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Well thought out. I have a similar disposition, which highlights the culture surrounding our smart-phones -- largely social networks such as Instagram & Snapchat. In one mode, they help people stay connected, and yet in another mode, they create create an ego-obsession (both of oneself and of others). This is the first part in feeling separated, alienated, or just generally inferior in a quasi social-network.

The second part is the ease of getting pleasure on demand. At any part of the day, most are free to look at the internet of anything ranging from funny pictures to pornographic pictures. They can turn on netflix, play video games, and do just about anything from the convenience of their smart phones. You can see this on just about any subway; a room full of people each engulfed in their own personal world driving their pleasure centers.

When you bring these two together (feelings of inferiority / detachment to those around you AND pleasure on demand), you get a person whose general approach to life is like that of a drug addict. They crave simple pleasures and justify it because they feel like shit. They also feel as if they're alone in this world, and so who cares? Of course this is all subconscious and part of a habitual perspective, but this is the kind of world we're growing up in America. Pharmaceuticals have significant power here and want to convince you they can fix you with a pill. Maybe they can. But what I'm trying to highlight is that we now have a mentality of always looking around for a "fix". I find very few people who can last a whole subway train just looking at the window pondering or who can strike up a conversation with a stranger for the hell of it. We're becoming way too engulfed in a pseudo personal world, and smart-phones are driving it.

No, I'm not trying to start a crusade against smart phones or even taking any stance at all. This is just how I see the problem currently. I want to believe technology can help fight it by bringing more people together for social events, but where's the advertising money in that? And who cares if you're not profiting? This pursuit of profits above all else has created a very shallow society and I would argue the drug epidemic is a reflection of it.

The global economy already produces enough for every man, woman and child.

The surplus increases every year.

Every year, fewer and fewer people need to work full-time in mind-numbingly boring jobs to produce what the population needs.

So why do we keep up the fiction that everyone needs to waste their lives doing unnecessary work?

It's time to imagine how we could achieve a post-work society where more people could realize their potential, instead of being tied down to meaningless, mindless and unnecessary drudgery.

I think you are drastically underestimating the amount of necessary work required to keep our civilization running. It's not just a matter of producing necessities--food, clothing, and shelter. The tools needed for people to "realize their potential" take work too. For example, the medium through which we are having this conversation, which is the most potent tool ever invented to help people realize their potential, took a lot of work to build and takes a lot of work to maintain.

Easy answer, the narrative embedded into our worldview (and in the worldview of many if not most decision makers) is that without work and the kind of structure it brings, people cannot be functional members of society. It plays itself out both externally and internally.

I’m reminded of Ursula Le Guin: “We live in capitalism, its power seems inescapable – but then, so did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings.“

>The global economy already produces enough for every man, woman and child.

But does it produce enough for every man, woman and child in a sustainable manner, and will it be able to keep up with the Malthusian population growth that would continue unabated if every person on earth was perpetually guaranteed to get "enough"?

The answer to both of those is no. While there is certainly a lot of inefficient busy work amongst the workforce of developed nations, to say that most people on earth waste their lives doing unnecessary work is an extraordinarily myopic claim that's been bandied about since that one guy wrote an article about BS jobs. Everyone latches onto that meme and assumes the majority of work being done is absolutely worthless, but they really have nothing to back that up except their own personal experience as a middle class corporate drone.

Malthus was wrong: access to birth control correlates with wealth

Malthus was temporarily wrong at best. You are taking an extremely narrow slice of human history and extrapolating the future from it. Without a controlling global enforcement of birth control (none currently exists and undoubtedly won't any time soon), then those who don't use birth control (whether driven through cultural or biological means) will have more fecundity and quickly outbreed and replace those that do. And if everyone is guaranteed equal sustenance and resources it will very quickly devolve into a Malthusian situation.

tl;dr Give everyone and their offspring guaranteed sustenance and the Catholics and Nigerians will take over in a couple generation. Nothing about the OPs post said give everyone enough wealth and force birth control so that they only reproduce at a replacement rate.

Not if the LDS Church has anything to say about it. I can't speak to the fecundity of the modern Nigerian family, but I'd wager the average American Catholic family is smaller than the average American LDS family , and by significant margin. Anecdotally, a former colleague (an LDS member) recently welcomed his 11th child. Apparently, a family with 11 kids was neither extreme nor unusual in his ward.

Hah, yea I was just going with Catholics since they've been burned into the collective conscious as anti-birth control. Seems most of them don't actually listen to the Pope much these days.

this is the same as the argument that gay people will die out because they don't reproduce

I love the concept of "a system where people have value independent of their productivity."

I worry that the increasing focus on a meritocracy (especially in tech) ignores the fact that it devalues anyone who for whatever reason -- lack of education, lack of natural ability, or just lack of motivation -- doesn't contribute enough to be considered important. It's probably an improvement on the system we had before, where you were valued for being part of the right community or the right family, but I hope this isn't the end goal, and that we can eventually get to a state where we consider everyone inherently valuable.

The basic problem is that meritocracy beats every other political system. The reason meritocracy took over is not because it is morally better, but because non-meritocatic societies fell by the wayside under the boot of meritocracy.

Hopefully in the post-scarcity society coming we can come up with a better approach not focused on people’s productivity.

Meritocracy is not a political system. Even calling it an economic system is questionable, but at least it comes close. And yes, the difference does matter. Failure to understand the proper relationship between politics and economics is one of the chief causes of the malaise people try to escape with opiates.

The third option is protests of various forms. The most polite one is throwing a brick trough the window of society by electing some loose-cannon politician. The brick went obviously unheeded, and I’m worried of what will follow.

Capitalism has succeeded in its primary goal - amassing resources for capital-intensive projects. We’re done, we have so much capital companies sits on hundreds of billions of dollars. Something new will be needed for the next step.

A loose cannon that wasn't, at heart, as corrupt and greedy a capitalist as anyone might be more effective.

But actually, I think the Trump loose cannon wasn't sent because of anger against capitalism, but rather misplaced anger against things like immigration, diversity, and a move away from traditional religious views. Capitalism is seen as A-OK, it's just that The Liberals have rigged the system against Good Honest People.

No, Capitalism itself is rigged against good honest people.

> curious to see what America's 3.5 million truck drivers do when they lose their jobs over the next ten years

That is a rather optimistic projection of the rollout of Level 5 autonomy. The total number of heavy trucks sold worldwide was less than 400k in 2014, and no one has full Level 5 yet (if it can even be done large scale at a profit), so I would adjust those expectations. Most 'displaced' truckers should be able to find work unloading automated long-hauls into smaller short-hauls and driving them during a lengthy transition period.

> your only options are to find a system where people have value independent of their productivity, make being valueless palatable, or just go die quietly

Points 1 & 2 are somewhat interconnected. If I add up the retail value of all my non-paid work, it comes to far more than I make at my day job, and I suspect this is true for many others. Much of what our culture calls "valueless" - because no money is involved - does actually have value, and this will become more clear as time continues to reveal how difficult automating everything really is.

We have already seen this, for example, with people posting what used to be called home videos (no revenue) to YouTube and stumbling into large amounts of ad income, and I believe we'll see it in more areas. It may increasingly be a 'gig economy', but it's happening slowly, and some of those gigs are turning out to be pretty good.

> Most 'displaced' truckers should be able to find work unloading automated long-hauls into smaller short-hauls and driving them during a lengthy transition period.

If a million truckers lose their long-haul trucking jobs, how do a million short-haul trucking jobs simultaneously come into existence? Many long-haul truck already go to distribution centers on the outskirts of metro areas so the long->short-haul transfer systems already exist.

Cheaper, mostly-automated long haul trucking should lead to an overall increase in its usage, meaning there will be more long haul trucks to unload than currently, which will then require even more medium sized trucks (multiple per load) to transfer to. This is a simplified version of the prevailing current theory as I understand it, and it seems fairly solid to me.

There's no denying that full Level 5 across the board would lead to very large disruption, but it's a little too early to call how it will play out yet.

If it takes 10 years for every long-haul trucker to be replaced by autonomous trucks, then 10 years of attrition will reduce the number who will actually lose their job. In a perfect world, new people won't go into the field, and the current truck driving workforce will age or transition out.

Exactly - we'll lose the long haul easier to automate truck driving jobs first and that will decimate the employment of the field. That's the easy part.

Enter UBI: an allowance from our masters, so that people can continue to consume when there's nothing left for people to produce.

Or perhaps UBI can set people free to live as they see fit, cultivate themselves spiritually, artistically, and communally without needing to consume nearly as useless garbage.

Maybe! Or maybe it creates an enormous, permanent underclass living hand to mouth on what are effectively ration cards, lacking even the power to deny the machine their labor. Then, is that actually as bad as it sounds? A walk around LA's skid row is a strong case it's not. For me, it's eyebrow raising that a lot of the momentum behind UBI seems (anecdotally) to come from people who don't expect to have to rely on it.

It's clear that if automation continues apace something will have to give. UBI might be the answer, but I suspect it's actually not radical enough: that trying to bring money with us into a post scarcity economy is not going to go the way we want, no matter how good our intentions.

There's no such thing as post-scarcity. Scarcity is imposed by physics, not a lack of technology.

What changes is our expectations, beyond basic survival. Most people living below the federal poverty line have one or more televisions with active cable, a smartphone, and air conditioning; nearly all of them, in the high 99.x percents, have refrigerators, which implies that nearly all of them are housed as well, and effectively none go without food and sufficient warmth to sleep by circumstance.

In the sense of survival, the United States is effectively post-scarcity. What you're talking about is more "post-ambition".

Scarce is the opposite of proximate, not the opposite of plentiful.

Yes, we're nowhere close to "post-scarcity" in the Star Trek or Iain Banks sense. But proximity is also a function of technology, and in a hypothetical world where human labor is mostly obsolete (STEM included), it approaches zero.

It's fair (and I think correct) to not expect the world to go so far in that direction any time soon enough to be relevant, but many do. Scratch a UBI supporter and you'll often find a big believer in AI.

I like the comparison of the economy with an optimizing AI, but the value function isn't max(paperclips), but whatever people will pay for. So it's not really the fault of the AI that people have fucked up priorities - the AI itself is value neutral.

If you can get a large enough group to say: "Enough, the AI doesn't represent our values, let's change it!", it will already have happened because the same people will have already changed their buying habits.

You may want to give "The Religion of the Future" by Roberto Mangabeira Unger a read. I'm nearly through with it, myself, and he lays forth many of the same thoughts present in this post while attempting to describe a new spirituality.

I love this comment so much I want to print it out on a sheet and sleep under it tonight.