[trevithick]

I have not heard or read anything about AI that could be construed as positive for an ordinary person. Step one is "lose your job with no possibility of finding another one, but still have to buy stuff to survive." That will also be the last step for a huge number of people. Is there a bull case for some hypothetical regular person with a desk job? I haven't seen one.

[infinitezest]

This is something I've been waiting to hear as well. We hear about how jobs will be eliminated, and occasionally we hear about how that means there will be time for other things that we want to do, but it kind of seems like AI is already doing all of the things that we want to do. And then, of course, there's the question of how the rest of us are going to provide for ourselves if none of us have jobs. Those at the top already seem quite reticent to share with the rest of us. I can't imagine that's going to get better if we don't provide any value to them that a computer can't do for cheaper.

[autoexec]

> occasionally we hear about how that means there will be time for other things that we want to do, but it kind of seems like AI is already doing all of the things that we want to do.

That's been the promise of every technology. Computers were supposed to make us so productive that that we could all work less and spend time with our families or whatever. Instead productivity went through the roof freeing most people to do even more work for our masters who started demanding more from us even outside the office while real wages stagnated. AI isn't going to make our lives any more carefree than any other technology. It'll just make a small number of extremely wealthy people even richer.

Thankfully, what passes for AI these days is pretty shitty at doing even basic tasks and so it'll be a while before we're all replaced. In the meantime, expect disruptions as companies experiment with letting staff go and replacing them with AI, get disappointed in the results, and hire people back at lower wages. Also expect a lot of companies you depend on to screw you over because their stupid AI did something it shouldn't have and suddenly it's your problem to deal with.

[ErroneousBosh]

> We hear about how jobs will be eliminated

I've been hearing about how $latest_technology is going to eliminate jobs for 40 years. It hasn't happened yet.

Which jobs, exactly, is AI going to eliminate? It's not useful for anything. It doesn't do anything useful. It's just mashing random patterns together to make something that approximates human-readable language.

[FuriouslyAdrift]

There's always crime...

[bpodgursky]

Individual countries, or even multinational orgs like the EU, "opting out" doesn't work, is the critical problem. In a digital economy, you can't keep AI workers from crossing borders. You can pretend to make it illegal, but the Philippine "contractors" you hire will just be fake!

Or more likely, your entire enterprise collapses against international rivals. Or your entire country turns into North Sentinelese islanders just surviving at the whim of hypertechnical industrialized neighbors.

I'm all for international cooperation on how to preserve a place for humans, I truly am, but the "let's just not do it" is frustratingly naive and not an actual plan.

[SpicyLemonZest]

20% of American workers (38% of those under 30) report that they use ChatGPT to help with their job (https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2025/06/25/34-of-us-...). I suppose it's possible that none of that group are "ordinary", but my anecdotal experience has been that random nontechnical people have no problem using or finding value in generative AI.

[autoexec]

While only 20% of workers (a very very small number) use AI at their job fewer than half of those say it actually helps them work faster and fewer than 30% said it improved the quality of their work (https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2025/02/25/u-s-wor...). I'm not seeing a lot of people "finding value" there

[mordymoop]

I used it to cure my 25-year-running chronic pain condition, I would call that a benefit.

[dontlaugh]

Especially with this bleak described future. Why would I want to be one of the few simulated? I’d rather stay dead.

If you think this may be the future, surely the only rational response is to do everything in your power to prevent it.

[trevithick]

Yes. I've always planned to stay dead forever after I die. AI is not changing that.

[cjs_ac]

The bull case is that when the venture capitalists stop subsidising LLM providers and expect them to turn a profit, the actual end-user costs exceeds the cost of employing a human. I don't know whether this is actually true, but it might happen.

[empath75]

Even it AI is better and more cost efficient at doing everything that humans do, there will still be work for humans to do. AI development will focus on stuff that ai is best and most efficient at. There will be many things that AI may be better at than humans but nevertheless would not be the best use of AI, and humans can still do that work.

[Zigurd]

Either that, or the AI bubble bursts hard and those people lose their jobs too, and nobody has a prospect of getting their job back. That then causes the market to lose enough that it becomes impossible for PE firms to exit any of their investments.

[trevithick]

True, my question assumed AI "progress" and adoption follow the hype trajectory. Reality could be closer to the scenario you laid out. The bubble pops, some AI tools maybe improve things in some areas, societal disintegration gets kicked down the road a few years.

[tormeh]

But think of the shareholders! No, but really. Humans have property rights because humans are useful to the dominant species on the planet. What happens when that stops being the case? Human investors will no longer be needed. So what are we really doing here?

[ducttapecrown]

The bull case is that everyone losing their jobs will accelerate and bring about the socialist revolution, giving us universal basic income and universal healthcare.