Comment by shermantanktop

The claim of the AI true-believers is that this time it will be different because of the "general" nature of it.

Fire can't build a house.

The wheel can't grow crops.

Writing can't set a broken bone.

Double entry bookkeeping can't write a novel.

If you believe that this AI+robotics wave will be able to do anything a human can do with fewer complaints, what would the humans move on to?

> Can you name me another time when humanity has run out of useful work to do? > > Was it when we tamed fire, invented the wheel, writing, or double entry bookkeeping? All of which appear more consequential than current AI. > > We’ll always have something to do. And humans like doing things.

History doesn't predict the future. I can't tell you about another time when humans ran out of usefull things to do. What I can tell you is that we humans are biological beings we limited cognitive and physical abiloties.

I can also tell you about another biological being whose cognitive and phyisical abilities were surpassed by technology. Horses. What happened to them then wasn't pretty. The hight of their population in US was in 1915.

And sure, humans like doing things and so do horses, but you can't live by doing things that aren't useful to others, at least not in the current system. If technology surpases our abilities, the only useful things left to do for vast majority of humans is the same thing that was left for horses to do. Entertainment in various forms and there won't be enough of those jobs for all of us.

In the USA, the great depression, that is what "the grapes of wrath" is about. Or in all the dock towns when we shifted to containerized shipping.

(I don't think technological innovation leads to permanent job loss, but some people will lose)

A lot of people are being more or less coerced into doing abjectly useless stuff with their time.

David Graeber did a thing on the topic where he called the subset he was interested in "bullshit jobs".

> Can you name me another time when humanity has run out of useful work to do?

Can you name me another time when big swaths of highly paid population were laid off due to redundancy and how did it go for the population?

Also, another hint: I couldn’t care less what is going to happen to “humanity”. “Humanity” isn’t the one who pays my bills and puts food on my table.