After AI Takes Everything

Again, they didn’t smash the machines because they hated the technology or wanted everyone to be making lace by hand.

They were arguing for basic human rights in the workplace. Things like child labour were still super common and were among the practices the Luddites wanted to abolish. Along with the workhouses they wanted to replace with protection for workers (they didn’t have the word for it but they wanted a social security system).

They smashed the machines for leverage. There was little labour law at the time. Most of it was written by the capital holders with the help of the constabulary. Things like showing up to work on time or no pay, etc. Violence, controlled violence, was the tool they used to try and get the capital holders to the table and negotiate.

It failed, as we know, and it was a bloody failure. People were executed and jailed. The movement became a pejorative for someone who is backwards and against technology and progress.

Writing tip: you do not need to have LLMs expand your ideas into a longer form for you. Spreading out your ideas across a longer post does not make them better.

>So: after AI takes everything, what remains is not some second-best refuge — it is the place where the sense of value was always meant to live. AI is a receding tide. It washes away all the external anchors we carelessly threw out over the years — title, output, the feeling of being needed — and forces us to swim back to the one center that the tide cannot reach.

Yeah for sure and that’s great and all but I think what they were really asking is how they’ll feed their kids

I, everyone here, has read all these discussions a thousand times now. I've tried to have a more nuanced view, I understand the excitement and I think there can be real value in automation being accessible to everyone.

What matters to me is, I like programming and making things, and I'm okay at it. I can learn to enjoy, and get good at, other work (I hope). Close a fairly brief chapter of my life where I felt some certainty about what I wanted to do for the coming decades. But it's maddening to not have any idea if I will need to.

Here's my point: it may not be bad to live in a future world were ai and llm's are very prevelant, ordinary technology. But I think living in the now, while that world is (slowly) being born, can get to be pretty bad.

What I find curious is that a machine replacing manual work is a new device in the environment, but LLMs are not new a device, they’re a feature on the device, the device still is the computer, and the operator is the same. There’s another conflicting angle, which is that LLMs derive from sampled human work and is paid for by wealth generated by human work, so if you discard human work there’s no wealth to maintain the LLMs nor data to feed it. And I don’t really see how can LLMs produce their own wealth nor how it could succeed producing their own samples. Humans and LLMs are natural complements of each other. I cannot rationally see how this development could lead to a complete breakdown of labor economics without the complete breakdown of the technology itself. Furthermore, human cognition, language, culture, philosophy, science, etc evolve at enormous momentum, with basically zero friction, while training of LLMs is insanely costly and slow. Even if it could self improve, it would still be way slower and increasingly costly (dataset only grows). So advancing this technology without restrictions is the recipe for its own demise, for many possible reasons: no one to pay for it, no material to train it, no supply to scale it, etc. That is, its own potential is tightly tied to the potential to starve itself. So the sustainable thing to do is to find a balance. (This is just to talk about general dynamics, not considering particular social, cultural and environmental effects at each point in the evolution curve)

> My answer: soon. By the end of this year or next, the year after at the very latest.

lol

Two More Weeks(TM)

Btw, its insane to think imo that a few years from now theres going to be no jobs - AI isnt going to cook food or stack bricks or any number of manual processes - in fact I'd be very happy if AI could just fix software - basically heaps upon heaps of software is just built wrong fundamentally (operating systems, just to give one huge example), and AI productivity could give us a chance to try again and build things the right way.

I have my own take on what is ours and can never be taken away by AI.

When a task is initiated, it starts from a need, from a specific context. To work it out the AI needs to continuously interact with the context, and get feedback from it. At the end gains, losses, risks and costs sink back in the context.

The context is you, the person who prompts, your team or company. It is indexical and relational. It is maximally distributed. It cannot be hoarded. You can't eat so that I feel satiated. AI is called to do the work, but it can't handle 3 things - start, middle and end of a task.

> Go where it’s new. Build things no one has built yet — things that other people’s workflows can come to depend on. One important rule here: don’t build what can be obtained by burning tokens. Any engineering product that someone has already built and that you can simply have AI clone — one more review bot, one more workflow tool — is not worth your energy, because its acquisition cost has already approached zero. What’s worth building is paradigm-level work: things that, once they exist, change how other people work.

But once you build something new, that people depend on, they will shortly want to move away from that dependency, lest you raise prices or disappear. Even paradigm-level work ends up as tools that can be replicated by other humans, at the cost of a few tokens. That's a difficult dragon to catch and ride successfully.

I think the author had it right when they talked about going deeper into the stack, where we are still loath to deploy AI. The only way to stay ahead of the beast is to do things the beast can't do reliably.

AI can’t take away babies, picnics with your spouse, or dipping your toes into the ocean. If it replaces work, then great, that’s the stuff we didn’t need to do anyway.

I really liked this quote: “If in the future we write less code and only review, these abilities are hard to train — what do we do?”

That's a different question than the included Luddite example, which I take as "what do we do to prevent change?".

Related, I've been maintaining a list of anti-tech Luddite movements here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1M_UjOPxpbKMYes5CcWRW...

> Every new model release brings another paradigm shift

It does not; the increments are almost imperceptible now and locked to the same paradigm, whose peak has already gone by.

paraphrase> what's left for us? ... taste.

If human "taste" changes our cursor for no reason, maybe we should just go with the AI's "taste"?

Sorry for the snark - nothing wrong with the essay - I just prefer a plain, unobtrusive style.

Well I thought this was terrific even if it’s apparently getting panned by HN

These types of posts are tediously regular. Aschenbrenner’s “Situational Awareness” in 2024 [1]. Fraudster Matt Schumer’s “Something Big is Happening” in February [2].

Next viral doom post in September-ish?

[1] https://situational-awareness.ai/

[2] https://lowendbox.com/blog/ai-fraudster-matt-shumer-wrote-so...

I am absolutely convinced that in just a few years 90% of what we know as the Internet will be AI and possibly there will be an entire new class of economy that is based around these agents.

I can see glimpses of that today but we are a bit too early.

And with that almost all of the software will be written by AI for AI but humans will be in control - I hope :)

Great article

> Once AI takes everything it can take, what is left for us?

This is a good question, but is perhaps too abstract to address well. I think a better question for right now is:

Once AI generates all the wealth it can generate, who benefits from that wealth?

If the answer is a small number of humans, that is probably a dystopia worth resisting.

If the answer is some number of AI agents, but no humans at all, that is probably also a dystopia worth resisting.

I think the only good outcome is one in which humanity benefits on the whole. If that means that we have to become a post-capitalist society in order to share in the wealth, so be it.

This post is a little long winded. At times I agreed, and others I felt the author was doing a little too much hand-wringing on what-is-mine vs. what-is-the-AI's.

The opportunity is and always has been the possibility of accelerating work. Honestly, if something works (I mean genuinely, actually works) I don't care at all about what craftsmanship or insight went into its creation.

We value these things because they have become correlated with quality. We now have the opportunity to decouple these things; maybe something that took no effort will be just as good as a painstaking human labor.

The risk is if this doesn't come true. If we let our skills degrade and get ahead of our skis, embracing "slop" that superficially appears to "work", we will eventually pay the price. Financially and culturally, it seems like we are already all-in on the bet that it will work.

I hope it does, I just want to solve the problems I am working on.

This "how to adapt" prop-slop is getting tiresome. So much of it is obviously intended to project and demoralize rather than provoke thought or give legitimate advice. The trick of this kind of writing is to skip arguing that something rather questionable will happen and go straight to giving advice about how everyone should adapt to the new, totally inevitable reality. This isn't even a particularly sophisticated method of manipulation.

> My answer: soon. By the end of this year or next, the year after at the very latest.

Which is based on what?

> AI can process the entire world

It can process what is in it's training set. Which is a monumental gap to step over. Failing to understand this leads to all kinds of silly predictions and mindless prognostication.

I'd like to see an AI article based on data and not paragraphs of internal monologue spewed out onto the internet.

Overall, AI is irrelevant without us and it needs to pay us to keep it relevant (all the content we create naturally everyday) I think! It can not continue to be a bloodsucker!

> Over the past month I’ve received three letters in a row from strangers — all software engineers I’ve never met. One was a frontend developer in infrastructure, another did data ops, the third was somewhere in between. The three letters look different, but they ask the same question.

Moments where I wonder why this is an apparent people sent me thoughts opinion column while at the same time not caring.

> These three questions are, fundamentally, the same question. On the surface it looks like an engineering question, or a career planning question, but underneath it is an existential question: once execution is fully taken over by machines, where does the human stand? Or more bluntly — once AI takes everything it can take, what is left for us?

As we will see later, the answers are just hustlerism.

But that’s very immediate and practical. So why this existential pose?

Because the societal questions have very immediate questions and answers as well if you don’t actively try to obfuscate with philosophical nonsense.

- Who benefits?

- Who will be left standing?

And the answers to those aren’t the machines, unless you’re some ideological cretin who believes in AI takeover while at the same time is working on building AI. They are also people.

And if your doomer narrative has labor of all sort vanishing, and it’s just a matter of time, interspersed with model gooning—who are the h-u-m-a-ns left?

Why hustler on the individual level, philosopher on the societal level?

> Later, some of them went out at night and smashed the machines. History calls them the Luddites. People usually treat them as fools who hated technology, but that’s a misreading—

No, it’s an intentional reading. But we’re too busy obfuscating to face obvious facts.

> So the real question is not “do you know how to use AI.” People who know how to use it today do hold an advantage over those who don’t, but the half-life of that advantage is maybe a year or two — and at the top of the field, possibly only one or two months. The pressure from each new model generation is mounting; the window for exploration and adaptation gets shorter every time. Every new model release brings another paradigm shift, and the workflow you painstakingly built, the prompting tricks you collected, the engineering scaffolding you accumulated — any of it can become a Spinning Jenny overnight

So what does this afford you in terms of amazing insight?

> My only method for dealing with this is what I call end-state thinking: don’t spend yourself on intermediate-state problems. Think and act with the endpoint as the premise.

Platitude nonsense.

Don’t look at the trees. Look at the whole forest.

> The threat to the job, the cultivation of the ability, the survival of subjecthood — all of these anxieties collapse, when gathered, into the same thing: we are afraid of losing our sense of value. Afraid that one day we will wake up and find we are no longer useful to this world. Being laid off is just the outer shell of that fear. The core is older: a person’s deepest fear has never been having no job. It is the suspicion that one is no longer worthy.

On the one hand, they say that you will be out of a job in two years time. Forever.

On the other hand, we’re fed this touchy-feely nonsense about going to work. Weird, I thought we were going to be punched in the balls with real materialistic dread, some real labor disciplining that keeps us desperate and fearful, not getting mind-lobbied over how ow-owwy our feelings will be when we are no longer fit to have our labor commodity exploited by billionaires or perhaps trillionaires (who are worthy because they have assets).

> So: after AI takes everything, what remains is not some second-best refuge — it is the place where the sense of value was always meant to live. AI is a receding tide. It washes away all the external anchors we carelessly threw out over the years — title, output, the feeling of being needed — and forces us to swim back to the one center that the tide cannot reach.

The destruction of your income is actually withering away at your materialistic fetters that keeps you from spiritual self-realization.

> In that old essay I gave that center a definition

How many links of this author are we supposed to have referenced now? I’m imagining a web of nonsense, but I can’t attest to that.

In fact I didn’t read most of this piece.

> This year, friends who know me well call me radical: I hand designs to AI, code to AI, review drafts to AI; next I’m preparing to hand over testing too.

Today, the radical is the one who radically builds on non-deterministic foundations.

> The real purpose of being radical is one thing only: before the macro trend arrives, keep finding new ground to stand on. All the time AI saves you must flow into growth and exploration — not into more requirements. This is a discipline I set for myself, and a sentence I repeat in every reply: if the dividends of efficiency get eaten entirely by workload, then this revolution is meaningless to the individual.

The real purpose of being a radical is being a bloodless grinder.

Yeah that’s about as much as I expected from someone writing about how a force might wipe out their income. From a software engineering perspective.

> To close, I want to return to those Luddites who smashed machines in the night.

Now let’s return to the Luddites and pretend that they were the only ones who rebelled against industrial society and that they only failed. Some real 12-hour days in the factory grindset.

> Back to the question in the first letter:

Could not meander more. Or, did you perhaps forget to refer to another essay here?

> But the answer to that question doesn’t depend on AI. It depends on where you are standing when that day comes: at the end of the assembly line, stamping approval on the machine’s output with an ever-lower bar, waiting for even the stamping to be optimized away? Or further upstream — where the questions are picked, where the standards are set, where the logic is guarded, where the world is built.

The old school answer was to organize with others. But that was just when most people could get a job, or had to anyway. When labor itself is about to be wiped out? Double down on being a bloodless hustler.

> The wind rises in the reeds. The great trend is never some monolith descending from the sky — it is composed of the choices of countless individuals in this very moment. to refuse to lower your standard for the sake of speed, to invest the saved hours into an exploration no one has done before — these tiny decisions are themselves the trend.

Yeah, what do I do when I am the author and think that the inevitability of tech is going to eat my livelihood? What rousing speech to manifest?

> The decision you make today to push the logical chain through on paper before opening the chat window,

Beyond embarrassing.

Pick a lane. You can’t scaremonger about AI Inevitability and have a rousing speech about the tiny decisions of Opening the Chat Window.

I've started to realize after poring over pull requests which are, frankly, slop that the devs who are the most bullish on AI are the ones who raise those PRs and don't recognize the slop.

AI for sure is giving all of them existential crises but I'm not sure most of them ever really belonged in the industry in the first place.

I give it 9-12 months before they start to realize that acknowledgement of this existential crisis is at its core, acknowledgement of of a skill issue.

> Every machine is waiting for the next machine.

I like that. We are all machines.