I had to check the year on this post because I couldn't believe someone could post something this naive in 2025.

i don’t think you’re supposed to read this if you don’t have “e/acc” in your twitter bio

> Historical precedent: child labor

amazing start. crushing it already

> Consider Qatar as a point of comparison. Migrant workers make up roughly 94% of the country’s workforce, yet only Qatari citizens, who make up the remaining 6%, are eligible to receive most government welfare benefits. As a result, Qatari citizens enjoy remarkable prosperity, with minimum pensions valued at over $5,700 per month and an early retirement age of 50.

consider: the upsides of doing slavery. a libertarian utopia of remarkable prosperity

> Future humans might gain entirely new senses, develop completely new ways to communicate, and expand our minds beyond recognition. From our present vantage point, we may become gods.

this is actually ripped directly from the closing paragraph of Don’t Create The Torment Nexus

This is incredibly shallow, and feels almost bordering on a type of delusion. Even if you agree that all labour _could_ be automated, it's highly debatable whether you'd want it to be. A lot of human society is for humans and by humans, and that is a good thing. We are social animals, automation of every task is not desirable to say the least.

Pyotr Kropotkin in _The Conquest of Bread_ writes the following conclusion about the advent of greenhouse agriculture and steam power and what they mean for European labor at the turn of the 20th century. It's a communist (well, they'd argue about that) book so it's got a lot of numbers and no great punchy pull quote, so this is as succinct as I can be:

> In basing the maintenance of these 150 acres on the Jersey average, requiring the work of three men per acre under glass—which makes less than 8,600 hours of work a year—it would need about 1,300,000 hours for the 150 acres. Fifty competent gardeners could give five hours a day to this work, and the rest would be simply done by people who, without being gardeners by profession, would soon learn how to use a spade, and to handle the plants. But this work would yield at least—we have seen it in a preceding chapter—all necessaries and articles of luxury in the way of fruit and vegetables for at least 40,000 or 50,000 people. Let us admit that among this number there are 13,500 adults, willing to work at the kitchen garden; then, each one would have to give 100 hours a year distributed over the whole year. These hours of work would become hours of recreation spent among friends and children in beautiful gardens, more beautiful probably than those of the legendary Semiramis.

> This is the balance sheet of the labour to be spent in order to be able to eat to satiety fruit which we are deprived of today, and to have vegetables in abundance, now so scrupulously rationed out by the housewife, when she has to reckon each half-penny which must go to enrich capitalists and landowners.

The work week has gotten much shorter since this was written, no doubt about that. But we keep aiming for ~5 hours a week with the profits of our higher mechanized productivity spread out among everyone and somehow we keep missing that one.

These AI bros are getting too high sniffing their own farts. They need to do a tour of duty doing actual manufacturing automation work.

There is a very stark discrepancy here. In online spheres Utopianism rises as a popular idea, describing a near future of complete abundance. At the same, in reality, people around me are noticably worse off, they can afford less, products and services degrade in quality and social bonds are deteriorating.

I can only believe that the former is a psychological reaction to the later.

His argument of GDP gains being distributed somewhat equitably relies on the assumption that healthy democracies continue to exist, and that those democracies are structured in such a way that would allow for the distribution of those GDP gains.

Aside from the ability to cast a ballot, the only other power that normal people have in our political economy is the ability to withdraw their labour. If AI replaces all labour, that already vanishing power completely disappears.

I could see countries like Norway having strong enough institutions to ensure that the benefits get shared in a reasonable way.

In places like the US or Russia, I have a difficult time imagining anything other than the creation of a dozen trillionaires. The US can't even agree on basic universal healthcare. Do you think that President Vance or Newsom are going to divert profits from Google and OpenAI to give to normal people?

A far more likely scenario would be the growth of a permanent underclass. Silicon valley would rather see 150 million people living in tents than agree to a higher rate of taxation.

TLDR: AI automating all jobs away is OK because UBI.

lol. Money is used to allocate resources. Most people sell their time to earn money. So if people don't have job anymore, theyre screwed if they don't have money, and they're screwed if they get a "universal income" or something. Why? Because everyone gets it, so how do you allocate scarce resources?

Suppose 1000 people live in a town where half own homes and half rent. A home comes up for sale and assume all renters want to own a home. If every renter is receiving the same income, who gets the house?

In today's world, whoever pays the most money. In this future world, maybe still the same (so who has the saved the most and can pay cash), or maybe alternative payments / bartering on the side to sweeten the deal.

Either way it's not this utopia where suddenly everyone can afford scarce resources - the price will just go up to remain scarce

I'm very skeptical about such a future. The 'world' is already high tech. We're already drowning in products and entertainment.

At the same time, a million people talk to chatgpt about suicide each week, there's an epidemic of loneliness, mental health issues, wars, famines, pollution, climate change and the list goes on.

Work is not just about earning wages. A lot of people find a sense of purpose, a sense of belonging, community, pride and joy in the work they do. For many it's also about the hierarchy, the title, the career ladder, etc.

I for one don't see how more automation / tech is going to fix the fundamental problems that the previous waves of automation have left behind.