About whether automation leaves room for a long tail of human creators.
Has this happened?
Yes 54 (51%)Not sure 25 (24%)No 26 (25%)
Votes cast 1–2 October 2026: 100,590 votes from 9,694 people.
Hacker News has set AI a lot of challenges over the years. Which ones has it met?
About whether automation leaves room for a long tail of human creators.
Votes cast 1–2 October 2026: 100,590 votes from 9,694 people.
The issue is an ever smaller percentage of the population can be successful at ever more difficult opportunities that result from ever better automation.
Manual labor still exists, but it’s a vastly smaller percentage of overall jobs. Productivity and automation seem like the same thing on the surface. However, the argument for a long tail of creators in an ever more wealth society breaks down when AI can start writing niche romance novels not just barely coherent news articles etc.
In theory we might have ever more new types of jobs, but automation isn’t just getting better it’s also getting faster.