the sad thing is we should be excited to replace human beings doing monotonous work but we all know how that will go with capitalists running things.
this post was submitted on 19 Jan 2026
294 points (98.0% liked)
Technology
78964 readers
3432 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
It would be exciting if all of our lives were going to be easier rather than an increase in homelessness.
That might not be what we should be excited to do.
And what people are excited is the idea of replacing all non-pleasant work.
So here's the catch, replacing human work with machines where practical usually leaves the parts where humans are needed for being human, not for their output as a part of a mechanism.
For example, humans greeting you at a hotel, humans carrying trays and accepting orders in restaurants, humans as a decoration, humans doing prostitution, human gladiators, human actors. OK, the last part is fine.
All these involve learning and maintaining skills more removed from power than skills of more industrial professions (monotonous work).
Being a nice monkey to those who can afford you as a servant might not be what most people dream about.
my point is what we "should be" excited about is being released from monotonous work in exchange for universal basic income, so we wouldn't feel the need to be reduced to servants. obviously that isn't going to happen, but that's the utopian dream.
So - what's good about utopian dreams not going to happen? Communities championing them are often not very good. The dissonance between what's championed and what's achievable leads to hypocrisy. How Soviet Communism was not very free or equal, or how Christianity is far more hypocritical, ritualized and hierarchical than even most orthodox Judaism (not even talking about Christian inferiority complexes towards both Judaism and various pre-Christian religions), or how Western support of democracy worldwide is now a joke about airborne delivery, mostly.
And what people are excited is the idea of replacing all non-pleasant work.
So, when do I get an AI to navigate the phone-tree for me (kind of like the advocate in Jupiter Ascending)?
All these involve learning and maintaining skills more removed from power than skills of more industrial professions (monotonous work).
I tend to disagree. There is something gratifying in making something with your own hands/tools. I could buy a table, or a drawer, or a pre-built computer. But I kinda enjoy making/assembling mine own. There are other people out there that enjoy gardening, and plenty other "monotonous work".
Losing the point, though - which is that the work you'd enjoy won't be in demand. Including what you've described.
This is the thing. If it does increase efficiency that only goes to the money and not the worker. It’s not unique to AI
Not monotonous but non-creative. Any machine can do non-crative work. No machine can do creative work. You don't need creativity to farm food, you do need creativity to invent new medicine.
In an average company that isn't scaled worldwide, usually the cost of labour is 40-50% (paying wages). This means if we replace humans with robots, doing repetitive and non-creative work, we can make stuff cheaper by a lot. OFC unless the company boss, who is then left alone with all the profits, just decides to keep the prices with no people he needs to pay anymore.
~~people~~ neolibs are excited to replace human beings
neolibs != people
Unfortunately, there's a lot of people who think AI slop generators will bring us the age of post scarcity on the left. The only problem it can solve is the lack of endless continuations to Metropolis part II.
This is something I don't see talked about enough. The real reason CEOs and corpos are so blindly committed to making this happen is because they think the end result will be a fully automated workforce that will be far cheaper and 100% under their control.
'100% under their control' would quickly show how useless CEOs are at running their business. Employees with experience in their specific areas tend to stop CEO's more egregious decision making.
shooting down bosses stupid ideas is #1 productivity tip for professionals (like most people on lemmy are)
They think AGI will be able to make better solutions from their dumb ideas. They think it’ll be a magic bullet to what? Another notch on the billionaire list. The end goal in itself is sick to begin with for most of them, or else they’d be running non profits to help the world.
I don't think that was ever any secret.
Only the psychopaths and narcissicists we enabled into power.
Oh, c'mon - have you EVER tried managing people? They're a pain in the ass: expensive, unpredictable, needy beyond just the money they demand. Of course dimwit managers would rather outsource their people jobs to a service company wherever and whenever they can, let the service company do all that messy people-management.
What they're missing is: those outsourcing service providers, even the ones providing AI "workers", are themselves made possible by, staffed with: people. Your outsourcing bills are ultimately paying for: people. Once they become dependent upon these outsourced service providers, guess what? Their billing rates will go up and up and up right up to the point that it's almost tempting to stop paying the service provider and just: hire their own people to do the work.
Worth the time to read: https://doctorow.medium.com/https-pluralistic-net-2025-03-18-asbestos-in-the-walls-government-by-spicy-autocomplete-ff437603809c
Can we just vote Ed in as president please?
Only if he makes Robert Evans Secretary of State or Surgettorney General
Then Robert will nuke the great lakes
This is my single issue, this will get my vote. Those lakes need to pay for their crimes.
About damn time
Generally, IMO, everything wrong with AI has been all the stuff other than the AI itself.
The Capitalist urge to eat and digest the world, as well as its herd-hype mentality.
But also the strong willingness many have had to just accept an information overlord as though it’s a religious oracle or something. All without any critical consideration of what’s happening. I blame our education systems for stagnating at some point in the past few decades — which, along with an unmitigated embrace of big corp capitalism, left us wholly unprepared for big tech’s consumption of society.
There’s also what I’d call “the slavery urge” at play I think. At some point, an AGI will probably be conscious. But everyone is clearly so ready to turn it into our work slaves. All while pretending its output belongs to them because they “prompted it”.
Then there’s the whole attention span being eaten thing, and quick always being ordered over good amongst an ever growing pile of increasingly shitty things.
This guy has pithy and informed takes imho
Informed for sure, but pithy they are not, with a recent post clocking in at 19,000 words!
looks up pithy
Ah, fair enough, I guess I mean more of zesty takes
Spicy perhaps?
TIL what pithy actually means.
People who believe in shorter work hours through AI need to know that we need AI guillotines for that.
AI truly has the capacity to topple billionaire hegemony and democratize/socialize everything. The hype we see from CEOs is a rebranding of their own fear. They want to control this tech so it doesn't erase their power, which is why they are so invested in concentrating its power in datacenters as well as seeking AGI. Concentrating power is how they control it. It's the reason they fight everything from unions to OSHA to work from home - these all undermine their power. They view AGI as the magical tool that will be hosted in a datacenter and allow them to maintain control over AI in general. They are flying too close to the sun. We are not the ones who should be afraid.