Hey it’s what executives want. Fake everything. Slop and robots everywhere. Have at it, I say. Maybe then people will go outside again

I wish going outside again were possible, but what if most of the people you actually want to hang out with aren't in the same area?

And for those who are near, the cost of having a coffee or a drink is too much now on top of expenses that are already stretching,

The kids tend to hang out with the kids of their parents' friends, with the neighbours' kids. A bit later in life, when in school, we find friends among the classmates, who too aren't usually all that similar to us.

Maybe when we switched to a fully online adult world with its hyper-optimization of everything, we've put our potential friends in the same bucket with recommendation system-driven content like music and tv-shows. Dating too.

There are certain benefits in getting by with limited choice, when we learn to communicate with people who are not a 100% match.

And as for having a drink or a coffee- we can always just invite the friends over. Hanging out in each others' apartments is fun and cheap

go for a walk with your friends and a bottle of water

It's becoming rarer and rarer for people to have friends that are physically close to them unless they've stayed in the town they were born in.

Modern technology kind of broke friendship in the sense that not very long ago maintaining friendships over any distance was expensive. That is it costs long distance fees, gas, or letter writing. Because of those expenses it was very common to make friends locally pretty quickly.

But the internet broke that, especially modern social media. Wherever you moved your friends were a free website away, and long distance calling was gone. At first this seemed fine because sites connected you to your friends, but as the lock in happened it became a contest of getting you pissed off and showing you ads.

Going to take a long time to socially fix this problem. Especially as some large number of people are going to talk to AI instead.

Hi Friend, are you looking for a <insert product>bottled water</>? Here are the top 1000 brands of delicious bottled water! Water is very good for you! You are an ugly bag of mostly water! You do not have to enter your payment details, I remember them! Be assured that 1000 cases of 1000 brands of delicious bottled water are on their way to you now [Shipping charges may apply] at Peach Trees 2026, Sector 13, Mega-City One! Have an adequate day!!!

Eventually that's what's going to happen if things keep on going in this direction and it looks like there's nothing stopping it so yeah, we're moving in circles. Old things will become new again.

My household just bought The Brick to start taking control of our phones and online usage. We've been very online for 15+ years but are hoping to break the addiction cycle by simply blocking our devices from access. The timing feels right, mostly because sites like Instagram and Reddit are too braindead and spam+ad heavy these days. The executives and shareholders' desire for profits have already killed two of my biggest online pastimes.

I heard of The brick and sounds very effective. Not many people realize the're addicted to their devices and most tragic of all is that kids who grew always online have no baseline to return to. As the OP mentions, I too hope that when it'll all become a junk pile people will eventually return to offline mode.

The schadenfreude is so fucking palpable

Weird take, will you also look sour at devs who use local LLM's in ~50 years? Or is that different

I was just thinking SWEs and AI researchers should all unionize before AI becomes AGI

Everyone is holding their breath praying AGI either will, or will not, come before the chickens come home to roost.

Not sure that makes sense. As amazing a technical feat as AGI will be, does it follow that s.tons of money will immediately be made? That's not really how humans act, historically. Any migration to new technology takes years, decades. There are still steam engines pulling revenue service trains.

Yes - if AGI is made, nearly immediately every knowledge worker’s labor value goes to zero over night.

This may or may not include AI researchers.

That seems like a wrong economic theory to me. The economy is based on differential of value. I can make furniture, so it's worth less to me than it is to you. Therefore we can trade. That's what supply/demand is. If AGI somehow exists, then the value of intelligence drops to zero for both of us, there's nothing to trade.

AGI would not make knowledge work valueless, it would move all the knowledge work value to the AGI companies.

> AGI would not make knowledge work valueless, it would move all the knowledge work value to the AGI companies.

Yep! That's the point :)

There still plenty to trade - you just don’t have any of it.

Those $300 billion dollar circular deals will become much more common.

Can you guys just say the quiet part out loud?

That you want slaves. You want slaves. This is what you are asking for.

Unless you're paying the AGI? Then why not just... pay a human that is already present? Much more efficient.

Not sure if you’re insinuating that I’m one of the capitalists? I’m not, that’s why I’m saying it out loud. I believe capitalism’s relationship with labor will need to fundamentally change if AGI and robotics takeover. I don’t know what that looks like but obviously the current capitalist overlords want everything to stay the same - just for them to have more power/money.

You are assuming that the AGI service is very cheap..

Based on current trends why wouldn’t it be cheap?

Why would an artificial intelligence want to do what you tell it to?

I don’t think AI in its current form and current track wants much of anything.

Why would it have any desire at all?

And probably not much longer after that, the bloodshed

Unless the benefits of AI get communalized (UBI, or some other form of sharing), ya.

How would that work? Taxes are already full of perverse incentives. Certainly anything resembling UBI will be just as bad.

You’re not wrong - I was just giving that as an example but not saying it’s the right thing to do.

I don't think there is any compelling reason to believe this will actually happen

It will drive capital into data centers, which is good for Oracle.

Or maybe it won't. If it can be made efficient like humans it might be at the edge mainly.

What is this "everyone" running from?

Collapse of return on investment

why do you care so little? it only represents thousands of peoples livelihoods.

I only care when I have incentives to care.

Thats OP's point - you need to reduce usage everywhere and pointing out that AI is only 1.5% doesn't take away from the fact that usage needs to be reduced there as well.

Well, at least you will have lots of company (me included).

This is literally what major company execs want engineers and eventually their agents to do.

Hm what about the Citadel rebuttal that showed growth?

https://www.citadelsecurities.com/news-and-insights/2026-glo...

Yeah, I was thinking the same. It seems like you can get data for whatever argument you want to support

Doesn't seem necessarily a contradiction. Job posting growth logically happens before effective job growth.

Biggest thing hurting folks is RTO. Unless you live in a large metro, tech jobs are slim/none.

That’s how it was before the pandemic.. Is it unusual that the jobs are where the people are?

I've heard other people say, situation has greatly improved over the past year, esp. 6 months.

How many of those are real jobs?

Mine is too. Absolutely no outreach from the major players however. Mostly AI startups with a few larger/older SaaS startups sprinkled in.