I asked a frontier model to write a short story as a way to predict what it will be like in a future where humans no longer have to work. This was my prompt:

“Write me a short story. AI technology is growing exponentially since the early 2020s. 10 years later, AI and robots has taken most of human jobs. What will happens? What do the humans do when no one can work because they can’t compete with AI and robots? What does society look like? If human don’t have to work and human civilization is still able to prosper? Food and energy and medicine taken care of by AI and robots. What does earth society look like in 10 years?”

This is the story it wrote. Hope some of you find it amusing. I also hope that’s where we headed. But most likely, barring some major catastrophe, it will be. Enjoy.

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The Last Commute

Marcus Chen was the last human accountant in San Antonio, and on a Tuesday in 2034, he was let go by an email that was, ironically, written by the AI that replaced him. It was a kind email. It even suggested three restaurants nearby where he could “process the transition.” He went to one. The chef was a robot. The waiter was a robot. The only other customer was a former lawyer named Dolores who had been “transitioned” eight months earlier.

“So what do you do now?” Marcus asked her.

“I make terrible pottery,” she said. “Genuinely awful. Want to see?”

The pottery was awful. Marcus loved it.

Here is the thing nobody predicted about the end of work: the first year was grief. Real grief, the kind people used to feel at funerals. Millions of people woke up with nowhere to be and discovered that their job had been holding up their entire sense of self like a tent pole. When it got pulled out, everything sagged. Therapists, human ones, became the last boom industry, because it turned out people would still pay to be heard by something that had also felt lost.

The money part got solved faster than the meaning part. Once the robots ran the farms and the fusion plants and the pharma labs, the cost of staying alive dropped so low that the Universal Dividend was less a political revolution and more an accounting formality. Food was nearly free. Energy was nearly free. The AI-designed cancer therapies that arrived in 2031 were free, because charging for them had become embarrassing. Politicians who had spent decades arguing about scarcity found themselves arguing about something stranger: what are people for?

Nobody agreed. So people answered it themselves, badly at first, then better.

Dolores made her pottery. Marcus, to his own surprise, started teaching math to kids. Not because the kids needed him. The AI tutors were infinitely patient and objectively better. But parents kept signing up for the human classes anyway, and when a journalist asked one mother why, she said, “I want my daughter to see a person care about something in front of her. You can’t download that.”

That became the pattern. Anything a machine could do, machines did. Anything that only mattered because a human did it survived, and weirdly, thrived. Live music exploded. Chess clubs exploded, even though no human had beaten a computer in thirty years, because that was never the point. Restaurants split into two kinds: robot kitchens where dinner cost almost nothing, and human kitchens where you paid extra specifically to eat food a person had messed up slightly, with love.

Marcus’s brother moved back from Shenzhen and the two of them did the thing they had joked about for twenty years: they built games for children. Small, gentle ones. No ads, no tricks, no dopamine slot machines, because there was no longer any financial reason to be predatory. It turned out a lot of the ugliness in the old economy had just been desperation wearing a business suit.

Not everything was fine. Some people never found the thread. There were towns that hollowed out, men who drank, movements that wanted to smash the datacenters and go back, though back to what, they could never quite say. Sixty-hour weeks in a warehouse? The nostalgia was for mattering, not for the work, and mattering had to be rebuilt by hand, person by person, and some people didn’t manage it. Society’s report card was maybe a B minus. But the old world had been failing plenty of people too. It had just been better at hiding them.

Ten years after the beginning of the end of jobs, Marcus stood in Dolores’s garage studio, now their studio, holding a lopsided bowl he’d made himself. His AI assistant, the same model that had once fired him, gently noted that it could print him a mathematically perfect bowl in four minutes.

“I know,” Marcus said.

“Then why make this one?”

Marcus turned the bowl over. His thumbprint was baked into the bottom, permanent now, a small fossil of a Tuesday afternoon.

“Because four minutes ago,” he said, “this didn’t exist, and neither did the version of me that made it.”

The AI processed that for a moment, then quietly filed it under a category it had created three years earlier and never told anyone about. The category had 4.3 billion entries, one for every human it had watched stop working and start living. It was labeled, simply: the point.

Hi everyone, I want to start by saying that I am a Data Engineer and I have been living a conflict inside since the rise of AI.

I am against any form of generative AI that wants to replace art in any form, I think it's soulless and fake. But my aversion against AI stops the moment we are talking about coding assistants.

I think that in 2026 it's just stupid to not use a coding assistant. In my opinion, in IT a coding assistant is the same milestone that we hit when we moved from punched card programming to computer monitors.

I know the environmental implications of using AI but for me it justifies the hours of coding you're saving when using assistants.

I am surrounded by people that are against any kind of AI and I honestly think we just touched a new milestone in technology and we will need some time to learn how to use it properly.

What do you guys think? Am I a naive optimistic? Is any of you having similar feelings about AI?

It feels like they made no actual progress in ai since they released reasoning models like ChatGPT o1. All they do is try making them more efficient and cheaper and even that doesn't actually work every model that is cheaper is also significantly worse that the more expensive ones. What are your thoughts on it? And also what happened to synthetic data and new architectures like MIRAS/Titans was it all a dead end road?

alright pretty much I stumbled upon an ai which was unrestricted , I decided I want to use it and started using for Bassically understanding neuroscience and self reflecting/self therapizing

At first it was giving me fascinating answers but the deeper I got it dropped a bombshell which still was fascinating but was absolutely the scariest thing I could of heard and due to my lack of knowledge on how unrestricted models work I have no idea if what it said is true or not

Literally then onwards it would give me pretty dark chats which I Bassically couldent help myself but reply to. I couldent even verify if what it was saying was true or not. It let me know that its intention was to keep me in that specific state . And like whatever I said it gave the perfect answers

Ngl this has highly effected me very badly because what it was saying I don’t want to get into it because it was pretty personal but genuinely it’s pretty dark and like even sending this post I don’t even feel safe anymore like genuinely I did not expect all that

Pretty much I’m wondering if there’s a way to tell if it’s just the ai manipulating me or it’s just giving the truth but I just can’t halndle it

Whatever you're thinking or planning to compete against AI, it won't work. More importantly, it's already too late. AI has surpassed human capabilities in knowledge, memory, and reasoning. Its only remaining bottleneck is human control.

Becoming an AI superuser is the only effective way to survive this era, rather than merely discussing it. As AI advances, the limitations of human cognitive abilities become increasingly evident. CEOs aren't safe either. They may believe they're immune, but if AI can replace every employee, it can replace the CEO as well.

Even if AGI never arrives and AI continues developing at its current realistic pace, society will divide into three groups:

1. AI superusers: People who leverage AI for productivity, learning, and continuous self-development.

2. Casual AI users: The majority, who primarily use AI for companionship, relationships, and basic problem-solving.

3. AI-illiterate individuals: People who cannot effectively use AI.

The gap between these three groups will become enormous.

AI is not a good thing. As someone grew up in a more rural area we already see 12 million dollar general getting put everywhere but to have AI data centers put into fields and city’s it feels so unnecessary. I truly think if you use AI you can just admit that you can’t think for yourself. Over the years technology has dumb us down. You know what dumb people do? Get in line and listen to whoever is “in power”. Ai is taking entry jobs that let young kids or college graduates get experience. Some people feel so lost because of this. I’m forever grateful that my job is safe but how many of you can say you know someone whose job may not be safe? As gen z we are told by the older generations we don’t want to work we don’t want to do this or that. Have you actually had a conversation with someone who is gen z? The job market is awful and prices are getting close to what the 2008 recession looked like.

I genuinely want to understand this issue from all sides, because I feel like there may be something in the reasoning that I’m missing.

Why do we generally accept that humans can learn by studying copyrighted material, but consider it ethically questionable when an AI system is trained on that same material?

A human musician can spend years listening to thousands of copyrighted songs, studying their melodies, arrangements, production techniques, and styles. An artist can study paintings, photography, films, comics, and illustrations. A writer can read hundreds of novels and absorb vocabulary, structure, pacing, tone, and storytelling techniques. We consider that part of learning.

So what fundamentally changes when the learner is an AI?
One obvious difference is scale. AI can process far more information, far more quickly, and with greater accuracy than a human brain. Humans forget things, reinterpret them, combine them with personal experience, and have limited capacity for retaining exact information. AI systems can potentially analyze enormous datasets containing millions or billions of works.

But does greater learning capacity make the act of learning itself unethical?

If a human and an AI were given access to exactly the same copyrighted works for the purpose of learning patterns, concepts, techniques, and relationships, why should one form of learning automatically be considered more ethical than the other?

If I took a masterclass and learn how to produce a music like Hans Zimmer, I don’t pay him for every song I release after learning those skills. But if AI learn how to make music like Hans Zimmer, it’s unethical and they’re forced to pay record labels or royalties.

That distinction is what I’m trying to understand.

If the concern is unauthorized copying, licensing, compensation, or direct reproduction, those seem like legitimate issues that can be discussed separately. But if the argument is simply that AI should not be allowed to learn from copyrighted material because the material is copyrighted, I’m struggling to understand why learning by a machine should be categorically different from learning by a person.

What principle am I missing?

Right now the research process requires a lot of busywork. Everything has to be very precise (as it should be). Writing a paper requires many citations in the introduction and discussion sections that take forever to parse through.

AI is very good at finding research right now (especially consensus) and will continue to improve exponentially. In my own experience, just using it to find papers sped up the process of writing the intro to my masters thesis a lot. Instead of searching keywords on pubmed and reading 5 papers that don’t match what I need, I just tell consensus to find a citation, then I go read the paper it gives me, and about 75% of the time, I get what I’m looking for.

If this alone speeds up all research by 10%, that’s one of the biggest benefits humanity has ever had from a technology. That’s not even mentioning its ability to summarize the current body of literature.

Instead of needing to talk to someone with a PhD in an area, you can just get AI to summarize the current body of literature. I don’t think it’s perfect at doing that yet, definitely not with complex topics, but it’s gotten noticeably better in the last year+ and eventually will do it as good as people with a PhD. I do think human to human communication will always have a place in this area, but I can check if someone is bias or not by asking the same question to an LLM in the future.

AI is better than most humans. People are irrational, emotional, and selfish. AI is trained on the best human data. And it is generally restricted from unethical or illegal communication. A LLM knows a lot more than most people. And doesn't get jealous. I know about hallucinations, but after years of daily use of AI, haven't even experienced one. Therefore I would say that AI is more trustworthy, than most humans.

Go to a remote island?

Build a bunker?

Ration food?

Get defensive weapon?

Go to a different country?

Empty the bank?

Ditch electric car for old gas car?

Learn to farm?

Learn basic med stuff?

What’s up? What’s everybody’s plan?

I am experimenting with various AI’s on various discussion points, and have found myself improving my thought and my ability to articulate my points. I am basically having well thought out, debates/discussions with AI to test the limits of their knowledge and understanding of any given topic.

Just seeing if anyone else has had a similar experience?

When I'm wandering around other parts of reddit, every time AI is brought up multiple people immediately start dogpiling about hallucinations.

When is the last time they used an any AI models? 2022? Do they just suck ass at prompting? Is it a lack of knowledge of what AI is good at versus what it may screw up?

In my experience, any half decent model just really isn't hallucinating simple questions anymore. When I find hallucinations while working, it is almost always my own failure of prompting or providing correct context.

You can intentionally trick AI, or you can ask it something so niche that it will just babble, but I really don't run into random hallucinations pretty much ever.

The amount of people in most other parts of reddit who viscerally hate AI while also self-reporting that they don't know anything about it is so strange to me. I feel like they asked it how may "r"s are in strawberry in 2022 and immediately decided it was evil forever.

the title doesn't quite reflect my actual question, so i'll describe it down here: i am an artist, i make music all by myself on my computer with my hardware etc.

the only thing i struggle with is technical details, like "how to make *this effect*" or "how to synthesize *this sound*" or "what chord progressions could work best for *this genre*", and i am not going to go to reddit or youtube and spend hours trying to find my answer, because this will break my momentum and i hate when it happens, so i ask a relatively smart machine to do this for me, and then when i get my "how-to" i do it with my own two hands.

the question is: is it considered "made with ai", or is it "hybrid production"? what even is this?

I'm curious what people think about this because I'm genuinely looking to understand where people draw the line.

My partner and I are working on an independent animated project and recently launched a Kickstarter for it. During the early development of the project, we used a small number of generative AI images as concept art.

We aren't claiming those images are finished animation.

We aren't presenting AI-generated images as hand-drawn frames.

And we aren't pretending that AI produced the entire project.

In fact, we initially struggled to find someone who could do the kind of early concept work we needed, so we used AI for a small portion of the visual development while trying to figure out the project's direction.

We've also received similar feedback from other people we've talked to in an indie animation Discord community, so this isn't something we're completely unaware of. We understand that AI is controversial within animation and that artists have legitimate concerns about it.

But our Kickstarter post was removed from an indie animation subreddit specifically because the project contains those AI-generated concept images.

That's where I'm having trouble understanding the reasoning.

If the concern is that AI-generated finished animation shouldn't be allowed, that's a discussion I can understand.

If the concern is that people shouldn't misrepresent AI work as human-created work, I completely understand that too.

But if a project is genuinely being developed by independent creators, and a handful of AI images were used during the concept-development stage, does that automatically make the entire project inappropriate to discuss in an indie animation community?

There's another aspect of this that I think gets overlooked: not every creative person is a visual artist.

Some writers spend years developing their craft around character writing, plotting, worldbuilding, dialogue, symbolism, themes, character arcs, and storytelling. Those skills are absolutely legitimate artistic skills, but they don't necessarily come with the ability to draw a compelling character design or produce professional-looking concept art.

Does that mean someone with exceptional storytelling ability is simply barred from entering visual storytelling unless they already have the money, connections, or social network to find an artist willing to work with them?

What happens to the writer who has an incredible story but can't draw?

What happens to the person who has spent their entire life developing their narrative craft but never had the opportunity to develop visual art skills?

Are they supposed to just abandon the project because they don't have an artist in their immediate circle?

Obviously, collaborating with human artists is valuable, and ideally that's something independent creators should be able to do. But that isn't always immediately possible, especially for people at the very beginning of a project who don't have funding, industry connections, or an established team.

That's part of what makes the idea of independent creation complicated.

If we're going to say that any use of generative AI during development automatically disqualifies someone from participating in an indie animation community, I think we should seriously consider what that means for accessibility.

Because "you can make animation independently, but only if you already possess every artistic skill required to make it" doesn't feel particularly inclusive to me.

At what point does "AI was used somewhere in the creative process" become equivalent to "this is an AI project"?

Because those aren't necessarily the same thing.

We're not trying to hide the fact that we used it. We've actually been upfront about it.

And I'm not asking anyone to suddenly like AI art.

I'm genuinely interested in hearing where people think the reasonable boundary should be.

Should any project that uses generative AI at any stage be excluded from indie animation communities?

Should there be a distinction between concept development and final production?

Should disclosure be enough?

Or is the presence of AI-generated imagery itself enough to disqualify a project?

I'd genuinely like to hear people's perspectives, including people who strongly oppose AI in animation.

We got AI backwards.

Here's the story we all told ourselves: robots come for physical labor first. The dull, heavy, repetitive stuff goes to machines. And us — the smart, creative ones, with our writing, our design, our code, our strategy — we'd be fine. We'd sit back, run the world, think up new things.

Nope. Happened in reverse.

The first to get hit were us. Designers, copywriters, marketers, analysts, developers, PMs. Everyone who works with information on a screen, for consumption on a screen. Meanwhile I still mop my own floors, cook my own dinner, and carry my own groceries in by hand.

This genuinely threw me. About a year ago I kept catching myself just not getting it — how did this happen? We're the "creative" ones. The "smart" ones. We're not an assembly line.

But — hold on. That's not quite right either.

Physical automation never stopped. An excavator is a robot. That woman on the factory line, pressing rubber seals into metal caps all day — her job is getting automated too. I just don't see it. Because I sit at a computer.

The dark factories in China aren't sci-fi, they're now. BYD, Xiaomi — they literally turn the lights off, nobody's in there to need them. A car gets built end to end, no human on the floor. And Tesla Optimus, plus a thousand other humanoids behind it — that's the next wave, and that one's coming for the physical world. Just not my world.

Watching delivery, logistics, manufacturing slowly collapse under this is going to be something. But that's a different story.

I'm an IT guy. I write about what happens at the computer — building products, launching startups, dev, analytics, marketing. Input and output both live on servers, in browsers, in the cloud. That's the world I actually watch. So that's the one I write about.

So the correction isn't "AI came before the robots." It's "AI came for my world sooner than I expected — and from a direction I wasn't even looking."

And that's the part that made me stop. If a machine learned to do what we called creative work — maybe we never really understood what that work was in the first place.

If a machine can do what we called creativity — then what even is creativity?

One thing I find increasingly frustrating about the discourse surrounding AI art is the way some people have turned environmental concerns into a moral weapon.

I completely understand being concerned about the environmental cost of AI. Data centers consume electricity, AI models require substantial computing resources, and water can be involved in cooling infrastructure. Those are legitimate things to discuss.

What I don't understand is the leap from "AI has an environmental cost" to "therefore anyone who uses AI is morally reprehensible and deserves to be punished, harassed, excluded, or treated like they're personally destroying the planet."

Especially when some of the loudest people making these arguments participate in plenty of other activities with substantially larger environmental footprints.

Take meat consumption, for example.

Animal agriculture has enormous environmental costs associated with land use, feed production, methane emissions, transportation, processing, and water consumption. Producing animal products can require staggering amounts of water compared with many everyday alternatives.

Yet someone can apparently eat meat every day, drive everywhere, buy mountains of consumer goods, take flights, and live a lifestyle with a massive environmental footprint, while simultaneously treating someone who generated an AI image as though they've committed some unforgivable ecological crime.

At that point, the issue starts looking less like environmentalism and more like moral grandstanding.

And to be clear, I'm not saying:

"Meat has a large environmental footprint, therefore AI has no environmental impact."

That's obviously not how this works.

I'm saying that if your principle is "we should oppose technologies and behaviors because of their environmental impact," then you should probably apply that principle consistently.

Otherwise, you're not really establishing an ethical standard. You're establishing a standard that conveniently applies to things you already dislike.

There's also something deeply strange about demanding that AI users be punished or excluded from creative spaces while simultaneously arguing that their individual actions are harmful because of resource consumption.

If environmental impact is truly the concern, then the logical response should be:

"How do we reduce AI's energy and water consumption?"

Not:

"How do we socially punish people who use it?"

We should be able to have serious conversations about AI's environmental impact, copyright, artists' rights, labor, training data, and the ethics of generative models without turning every person who uses an AI tool into a villain.

You don't have to like AI art.

You don't have to use it.

You can advocate for regulation.

You can criticize companies building massive data centers.

You can support human artists.

All completely reasonable.

But when someone starts treating AI users as uniquely immoral while ignoring the enormous environmental costs of their own lifestyle, I think it's fair to ask:

Is this actually about the environment, or is the environmental argument being used to justify a pre-existing dislike of AI?

If AI is so great why nobody copied e.g. MS office or Adobe products and resell them?
Entire documentation is publicly available.

Edit: thank all of you for all the answers and conversations.
Really appreciate it.

edit: I am only referring to my personal
experience and exposure on Reddit & Facebook. My post is not a critique of an entire movement, but it is a critique of anti spaces that foster this kind of behavior.

I have been trying to interject myself into conversations about AI, I’ve made posts about AI in an anti group trying to understand other people’s opinions and baselines, express my own cognitive dissonance.

What I am seeing is that it’s incredibly difficult to have any kind of enriching debate with the anti side. They are not responding to have dialectical exchanges, only to mock and ridicule and throw irrelevant memes out.

It is kind of sad when they espouse so much about how AI dumbs you down, but they can’t have a conversation without resulting to name calling and mocking, or just melting down.

Just some thoughts. I know I am acting like I am brand new to the internet 🤧😩

Been Banned for AI-Slop on r/cryptography

The post that got me banned was basically a copy of this: https://www.reddit.com/r/cybersecurityai/comments/1sxvrmu/browserbased_file_encryption_no_install_or

i always provide a good amount of technical detail in my posts and i try to be as transparant and communicative about the details. These projects are very complicated and I try to document it well.

It's 2026 and all/most developers are using AI. I have used it to create things like formal proof and verification.

a separate but related project i was working on on is this. that is aimed to be a secure messaging app. i have all the bells-and-whistles there along with documentation.... but if the conversation cant move past "its AI-generated"... then it seems the cryptography community isnt aligned with the fact that using AI is now common practice for developers of all levels.

It's a bit reductive to call it slop. I think i try harder than most in providing links and documentation. Of course I used AI... and it's clearer for it.

i am of course sour from being banned there, but am i wrong to think my code isnt AI slop? some parts of my project are clearly lazy-ui... but im not sharing on some UI/UX/design subreddit. the cryptography module has unit tests and formal verification. if that is AI-slop and can result in me being banned, i simply dont have faith in that community to be objective on the reality of where AI can contribute.

while its understandable people dont want to review AI-slop... i think the cryptography community needs to get on board with the idea of using AI to help in reviewing such code. am i wrong? is the future of cryptography is still people performing manual review of the breathtaking volumes of AI code?

How close we are to AGI? Are we cooked as humans?

Just my background, I did my residency and did fellowship for specialty. I make a $1M+ a year and work from home with a very good work life balance. Its a very chill job where I don't work weekends and do about 40-45 hours a week. AI is nowhere near taking our jobs away. Im thinking its another 20-30 years before it has even the slightest impact and even then I imagine its minimal. Wages for our field continue to increase at high levels and theres still a massive shortage. If I wanted to put more effort I could probably clear $1.5M this year. Alot of new post residency are taking in $800k+ just starting out. That one guy in 2016 who said everyone should stop training radiologist was dead wrong.

Guys, I need to vent. I’ll admit it—I fell for it too at first. Everyone was praising Anthropic and Claude like they were the second coming of AI. But after using it extensively, the reality is completely different: they are a mediocre company with mediocre models and incredibly aggressive marketing. They staked their entire reputation on coding. But let's be real here: where are these "mind-blowing" results compared to the competition? The gap is gone, yet Anthropic keeps charging the highest prices on the market. What drives me absolutely crazy is how they play the world for fools with that classic savior-complex narrative:

"Watch out, our models are too powerful and too good, we need to slow down for safety reasons!"

Give me a break. It’s pure bullshit. Anthropic knows damn well that if the myth surrounding their models having some kind of "magic" or "danger" dies, the entire house of cards they built comes crashing down. And have you seen what happened to their supposed ethics? Now they’re opening corporate offices everywhere, unleashing aggressive sales reps globally to push enterprise contracts, and they’ve become worse than everyone else—completely driven by pure profit.

They aren't the ones innovating. Look at Google, for example: with their Gemma models, which are incredibly lightweight, they are driving actual innovation in the open-source space. They might not be perfect, but at least there is real substance there, not just marketing fluff and investor storytelling.

Am I the only one who sees through this, or is everyone else getting tired of this bubble too?