11 ms·

Is work necessary?

106 points by bendmorris 13y ago

parasight 13y ago
The title is misleading I think. Fuller does not really question the necessity of work. He questions the ideas of "earning a living" and "work as a justification to exist".
gexla 13y ago
This could be describing the Philippines. A large number of people don't work because they don't really have to. OFW remittances send enough money back in some cases that the local economy makes it seem pointless to work (unskilled workers here might make $3 - $4 per day.) In other cases, the family has built a compound and everyone can live super cheap there. Maybe there is enough money flowing into the family that nobody has to work. I see a lot of drinking, fiesta's and festivals here. Given the idle time, it seems that most don't pursue education or other things which could further them. I suppose many of these people would choose to go to school if they could afford to do so. This may be a decent end goal, but I can't help but think there is always something that someone could be doing to make money. There is always more that needs to be done. I can see the "suck" all around us. Things which could be improved. If we were to ever be able to get large numbers of people off this planet then there will always be much more things for people to do. We could explore further and expand outward. For the foreseeable future. If you are in the U.S. you either work or you collect food stamps which barely cover you. It would be great for one person to support 10K, but for now, the less fortunate have to ask from people who are far less able to provide (family who is getting by, but not doing great otherwise.)
- kabisote 13y ago
  The Philippines did not come to mind when I read the article. What I took from the article was that the human race can invent a system that would provide for their basic needs so that humans don't have to worry about it and they can spend their time on their hobbies. (I'm from the Philippines.)
  - melling 13y ago
    It seems to me like there are still lots of problems to solve. Many STEM jobs still go unfilled even though they tend to pay more. If you want to build the next Android or iPhone, you need large teams of people, for instance. Some people will choose tennis while others choose medical research? I don't think anyone has mentioned the fact that there aren't enough hours in the day for people who do research or creative work. Personally, I image that if we could put 7 billion people to work on the more important problems, we'd still need a lot more fall short on resources.
    - jeena 13y ago
      Yeah but to fill the STEM jobs you need educated people to do so. To get educated people you need to make the process of education far less expensive and risky for the individual, only then you will get more people through the STEM education. I'm kind of old (35) and a CS student, I started fairly late in my 39ies. But I only was able to do so because I payed a high price for that. Nearly everybody else at my age has a family with kids, many of them even have bought their first house. Not me, I'm studying, I'm one of the very fiew 35 years old students at the university. And yes there are legitimate reasons why I couldn't start to study earlier (which I won't get into right now). What I want to say is that education is _very_ expensive for the student, even if here in Sweden I don't even have to pay for the university myself. Many people who would be able to learn and do the STEM jobs can't because they're stuck in survival mode earning a living at a job which doesn't help humanity, instead it is only there to keep someone ocupied.
- hershel 13y ago
  How are trends like online learning and online work afect the situation there? surely you can make reasonable money using those.
  - gexla 13y ago
    The Philippines does have a large presence on Odesk, Elance and similar services. I hear often from people that they are interested in giving in a try. Only the relatively well off have a computer and internet connection in the home. In the Philippines, even the increased electrical usage from a computer could be a significant cost. Cheap tablets and smart phones bring more computers into homes, but those are limited for doing work and you still don't have an internet connection. The relatively well off increasingly have more options as well. Wages are creeping up. Entry level call center work can pay nearly half the minimum wage in the U.S. Again, this is in a country for an unskilled laborer might work for a few dollars a day for an 8 - 10 hour day. So, the world opens up even more for the middle class while the poor get left behind (sound familiar?) I don't know how much these sorts of services could help the poor anyways. Imagine having to rely on someone to do work for you who is constantly having a difficult time paying bills and has little money to deal with problems in general. Maybe a low end co-working space could help out with this. There are internet cafes all over the place for around 30 cents an hour, but that's really expensive for internet.
stickhandle 13y ago
Yes. And its our collective fault. Capitalism and democracy are arguably the best collective system for living together that humanity has implemented. On a theoretical level, this is wholly up for debate, but in a practical sense, I believe this to be true. This has directly led to consumerism, the rise of the individual, and specialization. Follow that path, and you need to work. Or at least the typical person does. The dream of many is that work == something they want to do (so much so that it hardly feels like work in the strictest form), but I put forth that inevitably, as a person changes, they find it difficult to step away from their area of expertise (gained from years of specialization) and inevitably, for most, it truly becomes work. Disclaimer: this is a first world question (and answer)
kabisote 13y ago
Yes, work is necessary. Even before money was invented, our ancestors still needed to work for their basic needs. They had to harvest or hunt for food, build their houses and sew their clothing. All of that is work.
- boyter 13y ago
  I think you may be missing the point. Pretty much all developed countries produce an abundance of these things, and more to the point have automated a lot of it. A lot of jobs that used to be done by many people can now be done by a few.
  - bane 13y ago
    It would kinda suck to end up as one of the poor schlubs who has to be one of the "few" who works while everybody else kicks back and screws around all day.
    - gress 13y ago
      Is it different to ending up as one of the "many" who work, while the few kick back and screw around all day?
      - bane 13y ago
        Yes. Because being one of the few layabouts on either end of the bell curve is a blessing, while being one of the few who works for everybody else is easily viewed as a punishment.
        gress 13y ago
        So it's ok to be poor and stresses as long as everyone else is?
    - Aqueous 13y ago
      Well, in the future I'm thinking about, even the few would have very little to do operating the machinery that performs all of these tasks automatically. When given a choice between being one of the many and being one of the few, I usually choose the few.
shittyanalogy 13y ago
Since this is an opinion piece, I'll give mine on the same topic: We don't need more jobs or a re-imagining of the meaning of life, we need less people. We're pushing into the golden age of mechanization, automation and robotics and instead of being able to celebrate we have to wonder what everyone is going to do with themselves and invent assistant-inspector-inspector jobs. We're continuing to over fish, over build, over pollute, under service people at the doctors office, and under deliver on educational goals. We've just got too many people plain and simple if you ask me. Every major solution is aimed at trying to figure out how we're going to live together as a society of 10 Billion, IMHO we should be figuring out how to reduce the numbers and figuring out how to live together as much less. I don't have a good answer and I don't think anyone on this planet has more of a right to live or have kids than anyone else. And this isn't some immigration rant. This planet has too many people on it.
- thret 13y ago
  China's one child policy comes to mind. You could approach this in the west without force by tying tax thresholds to number of children.
  - bendmorris 13y ago
    I don't like this idea for two reasons: first, tax incentives for having children help to make sure the children are taken care of - socio-economic status is negatively correlated with number of children, and lots of kids are born into big families that can't afford to take care of them properly. Giving these families additional money seems like enabling them, but the kid didn't do anything and deserves to have a reasonable standard of living. Second, financial penalties for having children give the wealthy more freedom to reproduce. And couldn't tax penalties be considered a form of government force? Not that we don't already use incentives and penalties to shape behavior. Education, access to birth control, and improving the standard of living of the poor all seem to result in lower birth rates with no force necessary.
  - babby 13y ago
    Implying western countries produce too many children relative to the death rate. Overpopulation is far more prevalent in the underdeveloped countries. If their standard of living improves, with enhanced education (contraceptive) the populations are estimated to balance out to that of Western countries. Western countries have to worry far more about immigration than birth rate control.
jacques_chester 13y ago
Based on communities with multi-generational welfarism, I'd suggest that idleness comes with pretty serious social problems. Employment imposes minimum pro-social requirements on the employee.
- gress 13y ago
  I don't see how there is any relationship at all between current implementations of welfare and a putative work-free society given that welfare is associated with low social position and limited access to resources for self betterment.
  - jacques_chester 13y ago
    So you consider it to be a cultural artefact? What about antisocial behaviour by those who've inherited high status?
    - dreamfactory 13y ago
      You mean spoilt kids behaving badly? You can be given material needs without having to work but you will still need to work hard to become a dancer, ride a skateboard, play the piano etc. Maybe the root problem leading to antisocial behaviour isn't financial but a lack of cultural values?
    - gress 13y ago
      I think that is absolutely cultural too. I have lived in both environments. High status people or those born to riches are by no means universally antisocially behaved. I don't disagree that such people exist. Nor do I disagree that multigenerational, anti-social welfare recipients exist. Both groups exist I cultures where superficial media success and the acquisition of money are held up as the meaning of life. For the welfare recipients, this kind of meaning is perceived as impossibly out of reach, and so people are resentful and adopt a 'take what you can from the system' mentality. For some of the high status people, meaning is also unattainable since they already have what other people seem to value, so society doesn't value their actual contribution. In cultures where the 'rich' have a sense of responsibility, there is much less of the bad behavior you describe.
boyter 13y ago
I find it interesting that though the use of machines and the like we are rapidly approaching what occurred in ancient cultures through the use of slaves, which is many having a great deal of time to devote to leisure. What do we do we currently do with leisure? Watch TV unwind... but assuming you didn't need to unwind from work (because there was none) what would you be doing? Personally I would be studying random topics (sculpture, latin and dance), working on my own projects (software and community) and generally improving myself and hopefully society. I would imagine that the absence of work would be a net gain for society as people could devote their time to helping others or doing something for pure merit. Interestingly enough that's what the ancients did. The ancient greek word for leisure "schole" means learning or self improvement.
- sliverstorm 13y ago
  Yup, slavery was quite useful in advancing the human race for a while there. We don't like it today for moral reasons, but Leibniz would not have discovered calculus if he spent every day in a field somewhere, and it was slavery that bought him the time to do it.
  - captainmuon 13y ago
    Hah, funny. You can say the same thing about capitalism. It boosted the productivity and the technical capabilities of the human race tremendously (although at a pretty high cost).
  - delian66 13y ago
    What ? Leibniz lived in Germany and France, and I think there was no slavery (as in ownership of human beings; sure there were servants and nobility and so on, but no actual slavery) in there at the time ... Would you elaborate how "it was slavery that bought him the time to do it" ?
    - sliverstorm 13y ago
      For the purposes of brevity I'm grouping slavery, peasants, servants, indentured servants, etc into the same group. They all serve to buy leisure time at the expense of the sweat of other people.
yetanotherphd 13y ago
Work is necessary to get a whole lot of stuff that needs to be done done. That does not mean that we should not have a basic income, reverse income tax, or generous welfare system with few strings attached. However, it is annoying that proponents of basic income tax act as if the only reason for opposing basic income as a policy, is the idea that "work is necessary". The three policies I described are actually very similar, (well basic income is really a subset of negative income tax) but to choose between them is a subtle issue. Unfortunately the people who tend to get attached to political movements (or wannabe political movements) are rarely subtle. They prefer easy to identify bad guys, like people who believe in work as an ethical principal.
Aqueous 13y ago
The machines of the future will convert energy into wealth. They will do this by performing a large number of automated tasks for us. We will not have to work - it will be redundant to work.
- electromagnetic 13y ago
  Consider what the world, sorry universe will be when anything you can conceive of is a function of energy vs time. Set a self-replicating constructor going. All it has to do is harvest sunlight to produce more solar cells to capture more energy until it has a sufficient supply to expediently build that new house you ordered.
yarou 13y ago
I think "work" is necessary, at least the connotation that implies one has to strive for more or give up something in exchange for a tangible reward. However, work just for the sake of working is unnecessary and detrimental to the person that must endure it.
DigitalSea 13y ago
I fear a world where people don't need to aspire to something to better their lives (ie studying, learning a skill or educating oneself) wouldn't be a very nice world to live in at all. If we didn't need to work, what reason would there to learn to read? If we were rewarded with land, shelter, food and comfort for doing nothing, what would the incentive for those who will inevitably be responsible for keeping everything together? Plants don't grow without care and attention, electricity isn't as simple as sticking two wires into a powerpoint or setting up solar panels, if nobody worked, nobody would study and if nobody studied there would be no people left in the world. Money, sad to say motivates people, it motivates the disadvantaged to strive for more, it motivates the rogue developer with a wife and kids to attempt to build the next big thing knowing the reward will be a comfortable life where the family doesn't need to worry about money. Perhaps there is a better way, removing class barriers, maybe there is no such thing as lower class, you are either middle or upper class. A system where even a school janitor has an opportunity to do something more and earn a decent living. We can only dream, but I doubt for a very long time will there be a shake up to the class wars and pay discrepancies amongst professions.
- kareemm 13y ago
  > Plants don't grow without care and attention, electricity isn't as simple as sticking two wires into a powerpoint or setting up solar panels, if nobody worked, nobody would study and if nobody studied there would be no people left in the world. People would do these things out of curiosity, or because they want to see what happens. The need to know, learn, understand, and create wouldn't go away. Intrinsic motivation wouldn't go away. Indeed, I can imagine these becoming stronger if one could devote most of his waking hours to learning about the variety of topics that interest him.
- dreamfactory 13y ago
  So why does poetry exist and what are hobbies?
- jayfuerstenberg 13y ago
  Boredom is a powerful motivator too. A couple months of laying around doing nothing will drive most people crazy and they'll begin asking themselves what they want their life to be about. And even if they don't contribute anything, should all people be required to useful to others or can't some just choose to be left alone if they are self sufficient? In a world of scarcity I can see the argument of forcing people to contribute if they want to take back but what about a world of abundance? You and I are breathing abundant air, for free, and nobody is getting angry right? What if other resources like electricity were as abundant as Tesla once dreamed? I'm not saying I'm right or wrong. These are just thoughts worth consideration.
dnautics 13y ago
Fuller is half-right. The true business of people should be to discover skills which enrich others. In some cases, this is manual labor, but as our society makes that less and less necessary, we are able to spend more effort on creative and intellectual pursuits. Now, the problem with Fuller's concept is that 'creative and intellectual' pursuits are intensely introspective and rather qualitative. One could say, 'well I am ENTITLED to money because I spent a lot of EFFORT reading and analyzing the entire opus of English literature from 1200-1400.' But whom did that enrich? Why should we reward such behavior if it is solipsistic? On the other hand, if someone said, analyze the entire opus of English literature from 1200-1400 so that someday we can assist Shakespearean actors in their dramaturgy - and I'm willing to pay you X dollars for it... Now that's creating value for SOMEONE ELSE. It's not an entitlement, you have contributed to society in a way that is demonstrable, as proven by the exchange of resources for your effort. Work is necessary insomuch as it takes effort for one to provide 'other people' with goods and services that these 'other people' value. Now, what constitutes work will be dramatically different and undergo tectonic change - playing video games, for example, as an alpha tester, can be work (and hard work, too) - as can being a world-travelling dance teacher - or being a football player (these are professional jobs that would not have existed 200 years ago)- or who knows what in the future. Unfortunately the idea of doing work has been corrupted by a narrow-minded view of capitalism (agents on both the right and the left are guilty of this) and wages, have been caught up with cost of living and thus a sense of entitlement. Certainly, there are people who we should contribute to help out for no reason other than compassion (a quadruplegic multiple gunshot victim I delivered food to comes to mind) but we should think hard about what the mechanisms for doing this are, and who gets to decide how much. But the idea of abolishing all work forever is a dangerous one.
- rquantz 13y ago
  Fuller is arguing otherwise here. He says we need to get away from the idea that we have to do something to deserve to make a living. Your whole comment is premised on that idea. Whether it not you're right, you haven't engaged with what Fuller said. The closest you come is making the unsubstantiated statement that getting rid of work is a dangerous idea. Dangerous for whom? Other than, you know, powerful people who depend on an endless supply of cheap labor, and politicians who rely on an exhausted, frightened, ADD electorate.
ctdonath 13y ago
A human being daily needs something like 2000 kcal food-sourced energy, a slate of vital nutrients, 250 square feet of personal living space, some average BTUs of heating/cooling, a gallon of clean water, and a share of infrastructure to produce/acquire/deliver this. (YMMV; point of context made; details left as exercise for reader.) We can view this baseline as the objective essence of "value": one needs the aggregate of these points to sustain life for one day, anything less begins the descent into death. We can also view anything substantially beyond standard deviations of this as unnecessary (albeit desirable). SOMEBODY has to produce this, be it basic sustenance farming or creation & maintenance of high-tech high-productivity machinery; this work is necessary. The objective value of this baseline is the true "poverty line": if you try to exist on less than this, you're gonna die; if you can acquire substantially more than this, you can start indulging in relative luxuries. For sake of simple argument (detailed accuracy left to reader), we'll use the official USA poverty line as the currency equivalent of this objective value of what it takes to keep a median human alive under normal conditions: about US$30 per day. So...to keep one person alive & stable one day requires $30/day of work. This is invariant. If someone's work produces $30 of value (exchangeably equivalent to those enumerated basic daily needs), one person maintains sustainable life another day; if the worker "gives" that to someone else, keeping none for himself, he is literally giving his life to the other. If his work produces $60 of value, he can sustain himself for two days (work one, idle the second), sustain himself for one day and spend the remainder on comforts & luxuries, or give $30 to another and keep both sustained for a day. Technology makes it easier for one to earn more with the same expenditure of effort. The consternation about "is work necessary?" stems from who gets to decide how the extra earnings are distributed. If you retain your extra earnings, you are saving for future idleness (vacation, retirement) or statistical fluctuations (temporary increased cost of acquiring necessities). If you spend your extra earnings on comforts & luxuries, you are giving others the opportunity to work for their daily basic needs thru means other than direct acquisition (building cars, writing software, acting theatrically, etc. instead of sustenance farming, hewing trees, carrying water, etc). If you give away your extra earnings strictly voluntarily (no coercion), you are charitable (sacrificing idleness, preparedness, or comfort/luxuries for others). If you give away your extra earnings under coercion (if you don't consent it will be taken from you, or worse), someone else is making the decision for you regarding how your extra earnings should be distributed - and this, quite understandably, produces enormous consternation. (If your baseline earnings (the $30/day) are taken under coercion, your continued existence is threatened and the issue becomes a matter of self-defense - a separate topic to discuss.) Is work necessary? Yes, insofar as someone has to expend effort which can be converted into providence of basic needs. If someone can work earning $300/day, then he can take the next nine days off, purchase comforts/luxuries which pay enough to sustain nine other people another day, or sustain nine other people another day without obligating the benefit of creating comforts/luxuries. This thread addresses this last point: given no obligation to produce something exchangeable for basic needs, will a populace on the whole produce more* value or less? and does the populace at large have the "right" to compel individuals to give up their extra earnings without compensation, or does the individual have an absolute "right" to keep his earnings and distribute them as he sees fit?
bsbechtel 13y ago
The idea in theory is great, but we are generations away from getting there. Right now, the idea of having really high taxes for those who own/control technology to pay a minimum living wage for those who can't work would stop all forward progress from here on out. Case in point - Elon Musk. Musk nearly went bankrupt in 2008 trying to make Tesla and SpaceX succeed. If he had been taxed at any higher a rate, both companies would have failed. Musk is arguably a once in a generation entrepreneur. I'd hate to be waiting another 20 years for electric cars and private rockets to come around.
- damon_c 13y ago
  But, on the other hand, there might be dozens of Elon Musks each generation if people didn't have to worry about their children falling into poverty because the idea they quit their job and spent their savings trying to execute didn't take off. Or, imagine during that crucial make or break period, being able to go cut the founder of the electric car company you're working at a little slack with payroll because you already had a check coming in each month that covered your rent and data plan.
  - bsbechtel 13y ago
    Your first comment is a fair point, although the article is about not having to work and taking from those who are rich to pay for it, not providing a safety net so entrepreneurs could try risky thing. To your second point, I'm not convinced that would happen...even if it did, labor is a fairly small portion of an auto company's costs (I think at one point I saw around 20%).
- dingaling 13y ago
  > If he had been taxed at any higher a rate, both companies would have failed. I don't follow. Taxation applies to personal income and corporate profit. A company on the margin of bankruptcy isn't making profit, so they're not 'losing' money in tax.
  - bsbechtel 13y ago
    He used his Paypal money to fund Tesla and SpaceX. If those earnings had been taxed higher, no Tesla and SpaceX.
vacri 13y ago
It's nice to see an article title which violates Betteridge's law.
sfx 13y ago
Bill Joy's essay "Why the Future Doesn't Need Us" [1] is a good read for anyone working through what such a society would be like and what it means for our race. I think it comes down to the philosophical question of what man's purpose is. [1] http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/8.04/joy.html http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/8.04/joy.html
dreamdu5t 13y ago
Ugh, HN really has become reddit. Half-baked ramblings about socialist utopias powered by machines. I mean come on...
- wazoox 13y ago
  Actually, most of the answers are ranging from far-right (work or degenerate!) to extreme libertarianism (individuals must compete!), and that complete lack of basic humanity from HNers really is saddening.
  - clarkm 13y ago
    > complete lack of basic humanity from HNers Does that actually mean anything? Or is it just another way of expressing vague, general disapproval?
- dinkumthinkum 13y ago
  Yeah it's a lot of nonsense. There are some singularity believers, that's for sure.
everyone 13y ago
This article makes some good points. In my opinion, it isnt just that a lot of jobs today dont contribute anything to society, they actively work to its detriment by wasting precious resources and contributing to serious problems like climate change and pollution.
enraged_camel 13y ago
The fact that a very large percentage of jobs are unnecessary and were created simply because we felt like everyone should work for a living needs to be accepted before we can experiment with economic models such as Unconditional Basic Income.
Kiro 13y ago
"It amounts to saying that we should have fairly high taxes, and redistribute most of the money as a minimal income to every person." Yes, but before that we would need to have as low taxes as possible in order to stimulate the innovation needed.
- chroem 13y ago
  I would like to see some figures correlating taxation to innovation.
- hershel 13y ago
  Yes. Like in the nordic countries , which are pretty good at innovation. Or in israel where taxes are high but venture capital investments per capita are the highest in the world.
  - Kiro 13y ago
    They would be even more innovative with lower taxes and more market incentives to make technological advancements.
    - hershel 13y ago
      It's a nice opinion based on no data.
      - Kiro 13y ago
        Do you agree that the market advances technology?
austinl 13y ago
> The true business of people should be to go back to school and think about whatever it was they were thinking about before somebody came along and told them they had to earn a living This made me think of a world like Neal Stephenson's Anathem, where a portion of the population chooses to separate themselves and focus purely on education. Their lifestyles are essentially monastic/akin to $30 per day. Part of me wishes an option like that were more prevalent/acceptable in our society.
captainmuon 13y ago
Some work is neccessary, labour not so. (absolutely speaking) In our current society basically everyone has to work to earn money, to then buy such products on a more-or-less free market. We are able to produce more and more goods with ever less work. That's great on the surface, but wrecks the system, because: - Experience shows we can't really split the remaining work evenly, so some people work a lot, and some are unemployed. But people can only really participate in the economy if they do labour (and get money). It sucks for them to be unemployed, but they also fall away as consumers, which hurts the whole economy. - Stuff only ever get's done when labour is applied. (If I could produce and sell something with no human work, everybody else would do the same, and it would have no value. So, in the equilibrium that's not going to happen.) In a sense, labour is the secret engine of the economy. At the same time, you're trying to reduce the amount of labour needed, because it's expensive and cuts into your profits. All kinds of instabilities arise from this contradiction. In the end, we'll probably have to transition away from capitalism to something better suited to our modern realities of production, whatever that will be. An unconditional basic income would be a first step in this direction - acknowledging the fact that we need less and less work, but we still need to feed the same number of people.
forgottenpaswrd 13y ago
"It amounts to saying that we should have fairly high taxes, and redistribute most of the money as a minimal income to every person." It is called disguised communism. From each according to his ability, to each according to his need. The redistributors redistribute to their friends and family first, then on their party, and then the rest so now you have people living really well, most people living bad, like today, but with no connection between generating wealth and being rewarded by it at all. Don't let me wrong, this works, for a while. Until you get to consume all the savings of the productive society. And nobody wants to work anymore. Then societies collapse(Venezuela has 40% inflation per month now, Cuba, URSS) Some of my family members come from communist countries. I don't want some political commissar to decide who deserve what and who doesn't. I believe in distributed power, not centralized authority. Technology is making distributed power efficient again, with computers in every pocket and inexpensive 3d printers, laser cutters and CNC mills. Ironically we are supporting too centralized, too big to fail business.

106 points by bendmorris 13y ago

The title is misleading I think. Fuller does not really question the necessity of work. He questions the ideas of "earning a living" and "work as a justification to exist".

gexla 13y ago

This could be describing the Philippines. A large number of people don't work because they don't really have to. OFW remittances send enough money back in some cases that the local economy makes it seem pointless to work (unskilled workers here might make $3 - $4 per day.) In other cases, the family has built a compound and everyone can live super cheap there. Maybe there is enough money flowing into the family that nobody has to work. I see a lot of drinking, fiesta's and festivals here. Given the idle time, it seems that most don't pursue education or other things which could further them. I suppose many of these people would choose to go to school if they could afford to do so. This may be a decent end goal, but I can't help but think there is always something that someone could be doing to make money. There is always more that needs to be done. I can see the "suck" all around us. Things which could be improved. If we were to ever be able to get large numbers of people off this planet then there will always be much more things for people to do. We could explore further and expand outward. For the foreseeable future. If you are in the U.S. you either work or you collect food stamps which barely cover you. It would be great for one person to support 10K, but for now, the less fortunate have to ask from people who are far less able to provide (family who is getting by, but not doing great otherwise.)

kabisote 13y ago
The Philippines did not come to mind when I read the article. What I took from the article was that the human race can invent a system that would provide for their basic needs so that humans don't have to worry about it and they can spend their time on their hobbies. (I'm from the Philippines.)
- melling 13y ago
  It seems to me like there are still lots of problems to solve. Many STEM jobs still go unfilled even though they tend to pay more. If you want to build the next Android or iPhone, you need large teams of people, for instance. Some people will choose tennis while others choose medical research? I don't think anyone has mentioned the fact that there aren't enough hours in the day for people who do research or creative work. Personally, I image that if we could put 7 billion people to work on the more important problems, we'd still need a lot more fall short on resources.
  - jeena 13y ago
    Yeah but to fill the STEM jobs you need educated people to do so. To get educated people you need to make the process of education far less expensive and risky for the individual, only then you will get more people through the STEM education. I'm kind of old (35) and a CS student, I started fairly late in my 39ies. But I only was able to do so because I payed a high price for that. Nearly everybody else at my age has a family with kids, many of them even have bought their first house. Not me, I'm studying, I'm one of the very fiew 35 years old students at the university. And yes there are legitimate reasons why I couldn't start to study earlier (which I won't get into right now). What I want to say is that education is _very_ expensive for the student, even if here in Sweden I don't even have to pay for the university myself. Many people who would be able to learn and do the STEM jobs can't because they're stuck in survival mode earning a living at a job which doesn't help humanity, instead it is only there to keep someone ocupied.
hershel 13y ago
How are trends like online learning and online work afect the situation there? surely you can make reasonable money using those.
- gexla 13y ago
  The Philippines does have a large presence on Odesk, Elance and similar services. I hear often from people that they are interested in giving in a try. Only the relatively well off have a computer and internet connection in the home. In the Philippines, even the increased electrical usage from a computer could be a significant cost. Cheap tablets and smart phones bring more computers into homes, but those are limited for doing work and you still don't have an internet connection. The relatively well off increasingly have more options as well. Wages are creeping up. Entry level call center work can pay nearly half the minimum wage in the U.S. Again, this is in a country for an unskilled laborer might work for a few dollars a day for an 8 - 10 hour day. So, the world opens up even more for the middle class while the poor get left behind (sound familiar?) I don't know how much these sorts of services could help the poor anyways. Imagine having to rely on someone to do work for you who is constantly having a difficult time paying bills and has little money to deal with problems in general. Maybe a low end co-working space could help out with this. There are internet cafes all over the place for around 30 cents an hour, but that's really expensive for internet.

stickhandle 13y ago

Yes. And its our collective fault. Capitalism and democracy are arguably the best collective system for living together that humanity has implemented. On a theoretical level, this is wholly up for debate, but in a practical sense, I believe this to be true. This has directly led to consumerism, the rise of the individual, and specialization. Follow that path, and you need to work. Or at least the typical person does. The dream of many is that work == something they want to do (so much so that it hardly feels like work in the strictest form), but I put forth that inevitably, as a person changes, they find it difficult to step away from their area of expertise (gained from years of specialization) and inevitably, for most, it truly becomes work. Disclaimer: this is a first world question (and answer)

kabisote 13y ago

Yes, work is necessary. Even before money was invented, our ancestors still needed to work for their basic needs. They had to harvest or hunt for food, build their houses and sew their clothing. All of that is work.

boyter 13y ago
I think you may be missing the point. Pretty much all developed countries produce an abundance of these things, and more to the point have automated a lot of it. A lot of jobs that used to be done by many people can now be done by a few.
- bane 13y ago
  It would kinda suck to end up as one of the poor schlubs who has to be one of the "few" who works while everybody else kicks back and screws around all day.
  - gress 13y ago
    Is it different to ending up as one of the "many" who work, while the few kick back and screw around all day?
    - bane 13y ago
      Yes. Because being one of the few layabouts on either end of the bell curve is a blessing, while being one of the few who works for everybody else is easily viewed as a punishment.
      - gress 13y ago
        So it's ok to be poor and stresses as long as everyone else is?
  - Aqueous 13y ago
    Well, in the future I'm thinking about, even the few would have very little to do operating the machinery that performs all of these tasks automatically. When given a choice between being one of the many and being one of the few, I usually choose the few.

shittyanalogy 13y ago

Since this is an opinion piece, I'll give mine on the same topic: We don't need more jobs or a re-imagining of the meaning of life, we need less people. We're pushing into the golden age of mechanization, automation and robotics and instead of being able to celebrate we have to wonder what everyone is going to do with themselves and invent assistant-inspector-inspector jobs. We're continuing to over fish, over build, over pollute, under service people at the doctors office, and under deliver on educational goals. We've just got too many people plain and simple if you ask me. Every major solution is aimed at trying to figure out how we're going to live together as a society of 10 Billion, IMHO we should be figuring out how to reduce the numbers and figuring out how to live together as much less. I don't have a good answer and I don't think anyone on this planet has more of a right to live or have kids than anyone else. And this isn't some immigration rant. This planet has too many people on it.

thret 13y ago
China's one child policy comes to mind. You could approach this in the west without force by tying tax thresholds to number of children.
- bendmorris 13y ago
  I don't like this idea for two reasons: first, tax incentives for having children help to make sure the children are taken care of - socio-economic status is negatively correlated with number of children, and lots of kids are born into big families that can't afford to take care of them properly. Giving these families additional money seems like enabling them, but the kid didn't do anything and deserves to have a reasonable standard of living. Second, financial penalties for having children give the wealthy more freedom to reproduce. And couldn't tax penalties be considered a form of government force? Not that we don't already use incentives and penalties to shape behavior. Education, access to birth control, and improving the standard of living of the poor all seem to result in lower birth rates with no force necessary.
- babby 13y ago
  Implying western countries produce too many children relative to the death rate. Overpopulation is far more prevalent in the underdeveloped countries. If their standard of living improves, with enhanced education (contraceptive) the populations are estimated to balance out to that of Western countries. Western countries have to worry far more about immigration than birth rate control.

jacques_chester 13y ago

Based on communities with multi-generational welfarism, I'd suggest that idleness comes with pretty serious social problems. Employment imposes minimum pro-social requirements on the employee.

gress 13y ago
I don't see how there is any relationship at all between current implementations of welfare and a putative work-free society given that welfare is associated with low social position and limited access to resources for self betterment.
- jacques_chester 13y ago
  So you consider it to be a cultural artefact? What about antisocial behaviour by those who've inherited high status?
  - dreamfactory 13y ago
    You mean spoilt kids behaving badly? You can be given material needs without having to work but you will still need to work hard to become a dancer, ride a skateboard, play the piano etc. Maybe the root problem leading to antisocial behaviour isn't financial but a lack of cultural values?
  - gress 13y ago
    I think that is absolutely cultural too. I have lived in both environments. High status people or those born to riches are by no means universally antisocially behaved. I don't disagree that such people exist. Nor do I disagree that multigenerational, anti-social welfare recipients exist. Both groups exist I cultures where superficial media success and the acquisition of money are held up as the meaning of life. For the welfare recipients, this kind of meaning is perceived as impossibly out of reach, and so people are resentful and adopt a 'take what you can from the system' mentality. For some of the high status people, meaning is also unattainable since they already have what other people seem to value, so society doesn't value their actual contribution. In cultures where the 'rich' have a sense of responsibility, there is much less of the bad behavior you describe.

boyter 13y ago

I find it interesting that though the use of machines and the like we are rapidly approaching what occurred in ancient cultures through the use of slaves, which is many having a great deal of time to devote to leisure. What do we do we currently do with leisure? Watch TV unwind... but assuming you didn't need to unwind from work (because there was none) what would you be doing? Personally I would be studying random topics (sculpture, latin and dance), working on my own projects (software and community) and generally improving myself and hopefully society. I would imagine that the absence of work would be a net gain for society as people could devote their time to helping others or doing something for pure merit. Interestingly enough that's what the ancients did. The ancient greek word for leisure "schole" means learning or self improvement.

sliverstorm 13y ago
Yup, slavery was quite useful in advancing the human race for a while there. We don't like it today for moral reasons, but Leibniz would not have discovered calculus if he spent every day in a field somewhere, and it was slavery that bought him the time to do it.
- captainmuon 13y ago
  Hah, funny. You can say the same thing about capitalism. It boosted the productivity and the technical capabilities of the human race tremendously (although at a pretty high cost).
- delian66 13y ago
  What ? Leibniz lived in Germany and France, and I think there was no slavery (as in ownership of human beings; sure there were servants and nobility and so on, but no actual slavery) in there at the time ... Would you elaborate how "it was slavery that bought him the time to do it" ?
  - sliverstorm 13y ago
    For the purposes of brevity I'm grouping slavery, peasants, servants, indentured servants, etc into the same group. They all serve to buy leisure time at the expense of the sweat of other people.

yetanotherphd 13y ago

Work is necessary to get a whole lot of stuff that needs to be done done. That does not mean that we should not have a basic income, reverse income tax, or generous welfare system with few strings attached. However, it is annoying that proponents of basic income tax act as if the only reason for opposing basic income as a policy, is the idea that "work is necessary". The three policies I described are actually very similar, (well basic income is really a subset of negative income tax) but to choose between them is a subtle issue. Unfortunately the people who tend to get attached to political movements (or wannabe political movements) are rarely subtle. They prefer easy to identify bad guys, like people who believe in work as an ethical principal.

Aqueous 13y ago

The machines of the future will convert energy into wealth. They will do this by performing a large number of automated tasks for us. We will not have to work - it will be redundant to work.

electromagnetic 13y ago
Consider what the world, sorry universe will be when anything you can conceive of is a function of energy vs time. Set a self-replicating constructor going. All it has to do is harvest sunlight to produce more solar cells to capture more energy until it has a sufficient supply to expediently build that new house you ordered.

yarou 13y ago

I think "work" is necessary, at least the connotation that implies one has to strive for more or give up something in exchange for a tangible reward. However, work just for the sake of working is unnecessary and detrimental to the person that must endure it.

DigitalSea 13y ago

I fear a world where people don't need to aspire to something to better their lives (ie studying, learning a skill or educating oneself) wouldn't be a very nice world to live in at all. If we didn't need to work, what reason would there to learn to read? If we were rewarded with land, shelter, food and comfort for doing nothing, what would the incentive for those who will inevitably be responsible for keeping everything together? Plants don't grow without care and attention, electricity isn't as simple as sticking two wires into a powerpoint or setting up solar panels, if nobody worked, nobody would study and if nobody studied there would be no people left in the world. Money, sad to say motivates people, it motivates the disadvantaged to strive for more, it motivates the rogue developer with a wife and kids to attempt to build the next big thing knowing the reward will be a comfortable life where the family doesn't need to worry about money. Perhaps there is a better way, removing class barriers, maybe there is no such thing as lower class, you are either middle or upper class. A system where even a school janitor has an opportunity to do something more and earn a decent living. We can only dream, but I doubt for a very long time will there be a shake up to the class wars and pay discrepancies amongst professions.

kareemm 13y ago
> Plants don't grow without care and attention, electricity isn't as simple as sticking two wires into a powerpoint or setting up solar panels, if nobody worked, nobody would study and if nobody studied there would be no people left in the world. People would do these things out of curiosity, or because they want to see what happens. The need to know, learn, understand, and create wouldn't go away. Intrinsic motivation wouldn't go away. Indeed, I can imagine these becoming stronger if one could devote most of his waking hours to learning about the variety of topics that interest him.
dreamfactory 13y ago
So why does poetry exist and what are hobbies?
jayfuerstenberg 13y ago
Boredom is a powerful motivator too. A couple months of laying around doing nothing will drive most people crazy and they'll begin asking themselves what they want their life to be about. And even if they don't contribute anything, should all people be required to useful to others or can't some just choose to be left alone if they are self sufficient? In a world of scarcity I can see the argument of forcing people to contribute if they want to take back but what about a world of abundance? You and I are breathing abundant air, for free, and nobody is getting angry right? What if other resources like electricity were as abundant as Tesla once dreamed? I'm not saying I'm right or wrong. These are just thoughts worth consideration.

dnautics 13y ago

Fuller is half-right. The true business of people should be to discover skills which enrich others. In some cases, this is manual labor, but as our society makes that less and less necessary, we are able to spend more effort on creative and intellectual pursuits. Now, the problem with Fuller's concept is that 'creative and intellectual' pursuits are intensely introspective and rather qualitative. One could say, 'well I am ENTITLED to money because I spent a lot of EFFORT reading and analyzing the entire opus of English literature from 1200-1400.' But whom did that enrich? Why should we reward such behavior if it is solipsistic? On the other hand, if someone said, analyze the entire opus of English literature from 1200-1400 so that someday we can assist Shakespearean actors in their dramaturgy - and I'm willing to pay you X dollars for it... Now that's creating value for SOMEONE ELSE. It's not an entitlement, you have contributed to society in a way that is demonstrable, as proven by the exchange of resources for your effort. Work is necessary insomuch as it takes effort for one to provide 'other people' with goods and services that these 'other people' value. Now, what constitutes work will be dramatically different and undergo tectonic change - playing video games, for example, as an alpha tester, can be work (and hard work, too) - as can being a world-travelling dance teacher - or being a football player (these are professional jobs that would not have existed 200 years ago)- or who knows what in the future. Unfortunately the idea of doing work has been corrupted by a narrow-minded view of capitalism (agents on both the right and the left are guilty of this) and wages, have been caught up with cost of living and thus a sense of entitlement. Certainly, there are people who we should contribute to help out for no reason other than compassion (a quadruplegic multiple gunshot victim I delivered food to comes to mind) but we should think hard about what the mechanisms for doing this are, and who gets to decide how much. But the idea of abolishing all work forever is a dangerous one.

rquantz 13y ago
Fuller is arguing otherwise here. He says we need to get away from the idea that we have to do something to deserve to make a living. Your whole comment is premised on that idea. Whether it not you're right, you haven't engaged with what Fuller said. The closest you come is making the unsubstantiated statement that getting rid of work is a dangerous idea. Dangerous for whom? Other than, you know, powerful people who depend on an endless supply of cheap labor, and politicians who rely on an exhausted, frightened, ADD electorate.

ctdonath 13y ago

A human being daily needs something like 2000 kcal food-sourced energy, a slate of vital nutrients, 250 square feet of personal living space, some average BTUs of heating/cooling, a gallon of clean water, and a share of infrastructure to produce/acquire/deliver this. (YMMV; point of context made; details left as exercise for reader.) We can view this baseline as the objective essence of "value": one needs the aggregate of these points to sustain life for one day, anything less begins the descent into death. We can also view anything substantially beyond standard deviations of this as unnecessary (albeit desirable). SOMEBODY has to produce this, be it basic sustenance farming or creation & maintenance of high-tech high-productivity machinery; this work is necessary. The objective value of this baseline is the true "poverty line": if you try to exist on less than this, you're gonna die; if you can acquire substantially more than this, you can start indulging in relative luxuries. For sake of simple argument (detailed accuracy left to reader), we'll use the official USA poverty line as the currency equivalent of this objective value of what it takes to keep a median human alive under normal conditions: about US$30 per day. So...to keep one person alive & stable one day requires $30/day of work. This is invariant. If someone's work produces $30 of value (exchangeably equivalent to those enumerated basic daily needs), one person maintains sustainable life another day; if the worker "gives" that to someone else, keeping none for himself, he is literally giving his life to the other. If his work produces $60 of value, he can sustain himself for two days (work one, idle the second), sustain himself for one day and spend the remainder on comforts & luxuries, or give $30 to another and keep both sustained for a day. Technology makes it easier for one to earn more with the same expenditure of effort. The consternation about "is work necessary?" stems from who gets to decide how the extra earnings are distributed. If you retain your extra earnings, you are saving for future idleness (vacation, retirement) or statistical fluctuations (temporary increased cost of acquiring necessities). If you spend your extra earnings on comforts & luxuries, you are giving others the opportunity to work for their daily basic needs thru means other than direct acquisition (building cars, writing software, acting theatrically, etc. instead of sustenance farming, hewing trees, carrying water, etc). If you give away your extra earnings strictly voluntarily (no coercion), you are charitable (sacrificing idleness, preparedness, or comfort/luxuries for others). If you give away your extra earnings under coercion (if you don't consent it will be taken from you, or worse), someone else is making the decision for you regarding how your extra earnings should be distributed - and this, quite understandably, produces enormous consternation. (If your baseline earnings (the $30/day) are taken under coercion, your continued existence is threatened and the issue becomes a matter of self-defense - a separate topic to discuss.) Is work necessary? Yes, insofar as someone has to expend effort which can be converted into providence of basic needs. If someone can work earning $300/day, then he can take the next nine days off, purchase comforts/luxuries which pay enough to sustain nine other people another day, or sustain nine other people another day without obligating the benefit of creating comforts/luxuries. This thread addresses this last point: given no obligation to produce something exchangeable for basic needs, will a populace on the whole produce more* value or less? and does the populace at large have the "right" to compel individuals to give up their extra earnings without compensation, or does the individual have an absolute "right" to keep his earnings and distribute them as he sees fit?

bsbechtel 13y ago

The idea in theory is great, but we are generations away from getting there. Right now, the idea of having really high taxes for those who own/control technology to pay a minimum living wage for those who can't work would stop all forward progress from here on out. Case in point - Elon Musk. Musk nearly went bankrupt in 2008 trying to make Tesla and SpaceX succeed. If he had been taxed at any higher a rate, both companies would have failed. Musk is arguably a once in a generation entrepreneur. I'd hate to be waiting another 20 years for electric cars and private rockets to come around.

damon_c 13y ago
But, on the other hand, there might be dozens of Elon Musks each generation if people didn't have to worry about their children falling into poverty because the idea they quit their job and spent their savings trying to execute didn't take off. Or, imagine during that crucial make or break period, being able to go cut the founder of the electric car company you're working at a little slack with payroll because you already had a check coming in each month that covered your rent and data plan.
- bsbechtel 13y ago
  Your first comment is a fair point, although the article is about not having to work and taking from those who are rich to pay for it, not providing a safety net so entrepreneurs could try risky thing. To your second point, I'm not convinced that would happen...even if it did, labor is a fairly small portion of an auto company's costs (I think at one point I saw around 20%).
dingaling 13y ago
> If he had been taxed at any higher a rate, both companies would have failed. I don't follow. Taxation applies to personal income and corporate profit. A company on the margin of bankruptcy isn't making profit, so they're not 'losing' money in tax.
- bsbechtel 13y ago
  He used his Paypal money to fund Tesla and SpaceX. If those earnings had been taxed higher, no Tesla and SpaceX.

vacri 13y ago

It's nice to see an article title which violates Betteridge's law.

sfx 13y ago

Bill Joy's essay "Why the Future Doesn't Need Us" [1] is a good read for anyone working through what such a society would be like and what it means for our race. I think it comes down to the philosophical question of what man's purpose is. [1] http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/8.04/joy.html http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/8.04/joy.html

dreamdu5t 13y ago

Ugh, HN really has become reddit. Half-baked ramblings about socialist utopias powered by machines. I mean come on...

wazoox 13y ago
Actually, most of the answers are ranging from far-right (work or degenerate!) to extreme libertarianism (individuals must compete!), and that complete lack of basic humanity from HNers really is saddening.
- clarkm 13y ago
  > complete lack of basic humanity from HNers Does that actually mean anything? Or is it just another way of expressing vague, general disapproval?
dinkumthinkum 13y ago
Yeah it's a lot of nonsense. There are some singularity believers, that's for sure.

everyone 13y ago

This article makes some good points. In my opinion, it isnt just that a lot of jobs today dont contribute anything to society, they actively work to its detriment by wasting precious resources and contributing to serious problems like climate change and pollution.

enraged_camel 13y ago

The fact that a very large percentage of jobs are unnecessary and were created simply because we felt like everyone should work for a living needs to be accepted before we can experiment with economic models such as Unconditional Basic Income.

Kiro 13y ago

"It amounts to saying that we should have fairly high taxes, and redistribute most of the money as a minimal income to every person." Yes, but before that we would need to have as low taxes as possible in order to stimulate the innovation needed.

chroem 13y ago
I would like to see some figures correlating taxation to innovation.
hershel 13y ago
Yes. Like in the nordic countries , which are pretty good at innovation. Or in israel where taxes are high but venture capital investments per capita are the highest in the world.
- Kiro 13y ago
  They would be even more innovative with lower taxes and more market incentives to make technological advancements.
  - hershel 13y ago
    It's a nice opinion based on no data.
    - Kiro 13y ago
      Do you agree that the market advances technology?

austinl 13y ago

> The true business of people should be to go back to school and think about whatever it was they were thinking about before somebody came along and told them they had to earn a living This made me think of a world like Neal Stephenson's Anathem, where a portion of the population chooses to separate themselves and focus purely on education. Their lifestyles are essentially monastic/akin to $30 per day. Part of me wishes an option like that were more prevalent/acceptable in our society.

captainmuon 13y ago

Some work is neccessary, labour not so. (absolutely speaking) In our current society basically everyone has to work to earn money, to then buy such products on a more-or-less free market. We are able to produce more and more goods with ever less work. That's great on the surface, but wrecks the system, because: - Experience shows we can't really split the remaining work evenly, so some people work a lot, and some are unemployed. But people can only really participate in the economy if they do labour (and get money). It sucks for them to be unemployed, but they also fall away as consumers, which hurts the whole economy. - Stuff only ever get's done when labour is applied. (If I could produce and sell something with no human work, everybody else would do the same, and it would have no value. So, in the equilibrium that's not going to happen.) In a sense, labour is the secret engine of the economy. At the same time, you're trying to reduce the amount of labour needed, because it's expensive and cuts into your profits. All kinds of instabilities arise from this contradiction. In the end, we'll probably have to transition away from capitalism to something better suited to our modern realities of production, whatever that will be. An unconditional basic income would be a first step in this direction - acknowledging the fact that we need less and less work, but we still need to feed the same number of people.

forgottenpaswrd 13y ago

"It amounts to saying that we should have fairly high taxes, and redistribute most of the money as a minimal income to every person." It is called disguised communism. From each according to his ability, to each according to his need. The redistributors redistribute to their friends and family first, then on their party, and then the rest so now you have people living really well, most people living bad, like today, but with no connection between generating wealth and being rewarded by it at all. Don't let me wrong, this works, for a while. Until you get to consume all the savings of the productive society. And nobody wants to work anymore. Then societies collapse(Venezuela has 40% inflation per month now, Cuba, URSS) Some of my family members come from communist countries. I don't want some political commissar to decide who deserve what and who doesn't. I believe in distributed power, not centralized authority. Technology is making distributed power efficient again, with computers in every pocket and inexpensive 3d printers, laser cutters and CNC mills. Ironically we are supporting too centralized, too big to fail business.