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Cirsium

(4,365 posts)
5. Right
Sat Jul 11, 2026, 04:43 PM
Saturday

Who needs humans? They are such a pain.

A world without people might be lonely, but it sure would be convenient. How maddening it must be to invest billions in Amazon warehouse automation, only to have to slow down or (gasp!) stop the machines so that the workers who serve as "humans in the loop" can stop to pee! Isn't there some way we can make that their problem, not ours?

With AI, the fact that you need to pee – or get paid – does become your problem, rather than your boss's. After the majority of your colleagues have been fired ("because AI will do their jobs&quot , you become painfully aware that there are plenty of people who need your job, who will happily step in to take it if you complain too much about your bladder or your paycheck.

Even better is when the "human in the loop" can be outsourced to a company overseas, which allows bosses to simply set-and-forget a set of requirements for how the human part of the AI's labor is to be done without ever having to meet or even think about those workers' conditions. This is the illusion of full automation, in which the AI does the job "like magic."

https://pluralistic.net/2026/07/10/posthuman-as-in-no-humans/

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