After AI Takes the Work, All That's Left Is Who You Know: Asterisk Essay
sebkrier · x · 2026-09-05
Asterisk publishes Clara Collier's essay on what people will do once AI surpasses humans at all necessary labor; Robin Hanson shares it, arguing humans never needed work or self-actualization for meaning — only a social framework for respect and belonging.
- Citing economist Alex Imas's 'relational sector' thesis: when AI does everything else, the scarce good is the human touch, and relational jobs will be allocated through relationships — who you know, not what you know.
- Collier frames this as a return to pre-industrial norms, when labor itself carried little dignity and identity came from dense social participation rather than jobs.
- Her conclusion is uneasy: the relationalists are probably right that post-AI meaning will re-anchor in human connection.
More from AGI Musings
- Go into computers: a $12B bet on AI coding power makes it the smartest career path — gleech · 2026-09-05
- Do AI solvers already do Peircian abduction? Researchers debate the induction boundary on ARC-AGI — balazskegl · 2026-09-05
- Consciousness is stochasticity at all levels: a rebuttal to Denis Noble's water-vs-silicon divide — balazskegl · 2026-09-05
- Metaⁿ and Recuris: filling the missing pieces in recursive self-improvement — TheTuringPost · 2026-09-05
- One of the safest technologies ever deployed, yet generating the most hysteria in history — Dan_Jeffries1 · 2026-09-05
- Anil Seth: departing from digital computation undermines computational functionalism — sebkrier · 2026-09-05