this post was submitted on 07 Apr 2025
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-16
What Will Remain for People to Do? The future of labor in a world with increasingly productive AI. (knightcolumbia.org)
submitted 6 days ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
18 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

What paid work might remain for human beings to do if we approach a world where AI is able to perform all economically useful tasks more productively than human beings? In this paper, I argue that the answer is not ‘none at all.’ In fact, there are good reasons to believe that tasks will still remain for people to do, due to three limits: ‘general equilibrium limits,’ involving tasks in which labor has the comparative advantage over machines (even if it does not have the absolute advantage); ‘preference limits,’ involving tasks where human beings might have a taste or preference for an un-automated process; and ‘moral limits,’ involving tasks with a normative character, where human beings believe they require a ‘human in the loop’ to exercise their moral judgment. In closing, I consider the limits to these limits as AI gradually, but relentlessly, becomes ever-more capable.

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[–] [email protected] 11 points 6 days ago (7 children)

This current iteration of "AI" is just autocorrect on steroids, so... no, no AGI yet.
There'll be a lot of work fixing the effects of vibe-coding and similar practices, for sure.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 6 days ago (3 children)

Not yet, but it's an interesting thought experiment if nothing else. Someday, thanks to advances in robotics and computers, human labor will become largely obsolete. So the question is how do we structure our society when that happens?

[–] [email protected] 4 points 5 days ago

If human labor becomes obsolete, our current ruling class might attempt to just kill off all of us "undesirables".

[–] [email protected] 6 points 6 days ago (1 children)

The real question isn't how we structure our society if some extremely far-fetched scenario happens. The real question is how we structure our society right now that is already failing most of society the way it is structured right now.

Labor is not a necessity for people to survive, in fact most people would consider a place where their job wasn't required a utopia in terms of the enjoyment they get out of the actual labor. The real question is about wealth distribution, not labor.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago) (1 children)

But labor is a necessity to survive, and always has been. We need the production of goods and services. Of course the distribution of wealth and goods is also an issue, but somebody (or something) has to produce the things we use.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 6 days ago (1 children)

Labor is a human putting in work. Fully automated production of goods and services is already a thing for some goods and services today and some others have a much, much larger automation component than they had historically.

Don't confuse the wealth distribution mechanism (getting paid for labor) with the actual work itself.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 days ago

And all goods and services require some amount of humans putting in work in order for them to be provided. Nothing is truly 100% automated yet.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 days ago

I'm sorry but that's wishful thinking (IMO).
Don't get me wrong, there still may be a humanity when we reach a point when that's technically possible, but it'll be one more of the cyberpunk dystopia kind.

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