alt Hacker NewsMaybe I am being naive but I think there will always be room for smarts.
Every professor at any university has a dozen more project ideas than they have graduate students, every factory boss has a dozen more optimisations than ways to implement them, and looking up into the night sky we have 95% of it that cannot be explained.
The gap is not too few smart people, nor too few "jobs" that need smarts. The gap is being prepared to arrange society and wealth so the "job" is discovery, science, sharing. We are no longer hunter gatherers, no longer a feudal society, perhaps we shall stop being whatever this one is and try a new one.
(and no, I don't think there is a name for the new one yet (its not socialism, maybe not capitalism).
Lets just not fall back to Feudal if we can help it
Replies
The pattern holds across transitions: every shift to a new economic mode required new institutional scaffolding before the gains could be broadly distributed. Feudalism to capitalism needed joint-stock companies, double-entry bookkeeping, property law. Industrial capitalism needed unions, limited liability, welfare states.
What's interesting now is we might have more lead time than workers in Manchester in 1830 had—enough to build the scaffolding before the transition completes rather than after.
Mondragon is maybe the most useful living data point for what "arrange society and wealth differently" could look like at scale: worker-owned, competitive in global markets, weathered 2008 considerably better than comparable private firms. Not a utopia, but running code rather than theory.
The harder design question is what institutional form fits a world where AI handles most cognitive labor. My hunch is something like collective ownership of productive infrastructure—not the Soviet model, but closer to how water utilities or national parks work: you don't individually own the Hoover Dam, but you collectively do, and value flows back. The challenge is building that before the window closes.
Yes, we have an infinite amount of knowledge work that needs done. But if AI is better at it than humans, we aren’t going to use humans.
We don’t use chimpanzees for any knowledge work today, even though they’d be better at it than some other animals.