alt Hacker NewsPersonally, I would surprised if we are less than 3 years or more than 20 years from humans being obsolete. That is, humans would be economic dead weight, any job could be done better by AI/robots, and "comparative advantage" wouldn't apply because it's cheap enough to just make more robots. At this point, the average human would be completely useless to the billionaires (or to the AIs, if the billionaires fail to control the AIs).
I can see two major delaying factors here:
1. Current generation LLM technology won't scale to true AGI. It's missing a number of critical things. But a lot of effort is being spent fixing those limitations. But until those limitations are overcome, humans will be needed to "manage" LLMs and work around their limitations, just like programmers do today.
2. Generalist robotics is far behind LLMs for multiple reasons, including insufficient sensors and fine motor control. This would require multiple scientific and engineering breakthroughs to fix. Investors will, presumably, spend a large chunk of the world's wealth to improve robotics to replace manual labor. But until they do, human hands will still be needed in the physical world.
The real danger is if AI passes a point where it starts contributing substantially to its own development, speeding up the pace of breakthroughs. If we ever hit that tipping point, then things will get weird, and not in a good way.
Replies
AI is already contributing substantially to its own development: https://novaknown.com/2026/03/12/ai-builds-ai-claude/
> Personally, I would surprised if we are less than 3 years or more than 20 years from humans being obsolete.
I think we are as far from it as we were 10 years ago. Or 100 years ago. I think LLM is a deadend technology. Useful, but that won't get anywhere beyond what it is.
But that's the thing, "personally", "I think", etc. Not much of a debate to be had there.
AI making humans obsolete is not really something that causes me any anxiety.
[flagged]
I broadly agree with a 3-20 year timeline for a majority of office work. But some important qualifying statements I would add:
- some jobs will stay with humans even when AI would be better at it. We already see a lot of this with even with pre-AI automatisation. Neither markets nor companies are perfectly efficient
- at the point where AI is better than the average human, half of all humans are still better than AI. For companies or departments built around employing lots of average people the cutover point will be a lot earlier than for shops that aim to employ the best of the best. Social change is inevitable long before the best are out of work
- the actual benchmark for " replacement" is not human vs machine, but human plus machine vs machine alone. But the difference doesn't matter much because efficiency increases still displace workers
- I don't think robots will advance enough to meet this timeline. This is not just a software issue. Humans have an amazing suite of sensors and actuators. Just replicating a human hand is insanely complex. Walking, jumping robots are crude automatons in comparison. We can cover a lot with specialized robots, but we won't replace humans in physical jobs in 20 years