90% of US working hours are spent on tasks not covered well by AI benchmarks

Re:90% of US working hours are spent on tasks not covered we... by Wowfunhappy on Friday October 16, 2026 @02:50PM (#50122697)

That's not really the point I'm trying to make.

In the future, do bathrooms need to be cleaned? If yes, is it cheaper for that to be done by a person or by a robot?

Obviously, it is in the interest of the robot manufacturers to make the robot just a tiny bit cheaper than the person, so you'll buy the robot and the company makes the maximum amount of profit.

Now, if society breaks down and there's no one to consider buying the robot—well, that's not good for anybody, which is why I suspect society will find some way of working this out even if it's not ideal. But whatever, I don't particularly want to argue this point.

What I do want to argue is that there probably isn't a universe in which all white collar work goes away but blue collar work is still around.

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Re:90% of US working hours are spent on tasks not covered we... by shermantanktop on Friday October 16, 2026 @03:43PM (#50123520)

> I suspect society will find some way of working this out

Not sure what this "society" that works things out is, exactly. Top-down high-modernist plans for how society ought to work are the past; chaotic, twitchy, thrashy responses to disruption by a tiny elite class is where we are now.

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Re:90% of US working hours are spent on tasks not covered we... by Wowfunhappy on Friday October 16, 2026 @06:31PM (#50125647)

Again, this is really not the point I'm trying to make! If your prediction is that we'd end up in some apocalyptic dystopia, I'll concede the possibility.

But there still wouldn't be any jobs cleaning toilets, because the people who still had toilets to clean would have robots to do it.

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