Life After Work

https://www.mechanize.work/blog/life-after-work/

by colesantiago • 9 months ago

35 93 9 months ago

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.

nemomarx• 9 months ago

I bet during the great depression you had a lot of utopians too

gdulli• 9 months ago

Without pretending that utopia will result from the current direction of the tech industry, the people responsible would have to face the reality that's much more likely to unfold.

bittercynic• 9 months ago

There are some extra weird things going on, though. Many people are simultaneously getting poorer by economic/financial stability, and have less access to medical care and safe housing, but at the same time enjoying more luxurious vehicles than ever and ordering door dash multiple times per week.

I'm not criticizing people in that situation. Many people close to me wouldn't have a chance no matter how thrifty they were.

This is not some "revealed preferences" situation either. Something very harmful is happening, and it's not easy to see exactly what it is or why it's happening, though I suspect increasing wealth inequality plays a big part.

germinalphrase• 9 months ago

K-shaped recoveries generate fragmented realities.

dmitshur2• 9 months ago

Now consider humanity after full automation. Instead of millions of migrant workers, humanity will have trillions of digital laborers at its disposal.

One piece in the logic I don't get is this: why would (or should) the earnings done by those workers go into the pockets of humanity, who isn't doing the work, rather than into the pockets of the laborers, whether digital or not?

indigodaddy3• 9 months ago

Or more likely just the companies themselves if all the labor is AI no? Seems like the society/economy will need stringently enforced policies to even begin to think about making this happen

jimbokun4• 9 months ago

This is like asking why the profits of corporations aren't given to the machines in the factories.

dmitshur2• 9 months ago

A difference there is no one's claiming the machines in the factories are going to reach AGI levels of intelligence within some years.

trial3• 9 months ago

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

qsort• 9 months ago

I think the idea is that once we have AI that can use AI to help AI build AI we're so wealthy that we can afford to live lives of leisure. Naturally in that scenario shortly thereafter everyone dies, but we don't talk about that part.

SketchySeaBeast2• 9 months ago

Which isn't even true. We aren't all wealthy, those people who own the compute for the AI become wealthy. The rest of us, whose only value was labour, stop having value.

indigodaddy3• 9 months ago

Yeah I also thought these comparisons were a bit odd/off-putting. But I guess they must have thought that transmogrifying from slave to AI worker would strip away the stigma? Not sure if..

indigodaddy3• 9 months ago

"With trillions of digital workers and robots entering the economy, a tenfold increase in GDP represents a very conservative estimate of how much full automation could increase economic output. If this modest increase were reflected proportionally in US tax revenues, we could resolve all current Social Security funding shortfalls, lower the retirement age to 18, and increase the average payout to over $150,000 per adult per year."

From what money is that "ten-fold increase in revenue" coming from if no one is working? Is this a chicken/egg problem in the beginning in order to ramp this economy up? But even it it can get ramped up, the described scenario feels like a zero-sum game no? Like we're all just playing a continuous poker game with the same players and all the same money.

larsiusprime2• 9 months ago

If all labor is automated and nobody can earn anything selling their own anymore, all that’s left are the other two factors of production: capital and land.

Land is scarce and cant be produced, so whoever already owns it will benefit after the change.

Capital can be produced, but what produces it? Labor. Even worse, capital depreciates over time so just owning some now doesn’t guarantee you an income in the post labor future.

In a fully automated world where human labor is truly of zero value it seems the main returns in the long run are to those who can gate keep valuable land, natural resources, and other fundamentally scarce assets.

myth_drannon4• 9 months ago

That's why the tech billionaires buy islands. It's easier to protect the land in the coming conflicts.

cool_man_bob2• 9 months ago

Notice they’re building castles too. Look deeper you can even find insane sounding manifestos describing feudal style martial-loyalty oaths.

mopsi• 9 months ago

How many divisions does Zuck have?

optimalsolver• 9 months ago

How will they protect themselves from their own security forces?

android521• 9 months ago

Well , if that’s the case , it would be much easier to tax the land owners. Can have exponentially bigger tax so the more land they own, the more tax they have to pay until they can’t afford to own the land. They can’t run as they can’t bring the land with them . Socialism might work in that world

larsiusprime2• 9 months ago

Socialism might work in that world

Technically, what you've just described is Georgism: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgism

The real question is, in a truly post-labor future, how do workers have enough leverage to negotiate for any particular change in the economic system?

DeusExMachina2• 9 months ago

Socialism "might" always work in an immaginary world that does not take into account the reality of the human condition.

One of the many flaws of such immaginary worlds is thinking that people will be content to live in a system where they have no creative outlet left and nothing they do will have any ultimate meaning.

People in those conditions might burn down the system for the mere excitement of novelty. Even experimental rat utopias quickly degenerate.

scoofy• 9 months ago

You don't even have to tax the monetary value of the land. You can require a percentage of the land, itself, over time. If we're really moving to a post labor world -- which I sincerely doubt -- I think the concept of private property is going to have to be narrowed only to things that have a limited lifespan.

some_furry• 9 months ago

Well , if that’s the case , it would be much easier to tax the land owners.

No, the land owners have bought and paid for every politician. Not gonna happen.

dangus• 9 months ago

The article asserts that as wealth has increased, so has spending on social programs.

I think what isn’t said here is that there was a lot of blood involved in getting weekends and 8 hour workdays. Labor strikes used to be violent, and social programs are pitchfork insurance for the global elite.

If the owners of capital control all means of production, all automated, they will control literal robot armies - we already see this developing with drones and the like.

It’s entirely possible that the global elite succeeds in fighting off the underclass and their reality looks a lot more like Elysium where the owners of capital do not have to worry about the angry masses reaching them.

ryandrake4• 9 months ago

Every time I say we are headed towards an Elysium-like world, it gets downvoted pretty quickly. Yet all signs are pointed to that trajectory! The rich are getting richer, they live in essentially their own world already--they're buying islands and building fortresses. They are more and more just selling to each other because the rest of us are essentially irrelevant to commerce. It's reasonable to assume we are moving towards a society where a mere 1-10M or so people live walled-off somewhere in luxury (not necessarily a space station) while the remaining 8B people are economically irrelevant, scraping by in the periphery.

Jupe2• 9 months ago

Which is already happening. This is why stock buy-backs, IPO-less/private companies and private equity rule the future. This "wealth" will NOT come from government subsidies or UBI. It will stay where it is, with enough income doled out to the masses to keep the supply/demand economy chugging along.

monkeyboykin• 9 months ago

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

buildsjets• 9 months ago

Been working at it for 30 years, and we still cant fully automate the drilling of all holes and installation of all threaded fasteners in large aircraft primary structure. Hundreds of millions, potentially billions invested.

dwpdwpdwpdwpdwp• 9 months ago

>> "For each human, there could be thousands of robots, effectively an army of tireless servants for each individual."

yeah, blog at me after a few years of managing even a small fleet of robots

suriya-ganesh3• 9 months ago

The answer lies in recognizing that wages are just one source of income. People also earn income from investments....

I already can see the slant that, this whole article is going to be about. Capital holders are going to be the only people matter. Everyone else is trivial. i.e. the top 5% who hold 80% of all wealth in the world.

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.

My father was one among those 94%. Stayed away from my family for more than a decade, only visiting us for 2 months every 2 years. Leaving with tears in his eyes every time. Qatar shouldn't be a point of comparison for capitalism. With no way for naturalization, a strong monarchy, and Labor oppression. I think it's the opposite of free trade capitalism as preached by the west.

What I got from this article was. More money for me, and none for the peasants, but that's okay because they or their work don't matter anyway.

constantcrying3• 9 months ago

The article is equating automation technologies to the laborers in Qatar and humans in General to the Qatari.

The comparison is bad and yes the article is ridiculous, but it does not argue for human oppression or capital accumulation in a small minority of humans, it argues that in fact such an accumulation will be meaningless.

suriya-ganesh3• 9 months ago

But there is a risk that those who own negligible amounts of capital prior to full automation will be out of luck. With nothing but their wages to survive on, they may live dreary lives, and perhaps even starve. However, at least for citizens of high-income democracies, this risk seems to be quite small.

And then the article goes on to explain, how historically governments have always redistributed wealth from rich to the poor.

The wealthy were incentivized to provide for the bottom of the population only because there was need for labour for the wealth to stay alive. but then, going by the article's analogy when there is no need for labour, there is no need for the bottom 75% as well.

myth_drannon4• 9 months ago

"Migrant workers", call a spade a spade. Slave labour it is. 6500 of them died building stadiums for the soccer World Cup

jimbokun4• 9 months ago

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

SketchySeaBeast2• 9 months ago

Yes, yes, we will definitely get UBI, the government will absolutely be able to extract the required wealth from the few techno-feudal lords who control the entirety of humanity's compute.

jimbokun4• 9 months ago

I'm summarizing what I perceive to be the argument, not agreeing with it.

xivzgrev• 9 months ago

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

riehwvfbk• 9 months ago

It's not as much "lol" as what's implied, you have to read between the lines a bit. Their example is Qatar, a tiny elite supported by slaves. And in the brave new world we'll have a tiny elite supported by AI slaves. Left unsaid is what will happen to those for whom there is no place within the tiny elite.

There are two possibilities: mass extinction, or the new elite isn't tiny. Everyone hopes for the latter and fears the former.

DontchaKnowit• 9 months ago

This makes no sense to me. Work is needed only because there is scarcity. If no humans are needed to work, that means there is not serious scarcity.

4MOAisgoodenuf• 9 months ago

The linked hiring page has a junior react/python position listed at $250k/yr

The rest of the piece makes a lot more sense given the context that the author is temporarily divorced from the broader economy

alastairr2• 9 months ago

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.

sp4cec0wb0y2• 9 months ago

This point is becoming self evident in the rejection of generative AI by the broader populace. Maybe I am in a bubble, but it seems that everyone except tech bros (those who have something to gain in adoption) hate generative AI. Creation is what makes us humans enjoy life. No one (real) wants to automate the humanities.

alastairr2• 9 months ago

I agree, though it's hard to tell what people outside the tech sphere are signalling about what they think about the tech - many seem to be pretty positive about chatgpt.

What concerns me is that I don't think it's widely understood enough that there's a frantic, cultish mindset around the tech in SV and tech circles - a mindset that wants to see society upended in search of justifying the investments being made.

OkayPhysicist• 9 months ago

As much as I agree with the premise of liberation from toil, I don't think the author presents a compelling argument as to how you get from "most of the capital sits in the hands of a small group of oligarchs" today to "the fruits of AI productivity are broadly shared". Historically, capital-heavy innovations have made a small group of people very rich. I have zero doubt without very decisive action, the default is absolutely a "whoever has capital at time of singularity has capital forever".

haritha-j3• 9 months ago

It was logical to provide child welfare when children stopped working because parents loved kids. Similarly, most welfare systems work because economies run on labour, thus the owners of capital are motivated to appease the labourers. In a post labour world, what exactly motivates teh welfare?

mattnewton• 9 months ago

Fear of violent revolution?

Isn’t the end goal of any successful state ultimately to hold and protect a monopoly on violence, which is more “efficient” and less violent to the participants?

haritha-j3• 9 months ago

Sadly I believe fear of violent revolution would be an old fashioned concept in a post work world. Why would the state (run by oligarchs) simply deploy troops (sorry did I say troops, i meant killer robots) to squash any violent rebellion? Once the people are not needed, the power balance will shift drastically.

Jupe2• 9 months ago

Consumers are needed for capitalism to work.

ryandrake4• 9 months ago

But not everyone needs to be a consumer. I could see the end result of all of this wealth consolidation being that the top 1% both own everything and are the only consumers. Rich people selling things to each other.

I once worked with a founder whose side business was building and selling yachts. Why yachts? If you asked him, he'd say because yacht buyers are the ones who have money.

haritha-j3• 9 months ago

We already know what happens when a minority gains massive riches over the rest and also has the ability to gate keep said riches. Its called nations, and thats why an entire people will starve in an impoverished Somalia while another will revel in excess in Switzerland. Look no further than nations to see what the effect of life after work is.

cool_man_bob2• 9 months ago

In our lifetimes, we may see fully realistic virtual reality, abundant fusion power, cognitive enhancement through brain augmentation, mind uploading, relativistic space travel, unlimited personalized entertainment, full control over our genomes, ultra-luxurious hypersonic air travel, and extremely pleasurable drugs that carry no major side effects.

Promised before. It was a lie then, it will be a lie now.

Seriously though is this sort of stuff just nostalgia bait for people who were naive enough to believe it the last time?

sp4cec0wb0y2• 9 months ago

This is for people who read "Ready Player One" and thought it was a utopia. Those who soy over their tech fetishisms.

TrackerFF• 9 months ago

If/when we come to the level of artificial super-intelligence that no humans need to work, said AI would surely be smart enough to replace all human tasks?

At which point, what will be the "moat" between the haves and have nots?

Ideally this sort of AI would completely flatten the inequality curve, because whatever edge you would have, the AI would equalize that for those at a disadvantage. Given that the AI is equally available for everyone.

This alone, brings me to believe that when we get there, there will be some built-in safety mechanism to preserve power for those that are powerful. Sorry if I'm being a bit too general with this discussion, but if we're going to face a scenario where AI becomes too powerful, obviously all humans will/should feel the effect.

philipkglass• 9 months ago

This alone, brings me to believe that when we get there, there will be some built-in safety mechanism to preserve power for those that are powerful.

I think that people will try yet fail to build perfect security mechanisms for controlling the spread of smart robots. If robots build robots, and smart robots are smart because of software, then trying to stop copies of smart robots is like trying to prevent copies of movies. Most people will come to have their material needs met by smart robots, and in the typical case this will be an improvement in quality of life for people on Earth.

Unfortunately, it also means that when people have deadly impulses disconnected from material deprivation, the power to kill will be greatly amplified. Tiny states and even sub-national groups could easily acquire nuclear weapons. The key technical insights are already published. It just takes engineering work and willingness to violate international norms to develop an arsenal. (International norms are not going to be enforceable by "soft" measures like sanctions if every nation can be simultaneously autarkic and prosperous, thanks to smart robots.)

WMD proliferation in turn may drive more comprehensive, paranoid global surveillance and an increasing number of preemptive attacks on facilities that could become weapons factories. Fear of military attack then drives more small states to actually seek a nuclear deterrent. An increased number of actors with nuclear weapons increases the chance that they will kill people on a large scale either deliberately or accidentally (like a "retaliatory" launch against a falsely detected incoming strike from another nation.)

Sol-• 9 months ago

I do like that they notice the fact that automation and plummeting wages do not automatically mean immiseration for the population. I've read so many uninformed online discussions along the lines of "If no one has jobs anymore, who will buy their products" where people do not even briefly stop to think that automated jobs will most likely also depress prices of many goods and services.

I do not know whether the outcome will be good or not, but it's good to recognize that wealth can increase even in the face of widespread automation.

triceratops• 9 months ago

a tenfold increase in GDP represents a very conservative estimate of how much full automation could increase economic output. If this modest increase were reflected proportionally in US tax revenues we could resolve all current Social Security funding shortfalls

This would require a fundamental rewriting of Social Security funding law. Right now it's funded solely by payroll taxes. Read: mass automation will be utterly devastating for Social Security because there will be no paychecks to withhold taxes on.

If the author's predictions actually come to pass, it will look a lot like a wealth tax. The current political and economic elites are extremely allergic to anything resembling that.

Progressive income taxation is a central pillar of government revenue in most high-income countries around the world. If the rich could effectively coordinate to eliminate income redistribution, they would have abolished this system long ago

Hopelessly naive. Rich people are rich because of their assets. Not their income.

kyoob• 9 months ago

Who will take the coal from the mine? Who will take the salt from the earth? Who'll take a leaf and grow it to a tree? Don't look now, it ain't you or me

botanical76• 9 months ago

Can you explain the subtext here?

mdrzn• 9 months ago

These lyrics are from the song "Don't Look Now" by Creedence Clearwater Revival. The lines are a poetic way of saying that the work of taking coal from the mine, harvesting salt, and nurturing a tree is the task of other people, often those in the "working class", not the "you" and "me" of the song, who are implied to be in a privileged position

djoldman• 9 months ago

It’s natural to feel anxious as we approach the inevitable automation of all human labor.

These are absolute assertions about the near future absent any rationale or reason whatsoever that contradict the minimal evidence that actually exists.

Is this the pinnacle of AI hype? Time will tell.

delegate• 9 months ago

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.

weego• 9 months ago

It’s natural to feel anxious as we approach the inevitable automation of all human labor

This is sell-side idealist thinking and blurred view of reality. We're not approaching it, we're not even seeing metrics to suggest that any sub-division of any business is making serious progress there at all.

Too many people are hyping something that will not happen in our lifetimes and we risk looking beyond the terrible state of large global economies, poor business practice and human exploitation on mass scales to a place we will never see. It's more fun to try and shape future possibilities for large profit that we'll probably never have to justify, than attempt to deal with current realities, and thus go against the grain of investment trends today, for an uncertain benefit.

bparsons4• 9 months ago

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.

stared• 9 months ago

This mechanical revolution had a profound impact on child labor. Whereas children working was previously seen as an unfortunate necessity, the new wealth created from automation turned it into an excess. Families who no longer depended on their children’s wages stopped sending them to work. In response, society reoriented its perception of childhood, from a period of economic activity to one devoted to education and play. Mass public schooling was established, and child labor was widely outlawed.

No, that’s not how it worked.

Children were made to work in mines and factories to the point of exhaustion - so much so that, by adulthood, many were in poor health.

Prussia outlawed child labor and introduced public schools not because of Enlightenment ideas about human rights or education, but to train soldiers.

This idealization is not just a small historical omission; it’s the root cause of many core issues in the current education system. We take the current school system for granted - "either this or a lack of education" - but many features (e.g., teaching by age cohorts; the teacher as superior; everything organized in inflexible blocks of time; students expected to sit and stand on command, etc.) are not universal and are likely not optimal for growth. They were, however, very good for training infantry and factory workers - over 100 years ago.

Dnguyen• 9 months ago

I think the author assumed things will be spread fairly across the board. I don't think wealth gain will be evenly distributed. The other issue I have with the article is that the author assumed unlimited resource to build the robots. Resources will be limited. Building those robots won't be a nice green field either. I think there will be a lot of dirty waste by products that will be a major health concern for the human.

moribvndvs• 9 months ago

One issue with historical comparisons is that a pool of labor (such as child labor) were freed to transition to some other workforce. If AI hyperscales to a point of generally out-competing human work forces, then we have nowhere else to go but the dwindling havens where AI and automation cannot touch for now. If we live in post-scarcity equitable society–and we assume human society can cope without a struggle or purpose– this is great. If we don’t, this is an unmitigated disaster.

oramit• 9 months ago

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

1-more• 9 months ago

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.

cadamsdotcom• 9 months ago

Bottom of article: “we’re hiring”

Selling a job by saying that soon we won’t need to work.. I think some connections were missed..

samweb3• 9 months ago

Is it telling that I used chatgpt to summarize this as 5 bullets for me?

Automation will collapse wages but raise living standards: As AI and robotics replace all labor, human wages will fall—but productivity and wealth will soar, leading to better health, abundance, and comfort.

Historical parallel—child labor’s decline: Just as industrial automation freed children from farm work and shifted society toward education, future automation will free adults from economic necessity, redefining “work.”

AI as the new labor force: Trillions of digital workers could multiply global GDP many times over, making each human comparably wealthy—like Qatari citizens supported by a huge migrant workforce.

Redistribution will likely spread prosperity: Past trends and political realities suggest wealth from full automation will be broadly, though unequally, shared through asset ownership and social programs.

Post-scarcity future: Humanity may enjoy radical technologies—mind uploading, fusion power, genome control, and disease reversal—ushering in an era of leisure, health, and creativity beyond today’s imagination.

Life After Work

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