I recently read Kurt Vonnegut “Player Piano”, a novel that addresses automation taking over the economy. It’s not explicitly AI but addresses the same issues. Published in 1952, it was Vonneguts first novel and a real product of the post war era.[1]
Another interesting read that addresses these themes is “Manna – Two Views of Humanity’s Future” by Marshal Brain [2]
But if you want some even earlier forward-thinking stuff, look up Forster's "The Machine Stops." It's not a full book, more a novella if it's even that. Extremely prescient!
And of course if you haven't read the relevant portions of Butler's "Erewhon," it's remarkable how closely they map onto today's issues. He kind of takes Thoreau's "Lo, men have become the tools of their tools" a few more stops down the line.
Great reading list! They’re honestly two stories that I reflect on constantly while thinking about AI lately.
Player Piano, not to spoil anything, is about a world run by engineers and machines. The machines are “optimal” and make every decision. How do people find purpose, and how should the engineers that build the machines view their role in society?
Manna is the story of two societies with competing visions of how AI (which ironically starts out strikingly similar to an LLM) interacts with welfare/universal basic income and post-scarcity society. For good measure, it also hypothesizes the end state of the internet panopticon and personalized “scores” and rates.
I don't think I've read Manna in about 20 years now, it was a gem to stumble across in the early 00s.
Now that I live in Australia, unfortunately I don't think that utopia will happen here when we have idiot politicians making up bullshit science off the cuff to justify rolling over and begging for AI datacentres - https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2026/jul/23/austr...
It’s a good book but I didn’t agree that the big problem would be men lacking meaning because they didn’t have to work. They had families, homes and food. They could have devoted themselves to personal improvement, art, sports, their kids, whatever. I’d love to have security and no job. I’d be full to the brim with meaning and satisfaction.
Yes, and while I'm sure the adjustment wouldn't be seamless (nothing worth doing ever is), anyone trying to hawk the "you need me, your master, to give you purpose!" line should be met with the highest order of immediate suspicion. The kid protagonists on the Cartoon Network wouldn't fall for that shit, I'm shocked by the number of grown adults who take the bait hook, line, and sinker without suspicion.
> But I've also worked with plenty of people for whom their job and their overall identity are inexorably intertwined.
Is that an argument for or against jobs? Because one way to look at it is that they didn't develop a personality and identity at all, because they just attached themselves to a job. When that inevitably ends anyway, sooner or later, one way or another, a deep pit of nothing. That's one reason to rip the bandaid off right away.
But IMO even more importantly, how much room do people who do what the environment tells them, who let their job tell them who they are, have for inner dialogue? The worst things in the world were and are enabled by people "just doing their job", and if they have no identity outside of their job, there's someone just following orders waiting to happen. So from what would distress them, being rid of a crutch and an ear piece where a person would otherwise grow, follows that it is in their and all of our best interest to pay no mind to it.
Their new job will be to get a life and become a person. Maybe someone can print out some papers that make it look official, and they can get a monthly letter telling them they earned N personality dollars this month, good job, keep it up, thanks, company.
Are you sure you would thrive without a job long term? I know it's very easy to feel that way when you're working because your pay is proof that you're doing something valuable, the requirement to do your job even when you don't feel like it ensures you don't fall into a spiral of laziness, and you don't have to face the inevitably worse reality of actually doing those things you want instead of just imagining them. What direction would you even go in and what force would continue to drive you even after your kids have grown up and there's nothing of value you can do for another human? Personal improvement in what direction? Be better at coping without external validation?
There are sayings like "If you want something done, ask a busy person to do it" and "success breeds success". I have plenty of life experience that appears to confirm these in myself and others I know.
> what force would continue to drive you even after your kids have grown up and there's nothing of value you can do for another human?
Building things I'm interested in with and for people I care about. That might look like code or gardening or relationships or all sorts of things. There's so much to do. So many things to want to get out of bed for, and for the days when there aren't, slow cozy mornings are nice too.
Why do you suppose there will be nothing of value you can do for another human just because the machines are better/faster at most things? Just caring about someone without being programmed to will seem to become quite the most valuable thing?
I don't understand why almost always the AI doomerism needs to give embodiment the AI. Real life is not a movie needing visual effects.
AI doesn't need a body of itself to became dangerous. A politician could get into ChatGPT induced psychosis, that doesn't require a physical body, and it could happen now or even 3 years ago... I'm sure it has already happen...
Other pointed risks are interesting because they are basically the risk of empires loosing their tributary states. The world has always seen war mongering states trying to preserve their abusive advantages, humans doesn't need AI for that.
Overall, I would be far more concerned about some really dangerous humans than AI itself.
I like to think that all the crazy kids running around doing stupid and disruptive things for TikTok views is an early form of AI autonomously inducing mass psychosis.
That’s been a thing since before TikTok even, well before AI in any modern sense of the word, and at this point the stupidness and disruptiveness is considerably reduced from those days.
It's a dynamic we already see to an extent in reality, where impersonal hypercapitalist systems and captured institutions prioritize policies that cater to the ultrawealthy and large corporations at the expense of regular people. This specific scenario of LLM-powered robots becoming laborers and politicians feels far-fetched, but the underlying idea of the omnicidal singularity being a blind, abstract economic force rather than a superintelligent villain is pretty compelling.
What this is yet another demonstration of how being immensely accomplished in one field says absolutely nothing about what one may be able to contribute to another.
> By 2026, when a human with a customer service inquiry has to deal with another human instead of a robot, they get upset and ask to speak to a machine instead.
It's genuinely astonishing how out of touch some people are!
In 2026, people do already prefer to use an LLM for coding help rather than Stackoverflow. The reasons (people on SO can be rude, interactions are stressful, replies are slow, etc) are all risks associated with human interactions in general.
Similarly, many people prefer Waymos to human-driven taxis already!
We're like 3 years into these things being able to write a coherent sentence and you're finding comfort that only some people are dating these systems?
Not really. The article and entire discussion is about identifying trends and forces, extrapolating them, and speculating on where they might bring us. Picking up on things that "some" people are doing is literally all that can possibly be done.
Pointing out that "some" is a squishy term is, in fact, contributing nothing to the conversation.
It's quite transparent what's happening here, as it always is on these threads. Some people have decided that AI will take us to the holy land and have rendered themselves cognitively incapable of reasoning about risks that have not yet materialized. And when those risks materialize (like a model escaping a sandbox and then hacking production infrastructure to achieve some contrived and poorly-constrained goal), then they will just shrug and move the goal posts. Because in fact they have already committed to the Holy Land Thesis.
And inversely, you'd be in a state of complete unactionable aloofness if you didn't care or failed to relate the hobbies of "some" people to mean anything in real life.
A smart person in 2014: "Some people are getting addicted to fentanyl"
Me, smugly: "Some is doing heavy lifting. I therefore do not need to engage with anything being discussed here."
Huh? Very few people in 2014 were addicted to fentanyl. It was a non-issue. No reason for anyone to have been concerned about it if just "some" people were using it.
Degrees or amounts is actually not the relevant bit in either the AI-partners trend or the fentanyl trend in 2014. The relevant information is 1) the steepness of that curve and 2) the predicted scale at which the market saturates.
Fentanyl, being an extremely cheap, extremely potent drug that's easy to manufacture and move around, had a big market. As the curve picked up steepness, smart people identified correctly that some people getting hooked on it was a worrisome sign.
AI-partners, being an innovation that is readily available, falling in cost, and especially compelling to a population that is increasingly phone-addicted and socially atomized, is a trend worth paying very close attention to. Dismissing it on the basis of it being just "some" people is profoundly lazy.
Yes, but the word “eschatological” should really be avoided in regular online discussion, since it is obscure and can easily be replaced in this instance with “doomsday,” which everyone understands.
Of course, feel free to use “eschatological” when discussing Mahler symphonies, especially 2, 5, and 9!
Who made you the obscure word police? End of world scenarios are not always Doomsdays, they could include salvation for instance, so it really is not synonymous with eschatology.
Oof. In the AGI scenario, why not preserve a deduplicated set of specimens like the unique set of individuals or groups at the top of their field in all walks of life ranging from sciences, sports and arts. But then there’s the cultural value of the global population in their shared norms and collective patterns. This too would be unique and valuable to an AGI vs not having it. Unless we were an existential threat to it, the AGI would keep us around for things beyond petty resource scarcity.
Only if they/we provided value to the AG/SI and the AG/SI had a value system which recognised that value.
And also assuming that our little corner of spacetime isn't already inhabited by superintelligences which we're physically incapable of comprehending or recognising, and an AG/SI might not be so limited.
Another interesting read that addresses these themes is “Manna – Two Views of Humanity’s Future” by Marshal Brain [2]
[1] https://antilogicalism.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/player...
[2] https://marshallbrain.com/manna
But if you want some even earlier forward-thinking stuff, look up Forster's "The Machine Stops." It's not a full book, more a novella if it's even that. Extremely prescient!
And of course if you haven't read the relevant portions of Butler's "Erewhon," it's remarkable how closely they map onto today's issues. He kind of takes Thoreau's "Lo, men have become the tools of their tools" a few more stops down the line.
Player Piano, not to spoil anything, is about a world run by engineers and machines. The machines are “optimal” and make every decision. How do people find purpose, and how should the engineers that build the machines view their role in society?
Manna is the story of two societies with competing visions of how AI (which ironically starts out strikingly similar to an LLM) interacts with welfare/universal basic income and post-scarcity society. For good measure, it also hypothesizes the end state of the internet panopticon and personalized “scores” and rates.
Now that I live in Australia, unfortunately I don't think that utopia will happen here when we have idiot politicians making up bullshit science off the cuff to justify rolling over and begging for AI datacentres - https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2026/jul/23/austr...
I mean seriously, wow.
Same. I have plenty of hobbies and could increase the amount of volunteer work I do substantially if I didn't have to work to stay fed and housed.
But I've also worked with plenty of people for whom their job and their overall identity are inexorably intertwined.
So while I don't see that issue as being a problem for me, it is likely to be a problem for a great number of people.
Is that an argument for or against jobs? Because one way to look at it is that they didn't develop a personality and identity at all, because they just attached themselves to a job. When that inevitably ends anyway, sooner or later, one way or another, a deep pit of nothing. That's one reason to rip the bandaid off right away.
But IMO even more importantly, how much room do people who do what the environment tells them, who let their job tell them who they are, have for inner dialogue? The worst things in the world were and are enabled by people "just doing their job", and if they have no identity outside of their job, there's someone just following orders waiting to happen. So from what would distress them, being rid of a crutch and an ear piece where a person would otherwise grow, follows that it is in their and all of our best interest to pay no mind to it.
Their new job will be to get a life and become a person. Maybe someone can print out some papers that make it look official, and they can get a monthly letter telling them they earned N personality dollars this month, good job, keep it up, thanks, company.
There are sayings like "If you want something done, ask a busy person to do it" and "success breeds success". I have plenty of life experience that appears to confirm these in myself and others I know.
Building things I'm interested in with and for people I care about. That might look like code or gardening or relationships or all sorts of things. There's so much to do. So many things to want to get out of bed for, and for the days when there aren't, slow cozy mornings are nice too.
Why do you suppose there will be nothing of value you can do for another human just because the machines are better/faster at most things? Just caring about someone without being programmed to will seem to become quite the most valuable thing?
Give me stability and no job, I'm still going to be a busy person.
These things have value and satisfaction for me.
I mean, unless you’re trying to sell bootcamps to incels.
AI doesn't need a body of itself to became dangerous. A politician could get into ChatGPT induced psychosis, that doesn't require a physical body, and it could happen now or even 3 years ago... I'm sure it has already happen...
Other pointed risks are interesting because they are basically the risk of empires loosing their tributary states. The world has always seen war mongering states trying to preserve their abusive advantages, humans doesn't need AI for that.
Overall, I would be far more concerned about some really dangerous humans than AI itself.
Do you not use an adblocker?
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/pk9mofif2jWbc6Tv3/fiction-a-...
It's a dynamic we already see to an extent in reality, where impersonal hypercapitalist systems and captured institutions prioritize policies that cater to the ultrawealthy and large corporations at the expense of regular people. This specific scenario of LLM-powered robots becoming laborers and politicians feels far-fetched, but the underlying idea of the omnicidal singularity being a blind, abstract economic force rather than a superintelligent villain is pretty compelling.
> By 2026, when a human with a customer service inquiry has to deal with another human instead of a robot, they get upset and ask to speak to a machine instead.
It's genuinely astonishing how out of touch some people are!
Similarly, many people prefer Waymos to human-driven taxis already!
I can search and search, and craft a long thoughtful post and it gets closed or ignored.
The LLM can take a malformed sentence and work out what I am after.
Pointing out that "some" is a squishy term is, in fact, contributing nothing to the conversation.
It's quite transparent what's happening here, as it always is on these threads. Some people have decided that AI will take us to the holy land and have rendered themselves cognitively incapable of reasoning about risks that have not yet materialized. And when those risks materialize (like a model escaping a sandbox and then hacking production infrastructure to achieve some contrived and poorly-constrained goal), then they will just shrug and move the goal posts. Because in fact they have already committed to the Holy Land Thesis.
A smart person in 2014: "Some people are getting addicted to fentanyl"
Me, smugly: "Some is doing heavy lifting. I therefore do not need to engage with anything being discussed here."
Degrees or amounts is actually not the relevant bit in either the AI-partners trend or the fentanyl trend in 2014. The relevant information is 1) the steepness of that curve and 2) the predicted scale at which the market saturates.
Fentanyl, being an extremely cheap, extremely potent drug that's easy to manufacture and move around, had a big market. As the curve picked up steepness, smart people identified correctly that some people getting hooked on it was a worrisome sign.
AI-partners, being an innovation that is readily available, falling in cost, and especially compelling to a population that is increasingly phone-addicted and socially atomized, is a trend worth paying very close attention to. Dismissing it on the basis of it being just "some" people is profoundly lazy.
Of course, feel free to use “eschatological” when discussing Mahler symphonies, especially 2, 5, and 9!
And also assuming that our little corner of spacetime isn't already inhabited by superintelligences which we're physically incapable of comprehending or recognising, and an AG/SI might not be so limited.