this post was submitted on 24 Jun 2026
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The lump of labour fallacy was applicable to horses for 2000 years, new inventions that improved efficiency increased their demand ever further until the internal combustion engine closed every remaining niche all at once. The same will happen to us, it's mathematically inevitable. It might not be LLMs that do it, but something will.
i mean you say that, but every time i see an AI or algorithm try to work in one of my fields of expertise it's laughable how bad it is. maybe it's not obvious to the layman, but try to ask it about something you're an expert in. like it gives explicitly wrong information. people think it only hallucinates 1/5 of the time because the other 4/5 they're asking about shit they don't know
The current state of LLMs is not the end of development. Right now, they're sloppy and they consume a lot of resources to function, but future iterations will be better at it, will compute faster, and use fewer resources. Hopefully, we will have escaped the disease that is capitalism before we get there, and the gains in productivity can be shared alike with everyone, rather than a select few.
An industrial revolution expert on Wired pointed out the quality of products improved with power looms and assembly lines and the countless other inventions that rose with mass-produced steel. AI has had a few successes in science by making discoveries that humans hadn't yet, but other than that, we're seeing AI slop, vibecoding, etc. produces worse results than when human beings do it all by hand.
The horror of this moment is not that AI will someday out perform humans in complex and creative labor, and do it affordably. It's that corporations and billionaires believe they can force that moment to the present if they throw enough money and resources at it. And they're doing this specifically and brazenly with the intention of shutting out the majority of the human race as if this were an Ayn Rand fantasy.
And they're blind to the consequences of trying, which can break the global economy (and the global ecology).
Yup. Like I also said. It might not be LLMs. The same was once true of steam engines, which were great at long distances perhaps but were huge, heavy, expensive and complicated and required a team of people to operate. Horses became even more valuable for their last mile stuff. It took time before the internal combustion engine and 4 stroke compression suddenly made engine power smaller, cheaper, more efficient and easy to operate by a single person. In 1918, the US for example had 27 million head of horse, by 1960 it was 3 million. All I'm saying is that it will happen. When? I have no idea.
so like, i'm with you, only it's not just artificial intelligence it's also the power requirements. usable fusion is always 5 years away. like there's even been articles about it. scaling up green energy just to meet our demands (and i'm not an expert, i'm just really good at estimating) could provide the power to a society, but the first few AI will need many times that. as i understand my Machine Learning colleagues from college (and it's been a while since i've spoken to these friends, you know the type you see them every few years and no time has passed) we're really good at throwing spaghetti at the wall and hoping it sticks. getting the spaghetti to cook itself, throw itself at the wall, and stick the first try? well we can make it look like that happens
For sure man. Haha yeah we are. It's true. This is the critical aspect: teaching the spaghetti to harvest itself, make itself and cook itself. I think we are a ways away from it, but who knows. Energy requirements is also a huge issue.
How many car jobs are there now compared to however many horse jobs there used to be?
I feel like it’s many many fewer jobs, and the horse jobs did more of a disappearance than a pivot. But I don’t know it.
Does anyone here have data?
Yes, I saw data once. Everyone likes to parrot the concept that past industrial revolutions lead to all sorts of new jobs and the economy kicking it up a gear. But the jobs never pivot. The jobs are lost. A generation or two is disrupted, and worse off before their children and garandchildren see any benefit
That’s ok, because their misery and poverty lets us sit back from the distance of a century and claim it was all for the better
The industrial revolution began in Britain around 1760, but living standards for most people did not meaningfully improve until the late 19th century, they even fell in the first few decades.
That's over an entire century, or at least four to five generations for meaningful improvement.
It seems to me
the powers that be
hope the technology
will speed up the "wee"
poverty and displacees
to but a generation or three
The issue isn't that there are zero jobs. The issue is that there are far, far fewer jobs after automation and there are not other options.
We have massively reduced farm labor through automation, but people moved to industrial manufacturing. Manufacturing automation moved labor to office work and service jobs. In both there are still some people who design, build, and maintain the machinery, but they are a small fraction of what came before. We don't have additional jobs waiting to be filled, and with big increases in automation it will be easier to automate any new potential source of labor.
This could be avoided by universal income and health care and other approaches where the general public benefits from all this automation, but the environment that pushes the automation gives them the power to keep that from happening.