The West Forgot How to Make Things. Now It's Forgetting How to Code

Re:The West Forgot How to Make Things. Now It's Forgetting H... by Aaargh20318 on Sunday April 26, 2026 @05:13AM (#47908747)

> What AI is being sold as right now is not really productivity. In many domains, productivity is already sufficient. What’s being sold is workforce reduction.

And workforce reduction is a nobel goal. In fact, I think it's one of the most important things humanity should focus on. We should strive for a workforce of zero. Humans currently was an enormous amount of their life working instead of more worthwhile pursuits.

I despise the rhetoric around this, we didn't "lose jobs" over AI, we saved ourselves a lot of work. What it does do is highlight a problem in our current society: the link between labour and the access to resources (e.g. money).

I don't think that AI is the ultimate answer to the problem of work, but it can contribute to it.

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Re:The West Forgot How to Make Things. Now It's Forgetting H... by only-one1701 on Sunday April 26, 2026 @06:46AM (#47909199)

The time to solve that resource problem is before AI concentrates power, not after. It’s LESS likely to happen when a tiny elite increases their already huge amount of power.

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Re:The West Forgot How to Make Things. Now It's Forgetting H... by esseph on Sunday April 26, 2026 @07:26AM (#47909422)

Jobless people normally can't feed themselves in a modern world.

And uh, healthcare. Among other things.

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Re:The West Forgot How to Make Things. Now It's Forgetting H... by Aaargh20318 on Sunday April 26, 2026 @01:09PM (#47911895)

Exactly, so that problem needs to be solved. Labour and income should not be linked.

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Re:The West Forgot How to Make Things. Now It's Forgetting H... by esseph on Sunday April 26, 2026 @03:43PM (#47913384)

I think you could go at least another 10,000 years and that still wouldn't be "solved".

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