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That society will not exist. People derive meaning from work. Ambition also drives personal development. You take those away and all a person has left is self-m

That society will not exist. People derive meaning from work. Ambition also drives personal development. You take those away and all a person has left is self-medication with drugs and booze and suicide. We need the struggle.

JoeAltmaier 8y ago
Go on believing this fallacy, but please don't work to enslave the rest of us in service to this obsolete idea
- tomhoward 8y ago
  The parent may or may not be right about work being necessary to for a meaningful life. I don't have a strong opinion either way [1]. What matters more to me is that we are just so far away from all the important work being "done". As long as there are sick people, people in physical or emotional pain, people needing better housing or better education or any form of improvement to their lives, and as long as the global population has yet to figure out how to exist without harming the environment, there will be work to be done, much of it of great importance and urgency. This idea that we are within reach of all the important work being "done" so we can all just live a life of leisure seems fanciful to me; I haven't heard anyone propose a realistic pathway to bring about that version of reality - at least not one that doesn't just rely on handwavy concepts from science fiction. I'd be happy for you to point me to any solid material on this if I'm missing something. [1] I personally think all kinds of things can give people meaning, and those things may be considered "work" by some people and not by others (E.g., caring for loved ones, learning to create art, or indeed, writing open-source software), so it quickly becomes a futile debate over definitions.
  - JoeAltmaier 8y ago
    Its not black and white. Currently folks have lives all over the map - from working retail, fry cook, desk jockey, doctor, engineer. Then there are the underemployed. Some folks could be 'ramped down' now with a UBI that frees them from make-work drudgery. Others will find the UBI insufficient and keep working. It could actually be adjusted to tune the workforce to available work. Later, its true even some engineering, doctoring, lawyering (wait that happened already) jobs will be automated too, and those folks will find the UBI useful. Its a strawman that work just comes to a halt at some date.
    - macspoofing 8y ago
      >make-work drudgery "Make work drudgery" will still need to be be done by someone. >its true even some engineering, doctoring, lawyering (wait that happened already) jobs will be automated too, and those folks will find the UBI useful. How?! How will they find UBI useful? It is really frustrating to hear people argue that UBI solves problems that it does not actually solve. UBI has no answer to automation. For one thing our current welfare state can already provide the basic necessities (for example, nobody ever starves in developed economies), and we can keep adapting it as things change. What we don't know is how we can have a functioning society where the majority of the population doesn't need to do anything. UBI also has no answer for third world countries which have no capital to drain on a social spending. How is UBI going to work with failed states like Congo? Or Somalia? Or a developing nation like Bangledash? How is immigration going to work? Right now there is an economic case that developed nations can make for new immigrants, but in a fully automated world immigration is ONLY charity since every immigrant you take in will be a drain on your social system and provide no contributions back. UBI is also ill-defined. Libertarians think UBI will replace our social welfare state (including healthcare system). Progressives, Leftists and Socialists will NEVER EVER agree to that. At best, they may see it as a complement to the existing welfare state. So what problems is UBI actually solving for us?
      - profalseidol 8y ago
        UBI to me, should be understood as like receiving dividends like how rich people does today. They simply go to their mailbox and voila, money. I can now work on my GPL'ed 2D game in Java. Or work on free software projects for human sustainability. The problem however will still remain. The Capitalism system encourages businesses to work for profit mindlessly, and so we have invoked Oracle from the depths of hell. And a demagogue who can possibly tweet us into nuclear annihilation. Prices will keep increasing and economist will confuse us by calling it 'inflation' and put a bunch of fantasy-based math to delude themselves. The money I got from the mailbox won't be enough to afford me a much need vacation to unwind. And so I will have to gamble my meager UBI money into buying shares, insurance, retirement etc.. Then the corporations will keep exploiting the countries you mentioned, sending firearms to fanatics while extracting resources like oil. The answer? There is no guaranteed answer I believe. There are simply just too many moving global variables. With that said, I found the idea of worker-owned-cooperatives to be one good path to improvement. The idea is for employees to own the corporation and vote upon what to do with the profits. Ofc, this will require maturity of the employees just like how Agile requires that the team members to be seasoned in building software. The Mondragon umbrella of cooperatives is a good case study of this working in scale. Not perfect but still a success. The worker-owners used the profit to build a school, compensate for the effects of recession etc. Prof. Richard Wolff whom ironically is an Economist himself has been working hard to push this idea.
ghostbrainalpha 8y ago
The comment above said that you work for "additional gain". The parent comment didn't want to get rid of work. Just focus open source work improving robots that did the jobs we used to. All of human desires for competition and struggle would still be catered to.
- macspoofing 8y ago
  >All of human desires for competition and struggle would still be catered to. Maybe. This discussion is a little abstract, but if OP is proposing a system where there is an outlet for ambition that lets crazy people push themselves to raise themselves above others, then I have no qualms against that. The problem is that such a system is going to look a lot like capitalism or some sort of market-economy (maybe with a social welfare state). That is, such as a system is going to to look like either our society, or it will be a disaster like Venezuela (in the extreme) or Argentina and Brazil. You point me to a past, or present society that is a model for what OP is trying to argue for?
  - ghostbrainalpha 8y ago
    Obviously I don't condone this.. but a good example would be White Slave owning society in the United States pre 1860. Most of the "labor" on a plantation was done by slaves which will be very similar to the automated labor provided by robots of the future. But those slave owners still had jobs to do, they were still competitive with each other. They still used money and tried to acquire more wealth. Sparta was a neat example too. Menial labor was provided by slaves, but Spartan Citizens competed with each other for military honors and societal placement.
    - macspoofing 8y ago
      >a good example would be White Slave owning society in the United States pre 1860. Wow. Ok. Setting aside the humanitarian disaster that the South was in the 1800s, here's some qualification to your example: - The South was poor, much poorer than the North, both in economic and technological advancement. - The vast majority of Southerners were NOT slave owners. Meaning that Southern society was extremely stratified with wealth concentrated with a relatively small number of plantation owners. So your example is more inline with a bunch of rich people hanging out together. But your example does touch on the actual deep problem with automation. The Southerners that prospered under Slavery did so because they owned most of the capital (land and slaves), but the poor non-plantation-owning population still had to work to provide for themselves! Under a cynical (but realistic) views on automation, we expect to see owners of the automatons do great, but what of the masses? Bolting either UBI or increasing our social welfare state is not a solution, because redistribution of wealth is not the core problem (we know how to redistribute wealth - with plenty of examples from modern market economies with social welfare, to less-market/more-socialist attempts as exemplified by your traditional Soviet-style economies). The problem is we don't know how to run a society where the vast majority of people have nothing to do.
TaylorAlexander 8y ago
People tell me this all the time - work is vital to human happiness so we’d better keep buying in to a system that holds the threat of disaster and starvation over our heads if we don’t work. I have full faith that if work is this valuable, we’ll do it voluntarily. I cannot believe the fantasy that we have to be forced to work or we’ll be miserable. Humans are way too intelligent to just sit there getting more and more miserable because they don’t have to work. Yes, people coming from a capitalist society usually don’t know what to do when their work goes away. But people in a society where no one needs to work will find things to do. Maybe they’ll repair motorcycles as a way of finding Zen. There is a lot of work we can do that is not focused on economic productivity. In a world where people don’t have to work to survive, they choose what they do. Some will waste away, just as some do now. Most will not.
- macspoofing 8y ago
  > Humans are way too intelligent to just sit there getting more and more miserable because they don’t have to work. We have multitude of examples of populations with generational unemployment, accompanied by crime and drug use even though basic necessities are provided for by the larger welfare state. We see that with rich trust fund kids who also degenerate into drug use, crime, and suicide and are shitty people too. >Yes, people coming from a capitalist society usually don’t know what to do when their work goes away. This is not a capitalist thing. This is a human thing. Many people (not all mind you) need some pressure to push themselves ... because if not you can always find a way to fill your time with drugs. I don't think I could survive in a society where you don't have to do anything. My second point was that you need an outlet for ambition because there are people who will push themselves extraordinarily hard in order to raise themselves, and their families above others - in those cases material wealth is major a factor in that even if there are other goals (like saving the environment, or improving patient outcomes). Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk are examples, startup founders are too, and even immigrants are examples of that. My father left an eastern european communist nation to work (much harder) in a western capitalist democracy even though though his country did not suffer from political instability, nor was it the case the he could not provide food or shelter for his family. Within certain constraints you could live a comfortable life, and yet, a third of the country left over 50 years. >But people in a society where no one needs to work will find things to do. Again, we have many many examples where that isn't the case. I can't think of a SINGLE example that illustrates this however (even under communism, it was illegal not to work)
profalseidol 8y ago
Nah, we'll have more interesting Github projects if we stop writing the same software over and over again. People will do creative things. Ambition will exist even if the useless work we do today (getting clients richer with more software). Related - Interview of Noam Chomsky regarding Work: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bcBLCBxq1k8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bcBLCBxq1k8
- macspoofing 8y ago
  >Nah, we'll have more interesting Github projects Would we? Many (most?) people push themselves not only to satisfy some abstract goal (save the environment, build the best widget for industry X to improve efficiency, etc.) - and that's great, but the material wealth is a major component of that. This is literally the startup culture that resulted in the biggest corporations on the planet. It was a bunch of people who wanted to change the world for the better, with wealth being a secret (or not so secret) secondary goal. This also explains economic immigrants, or anybody who decides they want more than they have and so push themselves to get it. Also, why is Noam Chomsky an expert on everything? I understand he is a brilliant linguist, but what could somebody who self-identifies as an Anarchist could add to a reasonable political discussion? That is, his political ideas are clearly crazy and so his political reasoning is suspect because who the hell could think Anarchism is a good idea. Anarchism is an unworkable utopia that manifests itself as warlord-based tribal disaster akin to what is happening in Somalia and Afghanistan with warlords holding all power in a region, or El Salvador and Honduras with gangs and crime. What special credentials or expertise give him insight into work?
  - profalseidol 8y ago
    Well you already said it yourself. It is but a secondary goal. Those that do things worthwhile do it because it is worthwhile, however they understand that we live in a capitalist world where you don't eat if you don't profit. Only the investors (or gamblers) are in it for money. > This is literally the startup culture that resulted in the biggest corporations on the planet. So you think having these corporations are good for us? These are simply big because it allowed gamblers to take a share in the pie. Once the actual people who truly want something worthwhile happen leaves, then we are left with Oracle or Balmer. > Anarchism is an unworkable utopia that manifests itself as warlord-based tribal disaster akin to what is happening in Somalia and Afghanistan with warlords holding all power in a region, or El Salvador and Honduras with gangs and crime. What do you really think Anarchism simply means chaos? It's like talking to this person then: https://pics.me.me/i-dont-know-what-marxism-is-but-letmetella-you-why-2633374.png https://pics.me.me/i-dont-know-what-marxism-is-but-letmetell... > What special credentials or expertise give him insight into work? His credentials doesn't matter. What matters is what he said.
dfischer 8y ago
I mostly agree with this and I’d add: work does not have to be a “job”. Work can be your family, it can be art, and it can also be exploring the universe. I think Star Trek captures this idea very well.

JoeAltmaier 8y ago

Go on believing this fallacy, but please don't work to enslave the rest of us in service to this obsolete idea

tomhoward 8y ago
The parent may or may not be right about work being necessary to for a meaningful life. I don't have a strong opinion either way [1]. What matters more to me is that we are just so far away from all the important work being "done". As long as there are sick people, people in physical or emotional pain, people needing better housing or better education or any form of improvement to their lives, and as long as the global population has yet to figure out how to exist without harming the environment, there will be work to be done, much of it of great importance and urgency. This idea that we are within reach of all the important work being "done" so we can all just live a life of leisure seems fanciful to me; I haven't heard anyone propose a realistic pathway to bring about that version of reality - at least not one that doesn't just rely on handwavy concepts from science fiction. I'd be happy for you to point me to any solid material on this if I'm missing something. [1] I personally think all kinds of things can give people meaning, and those things may be considered "work" by some people and not by others (E.g., caring for loved ones, learning to create art, or indeed, writing open-source software), so it quickly becomes a futile debate over definitions.
- JoeAltmaier 8y ago
  Its not black and white. Currently folks have lives all over the map - from working retail, fry cook, desk jockey, doctor, engineer. Then there are the underemployed. Some folks could be 'ramped down' now with a UBI that frees them from make-work drudgery. Others will find the UBI insufficient and keep working. It could actually be adjusted to tune the workforce to available work. Later, its true even some engineering, doctoring, lawyering (wait that happened already) jobs will be automated too, and those folks will find the UBI useful. Its a strawman that work just comes to a halt at some date.
  - macspoofing 8y ago
    >make-work drudgery "Make work drudgery" will still need to be be done by someone. >its true even some engineering, doctoring, lawyering (wait that happened already) jobs will be automated too, and those folks will find the UBI useful. How?! How will they find UBI useful? It is really frustrating to hear people argue that UBI solves problems that it does not actually solve. UBI has no answer to automation. For one thing our current welfare state can already provide the basic necessities (for example, nobody ever starves in developed economies), and we can keep adapting it as things change. What we don't know is how we can have a functioning society where the majority of the population doesn't need to do anything. UBI also has no answer for third world countries which have no capital to drain on a social spending. How is UBI going to work with failed states like Congo? Or Somalia? Or a developing nation like Bangledash? How is immigration going to work? Right now there is an economic case that developed nations can make for new immigrants, but in a fully automated world immigration is ONLY charity since every immigrant you take in will be a drain on your social system and provide no contributions back. UBI is also ill-defined. Libertarians think UBI will replace our social welfare state (including healthcare system). Progressives, Leftists and Socialists will NEVER EVER agree to that. At best, they may see it as a complement to the existing welfare state. So what problems is UBI actually solving for us?
    - profalseidol 8y ago
      UBI to me, should be understood as like receiving dividends like how rich people does today. They simply go to their mailbox and voila, money. I can now work on my GPL'ed 2D game in Java. Or work on free software projects for human sustainability. The problem however will still remain. The Capitalism system encourages businesses to work for profit mindlessly, and so we have invoked Oracle from the depths of hell. And a demagogue who can possibly tweet us into nuclear annihilation. Prices will keep increasing and economist will confuse us by calling it 'inflation' and put a bunch of fantasy-based math to delude themselves. The money I got from the mailbox won't be enough to afford me a much need vacation to unwind. And so I will have to gamble my meager UBI money into buying shares, insurance, retirement etc.. Then the corporations will keep exploiting the countries you mentioned, sending firearms to fanatics while extracting resources like oil. The answer? There is no guaranteed answer I believe. There are simply just too many moving global variables. With that said, I found the idea of worker-owned-cooperatives to be one good path to improvement. The idea is for employees to own the corporation and vote upon what to do with the profits. Ofc, this will require maturity of the employees just like how Agile requires that the team members to be seasoned in building software. The Mondragon umbrella of cooperatives is a good case study of this working in scale. Not perfect but still a success. The worker-owners used the profit to build a school, compensate for the effects of recession etc. Prof. Richard Wolff whom ironically is an Economist himself has been working hard to push this idea.

ghostbrainalpha 8y ago

The comment above said that you work for "additional gain". The parent comment didn't want to get rid of work. Just focus open source work improving robots that did the jobs we used to. All of human desires for competition and struggle would still be catered to.

macspoofing 8y ago
>All of human desires for competition and struggle would still be catered to. Maybe. This discussion is a little abstract, but if OP is proposing a system where there is an outlet for ambition that lets crazy people push themselves to raise themselves above others, then I have no qualms against that. The problem is that such a system is going to look a lot like capitalism or some sort of market-economy (maybe with a social welfare state). That is, such as a system is going to to look like either our society, or it will be a disaster like Venezuela (in the extreme) or Argentina and Brazil. You point me to a past, or present society that is a model for what OP is trying to argue for?
- ghostbrainalpha 8y ago
  Obviously I don't condone this.. but a good example would be White Slave owning society in the United States pre 1860. Most of the "labor" on a plantation was done by slaves which will be very similar to the automated labor provided by robots of the future. But those slave owners still had jobs to do, they were still competitive with each other. They still used money and tried to acquire more wealth. Sparta was a neat example too. Menial labor was provided by slaves, but Spartan Citizens competed with each other for military honors and societal placement.
  - macspoofing 8y ago
    >a good example would be White Slave owning society in the United States pre 1860. Wow. Ok. Setting aside the humanitarian disaster that the South was in the 1800s, here's some qualification to your example: - The South was poor, much poorer than the North, both in economic and technological advancement. - The vast majority of Southerners were NOT slave owners. Meaning that Southern society was extremely stratified with wealth concentrated with a relatively small number of plantation owners. So your example is more inline with a bunch of rich people hanging out together. But your example does touch on the actual deep problem with automation. The Southerners that prospered under Slavery did so because they owned most of the capital (land and slaves), but the poor non-plantation-owning population still had to work to provide for themselves! Under a cynical (but realistic) views on automation, we expect to see owners of the automatons do great, but what of the masses? Bolting either UBI or increasing our social welfare state is not a solution, because redistribution of wealth is not the core problem (we know how to redistribute wealth - with plenty of examples from modern market economies with social welfare, to less-market/more-socialist attempts as exemplified by your traditional Soviet-style economies). The problem is we don't know how to run a society where the vast majority of people have nothing to do.

TaylorAlexander 8y ago

People tell me this all the time - work is vital to human happiness so we’d better keep buying in to a system that holds the threat of disaster and starvation over our heads if we don’t work. I have full faith that if work is this valuable, we’ll do it voluntarily. I cannot believe the fantasy that we have to be forced to work or we’ll be miserable. Humans are way too intelligent to just sit there getting more and more miserable because they don’t have to work. Yes, people coming from a capitalist society usually don’t know what to do when their work goes away. But people in a society where no one needs to work will find things to do. Maybe they’ll repair motorcycles as a way of finding Zen. There is a lot of work we can do that is not focused on economic productivity. In a world where people don’t have to work to survive, they choose what they do. Some will waste away, just as some do now. Most will not.

macspoofing 8y ago
> Humans are way too intelligent to just sit there getting more and more miserable because they don’t have to work. We have multitude of examples of populations with generational unemployment, accompanied by crime and drug use even though basic necessities are provided for by the larger welfare state. We see that with rich trust fund kids who also degenerate into drug use, crime, and suicide and are shitty people too. >Yes, people coming from a capitalist society usually don’t know what to do when their work goes away. This is not a capitalist thing. This is a human thing. Many people (not all mind you) need some pressure to push themselves ... because if not you can always find a way to fill your time with drugs. I don't think I could survive in a society where you don't have to do anything. My second point was that you need an outlet for ambition because there are people who will push themselves extraordinarily hard in order to raise themselves, and their families above others - in those cases material wealth is major a factor in that even if there are other goals (like saving the environment, or improving patient outcomes). Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk are examples, startup founders are too, and even immigrants are examples of that. My father left an eastern european communist nation to work (much harder) in a western capitalist democracy even though though his country did not suffer from political instability, nor was it the case the he could not provide food or shelter for his family. Within certain constraints you could live a comfortable life, and yet, a third of the country left over 50 years. >But people in a society where no one needs to work will find things to do. Again, we have many many examples where that isn't the case. I can't think of a SINGLE example that illustrates this however (even under communism, it was illegal not to work)

profalseidol 8y ago

Nah, we'll have more interesting Github projects if we stop writing the same software over and over again. People will do creative things. Ambition will exist even if the useless work we do today (getting clients richer with more software). Related - Interview of Noam Chomsky regarding Work: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bcBLCBxq1k8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bcBLCBxq1k8

macspoofing 8y ago
>Nah, we'll have more interesting Github projects Would we? Many (most?) people push themselves not only to satisfy some abstract goal (save the environment, build the best widget for industry X to improve efficiency, etc.) - and that's great, but the material wealth is a major component of that. This is literally the startup culture that resulted in the biggest corporations on the planet. It was a bunch of people who wanted to change the world for the better, with wealth being a secret (or not so secret) secondary goal. This also explains economic immigrants, or anybody who decides they want more than they have and so push themselves to get it. Also, why is Noam Chomsky an expert on everything? I understand he is a brilliant linguist, but what could somebody who self-identifies as an Anarchist could add to a reasonable political discussion? That is, his political ideas are clearly crazy and so his political reasoning is suspect because who the hell could think Anarchism is a good idea. Anarchism is an unworkable utopia that manifests itself as warlord-based tribal disaster akin to what is happening in Somalia and Afghanistan with warlords holding all power in a region, or El Salvador and Honduras with gangs and crime. What special credentials or expertise give him insight into work?
- profalseidol 8y ago
  Well you already said it yourself. It is but a secondary goal. Those that do things worthwhile do it because it is worthwhile, however they understand that we live in a capitalist world where you don't eat if you don't profit. Only the investors (or gamblers) are in it for money. > This is literally the startup culture that resulted in the biggest corporations on the planet. So you think having these corporations are good for us? These are simply big because it allowed gamblers to take a share in the pie. Once the actual people who truly want something worthwhile happen leaves, then we are left with Oracle or Balmer. > Anarchism is an unworkable utopia that manifests itself as warlord-based tribal disaster akin to what is happening in Somalia and Afghanistan with warlords holding all power in a region, or El Salvador and Honduras with gangs and crime. What do you really think Anarchism simply means chaos? It's like talking to this person then: https://pics.me.me/i-dont-know-what-marxism-is-but-letmetella-you-why-2633374.png https://pics.me.me/i-dont-know-what-marxism-is-but-letmetell... > What special credentials or expertise give him insight into work? His credentials doesn't matter. What matters is what he said.

dfischer 8y ago

I mostly agree with this and I’d add: work does not have to be a “job”. Work can be your family, it can be art, and it can also be exploring the universe. I think Star Trek captures this idea very well.