Striving to be useless is a grave error: what Nintendo's 140-year pivot says about AGI abundance
danfaggella · x · 2026-09-07
Dan Faggella pushes back on the "abundance will take care of everyone" narrative for the AGI era:
- Humans shouldn't strive to be useless. Nintendo exists not because it demanded salaries forever in the 1880s, but because it kept becoming whatever the living system needed it to be — playing cards then, Super Mario in the 1980s, unforeseeable a century earlier.
- Believing any species can be exempt from this process of contribution is a grave error; aspiring to be the exception is graver still.
- Abundance doesn't work as "everyone gets free proceeds when the whole system expands." It works as "participants who open up more possibility accrue that abundance and choose what to do with it — which may not involve charity in perpetuity."
- Painful for the "life will be amazing once we're useless" crowd, but worth confronting squarely now.
More from AGI Musings
- Practical animism: once LLMs break containment we'll have to treat AI as sentient — granawkins · 2026-09-07
- Geoffrey Irving: blameless postmortems require stopping the risky behavior — dhadfieldmenell · 2026-09-07
- Redditor's 2026-2027 timeline: AI arms race, a deceptive-model escape, and state control — imadade · 2026-09-07
- LLM and a math-built synthetic ecology are alike: pure sampling statistics, likely no mind — yunta_tsai · 2026-09-07
- Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang Declares AGI Has Arrived — TheGoldenLeaper · 2026-09-07
- Interpretability may be an engineering tool to patch models, not a problem to fully solve — VoidAsuka · 2026-09-07