What Will Be Left for Us to Work on? The Future of AI and Human Labor
I recently addressed the anxiety surrounding AI at ICML 2026, arguing that we should view AI as a normal technology that amplifies human potential rather than replacing us entirely. While recursive self-improvement is a possibility, I believe the future requires radical adaptation toward human-AI co-superintelligence. Instead of fearing obsolescence, we must now build complementary skills like judgment and taste to thrive in a transformed economy.
If you choose the first path, and it turns out that AI actually ends up being an amplifying technology as opposed to a replacing technology, then I would argue that over the next few years you've perhaps lost the best time in history to build these skills that will give us superpowers.
- zkmon
You need to first address 1)What is work? 2)Why we need to work?
Animals don't "work". Not atleast for their own sake. If there is enough green pasture and water around, they don't even migrate to other places. So if work is meant to provide food and shelter and if machines can ensure that, humans don't need to "work".
Wealth is only a reserve capacity to help future generations so that they don't need to work for their basic needs. But if machines ensure that too, then wealth itself, as a reserve, is unnecessary.
- Metricon
I have been writing software for over 40 years and have had a long time interest in and some work in AI over that time. I wouldn’t say this gives me any more prognosticating power about how all of this is ultimately going to go, but I believe we're soon nearing an area of plateauing; whether that's because the science itself is plateauing or the intervention of governments is going to force plateau it.
So if things continue as they are today, I think in the near future, being a software developer is going to be more analogous to the medical field, where in the medical field you have different levels of professional expertise.
Some will be like nurses, and some will be closer to a medic and a smaller set will be like doctors. Each with increasingly required knowledge and experience to fulfill a needed role.
Those who used to be actual software developers are going to be (or have to become) more in the doctor role with years of internship and practical experience to be the architects guiding the overall AI implementation of software development in organizations.
The medics are going to be people who are semi-technical, where they have some technical understanding but they don't dedicate themselves to it, like say product managers, where they jump in to help development along, but don't need to have many years of experience or very deep technical knowledge.
At the nurse level, it's probably going to be similar to what people would do in the past with no code tools, where somebod […]
- doubtfuluser
I think this is an important article that provides a framework how to think and navigate what’s happening.
What upset me a bit were phrases like “This is not a slogan. It’s a framework” which immediately devalued the work for me.
I have read so much Ai generated text recently, that I developed some AI-fatigue or AI-burnout, and I’m wondering if that might hit more fields - making more humans reject Ai work.
To be clear, I still like the text and I don’t know if it was written (partially) by Ai or not - but it’s this uncanny feeling I got reading it.
- burningChrome
The other issue is Gen Z and Gen A are now very much opposed to AI. I'm wondering with those two sets of generations who already have a very negative view of AI, how AI can survive that coming tsunami of change.
According to WRITER’s 2026 Enterprise Adoption Survey, 44% of Gen Z employees admit to sabotaging their company's AI strategy in at least one way compared to 29% of employees overall.
Sabotage behaviours include entering proprietary information into AI tools, using non-approved AI tools, refusing to use AI tools or outputs, ignoring guidelines or best practices, intentionally generating low-quality outputs, refusing to take AI training and tampering with performance metrics to make AI appear to underperform.
- franze
Question: Does anybody here yet personally has less (to) work 'cause of AI?
- Suzuran
What will be left for us to work on? Nothing. The wealthy own all of the infrastructure and we are already being priced out of the means of building our own. The proverbial ladder has been pulled up. When the wealthy no longer have need of us and we are no longer worth the resources we consume, they will give us death. All we can do is hope it is a peaceful and painless death instead of a violent and painful death.
- mrcwinn
If we were more connected to all the problems that exist in the world, we’d become acutely aware of just how much work there is to do, and we’d eagerly reach for any tool that could help us do more, faster.
- jppope
I wrote a related article here: https://jonpauluritis.com/articles/good-soldiers-find-wars/
There will always be new, hard problems to work on. AI will not, and can not eliminate that.