Ah don't worry. With robots we're getting there.
this post was submitted on 29 Jul 2026
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The funny thing is it can't do white collar jobs either.
It can’t draw dicks and write racial slurs all over the Porto potties with sharpie either
I implore young people to get into ai resistant fields and push for a return to basics and inefficiency.
I'm almost 49 and my exit plan from my corporate job is to have a small farm just big enough that it can be run simply with man power alone and then market to a premium.
Humans are not meant to be machines. Inefficiency needs to be valued more than it is.
Have you ever grown a tomato successfully and eaten it?
Nothing beats a garden tomato. It really is hard to eat store bought produce once you have grown it yourself and it is so much better tasting.
Increasingly, they're trying to get it to design the building.
I'm having to double-check credentials in my plan reviews because contractors have started turning in plans with AI-generated architect and engineering stamps because they don't want to pay a professional to prepare their plans.
How can they use AI for an engineering review? Wouldn't an actual licensed engineer have to sign off on the building?
I work for the city. Contractors are faking stamps to pretend there's an engineer to get a permit.
Lots of municipalities are overloaded and they'll just accept a stamp and approve the project. I do not. We review the engineering.
can you fine those who fake official stamps?
Not really. We can refuse to issue the permits.
If it were to slip by us and the house fail, even then it's difficult. Almost everything in my city is custom spec homes for the mega-rich, and the developers set up an LLC just for building the one house and dissolve the company as soon as the house sells.
What I've learned doing development review for houses being sold to billionaires is that contractors will try to do cheap, shitty, unsafe work no matter how rich the client is.
Fascinating. Insane, but it makes sense in today's economy. Thanks for sharing
It’s one of the big issues that capitalists continually overlook. In most states starting an LLC is nothing. My state it’s like $800 and a 1 page form plus getting a tax id (free and another 1 page form). There’s tons of shitty contractors that will start an LLC, do garbage work and get trashed online, then just fold it and start a new one every 6-12 months. Then if you need warranty work or whatever it’s like “oh sorry, company went under”. But the illusion of the small business being viable means this loophole will never be patched
You can and should check licenses and not hire unlicensed workers, but even that is almost impossible now as many contractors are licensed but never do any real work, they just come out, assess your issue, and then hire subcontractors for a couple hundred bucks per day. Your $30,000 roof replacement is like $1-2k in wages to workers, 8-10k in materials, and $20k to line the pockets of the fat shit “running the show” so he can keep up on the lease payments for his 4 million dollar house and 110k ford f150 that’s never seen a day of work
No one wants to pay anymore
Part of the problem is corporations have squeezed so much money out of all our systems that there is none left unless you start cutting corners. So that is what people will do.
As AI improves it will program hand like robotics or tool attachments to be able to do this work. This is in the pipeline. They already have workers in China, Indonesia, Vietnam and others wearing cams to capture what they do with their hands so it can be consumed and replicated by AI. It's only a matter of time. Then there is the replication of an issue we already had. Everyone is going into trades now same as everyone went into colleges before. Long term it will lead to surplus workers in that given field. Best thing to do is be agile and willing to learn and adapt as things shift. Link: https://deepmind.google/blog/gemini-robotics-2-brings-whole-body-intelligence-to-robots/
In the 1950s, Isaac Asimov predicted that eventually, nearly everything on Earth would be automated, leading to mass unemployment. He then predicted that the "excess population" would move to other star systems, which served 3 purposes: reducing unemployment on earth, providing a meaningful existence for the extrasolar colonists, and spreading humanity throughout the galaxy.
I'm down
We always think of not working as something negative, we should desire not having to work and machines giving us the opportunity to do so. But the system is scuffed and capitalism works against us rather than for us.
We need a new system where it's the goal to automate everything and then we only have to work a few hours a week and spend the rest with our loved ones, getting good at a hobby, enjoying life, singing dancing creating art all the fun stuff.
Well, there's livelihood and work, and so far no one has exactly inspired confidence that the current labor class will receive a livelihood. We've let systems solidify that basically demand that the labor class have some semblance of leverage to participate in the benefits. So far the practical result has been that the hypothetical scenario erases that leverage, while avoiding any concessions that may win over the people that would be screwed over. It's nice to hand wave and say "some new system", but without more concrete things to look at, there is the risk of "well, let's remove the labor leverage and just assume that the utopian outcome results instead of the dystopian".
One thing that concerns me is that a common short story held up as an example of awesome utopia brought on by post-scarity due to AI is "Manna". The plight of the dystopian half is very plausible, but the "utopian" half has a lot of problems in mechanism of how it happened and issues when "realized". If even in fiction we can't make a convincing narrative that lands in an unambiguous utopia, then my hopes for reality is pretty low.
So I guess in short, I agree with your sentiment, but too pessimistic to see the upside being realized and afraid that the optimisim around the upside results in rationalizing the downsides.
I'd be fine with that, as long as there was some academic aspect involved.
A bunch of idiots doing nothing for a long time isn't going to accomplish much of anything.
You frame it with ambition as a virtue to be desired, but that's really not a given.. ambition is often super toxic. I can imagine a future of luxury automated space communism(tm) where the ultimate purpose is fulfillment. To be Zen is to release ones self from ego and put desire and ambition in context.
The toxic aspect generally comes from the consequences of pursuing ambition by undermining others in a competitive context. If, hypothetically, the competitive pressure is off, then "ambition" is not nearly as likely to have negative consequences.
Here the person was saying we really need to actually put our minds to use, and that's not really likely to be the 'toxic ambition' you fear.
How about instead of automating everything to use machines that require electricity, maintenance and resources that wreck the planet, we make it so people worldwide only need to work four days out of the week at most while still being able to afford hobbies, holidays, and luxury items such as food that isnt poison.
And even worse, one of the thing they desperately try to automate is the arts and the humanities...
We can't let the BOWKYS win
I was at enough construction sites to know it would be quite trivial to automate at least laying bricks with some programmable robots. Less skilled workers are already taught on the construction sites how it's done, to help out masons. Same with roof tiles, you only need to look out for chimneys and edges.
And in our hellscape, it will just lead to forcing out a large portion of workers, make them work even more for even less, then a second round of layoffs can go.
It was supposed to cure cancer and other diseases, not make us homeless and surveil us.
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