4 ms·

Criticism of the -- what I believe to be -- inevitable post-work post-scarcity economy is rooted in the false idea that employment provides meaning to those emp

Criticism of the -- what I believe to be -- inevitable post-work post-scarcity economy is rooted in the false idea that employment provides meaning to those employed. But proclaiming the "Value of Work" is just arguing for the "Merits of Drudgery." I can't wait to not work ever again. The weak reply that, "doctors have valuable employment that gives them meaning," is completely beside the point. Doctors like helping people or the challenge of solving an ailment or they like the high status of being a doctor in society or the high pay. But they don't like paperwork, or interacting with insurance companies. Most work is like that. Low status, repetitive, boring, meaningless. Trading the best hours of the day of the best years of your youth is a terrible bargain, but persists because it is connected to survival and status. Break the connection and humanity prospers.

topmonk 9y ago
When I think about UBI, I keep picturing a group of pidgeons fighting over pieces of bread. I don't see UBI as freedom. It shares a lot with slavery, in that someone else is feeding you, and therefore has control over you. What I hope for in the future is a fully independent machine that each person owns and is capable of caring for them, by providing food, shelter, etc. and is capable of building a clone of itself. In this way, you truly are free, having a machine which you own, and can shutdown and leave at anytime if you wish.
- ThomPete 9y ago
  You are looking at this from the wrong perspective. You are assuming there is someone (other humans) who are feeding you. The point of UBI is that it's built on a realization that technology itself is feeding you. In the end, there isn't going to be any single owners because everything is better solved by the technology we are all going to be owning the means of production so to speak. The post-scarcity society is where all basic needs are met. If each person has their own machine you are kind of back to the same problem you have now. Who gets to use what resources?
  - LrnByTeach 9y ago
    Wow!!! one of the best explanations Type 1 Civilization (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kardashev_scale https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kardashev_scale ) where technological advances results in "The post-scarcity society is where all basic needs are met" and UBI is one form of Manifestation of 'Type 1 Civilization > The post-scarcity society is where all basic needs are met. > The point of UBI is that it's built on a realization that technology itself is feeding you. > If each person has their own machine you are kind of back to the same problem you have now. Who gets to use what resources?
  - bluesnowmonkey 9y ago
    Why should technology continue to feed you though? Maybe it's more efficient to let you starve. This isn't a theoretical, what-would-a-currently-uninvented-AI-decide-to-do kind of question. Just look at what corporations do now. It's all about dollars and cents. Non-human entities don't care about what's right for humans. Even ones that are mostly composed of humans.
    - cinquemb 9y ago
      >Why should technology continue to feed you though? I think this comes from current thinking based on past history where we were more resource constrained, embodied by this: "In the rest of society, however, we often both try to hire people who seem to show off the highest related abilities, and we let those most prestigious people have a lot of discretion in how the job is structured. For example, we let the most prestigious doctors tell us how medicine should be run, the most prestigious lawyers tells us how law should be run, the most prestigious finance professionals tell us how the financial system should work, and the most prestigious academics tell us how to run schools and research."[0] Where as a more technological perspective might recognize how thinking purely along the current "dollars and cents" prestige lines, and might come to realize that by seeking to sustain every human to some increasing degree, will then "free" the marginal human to help maximize along some dimension that isn't necessarily the "dollar and cents" direction (think for every high/college/grad school drop out now making ~6 figures writing software, that could be if afforded a similar style of living/degree of autonomy in life as they do today, might choose to pursue something more likely to enhance technological development[well who knows, maybe I am just speaking for myself], or those who were born into a situation where everyday was a arduous to feed themselves who then will be "free" to spend more of this time to anything but relative foraging for sustinence). This can perhaps be embodied as a solution by recognizing this: "This can go very wrong! Imagine that we wanted research progress, and that we let the most prestigious researchers pick research topics and methods. To show off their abilities, they may pick topics and methods that most reduce the noise in estimating abilities. For example, they may pick mathematical methods, and topics that are well suited to such methods. And many of them may crowd around the same few topics, like runners at a race. These choices would succeed in helping the most able researchers to show that they are in fact the most able. But the actual research that results might not be very useful at producing research progress."[0] [0] http://www.overcomingbias.com/2016/06/beware-prestige-based-discretion.html http://www.overcomingbias.com/2016/06/beware-prestige-based-...
- eli_gottlieb 9y ago
  >I don't see UBI as freedom. It shares a lot with slavery, in that someone else is feeding you, and therefore has control over you. Right now, the labor market is feeding you, and very directly has control over you. You don't pick out where you think you can make the greatest contributions to humanity, you pick the job field that lets you make rent/mortgage each month. Mind, I'm all in favor of fully automated luxury space homesteading, but a UBI or something like it will probably be an inevitable part of how we "convince" the economy to switch models from centralized infrastructure with competing workers to decentralized infrastructure with independent, mostly self-sufficient families and communities.
- jririri82838 9y ago
  ‘Look at your wrists. There – at any time – lies freedom.’ — Seneca That is the only freedom in the absolute sense you’re peddling A bit much maybe, but stoicism has been correlated to happiness. My point being is you’re tethered to how your culture works. Is it free to be told work in our factory or go hungry? Don’t be so full of yourself. You had to wrangle and barter to get the “machine which you own”. You have no ability to materialize it from thin air Fighting over access by competing for that job. Fighting to keep the power on in competition with other users needs It was the same as you describe with the bread Except in a UBI system the assumptions change from “make enough bread for the moneyed” to “make enough for all” You seem to realize your current reality is the raw fight for life, but are projecting it on things you’ve never experienced
ThomPete 9y ago
It goes further than that. More or less any job a human can do, technology will do better. If not today then soon. And so even if we purely took a market point of view it's pretty obvious that humans and work isn't really an optimal cocktail once there is a technological alternative.

topmonk 9y ago

When I think about UBI, I keep picturing a group of pidgeons fighting over pieces of bread. I don't see UBI as freedom. It shares a lot with slavery, in that someone else is feeding you, and therefore has control over you. What I hope for in the future is a fully independent machine that each person owns and is capable of caring for them, by providing food, shelter, etc. and is capable of building a clone of itself. In this way, you truly are free, having a machine which you own, and can shutdown and leave at anytime if you wish.

ThomPete 9y ago
You are looking at this from the wrong perspective. You are assuming there is someone (other humans) who are feeding you. The point of UBI is that it's built on a realization that technology itself is feeding you. In the end, there isn't going to be any single owners because everything is better solved by the technology we are all going to be owning the means of production so to speak. The post-scarcity society is where all basic needs are met. If each person has their own machine you are kind of back to the same problem you have now. Who gets to use what resources?
- LrnByTeach 9y ago
  Wow!!! one of the best explanations Type 1 Civilization (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kardashev_scale https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kardashev_scale ) where technological advances results in "The post-scarcity society is where all basic needs are met" and UBI is one form of Manifestation of 'Type 1 Civilization > The post-scarcity society is where all basic needs are met. > The point of UBI is that it's built on a realization that technology itself is feeding you. > If each person has their own machine you are kind of back to the same problem you have now. Who gets to use what resources?
- bluesnowmonkey 9y ago
  Why should technology continue to feed you though? Maybe it's more efficient to let you starve. This isn't a theoretical, what-would-a-currently-uninvented-AI-decide-to-do kind of question. Just look at what corporations do now. It's all about dollars and cents. Non-human entities don't care about what's right for humans. Even ones that are mostly composed of humans.
  - cinquemb 9y ago
    >Why should technology continue to feed you though? I think this comes from current thinking based on past history where we were more resource constrained, embodied by this: "In the rest of society, however, we often both try to hire people who seem to show off the highest related abilities, and we let those most prestigious people have a lot of discretion in how the job is structured. For example, we let the most prestigious doctors tell us how medicine should be run, the most prestigious lawyers tells us how law should be run, the most prestigious finance professionals tell us how the financial system should work, and the most prestigious academics tell us how to run schools and research."[0] Where as a more technological perspective might recognize how thinking purely along the current "dollars and cents" prestige lines, and might come to realize that by seeking to sustain every human to some increasing degree, will then "free" the marginal human to help maximize along some dimension that isn't necessarily the "dollar and cents" direction (think for every high/college/grad school drop out now making ~6 figures writing software, that could be if afforded a similar style of living/degree of autonomy in life as they do today, might choose to pursue something more likely to enhance technological development[well who knows, maybe I am just speaking for myself], or those who were born into a situation where everyday was a arduous to feed themselves who then will be "free" to spend more of this time to anything but relative foraging for sustinence). This can perhaps be embodied as a solution by recognizing this: "This can go very wrong! Imagine that we wanted research progress, and that we let the most prestigious researchers pick research topics and methods. To show off their abilities, they may pick topics and methods that most reduce the noise in estimating abilities. For example, they may pick mathematical methods, and topics that are well suited to such methods. And many of them may crowd around the same few topics, like runners at a race. These choices would succeed in helping the most able researchers to show that they are in fact the most able. But the actual research that results might not be very useful at producing research progress."[0] [0] http://www.overcomingbias.com/2016/06/beware-prestige-based-discretion.html http://www.overcomingbias.com/2016/06/beware-prestige-based-...
eli_gottlieb 9y ago
>I don't see UBI as freedom. It shares a lot with slavery, in that someone else is feeding you, and therefore has control over you. Right now, the labor market is feeding you, and very directly has control over you. You don't pick out where you think you can make the greatest contributions to humanity, you pick the job field that lets you make rent/mortgage each month. Mind, I'm all in favor of fully automated luxury space homesteading, but a UBI or something like it will probably be an inevitable part of how we "convince" the economy to switch models from centralized infrastructure with competing workers to decentralized infrastructure with independent, mostly self-sufficient families and communities.
jririri82838 9y ago
‘Look at your wrists. There – at any time – lies freedom.’ — Seneca That is the only freedom in the absolute sense you’re peddling A bit much maybe, but stoicism has been correlated to happiness. My point being is you’re tethered to how your culture works. Is it free to be told work in our factory or go hungry? Don’t be so full of yourself. You had to wrangle and barter to get the “machine which you own”. You have no ability to materialize it from thin air Fighting over access by competing for that job. Fighting to keep the power on in competition with other users needs It was the same as you describe with the bread Except in a UBI system the assumptions change from “make enough bread for the moneyed” to “make enough for all” You seem to realize your current reality is the raw fight for life, but are projecting it on things you’ve never experienced

ThomPete 9y ago

It goes further than that. More or less any job a human can do, technology will do better. If not today then soon. And so even if we purely took a market point of view it's pretty obvious that humans and work isn't really an optimal cocktail once there is a technological alternative.