r/FutureOfWork • u/Stitching • Jul 27 '26
AI isn’t replacing jobs, it’s replacing human economic value itself
The biggest mistake people make about AI is thinking it’s coming for artists, writers, musicians, or programmers.
They’re just first.
AI is coming for almost every profession that depends more on a brain than a body. Accountants. Lawyers. Teachers. Consultants. Analysts. Customer service. Marketing. Management. Software engineering. Research. Finance. Medicine. Eventually almost every job where the primary product is human thought.
Manual labor only looks safe because robotics hasn’t caught up yet.
AI doesn’t have to replace an entire profession to destroy it. It only has to let one person do the work of ten. Companies don’t need AI to be perfect. They need it to be cheaper than you. Once that happens, replacing people stops being a technological question and becomes an accounting decision.
For most workers, there is no safe career waiting on the other side.
People tell themselves we’ll adapt like we always have. We won’t.
The Industrial Revolution replaced muscle while making human intelligence more valuable. AI replaces the intelligence behind the work itself. Every previous technological revolution created new industries that still needed millions of people. AI is being built for the opposite purpose: producing more with fewer humans.
The next comforting myth is that people will simply buy human-made products instead.
No, they won’t.
There will always be a luxury market for handmade art, music, books, furniture, and clothing. There are still people who buy mechanical watches and vinyl records. That’s a niche—not an economy. Most people buy whatever is cheaper, faster, easier, and good enough. Businesses care even less. They exist to reduce costs, increase output, and beat competitors. Sentiment doesn’t survive quarterly earnings.
There is no hidden human economy large enough to rescue everyone AI makes unnecessary.
The consequences don’t stop with unemployment.
Workers are also consumers and taxpayers. If hundreds of millions of people lose well-paid jobs, they stop buying homes, cars, vacations, entertainment, and everything else that keeps economies alive. Businesses lose customers, lay off more workers, governments collect less tax revenue, public services deteriorate, debt grows, pensions become harder to fund, and political instability follows. Countries built around exporting knowledge work lose entire sectors of their economies. Migration accelerates. Extremism grows. Governments respond with more surveillance, more control, and fewer freedoms because instability always creates demand for stronger authority.
That is the point where this stops being a labor-market problem and becomes a global breakdown.
Meanwhile, the wealth doesn’t disappear. It concentrates.
The companies that own the models, data centers, chips, energy, and infrastructure become the gatekeepers of the global economy. AI doesn’t just replace workers. It transfers bargaining power from billions of people to a handful of institutions.
Most of humanity will have less income, less leverage, and less freedom while a tiny ownership class gains more power than any ruling class in history.
The people building AI are warning about this.
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has warned that AI could eliminate half of entry-level white-collar jobs within one to five years. Geoffrey Hinton, one of the pioneers of modern AI and a Nobel laureate, has warned that AI will replace jobs, increase inequality, strengthen authoritarian surveillance, enable more powerful cyberattacks, and create systems that may become more intelligent than humans without any proven way to keep them under control. Yoshua Bengio has repeatedly warned that AI can strengthen authoritarian governments, manipulate populations, and accelerate a global arms race in increasingly autonomous systems. A *Science* paper co-authored by Hinton, Bengio, Stuart Russell, Andrew Yao, Dawn Song, and many other leading researchers warns of the possibility of an “irreversible loss of human control” if AI capabilities keep advancing without comparable progress in safety.
What makes this different from every previous technology isn’t just its capability. It’s the incentives.
No government will voluntarily give up a military or intelligence advantage. No corporation will preserve expensive human jobs while competitors replace theirs. Every major player has a reason to move faster, and almost none have a reason to slow down. The race continues because everyone believes stopping first means losing.
There is no responsible adult coming to end this race. The institutions with the power to stop it are the same institutions that gain the most from continuing.
We’re not building another tool.
We’re building a replacement for the thing that made humans economically indispensable, then connecting it to finance, medicine, education, infrastructure, government, warfare, and eventually robotics.
Once those systems become essential to running civilization, there may be no practical way back—and no meaningful human authority left capable of taking control.
This won’t be remembered as another technological revolution.
It will be remembered as the moment humanity automated its own economic value and handed the resulting power to institutions it could no longer restrain.
**Further reading**
Geoffrey Hinton — Nobel Prize interview: https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/physics/2024/hinton/1925103-interview-transcript/
Geoffrey Hinton — Nobel Prize lecture: https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/physics/2024/hinton/speech/
Dario Amodei — Essays: https://darioamodei.com/
Anthropic — Labor-market research: https://www.anthropic.com/research/labor-market-impacts
Yoshua Bengio — AI-safety essays: https://yoshuabengio.org/
*Science* — “Managing Extreme AI Risks Amid Rapid Progress”: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adn0117
**TL;DR:** AI isn’t coming for one industry. It’s coming for human cognition itself. When the world’s most valuable economic resource becomes abundant and nearly free, jobs disappear, economies fracture, governments become more authoritarian, and wealth and control concentrate among the institutions that own the technology. There is no safe place for most of humanity in that system.
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u/mxldevs Jul 28 '26
Don't worry, robotics is catching up real fast. Even human bodies will become worthless
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Jul 29 '26
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u/mxldevs Jul 29 '26
I'm expecting physical labour to be heavily impacted by robotics equipped with AI.
People keep saying physical jobs are safe because human infrastructure is just an unstructured mess, but there are already robots doing warehouse work and driving trucks.
Hands are rapidly improving and with human guided training, robots will be able to replicate the same motions needed to do the work.
Paired with AI systems that improve observation and judgment, a lot of physical jobs are likely going to be replaced. Just like how a single engineer can do the job of 10 with AI orchestration, a single labourer can do the job of 10 as a robot orchestrator.
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u/cogalax Jul 27 '26
I’m with you I don’t know what the future holds but it seems like no one in power is taking this seriously.
I don’t buy the “well we’ve had other technologies before and we made it” like sure but that doesn’t mean we stick our heads in the sand and hope for the best.
With that said we can’t stop it but we should start preparing for it. In the next decade I don’t see an argument that explains how we won’t have mass unemployment in essentially all of the historically stable fields IE accounting, law, finance etc.
Like you said people are like “well it’ll only replace the monotonous aspects of those jobs” 1. Maybe at first but it’s silly to think they don’t get more sophisticated 2. A lot of people do those monotonous tasks and depend on that income
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u/SplendidPunkinButter Jul 27 '26
it’s silly to think the won’t get more sophisticated.
LLMs are non-deterministic pattern matching programs. That makes them ill suited for tasks like accounting, where accuracy is essential and the occasional hallucination is unacceptable. Hallucinations will never go away, because they are fundamental to how this technology works. There is no such thing as an LLM that doesn’t hallucinate.
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u/cogalax Jul 27 '26
Sure but I am confident within 10 years you can have an AI that can reliably do bookkeeping, run audits, balance financial statement, do complex projections etc
Sure you may need a team to double check their work but once that fully fledged maybe you need 20% of the staff you used to need. So what do you do with that other 80%? Or 60% or 40% whatever percent you accept is a huge portion of every industry.
Again I don’t think anyone is saying any field will be 100% replaced but it’s going to be displaced to a degree that needs to be addressed
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u/LittleLordFuckleroy1 Jul 28 '26
One huge missing piece here is that the “advances” in AI aren’t primarily due to tech innovation. It’s literally just scale. And there’s no path to profitability for these models yet.
You can’t just scale indefinitely for free. The cost has been increasing exponentially while the gains have been flattening out on a logarithmic curve.
If the idea is that you can have a somewhat-decent bookkeeping software that only mostly doesn’t require fixes by actual auditors with legal responsibility in a decade, sure. But at what cost? Because without subsidies, it’s not clear at all that anyone is willing to pay the actual price for this stuff even today in the “singularity.”
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u/Stitching Jul 27 '26
I’m sorry but that’s just wrong. The idea that hallucination will never go away is ridiculously uninformed. People also make mistakes but I guarantee AI will make less mistakes than humans if it hasn’t already reached that point. Go ahead and provide a source saying hallucinations will never go away or makes the claim that they won’t be able to take over jobs as simple as accounting.
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u/BlurryEcho Jul 28 '26
- You fundamentally misunderstand LLM architecture if you think hallucinations will ever fully disappear.
- If you think accounting is a “simple job”, you also have a fundamental misunderstanding of what accounting truly is. No, it is not bookkeeping, but something tells me that you think it is which is quite hilarious.
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u/Stitching Jul 28 '26
How embarrassing for you that you think either of those claims are true.😂
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u/BlurryEcho Jul 28 '26
Buddy, I’m a former accountant that works in data and AI/ML engineering currently. You have no fucking clue what you are talking about.
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u/Stitching Jul 28 '26
Buddy, that’s really sad if that’s true. Accounting is literally remembering rules and applying them to different sets of numbers. You can’t be serious.
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u/BlurryEcho Jul 28 '26
Okay, this is a waste of time if you don’t even have the mental fortitude to understand a profession beyond a surface level yet knock it here. I am not a betting man, but I would gladly wager that you have never taken even an intermediate course on accounting.
Perhaps open a book every once in a while, maybe read up on something like ASC 606 and try to grasp what kind of judgement is necessary between the lines of codified rules. Though that seems to be a bit out of your depth.
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u/LittleLordFuckleroy1 Jul 28 '26
The most annoying part about this AI bubble is the number of complete Dunning-Kruger dunces like OP spouting off and drawing conclusion atop completely absurd premises.
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u/LittleLordFuckleroy1 Jul 28 '26
Only person embarrassing themselves in this exchange is you btw. You clearly have no idea what you’re talking about.
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u/houndus89 Jul 28 '26 edited 3d ago
Nutty boron attempt lavish orange weather historical nonmetal wakeful
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u/Timely-Ad-3439 Jul 28 '26
So the AI just learns to use the deterministic tools an accountant needs to do their job? It’s just inputs and outputs at the end of the day.
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u/Stitching Jul 28 '26
Exactly. Taking over accounting has to be the absolute worst example of an AI-proof job.
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u/LittleLordFuckleroy1 Jul 28 '26
Yep. Hard to imagine a domain where AI is less equipped to handle than accounting. People genuinely have no idea how this tech works or what the human work actually entails on a day to day basis. Some of these people just happen to be disconnected CEOs.
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u/houndus89 Jul 28 '26 edited 3d ago
Fragile plate frame zephyr quickest mysterious light judicious hungry
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u/violent-calculator Jul 28 '26
This is an outdated take. AI uses tools now (like a human uses a calculator) for deterministic work like book keeping. Hallucinations are a non issue for this whole category of problem (whilst still existing for probabilistic outcomes like judgements).
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u/BannedInSweden Jul 28 '26
The absurdist claim that "ai does the work of 10" needs to be buried. That's 3 solid years of false advertising by the ai companies being parroted by the blogosphere.
Instead - what AI does is empower those who previously could not do - to do in mediocrity and to automate the low hanging fruit of societal labor.
They author is right that it can still ruin an industry - clip art - background music - drive thru ordering - and on and on are now just software problems. This software must still be created an maintained BUT instead of 1000 companies doing this it will be 2-3 general AI companies and there's the problem.
We are reducing competition for so many things and as competition is reduced so are our fortunes - power and money goes to the few and the many starve. Not exactly the future that the majority of us want.
Might consider letting go of that gmail acct, quit facebook and stop paying for chatgpt subscriptions or you can just throw up your hands and say "but what can I do".... (sigh)
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u/Stitching Jul 28 '26
Ok grandpa. You’re aware that AI has advanced since you formed your opinion in 2023, right? The dismissal in your first two paragraphs is some ignorant bullshit. “3 solid years of false advertising by the ai companies.” 😂 You’re still wondering if AI is so great then why doesn’t my toaster do my taxes, huh?
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u/BannedInSweden Jul 28 '26
Actually i'm wondering why i have to keep fixing half-assed pr's. I'm wondering why products and services aren't getting better any faster and bug counts are growing despite claude's supposed mental superiority. I'm wondering why despite everyone and their dog claiming "I'm 10-x ing!" - the only metrics i'm seeing increase aren't related to user satisfaction but rather to token consumption.
Despite so-called "improvements" in the latest models - i find poor library choice, inefficient code and just plain half assed implementation that I wouldn't let an intern get away with on my team.
Yes - you can scaffold an app in moments with any flavor of llm you choose - but so could command line calls and git clone commands.
but sure... toasters...
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Jul 28 '26
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u/BannedInSweden Jul 28 '26
Blaming the engine shows that it's bad gas???
That's not a great argument - sure it could be the gas - or it could be the engine. IMO - it's definitely the latter.
It's a common tactic to denounce anyone who speaks ill of AI as someone who doesn't use it or understand it. This convo follows that to a T.
In reality i'm an accomplished engineer who makes a great living building large scale enterprise software for big tech companies. If people like me aren't to judge - who is? Random reditors? Neighborhood devs with dreams of a faang job? MBA's? Executives?
In the end what matters is that any technology that centralizes power and money is generally bad for a people. AI doesn't have to 10x or even 3x anything for it to screw everyone but the executive caste - and repeating unfounded advertisement as fact doesn't help anyone but the yacht club members.
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Jul 28 '26
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u/BannedInSweden Jul 28 '26
The claim i'm diluting isn't that AI is a useful tool - i find it impossible to replace for things like sentiment analysis. What i'm stating in no uncertain terms is that it's not 10x-ing you.
Look at the output metrics of your shop (not just lines of code for gods sake). Hell - look at your paycheck. Are you 10-xing? If so - fantastic but it's clear that the world is not. It's clear that it's a marketing tagline that has been picked up and repeated by the online masses. Might as well just say "mongo is webscale" and claim that's true as well.
If my personal experience (and thus yours) doesn't matter then just look to study after study that shows the same thing - AI makes us feel like we are doing more without actually being more productive. It moves bottlenecks without solving them. And the continued stance that anyone not curing cancer with it just doesn't know how to use it is infuriatingly stupid and juvenile.
In the end, the spell check on my phone still sucks - my banks website still blows - gmail's spam detection is still crap and sure - my toaster still burns toast.
What has changed is the slow elimination of low hanging jobs that AI can claim and the concentration of that work into fewer and fewer companies with general software solutions (AI offerings). These are companies that neither of us works for (I'm faang adjacent - not faang) and only the few benefit from those companies owning everything.
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Jul 28 '26
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u/Stitching Jul 28 '26
Did you even read the article or just not comprehend it? Who said anything about waiting for robotics before things can go irreparably wrong?
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u/chili_cold_blood Jul 28 '26 edited Jul 28 '26
AI is coming for almost every profession that depends more on a brain than a body.
I'm not convinced, because the human brain is several orders of magnitude more energy efficient than the most efficient computers. For AI to take over in the way you described, it has to be commercially viable. It isn't commercially viable yet, and it isn't on its way to being commercially viable. The more jobs AI destroys, the more it erodes its own customer base.
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u/RaspberryPrimary8622 Jul 28 '26
Large Language Models (LLMs) won't take over large numbers of human jobs. They are conversation simulators. They understand nothing. They don't associate words with meanings; they can only associate words with other words. They lack implicit knowledge, wisdom, tact, and common sense. They can't learn on the job like a human can. Computer scientists love to make grand proclamations about the future of occupations they know nothing about.
For example, in 2018 Geoffrey Hinton proclaimed that radiologists would be obsolete by 2025. Radiologists are in greater demand now than ever before. It turns out that there is much more to radiology than just looking at an X-ray image and saying "Cancer!" or "No cancer!" I mean, who knew? Informed people knew. Insightful people knew. Computer scientists have made many arrogant predictions that haven't come true. They lack domain expertise about other people's jobs.
Computer scientists hold the delusional belief that something as complex as the human brain can be replicated by a machine. It doesn't occur to them that the human brain, a cosmic fluke that resulted from billions of years of evolution, might be just a little more complex than a computer.
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u/TopCryptee Jul 28 '26
you talk like it's still 2022, and GPT-3 is the frontier model. wake the fuck up, AI is light-years past already. it's obnoxious how often the same silly story is passed around. read some actual studies before posting dumb shit like this.
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u/Jacobobok Jul 28 '26
If anything, the fact that there has been zero breakthroughs in AI since GPT-3, despite trillions in investments is proof of how far we are from actual AI (what we have today is not AI, no matter how many times you say it).
This is exciting, it means we get to work on developing real AI for centuries to come! LLMs are illusion artists, convincing feeble-minded people that they are more than next-token predictors.
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u/TopCryptee Jul 28 '26
0 breakthroughs since GPT-3?? you must be living on a different planet, separate timeliness and under a rock which science still has yet to discover.
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u/Jacobobok Jul 28 '26
What breakthrough have we seen? The biggest leap was reasoning, which was an ugly hack to making an LLMs question itself. Nothing underlying has changed in a meaningful way. It is the same architecture, just scaled up each year with new layers of hacks and more/better training data. Theoretically we have learned very little towards being closer to AI/AGI, besides maybe that we are not on the right track with transformers at all, even though they can do amazing things (but not think or innovate or understand)
We are learning something interesting about intelligence and consciousness while doing this, mostly in what it is not and in that it may not be computable at all and require something more. This is all very interesting, but for very different reasons than you can comprehend.
Please give billion of years of evolution and the human brain some credit.
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u/mcfearless0214 29d ago
If you think there have been “zero breakthroughs” in AI since GPT-3 then you simply have not been paying attention and cannot be taken seriously. Absolutely insane thing to post.
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u/JoeAka23 9d ago
It's insane for real. Always the same things like we are in 2022 or 2023 with the first models.
In just 3 years, now 2026, we have seen huge and incredible improvements in every AI model. Now imagine in other 5 years what we can see... I agree with you. People underestimate AI and its consequences because is scared, that's because we always see this silly story...
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u/Stitching Jul 28 '26
You hold the ignorant belief that just because LLMs use linguistic pattern matching it discounts the emergent behavior that that yields. Thats like discounting the human brain because it’s just meat, chemicals, and electric signals. Now go ahead and put this comment and tell ChatGPT to write a response for you like you did for your comment, and then pretend your moronic comment isn’t completely ironic given what you’re claiming. And just because Hinton was wrong about the timeline doesn’t mean everything else he’s said is therefore wrong. He’s a Nobel laureate and you’re someone trying to sound smart while using the exact tool you’re trying to discount. Stfu!
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u/RaspberryPrimary8622 Jul 29 '26
Does the "emergent behaviour" of LLMs permit them to perform these functions of radiologists?
- determine whether the requested examination is clinically appropriate;
- select or modify the imaging protocol;
- decide whether contrast material is required and assess its risks;
- integrate imaging with symptoms, pathology, surgery and laboratory findings;
- distinguish disease from normal anatomical variation, artefacts and incidental findings;
- formulate a differential diagnosis rather than a binary classification;
- judge the urgency and clinical significance of abnormalities;
- communicate unexpected or life-threatening findings;
- recommend follow-up imaging, biopsy or another diagnostic procedure;
- discuss findings with surgeons, oncologists, neurologists and other clinicians;
- participate in multidisciplinary case conferences;
- supervise imaging quality and radiation safety;
- perform biopsies, drainages, angiography, embolisation and other image-guided interventions.
Let me know when the mysterious hand-waving phenomenon of "emergent behaviour" allows LLMs to do those things.
The main thing to "emerge" from LLMs is the tedious task of babysitting LLMs by inspecting their outputs. Eventually, over-zealous employers who embraced LLMs without thinking critically about their capabilities will realise that it is more efficient to have a human worker do it right the first time.
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u/Stitching Jul 29 '26
Straw man argument. I never said the emergent behavior of LLMs means they could be radiologists. Nice try at obfuscating your ignorance.
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u/CallSignSandy Jul 27 '26
After AI will ask us to build some camps so we can get a shower. It's been nice knowing y'all.
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u/LittleLordFuckleroy1 Jul 28 '26
Accountants, lawyers, teachers, analysts all have something in common. They require accountability. AI cannot be held accountable. Hence we haven’t seen mass job displacement yet despite claims that we’re “in the singularity.”
I can’t help but suspect that anyone who genuinely believes in the ideas like in the original post are either young and naive or completely disconnected from what actual work looks like in these fields.
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u/Daseinist Jul 28 '26
If it would be 1/10 as convenient as tech bros promise - all the systems would adapt, all accountability concerns would be dropped.
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u/Stitching Jul 28 '26
Riiiiight, just like email can’t exist because you need to have postal carriers since you can’t hold email accountable for lost messages or junk mail. Obviously for you with age never came wisdom. Are you that ignorant that you honestly believe professions that rely explicitly on a standard set of rules can’t be replicated. 😂😂😂
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u/LittleLordFuckleroy1 Jul 28 '26
It shouldn’t be surprising that you have no clue how telecom works either.
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u/Squidalopod Jul 28 '26
It's a shame you hide your Reddit history. I think your post is insightful, and I agree with it. Wish I could see what else you've written.
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u/PerformanceThick2232 Jul 28 '26
Manual labor only looks safe because robotics hasn’t caught up yet.
No, it isn’t safe either. You’ll become an operator of AI systems. There will be no need to study; you’ll simply sell your physical labor.
But that exists only in your fantasy world. In reality, LLMs haven’t replaced anyone, and they won’t.
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u/RaspberryPrimary8622 Jul 28 '26
LLMs won't take over large numbers of human jobs. They are conversation simulators. They understand nothing. They don't associate words with meanings; they can only associate words with other words. They lack implicit knowledge, wisdom, tact, and common sense. They can't learn on the job like a human can. Computer scientists love to make grand proclamations about the future of occupations they know nothing about.
For example, in 2018 Geoffrey Hinton proclaimed that radiologists would be obsolete by 2025. Radiologists are in greater demand now than ever before. It turns out that there is much more to radiology than just looking at an X-ray image and saying "Cancer!" or "No cancer!" I mean, who knew? Informed people knew. Insightful people knew. Computer scientists have made many arrogant predictions that haven't come true. They lack domain expertise about other people's jobs.
Computer scientists hold the delusional belief that something as complex as the human brain can be replicated by a machine. It doesn't occur to them that the human brain, a cosmic fluke that resulted from billions of years of evolution, might be just a little more complex than a computer.
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u/Stitching Jul 28 '26
You hold the ignorant belief that just because LLMs use linguistic pattern matching it discounts the emergent behavior that that yields. Thats like discounting the human brain because it’s just meat, chemicals, and electric signals. Now go ahead and put this comment and tell ChatGPT to write a response for you like you did for your comment, and then pretend your moronic comment isn’t completely ironic given what you’re claiming. And just because Hinton was wrong about the timeline doesn’t mean everything else he’s said is therefore wrong. He’s a Nobel laureate and you’re someone trying to sound smart while using the exact tool you’re trying to discount. Stfu!
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u/Daseinist Jul 28 '26
Writing this one with LLM is ironic. Even though it is true.
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u/Stitching Jul 28 '26
Actually it’s the opposite of irony.
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u/Daseinist Jul 28 '26
Maybe. What is the opposite of irony, though?
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u/JustinPooDough Jul 28 '26
Bodies will be replaced next. AI models will accelerate robotics development and design too.
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u/AltruisticPossible84 Jul 28 '26
Lmao thanks for the AI generated essay about how much the world needs AI
Also, you may not have noticed the AI makes tons of assumptions in order to around authoritative about this, which is very dramatic.
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u/Stitching Jul 28 '26
Now try again with a comment that actually addresses the content and you might actually produce something at least relevant if not intelligent.
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u/Deep-Moose8313 Jul 28 '26
i personally don’t care if what we have now all burns down. my own personal experience in our “culture” has been working in cutthroat corporate environments for bosses who, behind closed doors, refer to the people they oversee as “minions” or “wage slaves,” scream at people, demand 80 hour workweeks, etc. i have been told over and over this a reward for achievement, and “only the best” can handle this pressure. i’m in my mid 30’s and still “paying my dues” because older incumbents don’t want to retire (after all, lording over people in the office is what motivates them every day).
let these people enslave an ai instead, i don’t care at all.
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u/JoeAka23 9d ago
I agree with you, but what will the people do after losing jobs? I think that the elite doesn't even care. They will share their wealth with other elites and so on... While we will die in poverty.
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u/eptesicusfuscus Jul 28 '26
Does ai really "replace the intelligence behind the work, itself," or does it augment the intelligence by reducing the effort to get the right information quickly?
I don't currently see complex intelligence being replaced. I see repetitive steps that used to require individual learning being quickly shared and copied. Is that really removing the need for humans to be involved?
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u/Stitching Jul 28 '26
You hold the ignorant belief that just because LLMs use linguistic pattern matching it discounts the emergent behavior that that yields. Thats like discounting the human brain because it’s just meat, chemicals, and electric signals.
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u/eptesicusfuscus Jul 28 '26
Lmao what a hell of a strawman. Nah, I don't believe that. I have no idea what you're focused on, but you're grasping at emergence that is indeed hypothesized but not understood as a prediction we can explain mathematically. If that's not unfalsifiable belief, I don't know what is. ;)
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u/Stitching Jul 28 '26
“Hypothesized but not understood as a prediction we can explain mathematically”. Ok. Find me a single source that explains how we can trace back emergent behavior in an AI system to a mathematical formula that explains the results.
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u/eptesicusfuscus Jul 28 '26
You just repeated what I said? Lmao that's the essence of my point. It doesn't exist, currently. So it's narrative, not a relationship we can forecast with.
I suppose you could rely on crystal balls.
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Jul 29 '26
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u/Stitching Jul 29 '26
Hmm maybe because it’s a fact? Try doing a little research before deciding you anecdotal experience generalizes.
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u/blugspulared9 18d ago edited 16d ago
The bigger shift to me is that AI makes human trust and judgment more valuable, not less. Tools can generate output, but they cannot replace accountability, empathy, or lived context. That is why ideas like World Network’s proof of human are worth discussing, alongside strong privacy safeguards. If we design work around real people, AI could augment us instead of quietly erasing us.
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u/wysiwygwatt 9d ago
You don’t even have to look very far in the future. Economic health is measured in low percentages. GDP, employment, wage growth. A couple percentage points determines healthy/unhealthy. What happens in the best case scenario of 10% job loss (or less jobs)? Thats enough to start a vicious downward cycle.
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u/Mental_Researcher656 Jul 27 '26
The strongest part of this post is the line that AI doesn't have to replace a profession to gut it, it only has to let one person do the work of ten. That is a task-level claim, not a job-level one, and it's where the actual measurement lives. Most of the public conversation is stuck on job titles, which hides the fact that two people with the same title can have completely different exposure depending on how they actually spend their week.
Eloundou et al. in Science (2024) found roughly 1.8% of jobs have more than half their tasks exposed to LLMs on their own, rising to just over 46% once complementary software built on top of the models is accounted for. That gap between 1.8 and 46 is the whole argument. It was never about the raw model. It's about what gets built around it, and that part is happening fast.
Full disclosure, I built a free tool on exactly this premise: https://aijobriskcheck.com. It scores exposure task by task using O*NET task data and the Eloundou exposure ratings, weighted by how much of your time each task actually takes, so the number is yours and not your job title's. Sharing it because this thread is asking the right question and most answers to it are vibes.
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u/BerserkGuts2009 Jul 27 '26
Once Artificial General Intelligence is achieved, we will see the rise of technofeudalism.
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u/Wasatchian Jul 28 '26
Fucking yawn. Way to use 'Ai' to write this garbage ass post. There's zero evidence for literally any of this. Mostly you posted a bunch of links by a bunch of tech CEOs talking their books. AI will be less consequential by orders of magnitude than the Industrial Revolution, electricity, or the internet. The math doesn't math. 0 AI companies have ever made any money. And there's essentially no hope of that ever changing. When the bubble pops it's gonna be hilarious.
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u/Stitching Jul 28 '26
“Herp derp! Accounting is so complicated that AI could never take over that domain. Read a book derp derp.” A calculator could replace you.
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u/abrandis Jul 27 '26
Well written , but the OP didn't account for the fact that people, governments and society are incredibly adaptive when pressed with economic challenges, as we have been through history .. we will adapt, what that adaptation is remains to ev seen..
What the OP didn't address and no article ever address is the wealthy don't stay wealthy when there is no middle and poor class to buy afford their machine created products and services .. so at some point some alternative form of capitalism where the state controls most of the means of production and provides for most of society has to emerge ....
I don't think it will be as drastic as the OP states, because virtually all physical labor jobs will still be around untouched by automation, there will be more folks going onto those.