4 ms·

Counterpoint: Work sucks. Of the billions of workers on the planet, the number of them who love their job and would truly be doing it even if they didn't need t

by BosunoB 4mo ago

Counterpoint: Work sucks. Of the billions of workers on the planet, the number of them who love their job and would truly be doing it even if they didn't need to in order to survive is probably in the low single digits. Hating work is good, wanting it to all be automated is good. It is a pro-human flourishing stance, whereas keeping the majority of humanity laboring in jobs they dislike just to survive is against human flourishing in favor of the status quo.

afavour 4mo ago
> Hating work is good, wanting it to all be automated is good. Not without a concrete answer for how we all continue to survive and thrive when our jobs are replaced. And that's the part the AI boosters are silent on, beyond vague notions of UBI.
- joquarky 4mo ago
  UBI is not a solution either, as it will inevitably fall into the same traps and favoritism as tax laws.
  - iAMkenough 4mo ago
    Agreed. Sam Altman’s vision for UBI is basically “bring back company towns.”
frotaur 4mo ago
I don't think many people disagree with this. The main problem is that labour has been what allows regular people to have negociating power with those who own most of the capital. People are worried that if they lose this leverage, nothing is stopping the few who have most of the capital to just disregard the needs of the masses.
- BosunoB 4mo ago
  Democracy is what allows regular people to have negotiating power vs the rich, and the majority of these battles are actually won through legislation, not union negotiation. I understand that regular people have lost faith in democracy, and that they think rich people control the world and make every major decision, but that just doesn't ring true to me. Democracy is more or less giving us what we vote for, we just vote for dumb things. Ultimately, I have faith that if political and economic circumstances change enough, we might actually vote for the right things.
  - goda90 4mo ago
    > Democracy is more or less giving us what we vote for, we just vote for dumb things. Education and media are controlled by the rich, and those heavily influence how people vote.
    - xeonmc 4mo ago
      Because democracy basically means, government, by the people, of the people, for the people. But the people are... [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QFgcqB8-AxE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QFgcqB8-AxE
  - guelo 4mo ago
    AI is helping to finish off the job of destroying democracy that the rich started. We are doomed.
    - cmrdporcupine 4mo ago
      We're not doomed. We're just between revolutions. It's impossible to predict when they happen, or their outcomes. The world may be worse at least for a while after them. Or they fail in general. But they happen and then all the people who were crowing about the inevitability of some existing order and now it embodies natural law and what not look really f*ckin stupid in retrospect. People believed in the divine right of kings with the same full earnestness of people on this forum who have think AI is just the outcropping of some transcendent mathematical telos.
- user34283 4mo ago
  I often hear people talk online about burning data centers to avoid some capitalist dystopia. It just seems incredibly pessimistic to me. Who wants civil unrest? The rich elite does not want this either. We will pay people. Capitalism is not set in stone when human labor is no longer essential for productivity and AI can handle planning that markets currently coordinate through capitalism.
  - BosunoB 4mo ago
    Exactly! The rich don't want to see mass starvation any more than the rest of us. We only permit homelessness and food insecurity now because of scarcity and a "just deserts" mentality where we blame people for their lot in life. When AI is doing the majority of labor, there will be no "just deserts" mentality, and there will be massive abundance.
    - hack1312 4mo ago
      This is plainly delusional. There already is abundance, global crop lands produce enough calories to feed twice the world’s population[0]. Greed is the reason for inequality and “AI” is not solving that. It is pure wishful utopian thinking to believe that there will be some massive AI-initiated abundance. [0] https://www.oneearth.org/half-the-worlds-food-never-feeds-people-in-america-its-far-worse/ https://www.oneearth.org/half-the-worlds-food-never-feeds-pe...
      - user34283 4mo ago
        It would seem to me that the main source of food insecurity is violent conflict rather than greed.
        saulpw 4mo ago
        The main source of famine is corruption. Ireland had enough food, but it was exported to rich people.
      - BosunoB 4mo ago
- card_zero 4mo ago
  I might disagree with it, unexpectedly, even though I'm very lazy and anti-work and would have agreed with it ten years ago. This isn't some they took our jobs stance, either. Thing is, you have this mythical beast, the "dark factory". This exists mainly as way to humiliate the west by suggesting that China is way more developed. One reason that it's unlikely to be substantially real is because of the failure of robotics to really replicate adaptable, self-repairing, sensitive, sensible humans in an industrial context. But two of those adjectives are technical, while the other two, adaptable and sensible, are to do with knowledge and creativity. I mean that it's an ugly fact that human creativity (thinking on your feet), and morality even (knowing what to do), is useful and necessary in the context of the most boring shitwork. Even on an assembly line, if you're expected to do some QA and accept ad-hoc instructions for different products. I don't want us to be diminished by having to do the shitwork, but I don't think AI can make it go away. Oh come on, why a downvote? I put some thought into this and all I get is a binary nah.
  - NoGravitas 4mo ago
    You're directionally right, anyway. There's no reason significantly advanced AI (likely to not be developed from LLMs but from some other path) can't completely replace a wide variety of human labor. But replacing human labor with machinery (i.e., capital) is not new, it's been going on for a couple centuries plus some. The thing that happens when you replace wage labor with capital is that the rate of profit (i.e., the ratio of profit to the amount of invested capital) tends to fall, which is a systemic threat to investment. The recurring tech and asset bubbles since the 1990s have each been inflated in an attempt to maintain rising levels of investment in the face of rising productivity and therefore falling profit. An economy of dark factories isn't useful under capitalism, because it produces goods which end up having no sale-value.
    - card_zero 4mo ago
      The Musk-esque theory is that robots can do all the drudgery for free, while the economy centers on humans being creative, which in this trope looks like an Elysium with singing and dancing and poetry and painting, and maybe togas. The core argument is that people don't want to be machines, and shouldn't do mechanical work, and that it's a shame if anybody feels compelled to work like a machine to survive. But then we have the job loss part, in which, because of automation, that person doesn't even have the option of working like a machine, and complains about it. However, I'm coming round to thinking that the vision of a continual symposium-party is wrong anyway. I think automation can't do all that much, and creativity is needed in even the most mundane and dreary contexts. This means automation is less disruptive that it's purported to be - but is still somewhat disruptive - and the change in the nature of jobs is less of a shift to creativity - but is still a small shift to creativity. The jobs aren't delightful, people are still needed in factories, and there are no togas involved. This is my dreary insight.
Jtarii 4mo ago
Humans will not flourish if you remove their jobs, they will become violent criminals because they will have nothing else to fill their days and no purpose in their community. People may hate their job, but they will hate being unemployed way more.
- embracethenoid 4mo ago
  This is why rich inheritors usually become violent criminals. No jobs.
  - Jtarii 4mo ago
    Ah yes, the children of the ultra wealthy, famously mentally stable individuals.
- corky_buchek 4mo ago
  This is an incredibly pessimistic view of humanity.
  - logicchains 4mo ago
    It's an informed view for anyone who's spent time around multi-generational welfare-dependent households. Regardless of race or creed, the majority descend into substance abuse and domestic violence.
  - Jtarii 4mo ago
    It is extremely naive to think that if remove a fundamental pillar of human society everything else will just continue on as if nothing happened.
- goda90 4mo ago
  People can find purpose without jobs. But they can't find purpose if they are struggling to survive. If jobs are the only legal path to survival, and there are no jobs, then people will be driven to "crime" to survive.
booleandilemma 4mo ago
Work sucks, but try paying bills without working. Try buying food.
deaton 4mo ago
Its fine to hate work, whatever. But you wouldn't quit your job today, so why would you want to be replaced by an AI today?
UtopiaPunk 4mo ago
I would humor this stance if we were also actively building a new economic arrangement that was not capitalism. Automating away the drudgery or dangerous parts of life seems inherently good. But I would argue that AI has not been awesome at that, really. There are certainly cases where it has lessened tiresome work, but there are just as many cases where AI is worsening the pleasant parts of life. And I don't know anyone who has experienced shorter work weeks because AI is doing stuff for them. Under capitalism, AI is converting labor power of ordinary people to "property" owned by the owning class. It is making the rich richer. It doesn't really improve my state of being.
lbrito 4mo ago
That's not the future envisioned by AI pushers.
ironman1478 4mo ago
It's highly cynical, but people need to work. It provides structure and most people don't do well with unstructured time. Also, I find it odd that of all the automation being attempted with LLMs, we're automating the ones that actually are interesting, not the ones that are dangerous or truly rote, yet highly mechanical.
rf15 4mo ago
> Hating work is good, wanting it to all be automated is good. It's this "path of least resistance life style" that ruins a lot in our society. Yes, being wasteful is bad, but not appreciating the work is also bad.
OptionOfT 4mo ago
While that may be true, all the automation that's happening is not making people work less. Except by firing them, which is absolutely devastating, especially in places with 0 social protection like the USA. And for other people the workload has actually increased because we're being pushed left and right to use AI to go FASTER, yet over and over we see proof that we need to validate EVERYTHING. Automation is only useful if we use part of our brain to do something ELSE. Yet as a Software Engineer I cannot do that (full disclosure: I don't mind, I like to engineer and code). But from a managerial point of view there is this aura of 'AI will solve all our problems', whereas what we're seeing is a deluge of slop where the people producing the slop THINK they're helping, yet they are parasitizing on the time of the people who validate the PRs.
- BosunoB 4mo ago
  Yeah but the tech doesn't end here. Sure, it doesn't make anybody particularly happy that the tech started here. It's kind of a bummer to automate creative labor that gets social esteem so early on. But that's not the point. Where the tech ends is human-level intelligence that can do any task as well as a human and more cheaply.
dodu_ 4mo ago
Yeah surely the workers will be the ones reaping the downstream benefits of it right... right? Anakin stare
fmkamchatka 4mo ago
I’m not sure work sucks (at least as a general statement). Work is a way to be useful in the society and feeling useful is valuable for our wellbeing. I don’t think people who stop working and spend their days laying on the beach feel better.

by BosunoB 4mo ago

afavour 4mo ago

> Hating work is good, wanting it to all be automated is good. Not without a concrete answer for how we all continue to survive and thrive when our jobs are replaced. And that's the part the AI boosters are silent on, beyond vague notions of UBI.

joquarky 4mo ago
UBI is not a solution either, as it will inevitably fall into the same traps and favoritism as tax laws.
- iAMkenough 4mo ago
  Agreed. Sam Altman’s vision for UBI is basically “bring back company towns.”

frotaur 4mo ago

I don't think many people disagree with this. The main problem is that labour has been what allows regular people to have negociating power with those who own most of the capital. People are worried that if they lose this leverage, nothing is stopping the few who have most of the capital to just disregard the needs of the masses.

BosunoB 4mo ago
Democracy is what allows regular people to have negotiating power vs the rich, and the majority of these battles are actually won through legislation, not union negotiation. I understand that regular people have lost faith in democracy, and that they think rich people control the world and make every major decision, but that just doesn't ring true to me. Democracy is more or less giving us what we vote for, we just vote for dumb things. Ultimately, I have faith that if political and economic circumstances change enough, we might actually vote for the right things.
- goda90 4mo ago
  > Democracy is more or less giving us what we vote for, we just vote for dumb things. Education and media are controlled by the rich, and those heavily influence how people vote.
  - xeonmc 4mo ago
    Because democracy basically means, government, by the people, of the people, for the people. But the people are... [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QFgcqB8-AxE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QFgcqB8-AxE
- guelo 4mo ago
  AI is helping to finish off the job of destroying democracy that the rich started. We are doomed.
  - cmrdporcupine 4mo ago
    We're not doomed. We're just between revolutions. It's impossible to predict when they happen, or their outcomes. The world may be worse at least for a while after them. Or they fail in general. But they happen and then all the people who were crowing about the inevitability of some existing order and now it embodies natural law and what not look really f*ckin stupid in retrospect. People believed in the divine right of kings with the same full earnestness of people on this forum who have think AI is just the outcropping of some transcendent mathematical telos.
user34283 4mo ago
I often hear people talk online about burning data centers to avoid some capitalist dystopia. It just seems incredibly pessimistic to me. Who wants civil unrest? The rich elite does not want this either. We will pay people. Capitalism is not set in stone when human labor is no longer essential for productivity and AI can handle planning that markets currently coordinate through capitalism.
- BosunoB 4mo ago
  Exactly! The rich don't want to see mass starvation any more than the rest of us. We only permit homelessness and food insecurity now because of scarcity and a "just deserts" mentality where we blame people for their lot in life. When AI is doing the majority of labor, there will be no "just deserts" mentality, and there will be massive abundance.
  - hack1312 4mo ago
    This is plainly delusional. There already is abundance, global crop lands produce enough calories to feed twice the world’s population[0]. Greed is the reason for inequality and “AI” is not solving that. It is pure wishful utopian thinking to believe that there will be some massive AI-initiated abundance. [0] https://www.oneearth.org/half-the-worlds-food-never-feeds-people-in-america-its-far-worse/ https://www.oneearth.org/half-the-worlds-food-never-feeds-pe...
    - user34283 4mo ago
      It would seem to me that the main source of food insecurity is violent conflict rather than greed.
      - saulpw 4mo ago
        The main source of famine is corruption. Ireland had enough food, but it was exported to rich people.
    - BosunoB 4mo ago
card_zero 4mo ago
I might disagree with it, unexpectedly, even though I'm very lazy and anti-work and would have agreed with it ten years ago. This isn't some they took our jobs stance, either. Thing is, you have this mythical beast, the "dark factory". This exists mainly as way to humiliate the west by suggesting that China is way more developed. One reason that it's unlikely to be substantially real is because of the failure of robotics to really replicate adaptable, self-repairing, sensitive, sensible humans in an industrial context. But two of those adjectives are technical, while the other two, adaptable and sensible, are to do with knowledge and creativity. I mean that it's an ugly fact that human creativity (thinking on your feet), and morality even (knowing what to do), is useful and necessary in the context of the most boring shitwork. Even on an assembly line, if you're expected to do some QA and accept ad-hoc instructions for different products. I don't want us to be diminished by having to do the shitwork, but I don't think AI can make it go away. Oh come on, why a downvote? I put some thought into this and all I get is a binary nah.
- NoGravitas 4mo ago
  You're directionally right, anyway. There's no reason significantly advanced AI (likely to not be developed from LLMs but from some other path) can't completely replace a wide variety of human labor. But replacing human labor with machinery (i.e., capital) is not new, it's been going on for a couple centuries plus some. The thing that happens when you replace wage labor with capital is that the rate of profit (i.e., the ratio of profit to the amount of invested capital) tends to fall, which is a systemic threat to investment. The recurring tech and asset bubbles since the 1990s have each been inflated in an attempt to maintain rising levels of investment in the face of rising productivity and therefore falling profit. An economy of dark factories isn't useful under capitalism, because it produces goods which end up having no sale-value.
  - card_zero 4mo ago
    The Musk-esque theory is that robots can do all the drudgery for free, while the economy centers on humans being creative, which in this trope looks like an Elysium with singing and dancing and poetry and painting, and maybe togas. The core argument is that people don't want to be machines, and shouldn't do mechanical work, and that it's a shame if anybody feels compelled to work like a machine to survive. But then we have the job loss part, in which, because of automation, that person doesn't even have the option of working like a machine, and complains about it. However, I'm coming round to thinking that the vision of a continual symposium-party is wrong anyway. I think automation can't do all that much, and creativity is needed in even the most mundane and dreary contexts. This means automation is less disruptive that it's purported to be - but is still somewhat disruptive - and the change in the nature of jobs is less of a shift to creativity - but is still a small shift to creativity. The jobs aren't delightful, people are still needed in factories, and there are no togas involved. This is my dreary insight.

Jtarii 4mo ago

Humans will not flourish if you remove their jobs, they will become violent criminals because they will have nothing else to fill their days and no purpose in their community. People may hate their job, but they will hate being unemployed way more.

embracethenoid 4mo ago
This is why rich inheritors usually become violent criminals. No jobs.
- Jtarii 4mo ago
  Ah yes, the children of the ultra wealthy, famously mentally stable individuals.
corky_buchek 4mo ago
This is an incredibly pessimistic view of humanity.
- logicchains 4mo ago
  It's an informed view for anyone who's spent time around multi-generational welfare-dependent households. Regardless of race or creed, the majority descend into substance abuse and domestic violence.
- Jtarii 4mo ago
  It is extremely naive to think that if remove a fundamental pillar of human society everything else will just continue on as if nothing happened.
goda90 4mo ago
People can find purpose without jobs. But they can't find purpose if they are struggling to survive. If jobs are the only legal path to survival, and there are no jobs, then people will be driven to "crime" to survive.

booleandilemma 4mo ago

Work sucks, but try paying bills without working. Try buying food.

deaton 4mo ago

Its fine to hate work, whatever. But you wouldn't quit your job today, so why would you want to be replaced by an AI today?

UtopiaPunk 4mo ago

I would humor this stance if we were also actively building a new economic arrangement that was not capitalism. Automating away the drudgery or dangerous parts of life seems inherently good. But I would argue that AI has not been awesome at that, really. There are certainly cases where it has lessened tiresome work, but there are just as many cases where AI is worsening the pleasant parts of life. And I don't know anyone who has experienced shorter work weeks because AI is doing stuff for them. Under capitalism, AI is converting labor power of ordinary people to "property" owned by the owning class. It is making the rich richer. It doesn't really improve my state of being.

lbrito 4mo ago

That's not the future envisioned by AI pushers.

ironman1478 4mo ago

It's highly cynical, but people need to work. It provides structure and most people don't do well with unstructured time. Also, I find it odd that of all the automation being attempted with LLMs, we're automating the ones that actually are interesting, not the ones that are dangerous or truly rote, yet highly mechanical.

rf15 4mo ago

> Hating work is good, wanting it to all be automated is good. It's this "path of least resistance life style" that ruins a lot in our society. Yes, being wasteful is bad, but not appreciating the work is also bad.

OptionOfT 4mo ago

While that may be true, all the automation that's happening is not making people work less. Except by firing them, which is absolutely devastating, especially in places with 0 social protection like the USA. And for other people the workload has actually increased because we're being pushed left and right to use AI to go FASTER, yet over and over we see proof that we need to validate EVERYTHING. Automation is only useful if we use part of our brain to do something ELSE. Yet as a Software Engineer I cannot do that (full disclosure: I don't mind, I like to engineer and code). But from a managerial point of view there is this aura of 'AI will solve all our problems', whereas what we're seeing is a deluge of slop where the people producing the slop THINK they're helping, yet they are parasitizing on the time of the people who validate the PRs.

BosunoB 4mo ago
Yeah but the tech doesn't end here. Sure, it doesn't make anybody particularly happy that the tech started here. It's kind of a bummer to automate creative labor that gets social esteem so early on. But that's not the point. Where the tech ends is human-level intelligence that can do any task as well as a human and more cheaply.

dodu_ 4mo ago

Yeah surely the workers will be the ones reaping the downstream benefits of it right... right? Anakin stare

fmkamchatka 4mo ago

I’m not sure work sucks (at least as a general statement). Work is a way to be useful in the society and feeling useful is valuable for our wellbeing. I don’t think people who stop working and spend their days laying on the beach feel better.