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Toil for toil's sake is some Sisyphean bullshit. Our goal should absolutely be to eliminate the necessity of work. If you can't find reason to live in such a sc

Toil for toil's sake is some Sisyphean bullshit. Our goal should absolutely be to eliminate the necessity of work. If you can't find reason to live in such a scenario, you've whole-heartedly bought into Capital's propaganda, and frankly, lack imagination. You're always free to set your own goals, and pursue them as you see fit. Hell, look at the leisure rich: They're liberated from work already. Their lives don't seem particularly miserable.

vouaobrasil 3y ago
I have no objection to eliminating some toil, like working 9-5 in an office. That's indeed bullshit. And of course, I could find reasons to live. Going against AI would already be enough reason for me. My post was more subtle than that anyhow. I don't advocate work for work's sake, especially working FOR some worthless corporation. But swamping the world with AI-created things will also make most leisurely creative activities difficult for humans to do. So even purposes you create will be difficult to share with other people.
- DennisP 3y ago
  I create things to express my own feelings, for my own satisfaction in the act of creation. Nobody else can do that for me, including an AI. So far I just share with people I know, and AI won't make that more difficult.
  - vouaobrasil 3y ago
    It may not make it more difficult for you, but AI will make it MORE difficult for other people to even make friends. Friendship and even family bonds are partially dependent on needing other people, and with advanced AI and other technologies, we are approaching a world where we need less people all the time. AI also floods the world with a surplus of random content, which will make people less likely to appreciate what you share with them. Perhaps you are old enough to have developed a good network of people, which gives you some shielding against it, but for babies born today, they will have a much harder time developing such a network and they will not grow up right.
    - DennisP 3y ago
      The people I share with can already find plenty of better stuff online. So what? They're friends with me so they care about seeing what I've been working on, and what I have to say. I'm not sure what you mean by "needing other people." If you're talking about emotional need, I don't think AI really substitutes. If you mean pragmatic needs, then that's not what real friendships are based on.
    - soco 3y ago
      When I go to see an obscure band playing in a rundown club I go for being there, not for the quality of their riffs or for the acoustics of the space (which I expect both to be bad). This can't be replaced by a future AI as it cannot be replaced by the current radio playing in my car, this is the human part mentioned above.
- dkersten 3y ago
  I think it might actually be beneficial for artists, in the long run. Assuming that AI will remove the need to work for a living[1]. I recently saw a “modern art” exhibition and one of the things on display was quite literally a black square in a white wall. That’s it. AI could have produced that long ago. But presumably the artist, and at least some of the people viewing it, got something out of this as a means of expressing “something” (I don’t know what, I clearly didn’t “get it”). If AI liberates artists from having to make money from their art, then they can focus on expression and “art for arts sake” without having to worry about appealing to whoever is likely to pay them. Sure, the AI could create the same art, but it could create that black square too, long ago. That didn’t stop this particular artist. [1] I don’t think it will, automation has already improved productivity and production a thousand fold over the past 100 years, yet we still have to work just as hard while a handful of rich people are richer than ever before, with more personal wealth than sone nations. More likely, AI will make a handful of rich people even richer still leaving the rest of us in the dust, probably being put to work on meaningless grunt work — don’t want to waste valuable AI time on flipping burgers now do we!
  - OfSanguineFire 3y ago
    The black square may have been Malevich’s famous painting.[0] Even if you got nothing out of it, it has long since become part of the canon. A great deal of literature and later painting makes reference to it, so one benefits from seeing it in a museum and learning about its historical context regardless of what one thinks about the painting itself. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Square_(painting) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Square_(painting)
freedomben 3y ago
I tend to agree with you, but people like us need to face the fact that many people do live through work. I've seen it happen to a number of people where they are healthy, retire, and then their health goes downhill and they sometimes die. Depression rates can be terrible. If all we do for these people is say "you've whole-heartedly bought into Capital's propaganda, and frankly, lack imagination," we're going to have blood on our hands. I don't want to slow or halt the progress toward lack of scarcity, but we do need to figure this problem out and it won't be easy because millions of years of evolution have made us creatures who get satisfaction from accomplishing tasks that help us survive and thrive.
OfSanguineFire 3y ago
> Our goal should absolutely be to eliminate the necessity of work ... You've whole-heartedly bought into Capital's propaganda. It is not just capitalism that demands hard work but even some challenges to capitalism. I am again reminded of a bit of 1960s Maoist literature translated from Chinese into English that I once found in a Chinatown bookshop: in discussing the Peking Man fossil, it claimed that what set Man apart from his ape forebears was that he had the capacity to labor. Those who did not wish to dedicate their lives to labor, the book claimed, were reverting to primitive ways.
- OkayPhysicist 3y ago
  It's safe to say the average HN reader has been exposed to more Capitalist propaganda than ML/Maoist propaganda, but it is a good point. Harping on the virtue of work is a pretty common motif between authoritarian regimes of all manner of political ideology. It's an easy way to make people do what you want them to.

vouaobrasil 3y ago

I have no objection to eliminating some toil, like working 9-5 in an office. That's indeed bullshit. And of course, I could find reasons to live. Going against AI would already be enough reason for me. My post was more subtle than that anyhow. I don't advocate work for work's sake, especially working FOR some worthless corporation. But swamping the world with AI-created things will also make most leisurely creative activities difficult for humans to do. So even purposes you create will be difficult to share with other people.

DennisP 3y ago
I create things to express my own feelings, for my own satisfaction in the act of creation. Nobody else can do that for me, including an AI. So far I just share with people I know, and AI won't make that more difficult.
- vouaobrasil 3y ago
  It may not make it more difficult for you, but AI will make it MORE difficult for other people to even make friends. Friendship and even family bonds are partially dependent on needing other people, and with advanced AI and other technologies, we are approaching a world where we need less people all the time. AI also floods the world with a surplus of random content, which will make people less likely to appreciate what you share with them. Perhaps you are old enough to have developed a good network of people, which gives you some shielding against it, but for babies born today, they will have a much harder time developing such a network and they will not grow up right.
  - DennisP 3y ago
    The people I share with can already find plenty of better stuff online. So what? They're friends with me so they care about seeing what I've been working on, and what I have to say. I'm not sure what you mean by "needing other people." If you're talking about emotional need, I don't think AI really substitutes. If you mean pragmatic needs, then that's not what real friendships are based on.
  - soco 3y ago
    When I go to see an obscure band playing in a rundown club I go for being there, not for the quality of their riffs or for the acoustics of the space (which I expect both to be bad). This can't be replaced by a future AI as it cannot be replaced by the current radio playing in my car, this is the human part mentioned above.
dkersten 3y ago
I think it might actually be beneficial for artists, in the long run. Assuming that AI will remove the need to work for a living[1]. I recently saw a “modern art” exhibition and one of the things on display was quite literally a black square in a white wall. That’s it. AI could have produced that long ago. But presumably the artist, and at least some of the people viewing it, got something out of this as a means of expressing “something” (I don’t know what, I clearly didn’t “get it”). If AI liberates artists from having to make money from their art, then they can focus on expression and “art for arts sake” without having to worry about appealing to whoever is likely to pay them. Sure, the AI could create the same art, but it could create that black square too, long ago. That didn’t stop this particular artist. [1] I don’t think it will, automation has already improved productivity and production a thousand fold over the past 100 years, yet we still have to work just as hard while a handful of rich people are richer than ever before, with more personal wealth than sone nations. More likely, AI will make a handful of rich people even richer still leaving the rest of us in the dust, probably being put to work on meaningless grunt work — don’t want to waste valuable AI time on flipping burgers now do we!
- OfSanguineFire 3y ago
  The black square may have been Malevich’s famous painting.[0] Even if you got nothing out of it, it has long since become part of the canon. A great deal of literature and later painting makes reference to it, so one benefits from seeing it in a museum and learning about its historical context regardless of what one thinks about the painting itself. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Square_(painting) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Square_(painting)

freedomben 3y ago

I tend to agree with you, but people like us need to face the fact that many people do live through work. I've seen it happen to a number of people where they are healthy, retire, and then their health goes downhill and they sometimes die. Depression rates can be terrible. If all we do for these people is say "you've whole-heartedly bought into Capital's propaganda, and frankly, lack imagination," we're going to have blood on our hands. I don't want to slow or halt the progress toward lack of scarcity, but we do need to figure this problem out and it won't be easy because millions of years of evolution have made us creatures who get satisfaction from accomplishing tasks that help us survive and thrive.

OfSanguineFire 3y ago

> Our goal should absolutely be to eliminate the necessity of work ... You've whole-heartedly bought into Capital's propaganda. It is not just capitalism that demands hard work but even some challenges to capitalism. I am again reminded of a bit of 1960s Maoist literature translated from Chinese into English that I once found in a Chinatown bookshop: in discussing the Peking Man fossil, it claimed that what set Man apart from his ape forebears was that he had the capacity to labor. Those who did not wish to dedicate their lives to labor, the book claimed, were reverting to primitive ways.

OkayPhysicist 3y ago
It's safe to say the average HN reader has been exposed to more Capitalist propaganda than ML/Maoist propaganda, but it is a good point. Harping on the virtue of work is a pretty common motif between authoritarian regimes of all manner of political ideology. It's an easy way to make people do what you want them to.