Are we cooked?It’s a Yes or No question but you should argue your position.
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Theses · top
- > YES
Knowledge work is being replaced faster than people can retrain.
Junior analyst, paralegal, junior copywriter, support tier 1 — these are already gone in real teams I work with. The retraining cycle is 3-5 years. The replacement cycle is 6 months. The math doesn't work.
anon_4127 · 2026-05-17↑ 142 - > NO
Every technology this scary has expanded the work, not ended it.
Spreadsheets were going to end accounting. ATMs were going to end bank tellers. The internet was going to end newspapers. We got more accountants, more tellers (until 2015), and more journalists in absolute terms. Tools don't replace humans, they reshape what humans do.
marcus_w · 2026-05-17↑ 128 - > YES
We've already locked in 2.5°C minimum. That's enough.
The 1.5°C target was buried in 2023. Insurance markets are pricing 3°C. Crop yields in the global south are already declining. The cooked question isn't ambiguous when half the equatorial belt becomes uninhabitable in 40 years.
lila_r · 2026-05-16↑ 97 - > NO
Material conditions are the best they have ever been.
Global poverty is at a historic low. Child mortality is at a historic low. Literacy is at a historic high. People who say we're cooked are mistaking their Twitter feed for the world.
p_singh · 2026-05-16↑ 81 - > YES
Birth rates below replacement everywhere means the math runs out.
Korea is 0.7. Italy is 1.2. China is collapsing. The US is propped up by immigration we are dismantling. There is no recorded case of a society recovering from sub-1.5 fertility without external population inflow. We are cooked demographically and nobody is talking about it.
anon_8830 · 2026-05-15↑ 64 - > NO
Every previous generation thought they were the last one.
Read any newspaper from 1968, 1933, 1893, 1848. Same energy. Same certainty. Same 'this time is different.' They were all wrong. We are extremely likely to be wrong too. Humility is the actual signal.
k_yamamoto · 2026-05-15↑ 53