Two years ago, I was enjoying a drink with my wife, her friend, a very senior female VC partner, and another friend.

Somehow we talked AI in some depth, and the VC at one point said (about AI): “I don’t know what our kids are going to do for work. I don’t know what jobs there will be to do.”

That same VC invests in AI companies and by what I heard about her, has done phenomenally well.

I think about that exchange all the time. Worried about your own kids but acting against their interests. It unsettled me, and Kyle’s excellent articles brought that back to a boiling point in my mind.

Edit: are->our

In the other hand, shouldn't it be the objective of humanity to not HAVE to work for the most basic survival and to fit into society?

Not that we're in any way in that path, of course, with the people making the working machines also accumulating all the wealth. But still, there's something intrinsically good about automation, even when the system is not suited for it.

Sounds like she's acting in their best interests to me. Her kids will find something to do - the same things everyone else will find to do. There's just going to be a lot less working-for-a-living, and it's going to be glorious.

> Worried about your own kids but acting against their interests.

Ridiculous. You're not acting against their interests by amassing wealth from a technology that will happen with or without you.

I really hope they increase taxes and stop letting VC firms gamble with pension funds. These people shouldn't have their current jobs already, and you're telling me they're also dictating how technology is being shaped in the country as well?

Assuming “phenomenally well” means what it says, the conversation would have suddenly gotten a lot more real if she had said that more precisely: “I don’t know what your kids are going to do for work.”

There's plenty of things you can be simultaneously worried and optimistic about, and I find this is constantly true of parenting.

I will encourage my kid to gain independence, but of course I'm worried about it! The fact that there is uncertainty in her independence and that I can imagine bad outcomes does not mean I'm working against her interest by encouraging it.

"I don't know what jobs there will be to do" is a statement of uncertainty, and, given how you are relaying it, there must have been fear there as well. But it doesn't seem like it's a statement that the world will be worse. You can be fearful and hopeful at the same time, and fear tends to be the stronger of the two, and come out more strongly, again especially in parenting I find, even if you find the hopeful outcomes more likely.

At the beginning of the industrial revolution we didn't know what people would do for work but we eventually figured it out. Human demands are effectively infinite so there will always be work for other humans to satisfy those demands. The transition period may be disruptive.

If that VC partner gathered sufficient generational wealth, their kids will not have to worry about earning an income.

VC’s aren’t exactly known for being both wise and intelligent.

And people wonder why I'm doing all I can to ensure that world will never, ever again even pretend to try to find a place for me.