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Comment by savanaly | Hacker News Reader

I agree with this for the most part. There is a real human need though, and not one that makes a lot of rational sense, but a need nonetheless, to be needed. And for a lot of people in that world you described it wouldn't be met. It's kind of perverse right, because people don't want you to artificially create need for them (it wouldn't be fun to receive your basic income in compensation for digging and then filling in a big hole), they want it to be a genuine need for their talents. And unfortunately although we evolved that yearning to be helpful, we also evolved the ability to automate away most of the tasks that would have stimulated that.

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There is a ton of important work that needs to be done that gets the short shrift in our society. Taking care of our elderly and our children, teaching, cleaning up and looking after the environment, community service. There is a massive gap between the activities that our economy incentivizes and what is good for the health and happiness of our communities. Basic income doesn't have to involve useless hole digging, there is plenty of work out there that would be both useful and rewarding.

all of those jobs you mentioned are all targets of automation.

Well, using science we could construct a study where a large scale community has many services pro died by humans vs another large community where many services are provided by automatons. We could look at the strengths and weaknesses of both and maximize human happiness and well-being.

The result could be as simple as machines just fill in gaps for when were tired, moody or on vacation. We could optimize for min usage of automatons, and target low performers for educational opportunities and psychological support.

I much rather have window cleaning and fixing road pavement automated than looking after my kids and the elderly. I doubt that the machine or robot will be able to convey the empathy required for people interaction.

Nope, not going to agree on that one.

The robot is not going to molest my kids and the elderly. The Robot will not cough tuberculosis spores onto them, will not touch their food after picking a nose or wiping an ass (both of which the robot lacks), and will not brush them with herpes sores. When the robot dies, an exact replacement can be had. The robot will never decide to kill out of frustration, religious fervor, or revenge. The robot will not steal.

But those are jobs where personal contact matters, and that's not easily automated. By all means automate the hard/annoying/disgusting parts that can be automated, but still add people for the personal touch.

Today, due to the low amount of money we're willing to spend on care, and the high demands and pressure on the people providing that care, people who care for elderly and sick people often don't have the time for personal contact, often to their own frustration. So let's automate everything else so people have more time for real contact.

I think you're dramatically underestimating the cost of providing personal care. It's incredibly expensive because it's so labour intensive, and as you point out it's the personal part of that which matters, which makes the costs so hard to reduce.

I'm not underestimating the cost at all. The people in control of those budgets underestimate the importance of personal contact.

I think iain bank's "the culture" novels explore this future in depth quite well. I will not spoil it but the basic idea is "games" - people will just be able to play all the games they want and compete with one anoher without the need to survive.

Also, there is absolutely no abuse of power in Banks' society. This would certainly be a problem in a fully-automated capitalist society. I think Banks is a great inspiration, but it is not a world we will get by default. It needs active political effort.

IIRC not from humans, but some Minds still did abuse their power in Excession.

absolutely no abuse of power in Banks' society

':-|

finally a good plaintext candidate for the thinking emoji shortcut!

That statement makes no sense either, the Culture had an explicit department for abusing it's power, Special Circumstances.

I think his point was that even if you live in a post-scarcity anarcho-communist society where everyone is live and let live, the rest of the universe isn't an occasionally you need headbangers.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special_Circumstances

It's obviously more nuanced than that, but you'll end up in an argument of semantics pretty quickly. All the SC/Mind scheming is ultimately coming down to what we consider to be morally correct, so it'll be a discussion of whether e.g. letting a person die in order to serve a greater good constitutes abuse of power or not. The theme of the Culture series is what we would want to do if we could do anything we wanted, and there's not a clear-cut response to that. The egocentric part of the equation is reduced a lot.

Banks' society is explicitly post-ownership; it's fully-automated luxury anarcho-cyberism. It relies entirely on benevolent near-omnipotent AI.

Banks himself was distinctly anti-capitalist.

This is abuse of power in these books, sometimes even quite blatant. Player of Games has probably the best example, since it has blackmail and extortion of a Culture citizen by an AI, with the help of a ship's Mind. Not to mention cheating at a board game.

That said, the Culture does seem like it would be a nice place to live, over all.

The Culture series of books are the most uplifting things I've read. They just make me feel great, especially the parts that take place on Orbitals (apart from the strange shit in the first book).

You might also enjoy Constellation Games, by Leonard Richardson (http://constellation.crummy.com/).

Abuse of power is absolutely an issue for a fully automated society. Ultimately, somebody is in control.

Take the current political situation in the US. Trump would love for everybody to blindly obey him. His autocratic goals are frustrated by the fact that government is made up of people who are able to resist the government they are part of if they believe it's going wrong. Without those people, Trump could count on the obedience of the literal machinery of government. Having people involved can be an extra layer of protection against abuse.

Look at how little of the novels actually takes place within the borders of the culture though. The only place he can tell interesting stories is outside it, usually in neighbouring "primitive" societies - and the only way he can make relatable protagonists is to give them something equivalent to a job, despite this being supposedly extremely rare in the culture.

To the extent that people have a "need to be needed," we should ask ourselves what the most efficient way to meet that need is. Perhaps the answer is to keep "make-work" jobs around. Of course we'd hide the pointlessness of these jobs behind initiatives that "create jobs" and economic policies that "support small businesses" or "enforce fair trade." We've gotten really good at preventing workers (and perhaps ourselves) from knowing that the work they're doing is pointless.

The reality is that a lot of people already are doing the equivalent of receiving their basic income in exchange for digging and then filling in a big hole.

But maybe there's a cheaper way to meet people's "need to be needed" that's less wasteful of resources. Sports? Video game competitions? Intellectual debate? Volunteer work? There are a lot of possibilities here. I'd love to find out.

In any case, I think it would be prudent to separate the debate about how people get most of their incomes from the debate about how people find meaning in their lives. Tying the two together is only one option and I'm not sure it's the right one.

Military service is a good potential make-work program that can provide a sense of purpose.

Don't worry -- they'll get to play SimSteelFactory instead of working at (and possibly screwing up) a real steel factory. People can derive meaning from playing games.

This argument comes up time and again but I have never really seen someone attack it or someone substantiate the claim with studies or something. As far as I am concerned, I could not care less if I had no longer to work for a living.

If you're a typical HN reader you could probably retire to somewhere with a low cost of living tomorrow and live off your savings, or at worst you'd have to spend a few years saving up first. But you don't.

Long-term unemployed people whose cost of living is subsidized (in the US due to various legal quirks this is mainly disability) are generally substantially less happy than employed people. I don't have studies to hand but would you dispute that result?

tl;dr: we all need a reason to get up in the morning.

> There is a real human need though... to be needed

Get a pet.

Some people also get a human.

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