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This was posted a week ago and I'll just reiterate what I said there.. As an American why should I believe a word of this, when our country's Overton window ra

This was posted a week ago and I'll just reiterate what I said there.. As an American why should I believe a word of this, when our country's Overton window ranges from "lip service" to "open contempt" for the unemployed? How can I feel confidence for my economic future when, in less than a decade, the frontier AI labs have abandoned any semblance of caution and are embracing a lobby for fewer guardrails? When "move fast, break things" is applied to the "mass cognition replacement machine"? Filing this entire article under "I'll believe it when I fucking see it". The pollyannic nonsense is willfully ignorant and only serves to excuse more concentration of wealth and the mass theft of leverage from the average worker.

wduquette 19d ago
The point of the article isn't that we will have no need to work; that remains an open question. The body of the article is exploring previous societies or segments of society in which no one needed to have a job, and how they lived their lives, as a way of pondering what a post-work world would look like. It's not particular pollyannic in tone once you get past the opening paragraphs.
- dh2022 19d ago
  Well, the article seems mostly theoretical. One of the premises of the article is that the capital owners (who thus own the economy, and the political system, and the legal system and the law enforcement) will give the rest of the people enough to assuage economic anxieties. We know this premise is pure fantasy. For example Michigan which produces so much food it cannot even eat all of would not provide free school lunches for students: https://www.michigan.gov/mde/news-and-information/press-releases/2025/08/26/clarifying-status-of-school-meals-funds https://www.michigan.gov/mde/news-and-information/press-rele...
  - wduquette 19d ago
    It's not even clear that the AI data centers required to run all this will be economically viable in the long term. But again, the interesting part of the article comes after the discussion of any new kind of economy.
- calldacopsidc 19d ago
  If the author wanted to write a purely historical essay she is more than welcome to. Instead she chose a framing device of a post-work society thanks to AI that I think undermines the whole article. "Aristocrats are (typically) rich, which we certainly will be if we have robots capable of all normal nonrelational labor." ...okay
  - jfil 17d ago
    I think this framing device was unnecessary. This was interesting historical food for thought without tying it to AI. I think its relevant to a mass-unemployment, economic depression scenario too, and others.

wduquette 19d ago

The point of the article isn't that we will have no need to work; that remains an open question. The body of the article is exploring previous societies or segments of society in which no one needed to have a job, and how they lived their lives, as a way of pondering what a post-work world would look like. It's not particular pollyannic in tone once you get past the opening paragraphs.

dh2022 19d ago
Well, the article seems mostly theoretical. One of the premises of the article is that the capital owners (who thus own the economy, and the political system, and the legal system and the law enforcement) will give the rest of the people enough to assuage economic anxieties. We know this premise is pure fantasy. For example Michigan which produces so much food it cannot even eat all of would not provide free school lunches for students: https://www.michigan.gov/mde/news-and-information/press-releases/2025/08/26/clarifying-status-of-school-meals-funds https://www.michigan.gov/mde/news-and-information/press-rele...
- wduquette 19d ago
  It's not even clear that the AI data centers required to run all this will be economically viable in the long term. But again, the interesting part of the article comes after the discussion of any new kind of economy.
calldacopsidc 19d ago
If the author wanted to write a purely historical essay she is more than welcome to. Instead she chose a framing device of a post-work society thanks to AI that I think undermines the whole article. "Aristocrats are (typically) rich, which we certainly will be if we have robots capable of all normal nonrelational labor." ...okay
- jfil 17d ago
  I think this framing device was unnecessary. This was interesting historical food for thought without tying it to AI. I think its relevant to a mass-unemployment, economic depression scenario too, and others.