It's just workism with rose tinted glasses. All the perpetuation of the current "knowledge economy" would actually mean for most people's children (few of which whom will be blessed to do such erudite forms of cognitive labor - as has always been the case) is more time sitting at a desk, filling out spreadsheets, more psychosis from having humans be an interface where belongs a machine.

The irony is allowing machines to automate the economy will allow more people to have more enjoyable lives. For every nerd plugging away at something like this there are millions of ancestors who fought and died and clawed to do what for most humans for most of history was the only thing that qualified as labor - participating in brutish endeavors (hunting/farming/murdering) that barely sustained their short lives.

LLMs over the next century (probably in China given the retrograde impulses dominating both sides of the political aisle in the US) will likely assist (if not autonomously) solve cancer and other diseases, invent new alloys and forms for manufacturing, automate away all labor (including most if not all military service), travel farther into our universe than any human ever plausibly could, and other breakthroughs.

A huge concentration of the actual talent of our world is already enmeshed in this endeavor. The majority of the detractors aren't cut out to compete, so they cling to their "bullshit jobs"[1] instead of leveraging the democratic processes their ancestors bled for to simply convince enough of their fellow humans to engineer an equitable redistribution of gains. Why do so many people want to eliminate the only chance their kids will have to not have to work? Is it some desire to inflict our modern masochisms onto future generations? It's like watching these colonies of men sign up to get screamed at to prove they are masculine [2]. The West seems to have entered a state of mass delirium. It's the same thing. Pining for the past. One is even more distant - where the labor of raw strength mattered. Another is I guess pining for the more recent past where if you could write or manage powerpoint or excel effectively enough you could have the "American Dream."

Most of the people applauding this particular mathematical breakthrough are unlikely to be able to understand it. It's the same irony that has led man for centuries to use romanticism about human nature selectively. For most of history these conceptions were used to draw arbitrary lines around which homo sapiens were and were not worthy of basic dignity - who was citizen and who was slave. The same capacity for cognitive dissonance is alive and well in modern man.

Don't curse your children. If you don't like who owns LLMs in the United States, the democratic tools to nationalize or redistribute the gains are at your disposal. If you were to actually engage in this battle you will quickly learn the "enemy" is not the machines - it's what it has always been, your fellow man. The past is not coming back, and it was never that great to begin with. It was not so many generations ago that most children who were born died shortly thereafter, and more children were born in general because children were a source of labor to keep the household afloat.

Stop romanticizing labor.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit_Jobs [2] https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2026/04/06/the-camps-prom...

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