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Will we work for AI or will AI work for us?

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  1. Y Combinator startup will pay humans to help AI agents when they get stuck. ()

  2. At the same time, I see and the AI ​​learns from their movements (practically filming their firing process).

  3. In addition, there was already a site where .

  • First, AI worked for us.

  • Now we are starting to work for AI.

  • And eventually, will AI work (without us)?

I don’t want to portray a Terminator scenario where people will have to unite against AI, but what future awaits us in terms of cooperation/non-cooperation with AI?

We are already becoming its employees.

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I agree, some time I feels like we skipped “AI will help us” and jumped straight into “AI, what do you want me to do next?” 😅

Right now it’s like having a super smart coworker who still needs constant checking. You save time… but also spend time double checking everything, fixing prompts, and explaining things twice.

So instead of AI replacing jobs, it just created a new one: professional AI babysitter.

I don’t think we’ll end up fully working for AI though. More like this weird partnership where it does the work and we take the blame when something goes wrong 😂

At the same time… yeah, the future does look a bit scary if you think too far ahead.

 I built a product with LLM agents and the checking takes longer than the generating the output is fast. Knowing whether the output is actually good is the slow part, and that's still entirely a human job one im trying to fix.

 I can’t help it, but I completely exhaust my AI mentally. The language model around me is probably miserable, because my way of asking questions is almost neurotic. :D LOL

What if the real shift isn't "who works for whom," but that work itself becomes a shared loop where neither side is fully in control?

I think a lot of the hype around AI feels a lot like the excitement people had during the space race. A fast start makes it feel like progress will just keep speeding up. But history shows that's not always what happens.

AI will probably take over the things it's actually better at, and people will adapt, like we always do. That's what happened during the Industrial Revolution. Machines didn't turn people into their servants. They became tools that made work more efficient where humans were slower or less precise. I think AI will follow a similar path, not replacing people entirely, but changing how the roles are split.

So the real question isn't whether we'll work for AI. It's how well we learn to use it where it actually helps.

 Not so sure, let's have a look at how we became slavers of smartphones. We totally lost our minds, scrolling there for 8 hours in a row. Humankind is sometimes very easy to manipulate.

 Yes, but even there, I'd say smartphones didn't enslave us on their own. People and companies just got really good at using that tool, especially to grab our attention and keep us there.

   Some people are productive because they have a phone, others are entertained and less productive because they have a phone. It's all about how you use a tool. AI is different, we have trained it to make decisions and execute orders. When it starts making decisions and executing orders on us instead of for us it will be dark.

   I just think that the majority of people are too comfortable to make some effort and commitment to something, so they will fall for some addiction or dependancy trap :D

I see a great need for AI to replace humans in many venues. I've always been irate about forcing fallible, biased, dense,

apathetic, etc., people to be jurors. Short of having bench trials (judge only), I would never want a bunch of clowns deciding my fate. AI allegedly eliminates these factors, delivering true & accurate verdicts based on solid evidence, without encroaching emotions prohibiting equitable & honest evaluations. Before actually installing AI juries, they

must be tamper/hack proof, & ample test runs before marketing them to judicial systems. I hope my original idea

is taken seriously, & implemented in the foreseeable future. I also see many AI applications in medical, & other

fields, but that's for future threads to comment about.

 Hard to say whether juries is a good example, there are many ethical questions and yes, it could be very logical / not biased like: "kids and divorced couple – kids will stay with father who has economically strong position, but it will totally overlooks the fact that the father is a thug and a psychopath."

This could be along discussion on this.

 That long discussion is what I call "Pi whirlpools", as they can never be resolved. I've

worked in social services, & giving custody to the "wrong" parents happens so often it's commonplace, &

when fatalities occur, it's impossible (so far) to resurrect the deceased. When that occurs, all parties are

culpable, including CPS, courts, judges, etc. To handle guilt, grief, anger..., a common therapy is to file

lawsuits in order to channel pain, & punish the wrongdoers. I'm quite grateful I was bright enough to

avoid marriage & children. In retrospect, it truly saves lives, money, time, aggravation.

Even if machines eventually handle every practical job, people could still create new forms of trade, craft, and exchange, because the impulse seems to be baked-in to human behavior, at least so far. Humans who grow up with full AI automation on-demand, could have a very different mindset. Early in life, people may develop the big picture mindset just by using automations repeatedly. Thinking in Star Trek terms, more people could get comfortable being a commander rather than a narrow specialization such as engineer, science officer, counselor, doctor, etc. Ideally, humans remain the captain and all other roles are machines.

 My w*t dream is that people will not be okay doing nothing and will have the need to self-actualize. But I know people who would be too comfortable and probably start doing stupid useless things, e.g. drinking alchl just because they are bored.

Exactly. I think I'm the target here. I've been building with AI for three months. I'm still not sure if I'm using it or it's using me.

 It is exploiting you :D

I think in short term, it will be a combination of both.
There will be scenario where human gets AI to get human to work.

In other word, we are out-sourcing to AI to out-source other humans.

 Moral of the story is to be kind to those robots :D

 LOL great meme

 It is true hahaha

What we're calling AI right now isn't artificial intelligence It's statistical prediction. LLMs calculate the most probable next token based on training data. They don't understand the output, don't have goals, and can't reason about anything. Calling that intelligence is a marketing decision, not a technical one. A calculator doesn't understand maths. An LLM doesn't understand language.


The Terminator scenario requires general artificial intelligence, which is a system that can actually think, learn across domains, and form its own goals. That doesn't exist. Estimates for when it might range from five years to never nobody really knows because we don't fully understand human intelligence well enough to measure the gap.


So the question "will AI work without us" has a boring answer the technology we have now literally can't because it's architecturally incapable of independent action. It's autocomplete at scale. Extremely useful autocomplete, but it can't "employ" anyone or "replace" anyone on its own. It needs a human deciding what to feed it and what to do with the output, nobody is being employed by AI. The YC startup paying humans when the agent gets stuck is a human-run company hiring people to handle the cases where their autocomplete fails. The stablecoin agents "hiring" humans is the same thing with a smart contract as the middleman. A human wrote that contract, a human deployed it, a human profits from it. The employer is still a person.


The real risk isn't machines gaining agency It's companies and governments treating a probability engine as if it already has agency and making irreversible decisions based on that mistake.

 reaching the AGI at some point and maybe going beyond – do you think that AI will understand context at such extent that it will be thinking on its own? Because those AI agents right now can do many things that some people wouldn't be able to accomplish (and definitely not in such a short period of time).

 Agents are fast and useful but speed isn't understanding. Using the calculator analogy again it solves equations faster than any human but it doesn't know what a number is. Current agents chain together hundreds of autocomplete steps very quickly and the output looks like thinking, but there's no comprehension behind it remove the prompt and the system does nothing because it has no intent.


Whether that gap closes with AGI is genuinely unknown the problem is we don't have a working definition of consciousness or understanding, so we can't measure how close or far we are. It could be five years, fifty, or architecturally impossible with the current approach.

From where I sit, it mostly depends on how deliberately you use it. I've been careful to keep myself in the loop on everything Claude Code produces rather than just letting it run. That takes more effort but it also means I'm still the one making decisions. I think the "working for AI" trap happens gradually, when you stop reviewing, stop questioning, and start just executing whatever it suggests - so let's prevent Skynet from happening! :D

 we are already doomed. Today, I read how we think less using AI chatbots.

 hahahaha, why am I not surprised :D

I don’t think the future is as simple as “AI will work for us” or “we will work for AI.”

What’s happening is more subtle: humans are increasingly becoming the fallback layer for systems that appear autonomous. AI acts, predicts, recommends, and executes - but when it gets stuck, fails, misreads context, or faces ambiguity, a human steps in quietly behind the curtain.

So the issue is not only technical. It’s economic and philosophical.

Who sets the goals?
Who owns the systems?
Who gets paid the most value?
Who becomes replaceable, and who becomes more powerful?

If humans use AI to expand judgment, creativity, and leverage, then AI works for us.
If humans are reduced to invisible correction loops for automated systems, then in practice we start working for AI.

The biggest danger is probably not machine rebellion. It’s a world where human intelligence is still necessary, but broken into smaller, less visible, less valued forms of labor.

So the future of cooperation with AI depends less on the technology itself and more on the structure of power around it.

 and that's the thing – we are at the stage of helping people when it gets stuck. If AI will be learning through these actions (we helped to sort out), we can become at certain point to be totally useless and redundant.

I think that most likely, we will face the situation that only a few powerful people will own the system or control them. But Humans, like ordinary people – it is a big question mark for me what will be happening with them.

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