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We can not remove the need to work, because there will always be a need to eat, and to be able to eat, you need to work because nobody will feed you voluntarily

We can not remove the need to work, because there will always be a need to eat, and to be able to eat, you need to work because nobody will feed you voluntarily. If somebody else has to work so you can eat without working, thats theft and your victims will try to kill you to stop you taking the products of their labor.

minikites 12y ago
What if you could eat without any person having to work?
- muuh-gnu 12y ago
  There is no such possibility.
chongli 12y ago
you need to work because nobody will feed you voluntarily. Nobody pays taxes voluntarily either, yet we collect them and use them to pay for services everybody uses. I see absolutely no reason why we couldn't do the same thing for all of people's basic needs.
- muuh-gnu 12y ago
  Because taking from everybody and building common infrastructure _everybody_ benefits from is different than forcibly taking from one group of people (those who do work) and giving to another group of people who dont _want_ to work. Like communism, basic income (which is just another word for communism) is outright slavery, where person A is being forced to involuntarily work to feed person B who doesnt want to work.
  - chongli 12y ago
    Work is not the same thing as a job. Wanting to work vs not wanting to work is not even a relevant question. Everyone wants to feel useful. Not everyone has a job. Whether someone gets a job or not depends on market forces, not just desire or motivation. Like communism, basic income (which is just another word for communism) is outright slavery Machines can not be slaves. When machines produce everything we need it is unconscionable to allow some people to starve while others grow rich and fat with profit.
wcarss 12y ago
I believe the parent is thinking of a hypothetical reality trending toward one where technology is capable of solving nearly any arbitrary problem at no material cost. Imagine, say, a world where clouds of von Neumann self-replicating builder robots fly around and plant seeds, tend trees, harvest, and deliver food. They also charge and repair and modify themselves, take material from mined asteroids, and are so plentiful that they may respond to every nonviolent human whim. That world may have problems (which I don't care to discuss, I am just throwing out a possibility), and it's nowhere near reality. Not close. But I think such a pie-in-the-sky scenario is the one under discussion, where assumptions like 'nobody will feed you voluntarily' are not as bedrock as they are for us.
- muuh-gnu 12y ago
  Lets set aside the fact that somebody has to build those robots and wants to profit for building them... Once we have that hypothetical robot slave army feeding everyone of us, the discussion would be over by itself because there would be nothing left to discuss. Everyone would have all he needs and that would be it. The only reason we do have the discussion already now, long before the star-trekian replicator utopia has been realized is because a lot of people are so impatient to stop working, that they want to engineer a system where not robots, but _other people_ are working for them, of course involuntarily.

minikites 12y ago

What if you could eat without any person having to work?

muuh-gnu 12y ago
There is no such possibility.

chongli 12y ago

you need to work because nobody will feed you voluntarily. Nobody pays taxes voluntarily either, yet we collect them and use them to pay for services everybody uses. I see absolutely no reason why we couldn't do the same thing for all of people's basic needs.

muuh-gnu 12y ago
Because taking from everybody and building common infrastructure _everybody_ benefits from is different than forcibly taking from one group of people (those who do work) and giving to another group of people who dont _want_ to work. Like communism, basic income (which is just another word for communism) is outright slavery, where person A is being forced to involuntarily work to feed person B who doesnt want to work.
- chongli 12y ago
  Work is not the same thing as a job. Wanting to work vs not wanting to work is not even a relevant question. Everyone wants to feel useful. Not everyone has a job. Whether someone gets a job or not depends on market forces, not just desire or motivation. Like communism, basic income (which is just another word for communism) is outright slavery Machines can not be slaves. When machines produce everything we need it is unconscionable to allow some people to starve while others grow rich and fat with profit.

wcarss 12y ago

I believe the parent is thinking of a hypothetical reality trending toward one where technology is capable of solving nearly any arbitrary problem at no material cost. Imagine, say, a world where clouds of von Neumann self-replicating builder robots fly around and plant seeds, tend trees, harvest, and deliver food. They also charge and repair and modify themselves, take material from mined asteroids, and are so plentiful that they may respond to every nonviolent human whim. That world may have problems (which I don't care to discuss, I am just throwing out a possibility), and it's nowhere near reality. Not close. But I think such a pie-in-the-sky scenario is the one under discussion, where assumptions like 'nobody will feed you voluntarily' are not as bedrock as they are for us.

muuh-gnu 12y ago
Lets set aside the fact that somebody has to build those robots and wants to profit for building them... Once we have that hypothetical robot slave army feeding everyone of us, the discussion would be over by itself because there would be nothing left to discuss. Everyone would have all he needs and that would be it. The only reason we do have the discussion already now, long before the star-trekian replicator utopia has been realized is because a lot of people are so impatient to stop working, that they want to engineer a system where not robots, but _other people_ are working for them, of course involuntarily.