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Comment by manachar | Hacker News Reader

What you choose to be a fulfilling pursuit is what you should get to do.

For some, that's surfing. For others, that's building a rocket to Mars.

My point is that ideally we build a society where as many people as possible get to choose what they find fulfilling, and pursue it as much as they wish.

The problem we have right now is that opportunity, training, and investment for many things are restricted to the very few.

I agree that an exclusively hedonistic outlook on life is empty, but so too is letting the very few enslave the others to their dreams.

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> My point is that ideally we build a society where as many people as possible get to choose what they find fulfilling, and pursue it as much as they wish.

But then what of the work that nobody wishes to pursue, but is required? Like farming for food, generating electricity and water, and many of the modern comforts?

I'm sure everybody wishes to pursue their own passion, regardless of the value of that passion to _someone else_. But this is why it cannot be done today, because there isn't enough wealth and energy and resources to allow for this. The star trek style replicators don't yet exist.

Automate that work as much as possible and richly reward those who pursue it.

One of the oddities of modern work is that the lowest paid jobs are mostly those nobody wants to do.

Sure, we're not at replicator level, but farming of many crops require far fewer people than many imagine.

Personally I find that many things that could be automated are not yet automated because humans are cheaper. Think cashier, waiter/waitress, and so on.

In white collar work land, an amazing number of jobs could be automated, but are not yet because it's cheaper to use humans. These are the people who essentially just move numbers from one computer to another with a small amount of work in between.

The underlying assumption of people who make automation arguments are that those whose job got automated out of existence will somehow be able to consume the profits of those automation (and thus enjoy life, rather than to work).

This is wrong, because the automation costed capital, and the capital owners who invested in the automation are the ones capturing the benefits (mostly).

Horses whose job got automated out of existence by cars don't get to retire lavishly - they got turned into glue. And so will the people, if such an event were to happen.

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