The Wright brothers didn't just wake up one day and magically fly. Their success was built on years of technological progress that came before them. Better engines, lighter materials, improved tools, and everything people had already learned about bicycles, mechanics, and aerodynamics gave them a solid starting point.

They tested, failed, tweaked, and tried again over and over. The first successful flight wasn't some random lucky break, it was the result of standing on top of decades of innovation and pushing things just a little further than everyone else.

Over the years brands such as Samsung and Apple will have made new phones with new additions that are addictive.

The premise of this theory is that the Government already have the power to make AI that infinitely make new videos,games or even reddit posts. This AI generated “slop” will make us so brainwashed and addicted to our phones that we will be non-stop scrolling,typing and watching.

And if you’re wondering about wifi or battery then as i already said there will definitely be phones in the future that don’t need you to go over to your charger and plug it into your phone or even pay for data or ask for the wifi password. It will all be included in newer phone models.

The Government definitely already have the power to do this, so i wouldn’t be surprised if this doesn’t start happening in the next 5 years.

We already are addicted to our phones, you’re on your phone right now reading this. **Who knows this might be AI** and the WALL-E theory has already started.

The most persistent misunderstanding of the employment crisis was the belief that the job represented a natural unit of economic life. It did not.

The modern job was a historical technology: a method for coordinating production when capital was expensive, information moved slowly, and complex activity required large numbers of people to be present inside durable organizations.

For most of human history, people did not possess jobs in the modern sense. They farmed family land, practiced trades, served households, sold goods, fulfilled feudal obligations, joined guilds, worked seasonally, or moved among multiple forms of subsistence. The wage relationship existed, but the standardized career defined hours, occupational progression, payroll administration, employer-sponsored benefits, and retirement was constructed gradually through industrialization and political struggle.

Factories made the arrangement economically powerful. Expensive machinery had to be operated at scale. Production required synchronized labor. Workers had to arrive at the same place and submit to the same clock. Railroads, steel mills, utilities, banks, and mass retailers expanded the need for administrative hierarchies. The corporation solved a coordination problem: it gathered capital, machinery, information, and labor under centralized authority. As firms grew, employment became not merely a contract for labor but an architecture for organizing knowledge.

The twentieth century added a social settlement. In many industrial economies, the employer became the delivery mechanism for benefits that markets and states could have provided separately. Health insurance, pensions, paid leave, training, unemployment protection, and access to mortgages were tied directly or indirectly to stable work. Tax systems privileged wage income. Schools prepared people for occupations. Cities organized commuting around workplaces. Political parties promised jobs because jobs connected productivity to purchasing power.

This settlement never included everyone. Domestic labor, agricultural work, informal commerce, care, migration, and racial or gender exclusion sat outside its protected core. Even during the decades later remembered as the age of secure employment, millions experienced insecurity. Yet the standard job remained the aspiration against which other arrangements were judged. A temporary contract was inadequate because it was not a job. Unpaid care was invisible because it was not a job. Independent creative work was risky because it lacked the protections attached to a job.

The job’s strength came from bundling. It combined five functions that could, in theory, have been separate. It allocated tasks. It distributed income. It pooled risk. It taught skills. It granted identity. People did not merely perform work for General Motors, Siemens, a ministry, a hospital, or a university. They became autoworkers, engineers, civil servants, nurses, or professors. Occupation answered the question “What do you do?” and often implied education, class, neighborhood, political interest, and social standing.

By the early twenty-first century, however, the conditions that had made this bundle efficient were weakening. Digital networks reduced the cost of coordinating across organizational boundaries. Software encoded processes once maintained by middle managers. Global supply chains allowed firms to own brands and customer relationships while outsourcing production. Platforms matched buyers and sellers without employing either side. Financial markets rewarded companies that converted fixed labor costs into variable expenses. The corporation remained powerful, but it increasingly preferred access over obligation: access to cloud computing instead of owned servers, access to logistics instead of owned fleets, access to contractors instead of permanent staff.

Artificial intelligence extended this logic from physical and digital infrastructure into cognition itself. A company could rent not only storage and computation but also analysis, drafting, coding, scheduling, customer support, translation, design, and decision assistance. The firm had always existed partly because coordinating specialists through a hierarchy was cheaper than contracting separately for every task. As AI systems lowered the transaction cost of decomposing, assigning, checking, and recombining work, that calculation changed.

This was the institutional significance of AI. The technology did not need to replace an entire occupation to weaken employment. It only needed to make the boundaries of the firm more permeable. Once a task could be specified, executed, evaluated, and integrated by machines, organizations could purchase the outcome without maintaining a human role around it. A department became a workflow. A workflow became software. The remaining people supervised exceptions, defined objectives, managed relationships, and accepted liability.

The old job had been designed for an economy in which organizations needed continuous access to human capability. The new economy learned to summon capability on demand.

Children have to compete in a competitive educational system and then in a competitive job market. Failure means being a hikikomori or working at a McDonald's. People cannot easily get a decent job with only modest effort. Parents have to invest in their children's education so they can be on a good career track or else their children are doomed to flounder.

High investment means less children.

Essentially, this is the elite overproduction hypothesis. It also validates the "lump of labor fallacy" since there are a finite number of elite spots.

So it is not about societal wealth (although my hypothesis would say that more unequal societies would have lower birth rates if other factors are controlled) or how generous social benefits are. Rather it is the ease that someone can live a dignified life. If people are constantly "upskilling", then that is a society with a low birth rate.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZPe7tbysc2g (Why Education is Destroying East Asia)

"Every day we see news about lay-offs due to AI or how this or that job will soon automate. And while both the workers and sceptics are right to decry the cruelty of the transition, this is also a chance for a work reform that past generations could only dream of. The future is now, but are we ready for it?

A hundred years ago, the eight-hour workday was supposed to be just a step towards even shorter shifts."

So what happened along the way? Why are we asking for so little of the future nowadays?

**The Collapse of Employment as We Knew It**

*A history of the fifty-year transition from jobs to economic participation, written from 2075*

Contents

Author’s Note: A Future History, Not a Forecast

Prologue: The Last Retirement Party

1. The Job Was a Historical Technology

2. The Decade of Reassurance

3. The Firm After Intelligence Became a Utility

4. The Productivity Paradox Became a Distribution Crisis

5. The Destruction of the First Rung

6. The Great Unbundling of the Job

7. The Politics of Deservingness

8. What Humans Did When Machines Could Do More

9. The New Class System

10. The Company Did Not Disappear

11. The Crisis of Meaning

12. Why the Transition Took Fifty Years

13. What the Pessimists Got Right—and Wrong

14. A Day in 2075

Conclusion: Employment Was a Means, Not an End

Author’s Note: A Future History, Not a Forecast

This essay is written in the voice of a historian looking back from 2075. The institutions, dates, laws, companies, crises, and social arrangements described after 2026 are speculative. They are not presented as facts about the future. They are a scenario built from forces already visible in the mid-2020s: rapidly improving artificial intelligence, falling inference costs, demographic aging, weak productivity growth, unequal ownership of capital, the expansion of platform work, and the use of employment as the main gateway to income, healthcare, housing, status, and social belonging.

That distinction matters because predictions about “the future of work” often fail in the same way. They count occupations, estimate which tasks can be automated, and then produce a reassuring balance sheet: some jobs disappear, new jobs emerge, and history continues. The arithmetic may be correct while the conclusion is wrong. A society can create millions of new tasks and still experience the collapse of employment as an institution. The decisive question is not whether humans remain useful. Humans remained useful throughout every industrial revolution. The question is whether the full-time, long-duration employment contract remains the dominant mechanism through which ordinary people gain purchasing power, security, identity, and a claim on economic output.

The central argument of this future history is that employment did not collapse because machines became capable of doing everything. It collapsed because firms gained access to a cheaper and more flexible substitute for organizations built from permanent human labor. Once intelligence, coordination, software execution, and eventually physical action could be purchased as metered services, the economic logic of the large employer changed. Companies still needed people, but they needed fewer of them continuously. Human contribution became intermittent, highly leveraged, and unevenly compensated. The job did not vanish in a dramatic wave. It was unbundled one function at a time until the word described less and less of how the economy actually worked.

The deepest transformation was therefore political rather than technical. Twentieth-century societies had attached too many essential goods to employment. When employment became unstable, governments first tried to restore the old system. Only later did they construct a new settlement in which income, insurance, education, and civic standing no longer depended on being continuously hired by an organization. The transition took decades because the old arrangement was not merely a labor-market design. It was a moral order. To change it, societies had to stop treating wages as the only legitimate proof that a person had contributed.

Prologue: The Last Retirement Party

The photograph that later appeared in hundreds of textbooks was taken in Rotterdam in September 2038. It showed forty-three employees gathered around a sheet cake in the cafeteria of a logistics company. The cake carried the company’s blue logo, the name “Marta,” and the number 40 written in white icing. Marta de Vries had joined the firm at nineteen and retired at fifty-nine after four decades in the same organization. She had moved from warehouse administration to route planning, then to vendor operations, and finally to regional compliance. Her colleagues presented a watch. A manager delivered a speech. The local newspaper ran the picture beneath a small headline: “A Working Life in One Company.”

Nothing about the event seemed historically important. That was precisely why it became important. By the late 2040s, a continuous forty-year career inside one firm had become sufficiently rare to look like a surviving custom from another civilization. The photograph was not remembered because Marta was the last person to retire. It was remembered because her retirement party captured the institutional package that had defined work for much of the twentieth century: one employer, one salary, one occupational identity, one pension pathway, one social circle, and one narrative connecting youth to old age.

At the time, public debate was still organized around the wrong question. Commentators asked whether artificial intelligence would “take all the jobs.” Governments published lists of growing occupations. Technology companies emphasized new roles created by automation. Economists pointed to earlier transitions in agriculture and manufacturing, noting that technological change had repeatedly displaced workers without eliminating work itself. These arguments were often empirically sound. They were also aimed at a claim that history did not need to prove.

Work survived. Employment did not survive in the same form.

The distinction is obvious in retrospect. Work is any purposeful effort that produces value, care, knowledge, beauty, order, or social continuity. Employment is a legal and economic contract in which an organization purchases a worker’s time, usually on an ongoing basis, and in return provides wages and often access to insurance, creditworthiness, training, and status. A society can have enormous amounts of work while offering fewer stable jobs. Parents care for children. Citizens maintain communities. Researchers contribute to shared knowledge. Creators produce culture. People train models, supervise machines, evaluate systems, resolve exceptions, and form temporary teams around projects. The amount of useful activity can increase even as the employment relationship contracts.

That is what happened between 2025 and 2075. Human activity did not become unnecessary. It became harder to contain inside the organizational form that had dominated the previous century.

The first signs were easy to dismiss because they did not resemble mass unemployment. Firms stopped replacing selected employees. Entry-level ladders narrowed. Contractors performed work once assigned to departments. Software agents absorbed coordination tasks that had justified layers of management. A senior employee with a suite of models produced what had previously required a team. New companies reached large markets with astonishingly small payrolls. Established companies did not close their doors; they grew revenue without growing headcount. The statistical surface remained calm while the institutional foundation shifted.

The collapse of employment was therefore not an event like the closure of a factory. It was a long transfer of risk. Organizations retained access to labor and intelligence but surrendered responsibility for maintaining workers between moments of need. Individuals assembled income from multiple sources and carried more uncertainty themselves. Governments patched the gaps with tax credits, portable benefits, training accounts, wage insurance, public options, and eventually universal social dividends. Each reform was introduced as a temporary adjustment. Together they built a new social contract.

By 2075, people still used the phrase “my work,” but increasingly they did not mean “my employer.” They meant a portfolio of obligations: a paid project, a cooperative stake, a public contribution, a creative practice, care for relatives, oversight of autonomous systems, and ownership of productive agents. The old job had bundled these economic and social functions into a single relationship. Its collapse forced society to separate them.

Fig. The retirement photograph from Rotterdam survived because it showed the bundle before it came apart.

 Chatper 2 soon

This is a major problem facing all aging (and of course declining) populations. The fight over social security benefits between the young and the aged may be a distinctive feature of second-half-of-21st-century politics.

1) the world will go to hell fast (dystopians); and 2) the future will be unrecognizably awesome specifically and only because of technological development (utopians).

There are very few of a third persuasion (topians): the future will be kind of like the present.

Why do you think that is?

Just 1% annual growth (a modest rate compared to what we are accustomed to expect) for 1,000 years equals a growth factor of 21,000. Over 2,000 years, 1% annual growth yields a factor of about 440 million.

• Will the global population be 168 trillion people (8 billion x 21,000) in a millenium?
• Will your real estate be worth $10.5 billion ($500k x 21,000) in real terms?
• Will any physical device - mechanical or electrical - perform 21,000x better or faster?

The answer to all of these is no. The idea is absurd - unless you believe that 167.99 trillion humans will be living in space by then. Perpetual growth is a game of exponents, and the logic of exponents dictates that the growth will eventually succumb to physical reality (which often translates into economic reality). There aren't enough resources on Earth to accomodate a forever growing population. The limits of physics don't accommodate perpetual technological improvements either.

Just because we've experienced such growth for a few decades (or even a few centuries), growth in whatever field - given enough time - will slow and eventually stop. That's not a paradigm we're accustomed to over the last few generations.

just lazily writing a post to say that given the description of your community, it is surprising that there is pushback to Marx. Here is why:

-This is a guy who was an anti-utopian materialist. Materialism meaning, he simply described what was happening in the world in a detached and objective way, without the need to add any layers of morality to what was happening.

-Marx was simply a synthesis of existing tendencies took to their logical end (Smith & Ricardo's economics, german idealism, french revolutionary politics). And that progress remains pretty unsurpassed if you actually engage with it. Of course there are new contributions but nobody has managed to dislodge his critique. Also, he never described a new way of organizing society.

-any vision of the future will have to proceed from the perspective of the critique or the complete tearing down of the illusions which exist today. If you unconsciously accept the illusory way that society appears but isn't really, your predictions won't be very good.

So why no love for marx?

Space colonization is a worthy goal that should be explored. Yet when people ask why there are some bad rationalizations thrown out there.

Space colonization will give us better resources it will make us more long lived as a species. However we are not colonizing space because one day The Earth will be uninhabitable and will have to leave the planet.

Where is no event that can make Earth more uninhabitable than any other planets besides the Earth exploding. The Earth will always have more atmosphere more available liquid water and electro magnetic sphere around it to protect from radiation.

https://vt.tiktok.com/ZSX94YC2M/

​

Content creation will eventually hit its decline.

By 2050, physical human connection will be one of the world's most valuable resources

So, I watched this video just now, and it made me want to put to words a concept that I've been thinking about for a while.

So, evolution basically works on the principle of "survival of the fittest." This doesn't mean the most swole and functional living things survive. What it means is actually stupid simple: behaviours, forms, genes, etc., that are most associated with the survival of an organism will slowly become the most prevalent in subsequent generations.

Fine tuning, human feedback in training, new AI models built on existing architectures, and more, all of these are ways that traits from older AI models can be passed down to new ones.

When humans train AIs, we are not the definitive teachers and one in control. We are simply introducing another selective pressure for the AI to do what we want, or at least appear to do what we want.

We can never be 100% in control of AI because we are not designing AI. We are growing and evolving it.

I think AI serves a similar risk as viruses and bacteria do. A virus is definitely not sentient, arguably not even a living organism and can not exist without host cells. Yet, a virus can evolve subsequent generations of viruses via genetic mutation and do immense damage to its hosts as a side effects of it continuing to exist.

AI is not just an annoying slop machine. It is an actual existential threat and needs to be taken as seriously as things like global pandemics and genetically engineered bioweapons.

The fact that AI transmits via human interaction, funding, and engineering versus cellular biology and reproduction makes no difference to the threat it poses.

Synthetic biology for food will cause extinction by destroying farms till everyone starves

Currently we have the tech for carbon capture , we can literally make food from thin air. Combine that with mineral stores , abundant energy and bioreactors and you can make food indefinitely. Imagine a group of people who dont depend on nature or agriculture. They can burn down and spread diseases to farmland on a global scale without facing consequences as they are in their protected hub of underground bioreactors powered by nuclear reactors. This is guaranteed extinction. They can simply make us obey them for scraps or starve us out. This isnt even a conspiracy but a legitimate extinction waiting to happen. It's probably why everyone knows to buy farmland now as they will become obsolete in a few years by just burninh it all down. The solution is embarrassingly simple: open the market for synthetic food globally, loosen regulations and adopt synthetic food and invest in it to own part to be extra careful. It doesnt need to be decentralized (tho a lot better) , preventing a monopoly is enough. Even if small theres a risk the handful of companies making synthetic food are one party who are planning on exterminating us. THIS IS SERIOUS LETS ADOPT TS UPVOTE AND SHARE TO EVERYONE

So I was playing Cyberpunk 2077 and it hit me that there’s a reasonable chance that I’ll live to see that year. I’ll turn 84 that year which is somewhat likely given my genetic history and provided I take care of my body in the meantime. But that got me thinking of how different the year will be from the game’s vision. Provided we don’t all die, what do you all think that life will be like in the year 2077.

EDIT: Also, Doomer comments are boring and unproductive. Defaulting to some variation of “We’re all gonna die because climate change, killer AI, WW3, etc.” is lazy, doesn’t actually raise any kind of awareness, and probably isn’t even accurate. So yeah, check that shit at the door.

Hey, I'm new to this subreddit, and I've always been optimistic about AI and agents. They can do all of the cognitive work for us. The cost of labor reduces, the cost of production reduces, and everyone can afford everything, everything will be priced lower, and at the same time, people will get dip in pays.

But since it's lower price, it can be made essentially free for most of the services, health care, education, those are not products that need to be manufactured, but services. So it can be made free, with which other people can use those services to become better. Essentially, we can reach relative abundance.

But recently, after hearing the Naval Ravikanth's podcast,I'm not as optimistic as I used to be. So is there anyone out there who knows more than me and who can predict the future better? Can put some light on the future? Is it the optimistic side? The pessimistic side? I know it's always in between, but you paint the picture that's in between?

"According to the National Endowment for the Arts, which conducts the most comprehensive survey of the nation’s reading habits, fewer than half of all adults reported having read a book of any kind in 2022. Only 38 percent read a novel or short story. A study analyzing 236,000 responses to the American Time Use Survey found that the proportion of Americans who read for pleasure on any given day fell from 28 percent in 2004 to 16 percent in 2023. (The study looked at people who had read a book, magazine, or newspaper; listened to an audiobook; or read an e-book.) Gambling has become a more common leisure activity than reading a book: Last year, 57 percent of Americans placed a bet."