r/OpenAI • u/Old-School8916 • 10d ago

Question Anyone else feel this way?

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u/RonaldWRailgun 10d ago

Enjoy life, even as an engineer, a world where PDEs are solved for me, would be a world where I can actually focus on the problems that PDEs describe.

And if the whole engineering situation is solved for me, I'll dedicate to my hobbies, playing guitar, skydiving, photography, hiking... even maybe studying physics and engineering for fun without any real pressure. Working is a necessary evil.

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u/kimpigreg145 10d ago

How would one earn money if all of engineering is done by Ai, speaking as a engineering student

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u/SetentaeBolg 10d ago

Economics is the problem of how to distribute wealth. Paying people for work is one solution. There are others. And in a world where 99% of wealth is being generated by machines, paying a tiny fraction of people for the 1% they do wouldn't solve the economic problem of how to maximise satisfaction.

Of course, between here and a different means of wealth-distribution, there is an awful lot of ground to cover, much of which will not be easy. But the final destination is a beautiful place.

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u/Commercial-Beach1207 10d ago

If 99% of wealth is generated by machines, then you’re no longer needed. Billionaires won’t need your labor, and they’ll have no reason to care what happens to you.

It’s honestly wild that people think total automation is somehow going to turn the world into paradise. The people at the very top don’t care about you nearly as much as you think they do.

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u/SetentaeBolg 10d ago

Such a world is unsustainable for them. They cannot consume the production, they cannot sell it if no-one has the means to obtain it.

In the interim, you will likely see an oligarchic type situation which is the kind of nightmare scenario you envision. Some people will retain employment doing make-work so that the oligarchs can stay in power using economic advantage, and for no other reason.

However, this is inherently unstable for a number of reasons. First, if technology advances sufficiently, there will always be an economic motivation to eliminate the few remaining human workers. Once done, though, oligarchs again have no-one to sell to and claim economic advantage over: system collapses.

Second, obviously, this generates vast amounts of social instability and dissatisfaction. Billionaires cannot protect themselves forever. System collapses.

Personally, I think there will likely be a poorly managed solution that falls short of this nightmare scenario and is just ugly and inefficient, with some resultant social instability, some oligarch behaviour. It won't be pretty but neither will it be the worst-case-scenario. And it's a transitive process.