EDIT: Being downvoted, cannot reply for 10 more hours.

We still work hard and will continue to do so because we are conditioned for the first 21 years of our lives to work hard at school.

21 years is a third of your productive life, a time when you body still works reliably, can repair itself rapidly, you have very little responsibilities and thus can take more risk and explore the frontiers of possibility.

The math teacher tells you to write out twenty tables of addition, so you do it.

The chemistry teacher tells you to balance out fifty chemical equations, so you do it.

The English teacher tells you to write out 500 word essays to explain why Sherlock was not a villain but just misunderstood, so you do it.

If you question why, you fail.

If you question is there's a better way to demonstrate the understanding, you fail.

If you refuse to do these assignments and start a lemonade stand, you fail.

Thankfully working hard is getting disrupted. An LLM doesn't sleep, take breaks, fall asleep after three 6 hour shifts or take sick leave. Nothing works as hard as an LLM and even basic LLMs that can run on commodity GPUs with 6GB of VRAM can write out twenty tables of addition, balance out fifty chemical equations and argue both for and against why Sherlock was a villain.

People will argue that balancing out fifty chemical equations and writing out twenty tables of addition is necessary to gain the foundation necessary to do more abstract tasks.

That to be an effective writer, you need to read two works of Shakespeare and critique in a manner that appeals to your teacher or the AI that grades your writing assignments. People who never got to do this are idiots and their writing is just garbage, unfit for human consumption.

That to be an effective Front End developer you need to code in x86 assembly.

That you need to understand quantum physics before you can design your first semiconductor circuit. I would like to save those debates for another day.

But people actually don't give a s*it if you work hard or not!

They only care if you're giving them value for either their time or money.

Those who don't realize this will keep working hard for those who will put them to work. Those teachers will keep joining unions and complaining they don't get paid enough while they will reject the truth, the reality of why them working so hard isn't translating into a situation they like.

The problem is that people who refuse to work hard most often have life trajectories that most other people dislike. Someone may enjoy the life of leisure, drinking, and strolling around that bums choose. But the downsides are real, and most people abhor those.