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I, the author of the linked article, see the appearance of ever more productive tools as allowing humanity to break through the lie: that much of the labour we
by justusw 4y ago
I, the author of the linked article, see the appearance of ever more productive tools as allowing humanity to break through the lie: that much of the labour we perform is necessary and that labour at all is necessary. The concept of your status in society being tied to your job and the idea of full employment for all is what is holding us back to achieve personal and societal fulfillment.
I ask you this: is everyone contributing to a copyleft project ultimately just aiming for financial gain, or are there also true idealists who do it for the sake of doing it?
Doing things is one thing and earning money is another and we come closer and closer to decoupling those too.
Why not reap the benefits and free humanity from the yoke of labour once and for all? If one person does the work of ten (i.e., thanks to the loom, steam engine, or LLM), and we naively assume that the value created is that of ten workers, why can the remaining nine not share the harvest as well? Or, we could all work, just significantly less (a tenth each) and allow everyone to go to bed with a full belly.
No one can predict whether it will be business as usual or not, for anything. Not for the internet, the transistor or LLMs. But we should not hesitate and call out the thumb twiddling lie that is employment through economic coercion.
- 1attice 4y agoHi Justusw! No disagreement here -- wage slavery is just that -- and, in utopia, we would have the robots do everything. But, as the error message goes, "you cannot get to there from here." It's like seeing an ideal endgame config on a chess board but realizing that there's no combination of moves that will get your knight into position in time. Delicious pie, very much in the sky, and any attempt to get there looks like it involves mass surprise unemployment, which, as a general rule, tends to destabilize. Moreover, none of this actually affects or interacts with your original claim, that (more or less) the coming disruption will be similar to previous, smaller disruptions, for values of 'similar' that allow one to compare outcomes. Again, the better model is habitat loss. ICE and other inventions increased this habitat; AI seems poised to reduce it sharply.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]