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this whole blog post is basically "people need jobs to be happy, so we should design our society such that they need jobs" not only is the premise wrong, but f

this whole blog post is basically "people need jobs to be happy, so we should design our society such that they need jobs" not only is the premise wrong, but forcing people to work is not a good or ethical way to address this problem most people like the social aspect of work, but not being beholden to their boss we can give people meaning, community, culture, growth, without relying on employment and money we can do better than this

esafak 5mo ago
> we can give people meaning, community, culture, growth, without relying on employment and money What's your proposal if not traditional work? The realistic outcome I see is shifting labor to unautomatable sectors like hospitality. That will keep people employed, but unhappy as they increasingly find themselves unable to find jobs they enjoy, or at comparable levels of income. edit: I realize many people are unhappy with their jobs now, but by dint of labor, they can improve their lot. I am lamenting the closing of this window.
- harimau777 5mo ago
  A couple of options off the top of my head: art, research, athletics, the humanities
  - jjkaczor 5mo ago
    AI is already coming for "art" and "research" - by "slop metrics" it's already there for "art".
    - sph 5mo ago
      It's coming for the type of industrialised, commoditized art. Then there's art where human touch is the crucial ingredients. The problem is that it doesn't sell as well, but that has never stopped any starving artist from creating.
    - mnbpdx 4mo ago
      If a computer being better than people at a thing made it not satisfying to do, then no one would enjoy doing anything AI/computers are already better than us at doing. IOW why do people still love playing chess I love playing the piano, but my skill is pretty low. If AI becomes better than me at piano, that's just one other person among millions who are better than me at piano; I couldn't care less. meaning/satisfaction != advancing the absolute edges of human ability if you have to be the best to be happy you're missing the point
- wiseowise 5mo ago
  Milking unicorns.
- petsfed 5mo ago
  Or maybe the problem is that exchanging labor for scarce necessities only makes sense when labor itself is scarce.
  - esafak 5mo ago
    We all see the incipient decoupling of labor from capital, while still having bills to pay. We are at the stage where we need to trial solutions, like a Pigouvian tax.
- pessimizer 5mo ago
  The vast majority of people do not work jobs that they enjoy, that is a middle-class indulgence and ideal that they don't even live up to; almost all their literature is about why they should be enjoying things that they don't or how to discover the things that they might enjoy, and they stuff themselves with drugs to make themselves pay attention and not want to die. And that's the top 15% of the population. The rest are not romanticizing digging ditches, scraping the dead skin off people's feet, or putting catheters up senior citizens. Your "realistic" scenario is how 95% of the world lives already. Getting meaning, community, culture, and "growth" from your job is middle-class religion, and they're constantly having crises of faith. The default state is to find these things in something other than serving people in order to eat.
hexator 5mo ago
> not only is the premise wrong The blog post offers several studies as evidence, where's yours?
- foltik 5mo ago
  A study obviously can’t prove that people need jobs to be happy. If you can so much as imagine a society organized around some other source of happiness, there’s your evidence by counterexample.
  - lurk2 5mo ago
    I have no opinion either way but this doesn’t follow. I can imagine a world where people don’t need oxygen to breathe but they still do. If we say people need oxygen, the argument is obviously about the world such as it is rather than the world as it could hypothetically be.
    - pessimizer 5mo ago
      This is untrue. You cannot imagine a world where people, without changing the definition of people, don't need oxygen to breathe. "they still do" is just begging the question. Plenty of people live without working. We're ruled by people who don't work.
      - lurk2 5mo ago
        You’re right that my reasoning was off. I don’t think it helps the point OP was trying to make. The argument being made in favor of labor isn’t “The only way for someone to be happy is to have a job” but instead “The majority of people will be unhappy without an occupation,” which is testable. The existence of people who are happy without any sort of structured, purposeful activity would not invalidate that the majority of people may well need structured, purposeful activity in order to feel fulfilled. If you tested the claim it wouldn’t tell you about human nature, because it’s possible (and I think likely) that most people are simply conditioned to believe they need purposeful work to be fulfilled, so you could just as well argue that if society were to be radically re-engineered, it would be worthwhile to re-engineer it at the psychological level (such that no one felt the need to work), rather than the economic level (such that work was made available to everyone). > We're ruled by people who don't work. I don’t have any data to support this but I suspect the majority of those people that we would characterize as happy are still engaged in an occupation (not a “job” as such, but purposeful work that goes beyond mere leisure). I’ve seen dozens of well-to-do retired boomers who waste away on Twitter or YouTube and don’t seem to do much of anything anymore, which is what I’m guessing is the behavior you’re imagining when you talk about oligarchs not working, but I don’t see much evidence that the oligarchs are like that; most that I can think of have made no indication that they will ever retire. Now, granted, work looks a lot different if you’re Warren Buffett, but what we’re looking at is not the social benefit of work as such but the impact of structured, purposeful activity on an individual’s psychological sense of wellbeing. In that sense, I think it’s unlikely that these people would disprove the premise.
roxolotl 5mo ago
So there’s one reference to happy, investor happiness. There’s 4 to meaning though. I don’t disagree with you but you’re also missing the scarier point that economic collapse will come before the meaning even is missed. This article ideally should have been two. One about how a consumer economy without consumers cannot be an economy. Another about what comes next.
rectang 5mo ago
> people need jobs to be happy The happiness of the aristocracy depends on the spectacle of miserable workers performing humiliating tasks.
- fmbb 5mo ago
  Solution: take turns every other year.
yyyk 5mo ago
The problem is that he relies on a dubious Acemoglu estimate, without realizing that at best it's temporary. AI will be better than humans in doing tasks (the qualifiers don't matter in the aggregate). Any jobs then would be bullshit jobs, and everyone will know it.
- hunterpayne 5mo ago
  LMs are literally trained on Reddit. The idea they are "super-intelligent" is anthropomorphism and marketing. So far no independent research has seen AI be better at anything than humans. And that's unlikely to change with larger NNs.
  - yyyk 5mo ago
    If they're good enough at useful tasks and cheaper than any human, the economic and political effect is the same regardless of whether they are 'intelligent' or 'pretend-to-be-intelligent'. The philosophical debate does not change the practical effect.
mrtesthah 5mo ago
https://aeon.co/essays/what-if-jobs-are-not-the-solution-but-the-problem https://aeon.co/essays/what-if-jobs-are-not-the-solution-but...
- spongebobstoes 5mo ago
  this essay is asking the right questions
NoboruWataya 5mo ago
We would all love to move to a society where we don't have to work for others to survive, but our current system is fundamentally not set up to handle this situation. Capitalism is a useful system for employing scarce resources productively (most of the time) but it doesn't really have an answer for a post-scarcity world. If technology is developed to allow us to end scarcity, instead of everyone having enough, we will end up in a situation where the owners of that technology end up with far, far more than enough while the large majority of people who do not have anything to offer those owners will starve. That sounds dystopian (and it is) but I don't see how we avoid that fate with our current economic system.
9rx 5mo ago
> most people like the social aspect of work, but not being beholden to their boss From what I see out there "being beholden to the boss" is the social aspect people like most. It is what gives the work purpose; knowing that you are pleasing someone else. Some are quite capable of being their own boss, but the people who can actually sustain that long term seem few and far between. It seems that it becomes easy to spiral into a pit of depression when there is no clear feedback in the value being created. Having to regularly deal with another person is not always desirable but having to regularly deal with another person also forces the feedback loop to occur.
some_random 5mo ago
Star Trek isn't real life, when human labor stops being valuable the humans who's labor was previously vital will be at best left to rot in squalor.
- siriusastrebe 5mo ago
  A generation of people left behind. The birthrates will continue falling.
  - balamatom 5mo ago
    The bitrates, on the other hand...
- deaton 5mo ago
  Couldn't have said it better myself. The only reason we are worth keeping around is because what we do is necessary to keep the machine running. The idea that the AI singularity would lead to infinite free stuff for everyone is ridiculous.
- FuriouslyAdrift 5mo ago
  The Expanse would be an apt sci-fi example where almost no labor is needed and everyone survives on a bare minimum UBI unless they want to risk it all and go into space.
- forgetfulness 5mo ago
  For some reason programmers start thinking that we'll transition away from a whole world of societies built around the concept of individual ownership, i.e. your landlord charging you rent, company owners owning the company and the resulting product and paying you what they deem the work you own is worth, and move towards something like communism, all because people working in IT or marketing departments are having a hard time. I'm sorry but us programmers didn't invent capitalism, and it wasn't our consent under the condition of having a good run under it what kept it in place.
  - 5mo ago
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aleqs 5mo ago
Yeah, people need a creative output, not just for creativity sake but something that feels productive/constructive and beneficial to them and their society/community. Open source is an example of such work, and amazing things have been achieved - arguably far more impressive and useful than any private tech company has achieved ( and arguably more than all for-profit tech companies combined). We should focus on expanding the open source cooperative model to all other areas of society/productivity. With modern technology, knowledge availability, and AI, I don't see why people couldn't organize at the grassroots level and build/solve real problems their local (or global) communities may be facing. I really don't see why we need all of the VCs, marketers and MBAs... No offense to anyone but the typical SV tech company structure and operations just don't even seem efficient... much of the focus is on marketing/manipulation, enshitification, dark patterns and other dishonest and ultimately counter-productive bullshit. We should be able to organize and build open/cooperative alternatives to SV shitware (and not just software) and we should be able to outcompete the tech shittocracy.. simply because it's actually terribly shitty and inneficient.
- balamatom 5mo ago
  > I don't see why people couldn't organize at the grassroots level and build/solve real problems their local (or global) communities may be facing. Usually it's because when they do, their de facto owner - "the state" - goes after them with guns and trained sadists. >I really don't see why we need all of the VCs, marketers and MBAs... No offense to anyone but the typical SV tech company structure and operations just don't even seem efficient... much of the focus is on marketing/manipulation, enshitification, dark patterns and other dishonest and ultimately counter-productive bullshit. That's called value creation: manipulating human populations to perceive certain arrangements of matter (or of notions) as "valuable", i.e. that those forms have some inherent quality which legitimately causes individual volition to subject itself to outside command for the sake of the given arrangement.
- baddash 4mo ago
  [flagged]
bayarearefugee 5mo ago
> we can do better than this In theory we can do better than this, in practice we can't. 40% of the people in the US would rather starve to death themselves than live in a world where people they hate for their skin color get anything without toiling for it.
- troosevelt 5mo ago
  I appreciate that there is a significant chunk of people that are like this, but I think if you really believe the 40% number or anything like it, you're giving yourself a false worldview. The majority of people aren't racist nor do they have a problem with government helping them out. What was happening (are you referencing 2024?) in 2024 and today was a government saying the economy was fine when it is not. When that happens, people are going to pick the person that isn't in power, who says they are going to fix it, even if they aren't. "It's the economy stupid". People care about their own well-being above pretty much everything else most of the time. I don't think putting this on racism or anything else (though it is a smaller factor) helps, it's just rhetoric. 40% of the people in the US aren't dedicateed racists, they are, however, in working groups that the government has ignored for decades.
  - amanaplanacanal 5mo ago
    So do you expect Republicans to be thrown out of office en masse in the upcoming election? I personally expect plenty of them to get reelected even if they claim that everything is just fine.
    - troosevelt 5mo ago
      I think we're gonna see some def Democratic gains because the economy is shit and that's how voting always happens. The only argument I was making is it's no where near 40% of people that are voting for somebody cause they're racist. If you believe that then you're not going to see the world accurately. It's not how people work. But it goes back to my main point, Dem gains won't be what they should be because politics are a very vague and murky thing and people make all kinds of justifications for why they vote for their person. See the stat where most people rate Congress poorly but their Congressperson highly. It's not racism, it's that politics are inherently pretty stupid.
autoexec 5mo ago
> we can give people meaning, community, culture, growth, without relying on employment and money I agree, but those people will still need to eat and pay rent so I guess they're stuck either working or dying. People will always find something to do with themselves. You don't need to encourage people to explore their own passions much when they're able to do it. The need for jobs isn't really an issue as much as the need for money is.
petra 5mo ago
Maybe people don't need jobs to be happy. But it's a big change, and a better way to go about it, instead of huge layoffs is:reduce the hours of work gradually and equally. And possibly create some social infrastructure in the background, to fullfil the social roles of work.
kqp 5mo ago
I agree in theory, but this is so extremely far from the US political and social system that I think no nation has ever changed so much without being overthrown. So unless you’re talking about plans for a post-US world, this idea will always be theoretical and not how “the world” works.
- hunterpayne 5mo ago
  "a post-US world" I see, so you like large scale warfare then. Did you run out of WWII docs and want some more history for content?
  - checker 5mo ago
    Parent didn't say they liked it; I'm reading it as an expression of concern (that I share).
- stratos123 5mo ago
  I'm not sure it's that far out of the Overton window. US already managed to do some small-scale UBI trials, after all. Maybe one day it can do a countrywide trial.
  - hunterpayne 5mo ago
    No it hasn't. To actually try it requires giving to a large enough population that it can impact prices and inflation. Also, every time this has ever been tried it ended in atrocity. Lookup "War communism" to see what happened. Money literally predates civilization. The first writing we have are sales invoices.
kalleboo 5mo ago
The solution is The Matrix. The "real world" is just computers/AIs running everything in a pointless loop. Humans aren't "batteries" (that never even made sense to begin with) but instead are living their happy lives in the simulation to provide something to simulate investment and shareholder value. It's dumb, but it still seems more plausible than people accepting an overnight switch into the "space communism" of nobody needing to work. Everyone is too invested in their own spot in the hierarchy.
- cestith 5mo ago
  The original idea I think was they were biological components in a digital/biological computer complex. The Matrix sets up scenarios, and the human brains interact with them in human ways which are sometimes of use to the machines. Meanwhile, the machines see all of it and can monitor for problem humans. ISTR this was tossed as too intellectual for an action movie. Another option to either The Matrix or Star Trek is Idiocracy, only there’s an elite group of humans and AI in charge over the deteriorating masses. Let’s not count out The Hunger Games or Elysium.
mrdependable 5mo ago
You are ignoring the part where human labor is the leverage required for democracy to work.
- spongebobstoes 5mo ago
  I don't think it is required, democracies aren't designed that way not everyone in charge is a cartoon villain
  - vinyl7 5mo ago
    Most are...it's pretty much required to be a psychopath to climb the ladder to the top
- jpttsn 5mo ago
  This same point was also made clumsily in the OP; I’m very unconvinced. The obvious question marks in that theory: Lots of human labor happens in nondemocratic polities; slave-owning/repressive societies create lots of labor. Democracy historically doesn’t advance in lockstep with labor; it’s arisen with many contingencies. The model (English Parliament) seems founded on concerns with right of some wealthy barons v. Kings. Traditional common sense alternative is that military victory goes to people with largest army, so voting saves time. That’s been debatably less relevant with deadlier weapons, so democracy could be cooked.
xg15 5mo ago
> "people need jobs to be happy, so we should design our society such that they need jobs" No, this is not what the article said. It's more "people need jobs to have any kind of leverage in society" which is something different.
- philipkglass 5mo ago
  I don't think that "people need jobs to have any kind of leverage in society" is actually true, though. Retired people without jobs are (in-)famously known to be politically powerful, both regarding elections and regarding local political questions apart from elections (like city planning commission decisions).
  - Root_Denied 5mo ago
    Their leverage is a result of having the time to be involved in politics, which is itself a result of working for decades to build up to the point that they could retire. They're an end result of the system, not an exception to it.
    - xg15 5mo ago
      Not just the time, but also probably having been built up the expertise, social connections, reputation and wealth to be able to be elected on the council in the first place.
  - 1270018080 5mo ago
    The jobs they worked turned into capital which is where their leverage comes from. So it's still applies.
- asdfman123 5mo ago
  To be fair they argued both. Jobs suck but we need to feel useful to other human beings. Jobs (either paid or volunteer jobs) are the only ways we consistently contribute. Like maybe instead of making requirements docs you could pivot to counselling at risk youth... but AI is rapidly improving at that, too.
dgellow 5mo ago
Assuming that’s true and AI is part of the solution, are you implying we should expect the AI overlords to create such a system? That will never happen. They have literally no incentives to decommodify the economy it’s what gives them power
omcgrann 5mo ago
This isn't what the piece argues. It doesn't claim people need jobs to be happy, and the word "happy" doesn't appear in it. The argument is structural: when capital depends on labor, labor has political, economic, and democratic leverage. When that dependency ends, the leverage ends with it. Whether people find meaning in work or outside of it is a separate question the piece doesn't take a position on, because it's not relevant to the point being made. The question isn't whether we can give people meaning without employment (I would argue that most of us find most of our meaning outside of work), but who has bargaining power in a system where human economic participation is unnecessary.
- thechao 5mo ago
  The leverage doesn't end unless the AI-owning capital class Terminates the rest of the population.
  - hunterpayne 5mo ago
    Or visa-versa. Somehow I feel like this gets missed when discussing this topic. And consider which direction do you think this is likely going to go? Betting on the "AI-owning capital class" seems a bit delusional to me. Does money or gold have much value in Zombie apocalypse shows? How much are bullets worth in those shows? Please, for the love of god, think this through.
    - confidantlake 5mo ago
      How big is the government/supporters compared to the population in any dictatorship? Tiny.
    - kelnos 5mo ago
      Well it depends on the style of societal breakdown. In the zombie apocalypse shows, the human population is less than halved, and the sorts of daily things we take for granted (electricity, clean water, gasoline, etc.) become hard to come by, along with police, fire, and medical services becoming lost or completely disorganized, with governments completely falling apart at every level. But I could imagine a scenario where the AI-owning capital class becomes indistinguishable from the government, and the government retains control of the military. Regular disenfranchised folks usually don't stand much of a chance against their own country's military. It would be super super bloody, but it's a toss-up as to who would win. In reality, though, in the end, everyone would lose.
stego-tech 5mo ago
You're absolutely right, and people will cite this while pointing to The Culture and saying "see, this is what we mean, everything will be fine." Except nobody wants to get into the guts of how those systems came about. Nobody wants to discuss policy changes needed to ensure these sorts of outcomes, opportunities. Nobody wants to discuss regulations, tax schemes, land use requirements, accountability, ownership, shared prosperity. Citing a potentiality as a certainty without any discussion as to how to get there is about as productive as daydreaming you're a billionaire and how you'd spend all that money. You have to do the fucking work, first, before any sliver of that outcome even becomes possible. And if there's one thing the AIBros are adverse to, it's doing fucking work.
- cindyllm 5mo ago
  [dead]
asdff 5mo ago
>we can give people meaning, community, culture, growth, without relying on employment and money I think people get hung up on "job bad" and forget what the job is actually doing, functionally. We are animals, on earth, attempting to survive. We have evolved where we actually really suck at doing it alone, but we do really well if we delegate the various needs of survival. Now, how do we make it so if you chopped wood in the forest you get a piece of the fishermans take? You can do it in kind, although that would quickly become logistically complicated due to the size of the logs and fish catches. Instead, we use money out of sheer convenience and its amazing properties of being a store of labor both past, present, and future. So give everyone no jobs. Who fishes? Who chops wood? Someone or some thing has to do it right? And it needs to be delegated in some way. We can't all go happy go lucky and rave all day and fuck all night and have dozens of kids. Resources on the earth are finite. Forests will be depleted, fisheries crushed. There needs to be some counter to what would otherwise be runaway hedonism and resource depletion.
- philipkglass 5mo ago
  Pregnancy and childbirth are physically taxing for women. Most people of reproductive age want sexual relationships. Many people want children. Very few women want to give birth to 12+ kids. Even the wives of billionaires don't have that many children, despite having more than enough material resources to support them. (Elon Musk's 12+ children required several women.)
  - asdff 5mo ago
    Replace dozens of kids with any piece of wanton consumption then. How is it checked? Hoping we get bored of orgies and parties and feasting and this is enough to ensure we can reproduce indefinitely and continue to orgy and party and feast? I don't think so. At the end of the day, the world cannot sustain everyone living with the carbon footprint of a wealthy person living life to excess. It can't even sustain the carbon footprint of everyone living how they currently live.
    - IncreasePosts 5mo ago
crabbone 5mo ago
I'm sorry... you didn't understand the article. The goal of having a job isn't happiness. At least not immediately. The goal is to have something to bargain with: employees offer labor, employers buy it. If employees don't deliver, they get fired, if employers don't deliver, employees leave / strike. This is what keeps system in a semblance of balance. But once would-be employees can be employees no more, they have no way of influencing any aspect of their governance. Not economical, not political, not military, not ethical. In other words, people need jobs to try to secure their place in the world on multiple levels. It's not about socializing at work, at least, that factor is absolutely not a priority.
bilater 5mo ago
Reminds me of this story. Milton Friedman was once visiting China when he was shocked to see that, instead of modern tractors, thousands of workers were toiling away building a canal with shovels. He asked his host, a government bureaucrat, why more machines weren’t being used. The bureaucrat replied, “You don’t understand. This is a jobs program.” To which Milton responded, “Oh, I thought you were trying to build a canal. If it’s jobs you want, you should give these workers spoons, not shovels!”
boringg 5mo ago
Isn't there an entire r/antiwork thread dedicated to not working?
pdonis 5mo ago
> we can give people meaning, community, culture, growth, without relying on employment and money In a world where all of the necessities of life were free--not as in "not having to pay any money for because of some social policy" but as in "not costing any resources to produce"--i.e., the way air is free now--then this would be the case, yes. But we're not there yet. And I think a big part of why we're not there is that tech giants who could be spending their entrepreneurial efforts on making the necessities of life cheaper, are instead spending them on things like AI and getting people to click on ads and monetizing users' data.
- IncreasePosts 5mo ago
  What do tech giants have to do with food production, clothing, medicine, housing?
  - pdonis 5mo ago
    Nothing. That's the problem. The people running these companies say they're among the smartest, most driven people on the planet, the movers and shakers, the ones who are determining the future course of society. So why aren't they figuring out how to make things like food, clothing, medicine, and housing cheap, so cheap that everyone on the planet can have them easily? Why is it more important to figure out how to get people to click on more ads, or ask more questions to AIs that hallucinate wrong answers?
    - IncreasePosts 5mo ago
      I've worked for giant tech companies for the past 20 years and have literally never heard anyone refer to themselves or their coworkers as the smartest, most driven people on the planet, or movers or shakers. The biggest talk I've heard is developers thinking they're some of the better developers, like 95th+ percentile.
      - pdonis 5mo ago
        I said the people running the companies, not the people working in them.
IAmGraydon 5mo ago
A utopian dream. The world has heard this story before. It completely ignores the jungle we find ourselves in.
physPop 5mo ago
no? this isn't what it argues at all. did you read it?
checker 5mo ago
Nice thought, but who controls the production (AI Compute) that enables this lifestyle? Those who control the production will control the non-workers.

esafak 5mo ago

> we can give people meaning, community, culture, growth, without relying on employment and money What's your proposal if not traditional work? The realistic outcome I see is shifting labor to unautomatable sectors like hospitality. That will keep people employed, but unhappy as they increasingly find themselves unable to find jobs they enjoy, or at comparable levels of income. edit: I realize many people are unhappy with their jobs now, but by dint of labor, they can improve their lot. I am lamenting the closing of this window.

harimau777 5mo ago
A couple of options off the top of my head: art, research, athletics, the humanities
- jjkaczor 5mo ago
  AI is already coming for "art" and "research" - by "slop metrics" it's already there for "art".
  - sph 5mo ago
    It's coming for the type of industrialised, commoditized art. Then there's art where human touch is the crucial ingredients. The problem is that it doesn't sell as well, but that has never stopped any starving artist from creating.
  - mnbpdx 4mo ago
    If a computer being better than people at a thing made it not satisfying to do, then no one would enjoy doing anything AI/computers are already better than us at doing. IOW why do people still love playing chess I love playing the piano, but my skill is pretty low. If AI becomes better than me at piano, that's just one other person among millions who are better than me at piano; I couldn't care less. meaning/satisfaction != advancing the absolute edges of human ability if you have to be the best to be happy you're missing the point
wiseowise 5mo ago
Milking unicorns.
petsfed 5mo ago
Or maybe the problem is that exchanging labor for scarce necessities only makes sense when labor itself is scarce.
- esafak 5mo ago
  We all see the incipient decoupling of labor from capital, while still having bills to pay. We are at the stage where we need to trial solutions, like a Pigouvian tax.
pessimizer 5mo ago
The vast majority of people do not work jobs that they enjoy, that is a middle-class indulgence and ideal that they don't even live up to; almost all their literature is about why they should be enjoying things that they don't or how to discover the things that they might enjoy, and they stuff themselves with drugs to make themselves pay attention and not want to die. And that's the top 15% of the population. The rest are not romanticizing digging ditches, scraping the dead skin off people's feet, or putting catheters up senior citizens. Your "realistic" scenario is how 95% of the world lives already. Getting meaning, community, culture, and "growth" from your job is middle-class religion, and they're constantly having crises of faith. The default state is to find these things in something other than serving people in order to eat.

hexator 5mo ago

> not only is the premise wrong The blog post offers several studies as evidence, where's yours?

foltik 5mo ago
A study obviously can’t prove that people need jobs to be happy. If you can so much as imagine a society organized around some other source of happiness, there’s your evidence by counterexample.
- lurk2 5mo ago
  I have no opinion either way but this doesn’t follow. I can imagine a world where people don’t need oxygen to breathe but they still do. If we say people need oxygen, the argument is obviously about the world such as it is rather than the world as it could hypothetically be.
  - pessimizer 5mo ago
    This is untrue. You cannot imagine a world where people, without changing the definition of people, don't need oxygen to breathe. "they still do" is just begging the question. Plenty of people live without working. We're ruled by people who don't work.
    - lurk2 5mo ago
      You’re right that my reasoning was off. I don’t think it helps the point OP was trying to make. The argument being made in favor of labor isn’t “The only way for someone to be happy is to have a job” but instead “The majority of people will be unhappy without an occupation,” which is testable. The existence of people who are happy without any sort of structured, purposeful activity would not invalidate that the majority of people may well need structured, purposeful activity in order to feel fulfilled. If you tested the claim it wouldn’t tell you about human nature, because it’s possible (and I think likely) that most people are simply conditioned to believe they need purposeful work to be fulfilled, so you could just as well argue that if society were to be radically re-engineered, it would be worthwhile to re-engineer it at the psychological level (such that no one felt the need to work), rather than the economic level (such that work was made available to everyone). > We're ruled by people who don't work. I don’t have any data to support this but I suspect the majority of those people that we would characterize as happy are still engaged in an occupation (not a “job” as such, but purposeful work that goes beyond mere leisure). I’ve seen dozens of well-to-do retired boomers who waste away on Twitter or YouTube and don’t seem to do much of anything anymore, which is what I’m guessing is the behavior you’re imagining when you talk about oligarchs not working, but I don’t see much evidence that the oligarchs are like that; most that I can think of have made no indication that they will ever retire. Now, granted, work looks a lot different if you’re Warren Buffett, but what we’re looking at is not the social benefit of work as such but the impact of structured, purposeful activity on an individual’s psychological sense of wellbeing. In that sense, I think it’s unlikely that these people would disprove the premise.

roxolotl 5mo ago

So there’s one reference to happy, investor happiness. There’s 4 to meaning though. I don’t disagree with you but you’re also missing the scarier point that economic collapse will come before the meaning even is missed. This article ideally should have been two. One about how a consumer economy without consumers cannot be an economy. Another about what comes next.

rectang 5mo ago

> people need jobs to be happy The happiness of the aristocracy depends on the spectacle of miserable workers performing humiliating tasks.

fmbb 5mo ago
Solution: take turns every other year.

yyyk 5mo ago

The problem is that he relies on a dubious Acemoglu estimate, without realizing that at best it's temporary. AI will be better than humans in doing tasks (the qualifiers don't matter in the aggregate). Any jobs then would be bullshit jobs, and everyone will know it.

hunterpayne 5mo ago
LMs are literally trained on Reddit. The idea they are "super-intelligent" is anthropomorphism and marketing. So far no independent research has seen AI be better at anything than humans. And that's unlikely to change with larger NNs.
- yyyk 5mo ago
  If they're good enough at useful tasks and cheaper than any human, the economic and political effect is the same regardless of whether they are 'intelligent' or 'pretend-to-be-intelligent'. The philosophical debate does not change the practical effect.

mrtesthah 5mo ago

https://aeon.co/essays/what-if-jobs-are-not-the-solution-but-the-problem https://aeon.co/essays/what-if-jobs-are-not-the-solution-but...

spongebobstoes 5mo ago
this essay is asking the right questions

NoboruWataya 5mo ago

We would all love to move to a society where we don't have to work for others to survive, but our current system is fundamentally not set up to handle this situation. Capitalism is a useful system for employing scarce resources productively (most of the time) but it doesn't really have an answer for a post-scarcity world. If technology is developed to allow us to end scarcity, instead of everyone having enough, we will end up in a situation where the owners of that technology end up with far, far more than enough while the large majority of people who do not have anything to offer those owners will starve. That sounds dystopian (and it is) but I don't see how we avoid that fate with our current economic system.

9rx 5mo ago

> most people like the social aspect of work, but not being beholden to their boss From what I see out there "being beholden to the boss" is the social aspect people like most. It is what gives the work purpose; knowing that you are pleasing someone else. Some are quite capable of being their own boss, but the people who can actually sustain that long term seem few and far between. It seems that it becomes easy to spiral into a pit of depression when there is no clear feedback in the value being created. Having to regularly deal with another person is not always desirable but having to regularly deal with another person also forces the feedback loop to occur.

some_random 5mo ago

Star Trek isn't real life, when human labor stops being valuable the humans who's labor was previously vital will be at best left to rot in squalor.

siriusastrebe 5mo ago
A generation of people left behind. The birthrates will continue falling.
- balamatom 5mo ago
  The bitrates, on the other hand...
deaton 5mo ago
Couldn't have said it better myself. The only reason we are worth keeping around is because what we do is necessary to keep the machine running. The idea that the AI singularity would lead to infinite free stuff for everyone is ridiculous.
FuriouslyAdrift 5mo ago
The Expanse would be an apt sci-fi example where almost no labor is needed and everyone survives on a bare minimum UBI unless they want to risk it all and go into space.
forgetfulness 5mo ago
For some reason programmers start thinking that we'll transition away from a whole world of societies built around the concept of individual ownership, i.e. your landlord charging you rent, company owners owning the company and the resulting product and paying you what they deem the work you own is worth, and move towards something like communism, all because people working in IT or marketing departments are having a hard time. I'm sorry but us programmers didn't invent capitalism, and it wasn't our consent under the condition of having a good run under it what kept it in place.
- 5mo ago

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aleqs 5mo ago

Yeah, people need a creative output, not just for creativity sake but something that feels productive/constructive and beneficial to them and their society/community. Open source is an example of such work, and amazing things have been achieved - arguably far more impressive and useful than any private tech company has achieved ( and arguably more than all for-profit tech companies combined). We should focus on expanding the open source cooperative model to all other areas of society/productivity. With modern technology, knowledge availability, and AI, I don't see why people couldn't organize at the grassroots level and build/solve real problems their local (or global) communities may be facing. I really don't see why we need all of the VCs, marketers and MBAs... No offense to anyone but the typical SV tech company structure and operations just don't even seem efficient... much of the focus is on marketing/manipulation, enshitification, dark patterns and other dishonest and ultimately counter-productive bullshit. We should be able to organize and build open/cooperative alternatives to SV shitware (and not just software) and we should be able to outcompete the tech shittocracy.. simply because it's actually terribly shitty and inneficient.

balamatom 5mo ago
> I don't see why people couldn't organize at the grassroots level and build/solve real problems their local (or global) communities may be facing. Usually it's because when they do, their de facto owner - "the state" - goes after them with guns and trained sadists. >I really don't see why we need all of the VCs, marketers and MBAs... No offense to anyone but the typical SV tech company structure and operations just don't even seem efficient... much of the focus is on marketing/manipulation, enshitification, dark patterns and other dishonest and ultimately counter-productive bullshit. That's called value creation: manipulating human populations to perceive certain arrangements of matter (or of notions) as "valuable", i.e. that those forms have some inherent quality which legitimately causes individual volition to subject itself to outside command for the sake of the given arrangement.
baddash 4mo ago
[flagged]

bayarearefugee 5mo ago

> we can do better than this In theory we can do better than this, in practice we can't. 40% of the people in the US would rather starve to death themselves than live in a world where people they hate for their skin color get anything without toiling for it.

troosevelt 5mo ago
I appreciate that there is a significant chunk of people that are like this, but I think if you really believe the 40% number or anything like it, you're giving yourself a false worldview. The majority of people aren't racist nor do they have a problem with government helping them out. What was happening (are you referencing 2024?) in 2024 and today was a government saying the economy was fine when it is not. When that happens, people are going to pick the person that isn't in power, who says they are going to fix it, even if they aren't. "It's the economy stupid". People care about their own well-being above pretty much everything else most of the time. I don't think putting this on racism or anything else (though it is a smaller factor) helps, it's just rhetoric. 40% of the people in the US aren't dedicateed racists, they are, however, in working groups that the government has ignored for decades.
- amanaplanacanal 5mo ago
  So do you expect Republicans to be thrown out of office en masse in the upcoming election? I personally expect plenty of them to get reelected even if they claim that everything is just fine.
  - troosevelt 5mo ago
    I think we're gonna see some def Democratic gains because the economy is shit and that's how voting always happens. The only argument I was making is it's no where near 40% of people that are voting for somebody cause they're racist. If you believe that then you're not going to see the world accurately. It's not how people work. But it goes back to my main point, Dem gains won't be what they should be because politics are a very vague and murky thing and people make all kinds of justifications for why they vote for their person. See the stat where most people rate Congress poorly but their Congressperson highly. It's not racism, it's that politics are inherently pretty stupid.

autoexec 5mo ago

> we can give people meaning, community, culture, growth, without relying on employment and money I agree, but those people will still need to eat and pay rent so I guess they're stuck either working or dying. People will always find something to do with themselves. You don't need to encourage people to explore their own passions much when they're able to do it. The need for jobs isn't really an issue as much as the need for money is.

petra 5mo ago

Maybe people don't need jobs to be happy. But it's a big change, and a better way to go about it, instead of huge layoffs is:reduce the hours of work gradually and equally. And possibly create some social infrastructure in the background, to fullfil the social roles of work.

kqp 5mo ago

I agree in theory, but this is so extremely far from the US political and social system that I think no nation has ever changed so much without being overthrown. So unless you’re talking about plans for a post-US world, this idea will always be theoretical and not how “the world” works.

hunterpayne 5mo ago
"a post-US world" I see, so you like large scale warfare then. Did you run out of WWII docs and want some more history for content?
- checker 5mo ago
  Parent didn't say they liked it; I'm reading it as an expression of concern (that I share).
stratos123 5mo ago
I'm not sure it's that far out of the Overton window. US already managed to do some small-scale UBI trials, after all. Maybe one day it can do a countrywide trial.
- hunterpayne 5mo ago
  No it hasn't. To actually try it requires giving to a large enough population that it can impact prices and inflation. Also, every time this has ever been tried it ended in atrocity. Lookup "War communism" to see what happened. Money literally predates civilization. The first writing we have are sales invoices.

kalleboo 5mo ago

The solution is The Matrix. The "real world" is just computers/AIs running everything in a pointless loop. Humans aren't "batteries" (that never even made sense to begin with) but instead are living their happy lives in the simulation to provide something to simulate investment and shareholder value. It's dumb, but it still seems more plausible than people accepting an overnight switch into the "space communism" of nobody needing to work. Everyone is too invested in their own spot in the hierarchy.

cestith 5mo ago
The original idea I think was they were biological components in a digital/biological computer complex. The Matrix sets up scenarios, and the human brains interact with them in human ways which are sometimes of use to the machines. Meanwhile, the machines see all of it and can monitor for problem humans. ISTR this was tossed as too intellectual for an action movie. Another option to either The Matrix or Star Trek is Idiocracy, only there’s an elite group of humans and AI in charge over the deteriorating masses. Let’s not count out The Hunger Games or Elysium.

mrdependable 5mo ago

You are ignoring the part where human labor is the leverage required for democracy to work.

spongebobstoes 5mo ago
I don't think it is required, democracies aren't designed that way not everyone in charge is a cartoon villain
- vinyl7 5mo ago
  Most are...it's pretty much required to be a psychopath to climb the ladder to the top
jpttsn 5mo ago
This same point was also made clumsily in the OP; I’m very unconvinced. The obvious question marks in that theory: Lots of human labor happens in nondemocratic polities; slave-owning/repressive societies create lots of labor. Democracy historically doesn’t advance in lockstep with labor; it’s arisen with many contingencies. The model (English Parliament) seems founded on concerns with right of some wealthy barons v. Kings. Traditional common sense alternative is that military victory goes to people with largest army, so voting saves time. That’s been debatably less relevant with deadlier weapons, so democracy could be cooked.

xg15 5mo ago

> "people need jobs to be happy, so we should design our society such that they need jobs" No, this is not what the article said. It's more "people need jobs to have any kind of leverage in society" which is something different.

philipkglass 5mo ago
I don't think that "people need jobs to have any kind of leverage in society" is actually true, though. Retired people without jobs are (in-)famously known to be politically powerful, both regarding elections and regarding local political questions apart from elections (like city planning commission decisions).
- Root_Denied 5mo ago
  Their leverage is a result of having the time to be involved in politics, which is itself a result of working for decades to build up to the point that they could retire. They're an end result of the system, not an exception to it.
  - xg15 5mo ago
    Not just the time, but also probably having been built up the expertise, social connections, reputation and wealth to be able to be elected on the council in the first place.
- 1270018080 5mo ago
  The jobs they worked turned into capital which is where their leverage comes from. So it's still applies.
asdfman123 5mo ago
To be fair they argued both. Jobs suck but we need to feel useful to other human beings. Jobs (either paid or volunteer jobs) are the only ways we consistently contribute. Like maybe instead of making requirements docs you could pivot to counselling at risk youth... but AI is rapidly improving at that, too.

dgellow 5mo ago

Assuming that’s true and AI is part of the solution, are you implying we should expect the AI overlords to create such a system? That will never happen. They have literally no incentives to decommodify the economy it’s what gives them power

omcgrann 5mo ago

This isn't what the piece argues. It doesn't claim people need jobs to be happy, and the word "happy" doesn't appear in it. The argument is structural: when capital depends on labor, labor has political, economic, and democratic leverage. When that dependency ends, the leverage ends with it. Whether people find meaning in work or outside of it is a separate question the piece doesn't take a position on, because it's not relevant to the point being made. The question isn't whether we can give people meaning without employment (I would argue that most of us find most of our meaning outside of work), but who has bargaining power in a system where human economic participation is unnecessary.

thechao 5mo ago
The leverage doesn't end unless the AI-owning capital class Terminates the rest of the population.
- hunterpayne 5mo ago
  Or visa-versa. Somehow I feel like this gets missed when discussing this topic. And consider which direction do you think this is likely going to go? Betting on the "AI-owning capital class" seems a bit delusional to me. Does money or gold have much value in Zombie apocalypse shows? How much are bullets worth in those shows? Please, for the love of god, think this through.
  - confidantlake 5mo ago
    How big is the government/supporters compared to the population in any dictatorship? Tiny.
  - kelnos 5mo ago
    Well it depends on the style of societal breakdown. In the zombie apocalypse shows, the human population is less than halved, and the sorts of daily things we take for granted (electricity, clean water, gasoline, etc.) become hard to come by, along with police, fire, and medical services becoming lost or completely disorganized, with governments completely falling apart at every level. But I could imagine a scenario where the AI-owning capital class becomes indistinguishable from the government, and the government retains control of the military. Regular disenfranchised folks usually don't stand much of a chance against their own country's military. It would be super super bloody, but it's a toss-up as to who would win. In reality, though, in the end, everyone would lose.

stego-tech 5mo ago

You're absolutely right, and people will cite this while pointing to The Culture and saying "see, this is what we mean, everything will be fine." Except nobody wants to get into the guts of how those systems came about. Nobody wants to discuss policy changes needed to ensure these sorts of outcomes, opportunities. Nobody wants to discuss regulations, tax schemes, land use requirements, accountability, ownership, shared prosperity. Citing a potentiality as a certainty without any discussion as to how to get there is about as productive as daydreaming you're a billionaire and how you'd spend all that money. You have to do the fucking work, first, before any sliver of that outcome even becomes possible. And if there's one thing the AIBros are adverse to, it's doing fucking work.

cindyllm 5mo ago
[dead]

asdff 5mo ago

>we can give people meaning, community, culture, growth, without relying on employment and money I think people get hung up on "job bad" and forget what the job is actually doing, functionally. We are animals, on earth, attempting to survive. We have evolved where we actually really suck at doing it alone, but we do really well if we delegate the various needs of survival. Now, how do we make it so if you chopped wood in the forest you get a piece of the fishermans take? You can do it in kind, although that would quickly become logistically complicated due to the size of the logs and fish catches. Instead, we use money out of sheer convenience and its amazing properties of being a store of labor both past, present, and future. So give everyone no jobs. Who fishes? Who chops wood? Someone or some thing has to do it right? And it needs to be delegated in some way. We can't all go happy go lucky and rave all day and fuck all night and have dozens of kids. Resources on the earth are finite. Forests will be depleted, fisheries crushed. There needs to be some counter to what would otherwise be runaway hedonism and resource depletion.

philipkglass 5mo ago
Pregnancy and childbirth are physically taxing for women. Most people of reproductive age want sexual relationships. Many people want children. Very few women want to give birth to 12+ kids. Even the wives of billionaires don't have that many children, despite having more than enough material resources to support them. (Elon Musk's 12+ children required several women.)
- asdff 5mo ago
  Replace dozens of kids with any piece of wanton consumption then. How is it checked? Hoping we get bored of orgies and parties and feasting and this is enough to ensure we can reproduce indefinitely and continue to orgy and party and feast? I don't think so. At the end of the day, the world cannot sustain everyone living with the carbon footprint of a wealthy person living life to excess. It can't even sustain the carbon footprint of everyone living how they currently live.
  - IncreasePosts 5mo ago

crabbone 5mo ago

I'm sorry... you didn't understand the article. The goal of having a job isn't happiness. At least not immediately. The goal is to have something to bargain with: employees offer labor, employers buy it. If employees don't deliver, they get fired, if employers don't deliver, employees leave / strike. This is what keeps system in a semblance of balance. But once would-be employees can be employees no more, they have no way of influencing any aspect of their governance. Not economical, not political, not military, not ethical. In other words, people need jobs to try to secure their place in the world on multiple levels. It's not about socializing at work, at least, that factor is absolutely not a priority.

bilater 5mo ago

Reminds me of this story. Milton Friedman was once visiting China when he was shocked to see that, instead of modern tractors, thousands of workers were toiling away building a canal with shovels. He asked his host, a government bureaucrat, why more machines weren’t being used. The bureaucrat replied, “You don’t understand. This is a jobs program.” To which Milton responded, “Oh, I thought you were trying to build a canal. If it’s jobs you want, you should give these workers spoons, not shovels!”

boringg 5mo ago

Isn't there an entire r/antiwork thread dedicated to not working?

pdonis 5mo ago

> we can give people meaning, community, culture, growth, without relying on employment and money In a world where all of the necessities of life were free--not as in "not having to pay any money for because of some social policy" but as in "not costing any resources to produce"--i.e., the way air is free now--then this would be the case, yes. But we're not there yet. And I think a big part of why we're not there is that tech giants who could be spending their entrepreneurial efforts on making the necessities of life cheaper, are instead spending them on things like AI and getting people to click on ads and monetizing users' data.

IncreasePosts 5mo ago
What do tech giants have to do with food production, clothing, medicine, housing?
- pdonis 5mo ago
  Nothing. That's the problem. The people running these companies say they're among the smartest, most driven people on the planet, the movers and shakers, the ones who are determining the future course of society. So why aren't they figuring out how to make things like food, clothing, medicine, and housing cheap, so cheap that everyone on the planet can have them easily? Why is it more important to figure out how to get people to click on more ads, or ask more questions to AIs that hallucinate wrong answers?
  - IncreasePosts 5mo ago
    I've worked for giant tech companies for the past 20 years and have literally never heard anyone refer to themselves or their coworkers as the smartest, most driven people on the planet, or movers or shakers. The biggest talk I've heard is developers thinking they're some of the better developers, like 95th+ percentile.
    - pdonis 5mo ago
      I said the people running the companies, not the people working in them.

IAmGraydon 5mo ago

A utopian dream. The world has heard this story before. It completely ignores the jungle we find ourselves in.

physPop 5mo ago

no? this isn't what it argues at all. did you read it?

checker 5mo ago

Nice thought, but who controls the production (AI Compute) that enables this lifestyle? Those who control the production will control the non-workers.