Ok but... You aren't planning to get paid to be a software engineer? Or you are? Surely this is the way in which the futures are entwined, for most of us?

What if what we call "white collar work", for the most part sitting at a desk, interacting with a computer, isn't really the sort of work suitable for human flourishing at all?

When you think about it humans were never really well suited to such a lifestyle. Of course the transition may be bumpy but maybe the end point, of machines doing these machine-like tasks, isn't so bad for us.

What work does suit humans? Anything involving interaction with the world or other humans, perhaps.

But working is a necessity of life, how can one find meaning without being stuck in an office doing useless stuff for money?! /s

That's the take many have been educated against: maybe one day a category of bullshit jobs will be gone and it's fine.

Is roofing a useless task? I think not, we all need roofs. Have you ever personally replaced a roof in the middle of summer? I have. After that, I never thought of a climate controlled office as a place I was "stuck".

I did quite a few summers doing carpentry in the heat, and yes, I appreciate AC but what's your point?

Also if roofing was a non-problem anymore (we solved it somehow), would you want to have people doing it just for the sake of doing a job?

This is the old comfort/friction/happiness dichotomy isn't it.

Each incremental reduction in friction and improvement in comfort feels good. But is the net effect happiness? I think it's anomie, in the limit.

Ah but I'd take roofing in the summer over septic tank cleaning any day. The existence of even shittier jobs does not make any particular job not-shitty.

We've made money a necessity of life and working the only way billions of people can get money. If we think a big chunk of jobs can be automated away, how are those people going to fulfill their needs?

You make it sound like we invented work. When was work ever not necessary? All we invented was division of labor, and money as a way to translate between different kinds of labor. I think that's an improvement?

Modern work is certainly an unnatural invention. As is the phenomenon of rent seeking and allowing wealth accumulation to the point of absurdity.

I'd rather not go back to hunting and gathering. Though I would like to go back to trust busting, collective action, and rule of law.

Now you do it in your time off instead.

I'm an absolute doofus in the physical realm. No hand eye coordination of any kind. No common sense. No social skills or ability to read and understand humans.

In any other era I would have been a useless drain on society and yet I happened by an incredible stroke of luck to be born at a time when the few skills I do have perfectly aligned with a career niche. It's been a good few decades. Now I just go back to being a useless nobody but at least I have my memories and my investments.

I'm staring down the barrel of this particular prospect lately. I struggled through my twenties living with family until I finally managed to get my bachelor's degree and a job with a really solid company/team/product line. That silo of the business was then sold off to private equity, and it was fine for a while, but now the owners have been ensorcelled by the song of a C-list "rock star CEO" who has no respect for the team or the product line and very definitely has no sense of where the inertia lies when he keeps jerking the steering wheel of this particular vehicle. It's fucking exhausting to have to hold my tongue in meetings when I so badly want to say "it's late because you decided to delay it when it was about to be done, and then a couple months later you decided that it was urgent and had to be done ASAP, and then you decided to reassign staff to an initiative that you just made up with no actual product definition. But that would get me fired.

Remember, class, because this will be on the test: capitalism is the superior economic system because it elevates people who allocate capital efficiently. Just don't ever look too closely at the input and output functions of any such definition of "efficiency" (hint: they conveniently tend to elevate people who are skilled at flattering capital owners).

Does this advice still hold once 99.99% of people are invested in index funds?

It’s not clear yet. Index funds are now an enormous part of the market and players are starting to play them (see SpaceX, and given the door they opened OpenAI and Anthropic to follow).

And big tech is a large part of most indexes

I mean probably? It's still a much lower-risk strategy compared to investing in individual stocks.

Maybe that's a reasonable definition of white vs blue collar worker?

If you have enough excess income that you can build wealth in assets/investments until you become financially independent and no longer dependent on selling your labour, you're white collar.

If you don't, so you're condemned to work forever (apart from state support), you're blue collar.

White vs blue collar has always been about office/intellectual workers vs non-office/non-intellectual ones.

It has never been about how much money you make.

The overwhelming majority of self employed professionals I know (electricians, mechanics, plumbers) make way more than the average white collar worker (southern Europe).

Just to make it clearer: my SO, which works in governance of a major italian bank, makes way less than her brother painting walls.

Sitting at a desk and pressing buttons: $1

Knowing which buttons to press: $999

To paraphrase an old meme.

If an LLM now knows which buttons to press... the $1 part of my job is not going to pay my bills

knowing which button not to press, ... priceless.

Well, we've unlocked something. How much of it is progress remains to be seen. Definitely interesting times.

A lot of the AI hype these days reminds me of the infamous pets.com; but, of course, the general ideas of the dot-com boom did come to pass. (And if all ideas people had tried back then had turned out to be sound and successful, that would have been a surefire sign that they weren't trying out enough crazy stuff.)

What even is product management? Just saying what you'd like? That's like equating the person ordering their meal with the person who will create it.

Both of the comments replying to my comment so far are just demonstrating exactly the point I'm making!

Yes, software engineers have a giant blind spot about "what even is product management" and don't think it's hard. This is exactly what I'm saying!

Maybe I don't think it's hard because I have a blind spot. That's possible.

It's also possible that I have no blind spot and it isn't hard though.

It's because you have a blind spot.

"Sometimes"? I and I think many other people have been doing exactly this for most of 2026, assuming they look at the diff/PR at all and aren't all-in on dark factories.