Comment by globular-toast

We were always lazy, but there was no other option before. Nobody does any work that isn't required. If you want to do something that isn't required, then it's not work, it's a pastime.

So why do people work? For the vast majority of people there are three main incentives:

1. Survival. You need food and shelter. Most people don't own anything so have to do whatever the owners want them to do to meet basic needs,

2. We get satisfaction from helping, pleasing and impressing other people,

3. We get personal satisfaction from doing a good job, being proud of our outputs and learning and honing our skills.

A bad job like factory work or unskilled labour only has incentive 1. Nobody takes pride in how well they've cleaned a toilet, nor does anyone appreciate it. Better jobs get 2 and 3 as well. We generally got all three incentives in abundance.

What we're seeing is the loss of incentive 3 and inevitable eventual loss of 2. Those were what drove us to do more than the bare minimum that's required for 1. That's why we would spend time thinking through things, struggling with problems, learning and bettering ourselves in the process. Now there's no personal satisfaction because an LLM could do it. And we know that there's nothing really stopping other people doing to too, so what we did soon won't even be impressive or help others (although we can cling on to it for a little while maybe).

We have a few options going forward. On a personal level we could try searching for something that gives us the satisfaction we once had, or we could just accept that we'll become wage slaves likes so many others. On a societal level we could all decide to minimise the amount of work we do, given that it's much less enjoyable now.