Who Owns Work, and Its Future? | Hacker News Reader

Who Owns Work, and Its Future?

workfutures.io

73 pointsimartin2k16 comments

One possible future we should think about is one where humans are more capable (through technology) and can provide for more of their needs. So work would go back to being owned by us.

It would be a more self-sufficient life style, but on a higher technology base than farmers.

I'm blogging about it here at https://improvingautonomy.wordpress.com . My post on universal basic income is probably the most relevant.

https://improvingautonomy.wordpress.com/2017/08/05/what-afte...

I hope this line of thinking can be part of our discussion about the future of work.

It will be interesting to see what will happen when we have the technology to live in a self-sufficient way. My pessimistic self tells me that capitalists will find ways to make this impossible or illegal without paying them through IP or other laws.

I hope when we get there that we have set up a Manufacturing Freedom Foundation, equivalent to the EFF.

I'd point to property taxes as a plausible way this can happen. They're already a non-trivial consideration for people looking at low-tech self-sufficiency, and I can only see this getting more pronounced.

(This is something in the back of my mind whenever I hear calls for a shift to land value taxation. I can't really see it happening in a way that doesn't further normalise wage labour).

This will be a big thing. We could give people an allowance of a certain amount of land that is tax-free (as we have in the UK for income).

In the longer term, government could also be self-sufficient. This might be unstable though, it might be better for there to be a contribution of materials/energy/information to the the government from self-sufficient communities. The government would still provide the value of protection/arbitration to the self-sufficient communities.

Agree an allowance would be a sensible way to go about this. But given that, as far as I can tell, most of the motivation for an LVT in the UK is some variant of "stick it to small private landlords", I think it's unlikely.

Not hatin, but this is an old idea -- as old as the industrial revolution. Still interesting though; I like your site.

I know a bit about the transcendentalist movement of the early 19th century. I'd be interested to links to earlier stuff.

I think the birth of proper AI is a critical juncture for this idea (either enabling more self-sufficiency or reducing it). Which is why I'm bringing it up again now.

The header of your blog reminds me of a post by Eliezer in his Fun Theory sequence. The summary of the post:

"Living By Your Own Strength: Our hunter-gatherer ancestors strung their own bows, wove their own baskets and whittled their own flutes. Part of our alienation from our design environment is the number of tools we use that we don't understand and couldn't make for ourselves. It's much less fun to read something in a book than to discover it for yourself. Specialization is critical to our current civilization. But the future does not have to be a continuation of this trend in which we rely more and more on things outside ourselves which become less and less comprehensible. With a surplus of power, you could begin to rethink the life experience as a road to internalizing new strengths, not just staying alive efficiently through extreme specialization."

Full text: http://lesswrong.com/lw/wz/living_by_your_own_strength/

Fun Theory sequence: http://lesswrong.com/lw/xy/the_fun_theory_sequence/

> For the individual, work is at best an accommodation to the pressing need to provide for ourselves, and that can provide the wherewithal to pursue happiness. At the worst, it is a global system that requires the majority of adults worldwide to dedicate a large chunk of their waking hours to demanding bosses, harrowing commutes, stressful and dangerous work places, and often tedious, repetitive and unrelenting labor.

Well that's a cheerful perspective...

How about this for the "at best" scenario?

Work is how we give meaning to our lives. It is our way of contributing to each other's existence, and to challenge ourselves and thereby grow as human beings. Without work, with only leisure, our lives become superficial and less meaningful.

Now let's talk about the future of work.

Indeed. The article is based on a false premise, and that quote gives a very good idea of the framing of the entire piece.

Which of those descriptions of work resonates best with you will differ from person to person, and I would imagine that the description from the article resonates very well with a substantial fraction of all people.

This is the post-ww2 perspective when work was an enriching collective activity and 40 hours a week, stability, and a career path were the norm.

Now for most of America work has become an exploitative, unstable, zero sum game, with employers paying well under livable wages and employees being required to work long hours to make ends meet.

In my experience, your description applies to a fraction of lucky people today; for the rest, the OP's description applies, and some (many?) people manage to Stockholm-syndrome themselves into feeling it the way you described.

One of the dangers of writing structural critiques like this is that it's easy to feel like the problems are structural in a way that makes individual effort irrelevant. On this particular topic, I think there is a huge amount of individual latitude to attack the problem.

I'm lucky enough to work on problems that I find interesting, important, and personally challenging. I optimize for this at the expense of salary and stability. One of the biggest things that's helped me in a cultural safety net of believing that this is OK, with a network of people that help me out. I think there's also enormous potential for individuals to reinforce the values they think will define work in the right way.

- Can you support your friends when their companies attack their work/life balance? Can you help them come up with ways to fight back without hurting their careers?

- Can you share information that's not typically public, in order to help others make better decisions? Salary to peers is an easy place to start. Harder is telling younger folks what Sales Engineers and Product Managers do (and how it can be really fun, fulfilling, and lucrative!).

- Can you normalize behaviors that benefit workers at the expense of companies? Unions used to be great, but I personally think they're the wrong tool for the problems of 2017. Working from home 2 days a week shouldn't break any team, but it's still a cultural taboo.

I'll admit that these are pretty 1st-world problems and I can't do much for people outside of Bay Area tech, but Bay Area tech is where I live and work. We can't change where we are right now, but there's a pile of small problems that are right on your doorstep that you can shove in the right direction. I think there's more ground to be won there than trying to overhaul the whole system.

We overestimate what we can do in a year and underestimate what we can do in a decade ;)

Aside: I disagree somewhat with the framing as a Wicked Problem. That method seems to deliberately conflate multiple problems, in order to make the discussion more sweeping. I think there's value to breaking down "Work" into smaller, more tractable problems. That aside, there's a lot of meat on this bone, so it's good to acknowledge that.

Work is an abstract concept, not a tangible object. We can spout all the baloney we want about it and it won't change a darned thing.

Everyone's got an opinion, everyone's got a magic bullet policy. I implore everyone who has a "solution" to first consider if it is really any better than doing nothing at all, all things considered.

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