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So your position is that people who have free time mostly do awful things and your support for this position is like... a misquoted aphorism from the bible ("id

by advael 2y ago

So your position is that people who have free time mostly do awful things and your support for this position is like... a misquoted aphorism from the bible ("idle hands are the devil's workshop")? I don't find that particularly compelling at all. People find things to do with their time when they don't have external pressure on them. Most of those things are "useless" but also pretty harmless, and make them happy. Often people spend their free time building community with other people, which can often be valuable to others as well. Sometimes they do stuff like discover laws of physics or write novels. To claim that there is some great evil that comes from merely giving people more leisure time is an extraordinary claim that to me seems to lack even a modicum of evidence. Sure, some people do harmful things and we should stop them from doing those things. To attribute this to people being able to pursue their own interests is not even wrong, it's completely incoherent

WheelsAtLarge 2y ago
There is no absolute proof of how people will behave. People are just too inconsistent from moment to moment. But we can get an idea from past activities. The COVID lockdown was a small view into people's behavior when they have too much idle time. I remember riots, protests, and crimes, to name a few, and that was a small amount of time. Also, when do people start to get into trouble? When they have too much time. It does have to be everyone, not even the majority, for it to be a huge problem. Even you talk about it as a "useless" use of time. It may be great for the individual at the given moment. A dopamine hit always feels good. But it's not great for society. How is that a plus for the future? Thousands of years of societal evolution just to have people figure out what to stream next. Boy, AI will lead to a great future. Happy and fruitful times are on their way. :-( AI's future is all speculation. There's no way to know until it happens but I don't see it as a plus.
- advael 2y ago
  If we purport that human labor has no economic value, people being useless in their idleness has no bearing on the future. Also, the COVID pandemic was not people having free time, it was people being ordered to stay at home, many people being excluded from this due to being "essential workers", society doing damn near nothing to adjust to this state of affairs and thus keeping people in the "normal", stressful state of having to labor to live, and also in fear of a deadly disease, and often socially isolated and prevented from pursuing many of their interests. This seems like a poor comparison. If your experience of the global pandemic was just "I had a bunch more free time" it seems like you're already of the subset of the population experiencing something closer to the post-scarcity reality that all possible valuable human labor being cheaper to automate could be, and I assume you weren't doing crimes or whatever, right?

by advael 2y ago

WheelsAtLarge 2y ago

There is no absolute proof of how people will behave. People are just too inconsistent from moment to moment. But we can get an idea from past activities. The COVID lockdown was a small view into people's behavior when they have too much idle time. I remember riots, protests, and crimes, to name a few, and that was a small amount of time. Also, when do people start to get into trouble? When they have too much time. It does have to be everyone, not even the majority, for it to be a huge problem. Even you talk about it as a "useless" use of time. It may be great for the individual at the given moment. A dopamine hit always feels good. But it's not great for society. How is that a plus for the future? Thousands of years of societal evolution just to have people figure out what to stream next. Boy, AI will lead to a great future. Happy and fruitful times are on their way. :-( AI's future is all speculation. There's no way to know until it happens but I don't see it as a plus.

advael 2y ago
If we purport that human labor has no economic value, people being useless in their idleness has no bearing on the future. Also, the COVID pandemic was not people having free time, it was people being ordered to stay at home, many people being excluded from this due to being "essential workers", society doing damn near nothing to adjust to this state of affairs and thus keeping people in the "normal", stressful state of having to labor to live, and also in fear of a deadly disease, and often socially isolated and prevented from pursuing many of their interests. This seems like a poor comparison. If your experience of the global pandemic was just "I had a bunch more free time" it seems like you're already of the subset of the population experiencing something closer to the post-scarcity reality that all possible valuable human labor being cheaper to automate could be, and I assume you weren't doing crimes or whatever, right?