> Chess is a good example.

Chess is an unusually poor example. When computers took over Chess, we didn't have something stupid like 30% of employment relying on playing Chess to eat and pay rent.

The analogy only makes sense if you're already convinced that we won't lose the majority of white-collar work to computers.

To those who are not convinced that we are looking at making 50% of the workforce redundant, Chess is an analogy that makes no sense.

It only makes sense if you're already a true believer.

I respectfully disagree with this statement in the sense that if the whole world ends up becoming like a chess tournament. It would become insanely more harder for us to live our lives peacefully. The life of a chess player is filled with stress.

(https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47587863) A comment I had written sometime ago. Aside from a very few at the top, I have seen some chess players regret in a very nostalgic way.

The chess industry continues to allege against each other and we lost a star (Rest in peace, Daniel Naroditsky) because of it. The current world champion himself is struggling from all the pressure put on a 19 year old boy.

We enjoy playing against each other but man it is competitive if you wish to feed families.

Most of us play chess out of leisure. I am unsure how a world where everyone does something akin to chess competitively (ie. for money, as we wish to feed our children and ourselves) would look like.

One can say something similar to UBI might be needed and then we all play chess in leisure, but I don't think that is what most people propose when they mention the example of chess.

> the German word for "entertainment" is "Unterhaltung"; thus it can be argued that the purpose of entertainment/Unterhaltung is "unten halten"

No, that would be "Untenhaltung", which isn't an actual German word, but could be.

"unterhalten" in German can both mean to entertain (however, not as in "entertaining a notion") having a conversation, as well as "to maintain". It has several meanings, all of them positive.

To be fair, most robot turnaments are still very much about human intellectual and engineering achievements. The robots are just a vessel

I'm not really into either F1 or Nascar, but my impression from the outside is that those sports are still primarily about the drivers

F1 is somewhat about which company can build a better car. But any real improvements seem to invariably lead to a rule change that bans that improvement in future seasons. So you are back to drivers being the most visible differentiator

A lot of the inequality is a political choice that could be changed if people vote to do so.

Olympic Athletes are the fruits of our labour. They are what things like money and cars are for.

Support jobs are very definitely not "bullshit jobs".

The point is that the same thing is likely to occur with the arts

Why would it be bad for technology to get smaller, more productive and exponentially cheaper? As long as its available to everyone, which is impossible to prevent if its really that cheap and trivial to access & create, which is true as long as we have access to tech advanced enough to create it, which we increasingly do at increasingly cheaper and more widespread rates, etc...

Well "most" devs is doing a lot of work here.

I'm not sure about other devs, or even their number, but AI can most definitely NOT produce better code than I can.

I use it after I have done the hard architectural work: defining complex types and interfaces, figuring out code organization, solving thorny issues. When these are done, it's now time to hand over to the agent to apply stuff everywhere following my patterns. And even there SOTA model like Opus make silly mistakes, you need to watch them carefully. Sometimes it loses track of the big picture.

I also use them to check my code and to write bash scripts. They are useful for all these.

You’re equating two things that aren’t the same. I’m not still manually writing code, but it’s not at all because Claude can produce better code than me. It’s worse at CRUD apps and a lot worse at domain specific bits. But it’s more parallelizable, so if I drive it well I can focus my skill on the small subset of problems that actually require it and achieve increased throughput.

It can produce better code than most devs in the hands of a good dev. The bullshit code I see coming from juniors using AI..

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This, give me some french fries from time to time and a house and basic food necessities for human-living and I am happy to be creative.

But what I worry about sometimes is when you snatch that away, then you just lead to stress over basic existence.

> If this goes away, and we have millions completely adrift? With no structure to contribute to? Even with the largest welfare expansion in history, I think we’re preparing for a very turbulent society.

Please look around and just try to remember how many things have happened in a year or two, We are already within a turbulent society but yes I also feel like this isn't the end and the cat is sort of out of the box and the world has to prepare itself for even more turbulences/radical changes.

I don't see why you need to armchair philosophize about what people are or what they need "in general." How could we know such things? What we know is we find ourselves in certain historical circumstances, and we navigate. Right now we are, with exceptions like you mention, free only to be a worker or to be, essentialy, a homeless criminal.

This whole prescriptive thing this response and others have where its like "ah surely it is up to us to find some meaning for the masses of plebs in our brave new world" is, IMO, presumptuous at best.

Like literally just give people an actual chance to find their own meaning, and I promise you they will find it. If it seems hard to you or "full of turmoil", that suggests a poverty of inspiration on your end, not everyone elses. Meaning is not intrinsic to our particular mode of production at the moment, in fact, individuals find meaning despite this mode!

Then you clearly don't understand my take.

I broadly agree with a 3-20 year timeline for a majority of office work. But some important qualifying statements I would add:

- some jobs will stay with humans even when AI would be better at it. We already see a lot of this with even with pre-AI automatisation. Neither markets nor companies are perfectly efficient

- at the point where AI is better than the average human, half of all humans are still better than AI. For companies or departments built around employing lots of average people the cutover point will be a lot earlier than for shops that aim to employ the best of the best. Social change is inevitable long before the best are out of work

- the actual benchmark for " replacement" is not human vs machine, but human plus machine vs machine alone. But the difference doesn't matter much because efficiency increases still displace workers

- I don't think robots will advance enough to meet this timeline. This is not just a software issue. Humans have an amazing suite of sensors and actuators. Just replicating a human hand is insanely complex. Walking, jumping robots are crude automatons in comparison. We can cover a lot with specialized robots, but we won't replace humans in physical jobs in 20 years

AI is already contributing substantially to its own development: https://novaknown.com/2026/03/12/ai-builds-ai-claude/

> Personally, I would surprised if we are less than 3 years or more than 20 years from humans being obsolete.

I think we are as far from it as we were 10 years ago. Or 100 years ago. I think LLM is a deadend technology. Useful, but that won't get anywhere beyond what it is.

But that's the thing, "personally", "I think", etc. Not much of a debate to be had there.

AI making humans obsolete is not really something that causes me any anxiety.

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