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Culture War Roundup for the week of October 13, 2025

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Unemployment is low and humans have been replaced by machines for 250 years. If anything we would stagnate if we were unable to boost productivity.

There are other productivity improvements from AI, such customer service outside of office hours speeding up bureaucratic processes, rapid prototyping and making it easier to start companies and more. This should improve the overall economy.

Unemployment is low and humans have been replaced by machines for 250 years.

Until a few years ago, mechanization has only been competing with some human skills. Skills which were automation-proof, such as truck driving, were well within reach of the median human. Sure, you would need to employ a lot more people to transport 40 tons of goods using horse-drawn carriages, but this was compensated by an explosion of shipping (as per-unit costs plummeted).

In the future Altman envisions, humans do not have a moat which prevents AI from eating their lunch. Perhaps there will be a minimum wage labor market for people being biodrones (just wear AR glasses for eight hours and follow the instructions) until robotics or neural interfacing catch up and provide better options. But in the long run, being a sex worker for an AI billionaire with a human fetish might be the only paid profession left, and that will obviously not scale to billions of people.

But in the long run, being a sex worker for an AI billionaire with a human fetish might be the only paid profession left, and that will obviously not scale to billions of people.

I feel like, if we're far along in the scifi AI future where the oldest profession becomes the final profession, then this is likely to scale not just to billions but trillions, and there would be plenty of incentives by these billionaires to create the technology that enables this.

Why limit yourself to a harem of mere hundreds or millions when that doesn't differentiate you from other billionaires who could do the same? Surely having a billion living, breathing, suffering humans who are willing to go through the experience of having sex with you is higher status than having mere millions. And certainly more than a harem of any number of unthinking, unfeeling, unsuffering android sex bots, no matter how "hyperpalatable" (a la modern fast food relative to pre-historic food, or modern porn relative to pre-historic sexual content) these sex bots might become.

Of course, having that harem not require money would be even higher status, so being one of billions of stay-at-home wives to a single Morbillionaire might actually be more accurate as the final profession, not prostitution.

And, also of course, if we invent consciousness and the ability to suffer in AI, then all bets are off.