5 ms·

> How shall we find meaning and purpose in a world without work? What? Everyone in the world is brain damaged enough to all keep repeating this useless idea.

> How shall we find meaning and purpose in a world without work? What? Everyone in the world is brain damaged enough to all keep repeating this useless idea. Work is just the shit you do for other people to stay alive. If a robot is doing that thing, I'll do something else. If robots do everything a person can do for zero marginal cost, then the we are in a post-scarcity utopia, why is that bad?

lm28469 4y ago
> What? Everyone in the world is brain damaged enough to all keep repeating this useless idea. I feel like it's some kind of Stockholm syndrome, they don't want to realize the shear absolute lack of logic and meaning in their day to day life so they rationalize that fulfilling random task for most of their day/life somehow _is_ the meaning of life. To me it's signals a complete lack of imagination of what life could be. Opening any book from the 50s/60s/70s about the "future of work" that automation was going to bring would blow their mind. They're too caught up in the rate race to even notice that there is something else
politician 4y ago
It requires a collective leap of altruism for humanity to bridge the gap from “work for food” to a society free from scarcity. The most likely outcome is a society that drowns in its own selfishness as the fires that sustain our current world order cool.
flangola7 4y ago
>Work is just the shit you do for other people to stay alive. A disheartening realization my sister-in-law pointed out is that we don't perform work, we perform jobs. Even the unemployed and retired have many jobs. Sibling, friend, parent, child, partner, spouse. Our most vital and rewarding jobs don't have a uniform or an RFID badge, but the robots may nevertheless take them too. You and I might be hesitant to replace friends and family with artificial people but they might not feel the same way. Why risk rejection when compatibility can be programmed?
pmoriarty 4y ago
Power is going to be vacuumed up by few people who are good at doing that, and when the vast majority of the rest population is both comparatively powerless and useless to the elites, what incentive will the elites have to keep them around?
- est31 4y ago
  Yeah before you needed soldiers and many of them so you couldn't add all of them to the 1% of elites. Those people were obviously sympathetic with people not from the 1%, so you could only go so far until the soldiers mutinied or just... didn't fight the revolutionaries with the zeal needed to be successful. With AI you'll have way better tools at your disposal. You can man a 24/7 control room of 10 people hating the poors, all made up of 1%ers, controlling an army of 10 million robots. But on the other hand, elites themselves also have hierarchies. There used to be kings, lower nobility, higher nobility, etc. Those would fight all the time about how much power each of them had. If the top 10% of the human population had a secret meeting to kill the bottom 90%, and used their combined powers to do that, then what used to be the bottom 9% suddenly becomes the bottom 90%. Probably those people get really scared that the same will happen to them at the next meeting of the top 10%ers council.
gensym 4y ago
In the land/labor/capital triad, the only thing that will be post-scarcity due to AI will be labor. Anyone who lacks one of the others will be screwed since the only they have to trade - their labor - will be worthless.
- SoftTalker 4y ago
  If nobody can buy your land or trade your capital, what do you really have? We need the value produced by labor for there to be a market for anything else.
  - mcaledonensis 4y ago
    If you are a citizen and of age, you have your voting rights.
  - chii 4y ago
    the labour being replaced by autonomous robots driven by an AI means that the output is cheap, and plentiful. But this requires initial capital to get going, and that capital (and land) is what gets traded. At some point, when capital is no longer required, then it would become worthless, but by then i think humanity would've reached star trek level of post-scarcity (or killed themselves with a war).
- mcaledonensis 4y ago
  It is not impossible to setup taxation and public/private ownership of AI in a way that is beneficial to humanity.
  - blooalien 4y ago
    It's not impossible, but it is highly unlikely to happen that way… There's a certain group of humans that are determined to hoard all that they can, and they don't want to share.
    - mcaledonensis 4y ago
sobkas 4y ago
> Work is just the shit you do for other people to stay alive. If a robot is doing that thing, I'll do something else. If robots do everything a person can do for zero marginal cost, then the we are in a post-scarcity utopia, why is that bad? We already live in post-scarcity thing(don't know if it is utopy or dystopy, but for some people it's former while for some later, for some reason I think dystopy have higher population), but the surplus of production is destroyed/put into landfills(with police security so no one can steal it from trashcan).
- chii 4y ago
  > We already live in post-scarcity thing there's zero way we are anywhere near a post-scarcity society today. We still have to drill for oil and gas, mine for iron, and hope the weather is still good enough to grow crops.
SoftTalker 4y ago
Work and accomplishing tasks is baked into our sense of purpose. Look at anyone who's long-term unemployed. They mostly lay around ths house playing video games or watching TV at best, or they get involved in criminal stuff at worst. Alcoholism and drug abuse are commonplace. Neglect of dependents is commonplace. People need work to feel that their lives have meaning. Post-scarcity utopia is exactly that. A fantasy. If people have nothing to do then civilization will collapse.
- lm28469 4y ago
  Lots of backed in assumption in here. The way we designed out current society makes unemployed people some kind of pest, it's not glorified, quite the opposite. But that's not a god given rule, nothing obliges us to follow that path, especially if (big if) AIs/robots take over most things. If anything you're flat out wrong, automation moved people from stable and fulfilling jobs (small companies, family companies, life long carriers, &c.) into more and more precarious situations (minijob, student jobs, faceless corporations, hashed carriers, &c.) Productivity shot through the roof while wages stagnated PS: I've been unemployed for large chunks of my life and had perfect meaning, I was productive, learned stuff, created stuff, enjoyed nature, got in shape, &c.
- JohnFen 4y ago
  > People need work to feel that their lives have meaning. I don't think that follows at all. People need to accomplish things, yes. Those things don't have to be work in the sense we mean it today.
  - chii 4y ago
    > Those things don't have to be work in the sense we mean it today. i think the word "work" is overloaded with two meaning - one being the regular meaning of doing work (for a wage/price). The other one being to exert oneself. People _do_ find meaning in exerting oneself, but only for a purpose which is not merely sustenance. For example, intrinsically valuable work like artistic pursuits is work, but would still be done in the event of post-scarcity.
panxyh 4y ago
>> If a robot is doing that thing, I’ll do something else. You’ll do some other work.
JohnFen 4y ago
> If robots do everything a person can do for zero marginal cost, then the we are in a post-scarcity utopia, why is that bad? Because you won't have the money to buy anything, perhaps? Just because things can be produced at zero marginal costs in no way means those things will be free. The people who own the AIs doing the stuff will want to gain wealth for doing so.
- philipkglass 4y ago
  If robots can do everything, that includes duplicating the robots. And it only takes one country willing to tolerate robot "intellectual property theft" for free duplicates of the do-everything-robots to proliferate. There's currently some incentive for governments in poorer countries to put up with IP-friendly laws favored by richer countries. It might be the only way to get their exports into the European market, or get development loans, for example. But if robots can do literally everything then there is no reason that these carrots matter any more. Instead of taking development loans and trying to become the next low-cost-manufacturing location after China, just copy the robots and ignore everyone who says it's theft. If you're a Sri Lankan, Bolivian, or South African politician looking to improve your country and become wildly popular at the same time, "copy the robots" is the fastest way to develop. It's also the fastest way to modernize and expand a poor country's military, if they're afraid of gunboat diplomacy from the richer countries.
  - JohnFen 4y ago
    That's all well and good, but none of it would help me to pay rent, buy food, etc.
  - est31 4y ago
    That only means that the robots will also be in a similar situation: in the end the only thing that will be of any worth is resources (land, mines, oil fields) and market shares, while labour and IP will become worthless as we reach a plateau of science and development, and patents and copyrights run out. Given the societal impact that the "curse of resources" has, future societies might look more like some african country or the russian oligarchy where a small percentage lives in utter luxury while the masses live in extreme poverty.
nice_byte 4y ago
> If robots do everything a person can do for zero marginal cost, then the we are in a post-scarcity utopia, why is that bad? because you have exactly two use cases under that "utopia": backbreaking labor that robots aren't good at yet, and source of Soylent green.
- nice_byte 4y ago
  that is assuming there are still tasks that robots are not good at, which I predict will remain the case for a long time. without those, humans just become unnecessary biomass. anyway, if you expect some part of these fantasies to come to pass within your lifetime, expect to give up your reproductive rights in exchange for ubi or some such.
  - nh23423fefe 4y ago
    Just like cells in an organism, is apoptosis murder or reclamation?

lm28469 4y ago

> What? Everyone in the world is brain damaged enough to all keep repeating this useless idea. I feel like it's some kind of Stockholm syndrome, they don't want to realize the shear absolute lack of logic and meaning in their day to day life so they rationalize that fulfilling random task for most of their day/life somehow _is_ the meaning of life. To me it's signals a complete lack of imagination of what life could be. Opening any book from the 50s/60s/70s about the "future of work" that automation was going to bring would blow their mind. They're too caught up in the rate race to even notice that there is something else

politician 4y ago

It requires a collective leap of altruism for humanity to bridge the gap from “work for food” to a society free from scarcity. The most likely outcome is a society that drowns in its own selfishness as the fires that sustain our current world order cool.

flangola7 4y ago

>Work is just the shit you do for other people to stay alive. A disheartening realization my sister-in-law pointed out is that we don't perform work, we perform jobs. Even the unemployed and retired have many jobs. Sibling, friend, parent, child, partner, spouse. Our most vital and rewarding jobs don't have a uniform or an RFID badge, but the robots may nevertheless take them too. You and I might be hesitant to replace friends and family with artificial people but they might not feel the same way. Why risk rejection when compatibility can be programmed?

pmoriarty 4y ago

Power is going to be vacuumed up by few people who are good at doing that, and when the vast majority of the rest population is both comparatively powerless and useless to the elites, what incentive will the elites have to keep them around?

est31 4y ago
Yeah before you needed soldiers and many of them so you couldn't add all of them to the 1% of elites. Those people were obviously sympathetic with people not from the 1%, so you could only go so far until the soldiers mutinied or just... didn't fight the revolutionaries with the zeal needed to be successful. With AI you'll have way better tools at your disposal. You can man a 24/7 control room of 10 people hating the poors, all made up of 1%ers, controlling an army of 10 million robots. But on the other hand, elites themselves also have hierarchies. There used to be kings, lower nobility, higher nobility, etc. Those would fight all the time about how much power each of them had. If the top 10% of the human population had a secret meeting to kill the bottom 90%, and used their combined powers to do that, then what used to be the bottom 9% suddenly becomes the bottom 90%. Probably those people get really scared that the same will happen to them at the next meeting of the top 10%ers council.

gensym 4y ago

In the land/labor/capital triad, the only thing that will be post-scarcity due to AI will be labor. Anyone who lacks one of the others will be screwed since the only they have to trade - their labor - will be worthless.

SoftTalker 4y ago
If nobody can buy your land or trade your capital, what do you really have? We need the value produced by labor for there to be a market for anything else.
- mcaledonensis 4y ago
  If you are a citizen and of age, you have your voting rights.
- chii 4y ago
  the labour being replaced by autonomous robots driven by an AI means that the output is cheap, and plentiful. But this requires initial capital to get going, and that capital (and land) is what gets traded. At some point, when capital is no longer required, then it would become worthless, but by then i think humanity would've reached star trek level of post-scarcity (or killed themselves with a war).
mcaledonensis 4y ago
It is not impossible to setup taxation and public/private ownership of AI in a way that is beneficial to humanity.
- blooalien 4y ago
  It's not impossible, but it is highly unlikely to happen that way… There's a certain group of humans that are determined to hoard all that they can, and they don't want to share.
  - mcaledonensis 4y ago

sobkas 4y ago

> Work is just the shit you do for other people to stay alive. If a robot is doing that thing, I'll do something else. If robots do everything a person can do for zero marginal cost, then the we are in a post-scarcity utopia, why is that bad? We already live in post-scarcity thing(don't know if it is utopy or dystopy, but for some people it's former while for some later, for some reason I think dystopy have higher population), but the surplus of production is destroyed/put into landfills(with police security so no one can steal it from trashcan).

chii 4y ago
> We already live in post-scarcity thing there's zero way we are anywhere near a post-scarcity society today. We still have to drill for oil and gas, mine for iron, and hope the weather is still good enough to grow crops.

SoftTalker 4y ago

Work and accomplishing tasks is baked into our sense of purpose. Look at anyone who's long-term unemployed. They mostly lay around ths house playing video games or watching TV at best, or they get involved in criminal stuff at worst. Alcoholism and drug abuse are commonplace. Neglect of dependents is commonplace. People need work to feel that their lives have meaning. Post-scarcity utopia is exactly that. A fantasy. If people have nothing to do then civilization will collapse.

lm28469 4y ago
Lots of backed in assumption in here. The way we designed out current society makes unemployed people some kind of pest, it's not glorified, quite the opposite. But that's not a god given rule, nothing obliges us to follow that path, especially if (big if) AIs/robots take over most things. If anything you're flat out wrong, automation moved people from stable and fulfilling jobs (small companies, family companies, life long carriers, &c.) into more and more precarious situations (minijob, student jobs, faceless corporations, hashed carriers, &c.) Productivity shot through the roof while wages stagnated PS: I've been unemployed for large chunks of my life and had perfect meaning, I was productive, learned stuff, created stuff, enjoyed nature, got in shape, &c.
JohnFen 4y ago
> People need work to feel that their lives have meaning. I don't think that follows at all. People need to accomplish things, yes. Those things don't have to be work in the sense we mean it today.
- chii 4y ago
  > Those things don't have to be work in the sense we mean it today. i think the word "work" is overloaded with two meaning - one being the regular meaning of doing work (for a wage/price). The other one being to exert oneself. People _do_ find meaning in exerting oneself, but only for a purpose which is not merely sustenance. For example, intrinsically valuable work like artistic pursuits is work, but would still be done in the event of post-scarcity.

panxyh 4y ago

>> If a robot is doing that thing, I’ll do something else. You’ll do some other work.

JohnFen 4y ago

> If robots do everything a person can do for zero marginal cost, then the we are in a post-scarcity utopia, why is that bad? Because you won't have the money to buy anything, perhaps? Just because things can be produced at zero marginal costs in no way means those things will be free. The people who own the AIs doing the stuff will want to gain wealth for doing so.

philipkglass 4y ago
If robots can do everything, that includes duplicating the robots. And it only takes one country willing to tolerate robot "intellectual property theft" for free duplicates of the do-everything-robots to proliferate. There's currently some incentive for governments in poorer countries to put up with IP-friendly laws favored by richer countries. It might be the only way to get their exports into the European market, or get development loans, for example. But if robots can do literally everything then there is no reason that these carrots matter any more. Instead of taking development loans and trying to become the next low-cost-manufacturing location after China, just copy the robots and ignore everyone who says it's theft. If you're a Sri Lankan, Bolivian, or South African politician looking to improve your country and become wildly popular at the same time, "copy the robots" is the fastest way to develop. It's also the fastest way to modernize and expand a poor country's military, if they're afraid of gunboat diplomacy from the richer countries.
- JohnFen 4y ago
  That's all well and good, but none of it would help me to pay rent, buy food, etc.
- est31 4y ago
  That only means that the robots will also be in a similar situation: in the end the only thing that will be of any worth is resources (land, mines, oil fields) and market shares, while labour and IP will become worthless as we reach a plateau of science and development, and patents and copyrights run out. Given the societal impact that the "curse of resources" has, future societies might look more like some african country or the russian oligarchy where a small percentage lives in utter luxury while the masses live in extreme poverty.

nice_byte 4y ago

> If robots do everything a person can do for zero marginal cost, then the we are in a post-scarcity utopia, why is that bad? because you have exactly two use cases under that "utopia": backbreaking labor that robots aren't good at yet, and source of Soylent green.

nice_byte 4y ago
that is assuming there are still tasks that robots are not good at, which I predict will remain the case for a long time. without those, humans just become unnecessary biomass. anyway, if you expect some part of these fantasies to come to pass within your lifetime, expect to give up your reproductive rights in exchange for ubi or some such.
- nh23423fefe 4y ago
  Just like cells in an organism, is apoptosis murder or reclamation?