Comment by brtkwr
6 days ago
If your plan for humanity is to maintain the current number of jobs on one planet, sure, AI is a threat. But if you think we should be building civilisations beyond Earth, terraforming, mining the outer solar system, understanding the universe — then a 10x productivity gain per person isn't a disruption. It's barely enough to get started. We need 100x. 1000x. And we'll still be short-handed.
The chain of operation never ends either. Every AI system needs someone to run it. Whatever runs it needs to be built and maintained. Follow that chain as far as you like — human agency doesn't disappear, it scales up. The universe is not running out of things that need doing.
"AI will take our jobs" is not a civilisational concern. It's a failure to imagine what civilisation could actually be.
People still do press buttons, handle the few tasks still not available to robots, do maintenance as needed, it just happens they are now a fraction of what used to provide work to a whole village.
You are likely living in a bubble if you actually think this. Less than 2 billion people in the world have used AI chatbots, let alone frontier AI models of any kind. I much prefer the bicycle analogy for AI, its just a force multiplier.
Of course I think this, otherwise I would not have written it, I also have seen people lose their bycicles and now wondering what they will do next to keep their mind sane.
slop comment. we've barely left our own planet, let alone the solar system
fair, lets leave space. even here on earth, 10x productivity gain from AI isn't enough. we're underresourced on problems we've had for centuries, e.g. poverty, disease, work/life balance and more recently climate, etc.