

I suppose it's better than unemployed people lying on couches all over the place.

Maybe the ancient Egyptians had a good idea: Put the idle people to work on something grand. Let's come up with some kind of project to keep all of the underemployed people busy!

The Human Playbook's avatar

This hits hard. Because it’s true. Everyone is feeling it. We are already living in the performative layer … interviews, jobs, even ambition itself feels like a performance of usefulness. Everything is 10X, but increasingly hollow. The real risk is that we adapt too well to meaninglessness… to conform and forget who we were in the first place.

Lawrence Lundy-Bryan's avatar

And it’s always highly contentious to attribute a causal effect. To what extent is this loss of meaning the cause of far-right movements? Or increase in mental health diagnosis? Or is it all because of 2008? Social media? Covid? I worry the same thing will happen with AI automation and it will never be pinned as the root cause of social and political issues we will see 2025-2035

The Human Playbook's avatar

Hi Lawrence I really respect your POV here and think this should be amplified. Not everyone is asking the question of what AI is doing to us? Most discussion has centered around alignment, capabilities, etc …

Lawrence Lundy-Bryan's avatar

Do you have a megaphone?

Bojan's avatar

You need to take into account the competition. Competition within the same industry, then competition between communities, countries, blocks. Keeping people for performative reasons only will put the company out of existence if it has to compete on the basis of productivity or a similar metric. For this performative vision to work one needs a global framework that would impose conditions for such an environment. But, who and why (on the basis of what incentives) would impose such a framework?

Henry's avatar

No mention of HVAC here. Physical manipulation may be mankind's last stand.

Henry's avatar

Also, I find this perfectly plausible and awful. Good job?

LawW's avatar

I think remote work will come back into fashion once its healing effect on population collapse becomes more widely studied and proven. I for one LOVE that economic equality seems to be an essential ingredient for the species to even want to continue in all 1st World countries.