As a former fine arts student that became a UI developer mostly for the monetary stability, I do feel like if I had the ability to fully invest myself creating art without constantly struggling with relevancy and rent, I would have been far more qualitatively useful to society at large.
art, volunteering, social programs and plenty other activities are way more useful for civilization as a whole than almost any random job on the market. as soon as businesses start losing workers as they realize they don't need to do shitty unimportant stuff just to put bread on a table - market will finally put the right price on lots of these jobs and start paying for it adequately.
I think at first they will, but I think over time they will realize they don't have to do anything at all. People work because they want something, or at least I always have.
nope. there is a deep psychological need to feel productive and useful to society in all but very few sociopathic humans.
For example, my step-father was a copy editor for a large government body who was initially happy/go-lucky on retirement initially but is now extremely self-isolated and depressed.
I know lots of employed people who spend their days “staring out the window losing their mind”. It seems we have over optimized in the wrong direction (towards work and away from leisure).
It raises a fundamental question about the government's role and it's goals. We tend focus on maximizing productivity and other countries focus more on maximizing health/happiness. Even the way Americans talk about education is through the lenses of creating more productive workers as opposed to something like creating more enriched citizens.
You also ignored my first and more explained upon example, volunteering. Is there a reason for that?
I encourage you to make a list of countries ordered by taxation level, and another one ordered by the risk of doing business. And then compare the two.
imo, only the latter setup is reasonable. I'm all for giving individuals the freedom to float around for a while figuring out what the want to do, or even subsist for their whole lives if they don't "click" with any work that's valuable to the market. but I don't think it's fair to make the taxpayers support however many children you decide to have.
If you're happy living as a lazy fuck just shy of poverty, you're welcome to do so. If you want some comfort, security, and the ability to not anticipate each 1st of the month, you'd probably still want to work.
I personally think that UBI is a requirement for us to be able to say that we each have a fair shot at success. Nobody should worry about having a roof over their head or providing food on the table. We have plenty of both for each human in the world already.
Given that he is strictly providing a personal anecdote on what he would do with the money and extra time, the responses suggest that some people are quite judgemental about how other people spend their own money.
- How much does this actually happen? - Is the job market over or under satisfied? - Does what people end up doing somehow turn out valuable to society, even if not in a way we know how to assign monetary value?
There are so many unknowns. Great that somebody are actually trying it out and getting us some data.
UBI might give people the opportunity to explore their interests but ultimately wouldn't you end up in the same place? Torn between a desire to make "art" which suddenly everyone else is also trying to make and follow their passion, or get paid substantially more for UI Development?
They write for themselves and develop a niche that they are happy to contribute to.
Just because the cost of writing and publishing has plummeted doesn't mean it's less valuable, it's development becomes either decentralized or internalized.
If there was UBI, I'd have stopped working for them altogether.
Show me the gun being pointed to your head to keep you in that job. Otherwise, shut up about slavery.
My senior thesis was a receipt printer that wireshark'd instant messenger messages on our school's unsecured wifi and dumped those messages into a pile.
As for your senior thesis - Developer's job is to create software that makes lives easier. It was your decision to use your skills to harm people by exploiting their privacy. Or it could be seen as something good - you discovered a way to exploit people and if you informed whoever was running this app you helped a good amount of people in your school.
It takes critical time and energy to reduce the complexity of a products' features to something a layperson can use, and a layperson is usually barely paying attention.
As to your second point, I wasn't a developer, I was an artist, attempting to ask real questions about privacy and spark real discussions and possibly getting myself in trouble to start a conversation.
"Qualitatively" UI work is far more useful to society.
Only half rhetorical, as I'm actually curious.