As a permaculture homesteader who has been farming full time since 2012 and as a college drop out, I largely agree with the sentiments of this thread. The reason my farm works is because I keep expenses really, really low. No restaurants, no excursions except free stuff like hiking and camping with friends in free parks or on private land. No luxuries or smart devices in the home except a smart phone each for me and my partner. No subscriptions, no memberships, no services. We're grid tied but thanks to net metering we send twice as much electricity TO the grid as we draw from it, so the utility bill more than pays for itself. Luckily the power company here actually writes checks for surplus kWh production. We grow 100% of our starches, fiber, veg, and meat consumption, and hopefully dairy will join the list next year because we just got a cream separator--finally making butter and cream efficient enough to produce at home from our sheep and goat milk.
So I've never put my English major, which I completed in 2 years before dropping out halfway through junior year, to any use. I adore learning, researching, writing research papers and being surrounded by great debate cultures like you can be on campus. However, I was in college during the recession of 2008 and it was already becoming thoroughly uneconomical back then. Costs have gotten worse and the prospect of AI taking jobs has been on my mind since about 2015 (as in, what will people do if they can't find work?).
Personally, I really want a few dedicated robots: first, a pasture crab! I want a multi-legged robot similar to a Roomba vacuum or those lawn mower robots, but capable of navigating over my very uneven, steep pasture terrain. All it needs to do is identify thistle, barberry, wisteria and other invasive pasture weeds, and then mechanically kill them with loppers, or a mini saw, or girdling. It can be almost 100% solar direct powered, and just run during the daylight hours, but with a small battery to save programs and remember where it is in the grid of the pasture.
Next, I want a little robot that collects eggs from the coop for me, and sweeps out the nesting boxes and moves the chicken tractors and rabbit grazing tractors. And next, I would like a set of radio based electric collars or ear tags for the sheep and goats that would allow safe rotational grazing around a radius-defining transmitter. No more moving the electric nets! Current versions of these collars don't work for small ruminants for much time, so we're waiting on battery life improvements and affordability.
Anyway, I largely agree that a healthy post-AI society will embrace small homesteads and crafts and community as deliberate lifestyle choices to provide purpose and fulfillment. Do I really believe that AI can replace all current human jobs? Absolutely. Give it a few years to keep learning at the phenomenal rate of improvement that it has been already demonstrating. As for the 'no hands' argument, I'm currently healing from my second robotic surgery this year. The robot was guided by a human surgeon in both cases, but the use of the "daVinci robot" meant that the incisions could be much smaller and the removal of tumors was much more precise than feasible for human hands after several hours of effort. Each surgery took about 4 hours, but robots don't get tired. Once AI can run surgical robots, I would expect most surgeries to be done entirely by robot, perhaps with a decade or so of direct human oversight.
There is one point in this thread, however, that I must kick back against, hard. While I personally love living humbly and with practically no income, mostly living off the land and needing little... The medical necessities that hit me this year demonstrate just how problematic it would have been to not have health insurance and savings. I'm in my 30s and have always lived a healthy, active, outdoor life with no illicit or recreational substances, not even alcohol, and eating cleanly. It didn't matter; you can't overcome genetics, and I ended up with the same cancer my dad had at an even younger age. Without insurance, I couldn't have pushed the doctors thru screenings, scans and follow-up visits on a fast enough timeline to prove that it was cancer, and treat it.
Many of my friends have disabilities; extremely poor vision, or hearing, or cerebral palsy. Some have auto-immune disorders that are fatal without constant injections. How are they supposed to drop everything and live off the land with no income and no savings? Their medical care costs don't disappear just because they grow a garden. How about the parents with little kids who have diseases or special needs? Should they shrug and hope that healthy garden food will fix the problems, and then watch their kids die like 19th century kids did? How will green woodworking skills and a food forest work for a 25 year old who is blind? How can my friend with only one arm and one leg be expected to turn a compost pile or haul firewood out of the forest?
It's harsh to sneer at folks who cannot turn to the permies life. I'm basically healthy, with no kids or human dependents, and able to live almost expense-free, but still, cancer hit and brought medical bills with it. My farm cannot cover even the tiniest fraction of those surgical costs, not in a hundred years, literally. I'm very lucky that I came to farming with reserves already in place and don't need to rely on the farm to cover those expenses. But I would never act as though a minimalist, agrarian, subsistence life is the only solution to the future, and most especially not for anyone dealing with special needs and disabilities.
