Ask HN: Will Humans Become Useless?
We are seeing a shift in the emergence of new tools towards humans and agents so that the product can be used by these two. It is likely that the next generation of tools will only be used by agents, and humans will only be consumers, not producers. So what will be human use?
In the ancestral environment, prior to even agriculture, was the “use” of humans merely to hunt and to gather? To reproduce? What is your “use” to your friends and family? What is the “use” in a smile, or a laugh, or tears, that an LLM could possibly take from you?
In the ancestral environment one didn't have to justify their existence. There were no taxes and no one would bat an eye if you built a cabin out of straw in the middle of nowhere to try and survive.
If you stayed in the tribe you were born in, no one would expect more from you than to contribute a bit of your time and effort for the well-being of the social group. Every pair of arms is useful, and on average there are enough that you can deal with the random invalid tribesperson; in fact even the invalid tribesperson would have a legitimate 'usefulness' to the tribe.
Given that this was the state of things for million of years, we shouldn't taint our assumptions by basing it on our modern utilitarian view of society. For most of our time on Earth, for every animal except the human, only the individual has determine their own usefulness, even if it is just to eat, reproduce and die. There's nothing wrong with that.
There is nothing a human brain can do that a computer theoretically could not do. Likewise there is nothing the human muscular or sensory systems could do which machines could not be made which do better or more accurately. Thus, as long as computers and machines improve at a rate which is not slowing down exponentially, it is inevitable computers and machines will be better than all humans in any thing they can do with their brains or bodies.
That's only true computationally. The function of what a human would do is very different to what a human could do. We may be close to the latter when it comes to designing thinking machines, but we're nowhere near the first one.
I think once we match everything a human could do via a machine, they would do very well at predicting what humans would do (i.e. the full landscape of human preferences, biases, values and how they reflect in their actions). AI models are already very good at predicting human behavior in limited contexts.
Eh, I'm not sure. I feel like a lot of society isn't about what's technically better, but about some other human element that's valued instead. Like technically speaking, someone can vibe code a decent enough game in many genres. But does that mean those mass produced games are going to necessarily do better than human-made ones? I'd say no. The personality and creative effort behind a game can help it stand out even if it's not as technically competent as something made by a machine.
Same with art, music, literature, film, etc. There's no reason to assume humans can't compete with AI in these fields. They just need someone that finds their work interesting/enjoyable to interact with.
And there are plenty of fields where the human element is just more appreciated in general. Do you really want the doctors and nurses in your hospital to be robots run by AI tools? Do you want the support staff in a care home to be robots or AI? Do you want your teachers and lecturers to be robots or AI? What about serving staff in an upscale restaurant or business?
Maybe I'm out of touch here, and people in future will be fine with it. But I feel like a lot of jobs in society would lose something if you make AI the norm.
Also for tools in particular, a lot of people just like making stuff themselves even with AI available. The ability to have Claude code a website doesn't mean I want to lose the ability to code myself with a text editor or integrated development environment. Not everything is about making money or saving time there.
The purpose of the system cannot be derived from inside the system (or reduced to the parts of the system). So your question requires defining of “who” or “what” is using humans.
No.
Being useless requires situational circumstances, and there's 9 billion people.
Even if AI takes over everything, humans will still create situational circumstances that require other humans; via desires and needs for various kinds of fulfillment.
Remember that there are people who do not buy Chinese products. There's people who will never work for Americans or trust Russians.
There are enterprises who just won't use AI for anything because they know they can hire and pay people. If it gets to the point where an enterprise, whatever size, cannot compete without AI, then it's game over, which isn't even ridiculous but makes for a fun story like shooting up stuff in the strait of Hormuz or blocking it for fun & gas prices.
I think people just need to use their time to have fun. Is that not what our use is right now? We’ll find new work to do, new problems to explore, new ways to have fun. Our original use was hunting and gathering. We then went to farming but I doubt people thought they didn’t have a use anymore because they weren’t hunting
Too bad most societies are built around the concept of utility, it's going to lead to a lot of issues (it already does) once both mental and physical human labor can be mostly replaced by capital. I always liked the world view of indigenious societies like e.g. native American tribes regarding this (not all their views), as they see humans simply as part of nature, you do not need to fulfill a purpose or be useful, you can just exist.
This feels like a bit of a philosophical question, and in that sense I think our usefulness may be a bit questionable already, so I'm not sure AI changes too much on that front. Seems like we're largely just a circular dependency anyway.
Why should I care of what others think if am I useful/pretty/cool/interesting enough or not?
This posts sounds like the capitalistic equivalent of those '80s movies where the losers are afraid of not being part of the cool clique in high school.
Don't worry about what some myopic idiots think about your perceived "usefulness". It's their problem, not yours.
The primary use case for humans today is the metabolism of fossil fuels into carbon dioxide, long-chain polymers, pornography, machines for generating pornography, shit, and other environmental contaminants.
Are you suggesting something’s changed?
Let's just say the majority of us are going to be unemployable.
No, not in our lifetime. Our kids - maybe. But not in our lifetime. Although work-life balance will look different in the next 10-15 years for sure.
The unstated premise of this question is that the goals we all aim for are about business/productivity, not the human experience. As I completely disagree with that premise, the question becomes absurd. Humans can never be useless - our existence and experience is the meaning we seek in life.
Much as it is today, with the vast majority of humans looking at the tech bubble dwellers and saying to their peers, what are those folk talking about?
yes