4 ms·
There's an infinite amount of work to do.
by afpx 4y ago
There's an infinite amount of work to do.
- marginalia_nu 4y agoWhen all our needs are met, and all the machinery to meet those needs tend to themselves, what work remains?
- jstanley 4y agoIf all your needs are met, what is there to be upset about? If you're upset about something, obviously all your needs aren't being met yet.
- marginalia_nu 4y agoWho said anything about anyone being upset? I asked for clarification about a statement about work being infinite.
- ben_w 4y agoIain M Banks wrote a series if books in a universe where super-advanced friendly sentient AI could do all the things. That Culture was a complete utopia from the author's perspective — all their serious drama had to come from their interactions with various outsiders. Yet there are people here in the real world who find it horrifying. Those fictional AI would out-class humans by about the degree to which a human would outclass a blade of grass; even if you tone that down a bit and we're just pets rather than plants in comparison, I can see how people may feel that this detracts from their sense of self-worth.
- jrvarela56 4y agoWhen all needs are met, people tend to come up with new needs. Economists predicted we’d be out of work by now thanks to productivity gains, but we’re still working and miserable.
- marginalia_nu 4y agoRight, but lets say even the coming up with new needs and satisfying them is automatic.
- ben_w 4y ago"Robot! Experience this tragic irony for me!" - Futurama: https://youtu.be/LCPhbN1l024 https://youtu.be/LCPhbN1l024
- jrvarela56 4y agoBeing the humans that we are, we’ll come up with needs missed by the automatic process. If it really just expands faster than we can come up with needs, then what is there to worry about?
- fatneckbeard 4y agoour most pressing need is to ensure the survival of the species given that the planet's climate is inherently unstable over a period of 100,000+ years. which means we need to learn terraforming and/or interstellar travel within the next 100,000 years, without killing our entire species while we do it.
- codq 4y agoI always think back to those space age cartoons from the 1950s, with a man sitting back in his lawn chair reading the paper while a giant robot trims the hedges. The promise: “The machines work, so we’re don’t have to!”
- onos 4y agoI recently completed a task of high importance to me after a few months of ~intense effort. Within a day of having finished I was stressing over a new task of little relative importance, but next on my list.
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- heavyset_go 4y agoWhat work gets done and by who is limited by the whims of a handful of people who allocate those resources. It's possible that the work that's chosen to be funded is work that seeks to eliminate human labor to the point that it's cheaper to hire hardware/software to do it instead.