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When 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 wor

When 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 ago
Right, 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 ago
  Being 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 ago
    our 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 ago
I 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 ago
I 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.
mctaylor 4y ago
That's not how that works. That's not how any of that works. Needs are food, housing, and safety. Anything beyond that is not a need, it is a want. We're not giving everyone everything they need, and an increasingly tiny number of people are grabbing anything and everything they want. We're about to start discovering that in a dynamical system with lots of other intelligent agents, our need for "safety" at a certain point does depend on others need for food and housing. Let's try to remember that as we are laying them all off to give their jobs to AI.
- flappyeagle 4y ago
  AIs don't provide food, housing, or safety. They don't farm, build houses, or police the streets
- jrvarela56 4y ago
  That's a very narrow definition of a 'need'. You haven't even mentioned emotional needs and these are widely accepted as must haves to lead a 'happy' life. The line between a need and a want is fuzzy to say the least. To cavepeople, all our needs are met at this point. But we're anywhere near fulfilled and have come up with more terms that enter the 'need' category. Maslow's hierarchy, pop authors like Tony Robbins (certainty, uncertainty, significance, connection, growth, contribution) and Dan Pink (autonomy, mastery, purpose), trained psycologists/psychiatrists like Gabor Maté and Ted Klontz talk about how our relations during childhood reveal a need for bond/connection to oneself and others. We're not dealing with exact sciences here, so it's not easy to converge on an objective list of 'needs' that are separated from 'wants'. There are studies like the famous Harvard Hapiness study that may give us more objective notions, but you'd need to run several of these across time to find stuff that has stronger predictive value across generations. We could go on here - I'd argue universal healthcare is a 'need' in order to live a happy/fulfilled/safe human life in the modern world. Many would disagree with me, but the point is the goal post shifts as we progress. I'd call it a need if the lack of it is correlated with disfunctional states or objectively lesser outcomes (which outcomes are necessary?). Even if you have this clear cut the question of what's considered necessary is an opinion. The implication of this in the conversation is that AI isn't likely to fulfill our needs: we'll come up with more and shift the goal post just like all our ancestors have done until now.
danaris 4y ago
The reason for that is not the creation of new needs by regular people. It is the siphoning of nearly all the benefits of those productivity gains by the very wealthy, so that the rest of us are left fighting for scraps, and they can use that wealth to change the laws so they don't have to share it. Never mind the fact that for them, the extra does nothing to change their lifestyle, and is essentially just a dollar-denominated high score, while for the rest of us, the smallest fraction of that wealth would be life-altering.

When 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 ago

Right, 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 ago
Being 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 ago
  our 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 ago

I 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 ago

I 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.

mctaylor 4y ago

That's not how that works. That's not how any of that works. Needs are food, housing, and safety. Anything beyond that is not a need, it is a want. We're not giving everyone everything they need, and an increasingly tiny number of people are grabbing anything and everything they want. We're about to start discovering that in a dynamical system with lots of other intelligent agents, our need for "safety" at a certain point does depend on others need for food and housing. Let's try to remember that as we are laying them all off to give their jobs to AI.

flappyeagle 4y ago
AIs don't provide food, housing, or safety. They don't farm, build houses, or police the streets
jrvarela56 4y ago
That's a very narrow definition of a 'need'. You haven't even mentioned emotional needs and these are widely accepted as must haves to lead a 'happy' life. The line between a need and a want is fuzzy to say the least. To cavepeople, all our needs are met at this point. But we're anywhere near fulfilled and have come up with more terms that enter the 'need' category. Maslow's hierarchy, pop authors like Tony Robbins (certainty, uncertainty, significance, connection, growth, contribution) and Dan Pink (autonomy, mastery, purpose), trained psycologists/psychiatrists like Gabor Maté and Ted Klontz talk about how our relations during childhood reveal a need for bond/connection to oneself and others. We're not dealing with exact sciences here, so it's not easy to converge on an objective list of 'needs' that are separated from 'wants'. There are studies like the famous Harvard Hapiness study that may give us more objective notions, but you'd need to run several of these across time to find stuff that has stronger predictive value across generations. We could go on here - I'd argue universal healthcare is a 'need' in order to live a happy/fulfilled/safe human life in the modern world. Many would disagree with me, but the point is the goal post shifts as we progress. I'd call it a need if the lack of it is correlated with disfunctional states or objectively lesser outcomes (which outcomes are necessary?). Even if you have this clear cut the question of what's considered necessary is an opinion. The implication of this in the conversation is that AI isn't likely to fulfill our needs: we'll come up with more and shift the goal post just like all our ancestors have done until now.

danaris 4y ago

The reason for that is not the creation of new needs by regular people. It is the siphoning of nearly all the benefits of those productivity gains by the very wealthy, so that the rest of us are left fighting for scraps, and they can use that wealth to change the laws so they don't have to share it. Never mind the fact that for them, the extra does nothing to change their lifestyle, and is essentially just a dollar-denominated high score, while for the rest of us, the smallest fraction of that wealth would be life-altering.