I'm overwhelmingly convinced that this not uncommon perspective is the "what are all those construction workers even doing?!" fallacy.

Like any sizable population, there are absolutely some do-nothing inefficiencies to be culled. But most of the time it's just onlookers seeing a tiny slice of the day to be interpreted from their very limited vantage.

A small but meaningful percentage of people have the jobs that they have because they are some combination of fun to be around, attractive, and well-connected. All of these qualities can be productive in some pursuits (a club promoter needs to be fun to be around, a model needs to be attractive (usually), a financier needs to be well-connected), but they are all too often wasted on e-mail jobs.

Perhaps in general but for knowledge workers or creative people, what is productive is hard to measure. That also happens to be the most valuable work.

A lot of AI agent swarm management is being automated. People keep pitching these to me with a straight face.

It's worse than that.

People are producing output that is worse than "doing nothing".

This would imply then that AI output is equally wortheless.

Hot take: who fucking cares. People need to eat and buy homes. We don't need to optimize ourselves into oblivion for the sake of number go up. Because we sure as hell don't have any sort of social safety net here in the US, and if AI takes as many jobs as these chuds say it will then we're going to have a BIG fucking problem on our hands.

I think it's quite clear to anyone with eyes attached to their brains that we're not getting fully automated gay luxury space communism. The AI will just replace the good jobs and leave us with the service industry wage-slavery. Given the choice, I'd much rather an abundance of bullshit email jobs and people with food than the alternative that's being presented currently.

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